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Desktop Printers

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• Guests
• For Your Files

Good printing involves more than just a printer. In this episode, we learn what technique, printers, and paper can add!

Guests

Doug Gogerty

Doug Gogerty

Douglas Gogerty is a senior information technology specialist from the University's Academic and Distributed Computing Services (ADCS) unit who helps maintain several campus computer labs on the West Bank and all ADCS print queues. He also helps departments with printer problems, sets up printers for conferences, and provides technical support for the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. He wrote the UMN Pay 'n Print program that enables students to obtain computer printouts using their U Cards. He has a master of arts degree in mathematics from the University of Northern Iowa.

Nicky Torkzadeh

Nicky Torkzadeh

Nicky Torkzadeh is a graphic designer from the University's Academic and Distributed Computing Services (ADCS) unit. She has taught computer graphics, digital video, and animation short courses and has been a technical support consultant. Nicky has a master of arts degree in architecture from the University.

For Your Files

Doug Gogerty, technology specialist, talked about laser versus ink jet printing. "Your laser [printer] will do a little bit better, [be] better quality. That's one of the advantages of it. It will use different paper; you can use essentially ordinary paper on a laser, whereas it's better to use ink jet paper in an ink jet [printer]. Regular paper will absorb the ink and it will smear."

Doug also explained what a printer driver does. "A driver tells your computer software or your operating system (MAC or Windows) what¹s the capability of the printer: does it do color, or does it do black and white, [and] does it print on both sides of the paper or not."

Nicky Torkzadeh told us how to get a good print out of photos. "For photographs you generally want to be around 300 to 600 dots-per-inch on the printer side."

Nicky gave us some more advice on getting good printing of our photos. "To reduce that pixellation you actually have to change your resolution or pixels-per-inch on your printer. The way you do that is by reducing the image size. When you reduce the image size you're actually jacking up the resolution, [and are] also increasing the pixels-per-inch."