Prints vs monitor

kfish2oo2

I decided to try out my dads printer (a HP jobby which he bought along with his DSLR so he could print his photos on photopaper) and all my images came out noticeably darker than how they look on screen. Now I'll be the first to admit that my monitor isn't very good - its close to 8 years old now and has noticeable burn in and the colour calibration is really not that good. I did, however, throw the images up on my mams brand new laptop and still, the pictures were noticeably darker on the prints than on screen.

I printed the images at full original resolution (4752 x 3168) and at 600dpi. My dad has also complained in the past that his images are coming out darker than they look in-camera.

Is this a problem with the printer, monitor calibration or something else?

challengemaster

Monitors have to be calibrated regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) for accurate calibration, so that's one issue

The other is that no matter how well you calibrate your screen, prints will always differ from it. Every printer and every type of paper will all yield different results

Basically there's a bunch of contributing factors towards it, but there's no actual "problem" with any of the equipment

kfish2oo2

Damn, I was hoping there would be an easy fix :P I suppose a lot of experimentation is in order so!

stcstc

a very quick fix (not suggesting this is a proper solution) is to turn the brightness of your monitor down to appox 25%

i bet you pictures thenwhen printed are way closer to you monitor

the way to do it is:

control colour coming into the computer from camera
control the output to your monitor - use a calibrator
profile your printer ( you might be able to download profiles from the paper manufacturer

there are some very good tutorials on cambridgeincolour.com

My prints always look exactly the same way my monitor displays them.

I have never touched my monitor, though. I think it may have went through a process where I had to calibrate it out-of-the-box when first setting it up (About 2 years ago) and I always use the same print place.

Could it be that your prints look different when coming from different printers? If not, then just keep a print nearby, and adjust your PC monitors brightness to match the print. If this is too dark, then try to remember the brightness number setting, and only use it at that brightness when actually editing photos (so you can switch between brightness for everyday tasks like web browsing and brightness for photo editing).