How often have you heard the term “300 dpi” being tossed around loosely in the photography business like a bowl of salad? Your digital camera menu doesn’t have a DPI (dots per inch) setting so why should you concern yourself with this cryptic term at all? That’s right, you shouldn’t. DPI has absolutely nothing to do with digital photos but Capture Resolution does. Don’t believe? The Kodak digital printing guide has some useful info you may like to know but no more useful than the chart below. As a professional photographer of 8 years, I have often disassociated myself from matters in the business pertaining to printing — I leave that to the printing professionals so I can focus on what I love: the art of creating pictures with my camera.
If you work on the iPad a lot chances are you will need to print your documents at some point. Anyone who has tried setting up AirPrint™ service to work with their existing printer will have discovered one of a few things: 1) their printer isn’t AirPrint™ compatible; 2) curse and swear at Apple for making life difficult; 3) it’s easier to give up — the path of least resistance. I soon came across an installer for Windows that enables the AirPrint service to work with any shared printer. Everything seemed OK for a while until one fine day after upgrading to iOS 5 printing immediately stopped working. All this time, I had only been printing black and white documents to my legacy HP LaserJet 1200 printer and I discovered this problem when I installed Canon Easy-PhotoPrint (Canon iEPP) app on the iPad to enable photo printing. Excitement and pride quickly turned to disappointment when the attached photo printer couldn’t be found.
So back to Google I probed for more enlightening solutions perhaps a miracle even after an unproductive and exhausting night stubbornly trying to print to the Canon PIXMA iP 6700D. Evidently, miracles do exist and one such miracle is FingerPrint by Collobos Software that runs on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
All your printers are displayed in an easy to read list in FingerPrint’s main window. You can then select which printers you want to AirPrint™ enable. Bonjour technology is used to advertise your printers, and in seconds those printers will show up in your iDevice. — Collobos Software
Besides unprecedented ease of printing, FingerPrint also makes it easy to move files from your iDevice to your computer. Open up documents and photos, import photos into iPhoto (Mac only), and save files to Dropbox. Find out more about at www.collobos.com. In case the booklet on the left of the sunflower print caught your eye, pictures from the Islamic Tourism Brunei Darussalam assignment are one of my 2011 highlights.