A Great Way To Print Your Digital Snapshots

by D'Lynn Waldron, PhD. The Olympus P-330 Digital Home Photo Printer is an affordable dye sub printer that produces excellent snapshot size prints on 4 x 6 inch heavy, glossy paper. Both the printer and its driver are very easy to use. ... The printer is small enough to pack on holiday and it is standalone for printing out of an Olympus digital camera, or as a video frame grabber.

... You can print directly from your Olympus digital camera by removing the SmartMedia card and inserting it into the printer. ... The video frame grabber allows you to capture then print images from any camcorder or VHS/DVD video displayed on a TV monitor. ... Any bitmapped image can be printed out of a computer with standard applications, using the serial (Mac) or parallel (Win) port. ... The dye sub prints cost about 65¢ each and come in packets of 60 for around $35. This is less expensive than a Polaroid print, or buying a roll of film and having all the pictures processed, some of which may not turn out. And, of course, there is no round-trip to the photo finisher. ... A dye sub print has better quality image than a Polaroid print and unlike photo prints, there is no visible grain, because a 300 dpi dye sub is equal to 2400 dpi on an inkjet printer. Dye sub colors are often more accurate than photoprints, and much better than Polaroids. Also, dye sub prints are archival. The P-330 applies a UV overcoat gives extra protection. ... The 4 x 6 photo paper has a printable area is 3.35 x 4.51 inches, which leaves a rather wide white margin. You can print 1, 4, 9 or 16 identical images on a print, or make an index print with up to 30 images. There is also die cut paper that peels into 16 small stickers. The dye cut paper is more expensive than the plain sheets. Printing takes about 2 minutes. When you are printing out of an application, the printer driver puts no limitation on the resolution of the image, but you must set the size in inches in Image Size in the application to a maximum of 4.511 wide and 3.35. I also found I had to rotate vertical images to the horizontal for printing. Olympus P-330 Digital Home Photo Printer: Street price under $500. OLYMPUS www.olympus.com .................. ......... did you come in from the &FOTOgraphic"department?