For me the print has always been the end-all, be-all to my photography pursuits. I still remember my excitement years ago seeing my first black and white image magically appear from the liquid depths of the print developer tray. Although digital has freed us from having to develop prints in a dark room illuminated only by a small red bulb, I still enjoy seeing the leading edge of a new print as it emerges from my printer.
As someone suggested on one of the Pentax forums, I've been super busy helping Japan paint some of our more exotic color K-x models. Consequently it was only today that I was able to start making some test prints from my first K-x sample images that I posted previously.
Although I have yet to upgrade my Epson 4000 to their latest 3880 or 4880 (which is a decision I'm still struggling over), the 4000 is still a wonderful printer and I have years of experience printing with it on my two favorite papers, Velvet Fine Art and Premium Luster. As I've used this combination of printer and paper to test all our previous SLR's, I was eager to see how my K-x images looked when pixels were converted to print.
As the above photo shows, I'm printing my K-x images on 17 x 22 cut sheets of Velvet Fine Art paper. I resized the K-x RAW files with no cropping, applied a small amount of USM as I typically would for a print of this size, and saved the images as TIF files.
While it's impossible to show or convey print results with low res images on a display, my initial impression of prints from the K-x are very positive. While I suspect that many users of the K-x will not be making large prints from this camera, it's good to know that this camera will deliver very high-quality, large prints if the need arises.
I realize that the vast majority of review sites only judge a camera's image quality by inspecting images at a pixel level, I think it's time that full reviews include carefully controlled print tests. I can't help but think that many prospective camera buyers would appreciate understanding the print quality they can expect from a given camera. I realize that many folks are buying SLR's today and don't make prints on a regular basis, and therefore I'd be interested in hearing feedback on the importance of print quality when you're making a decision on which camera to purchase.
