I have a Kodak DC120 camera and an HP Deskjet 660C. I am having a problem printing photos without streaks and grainy look. For the past month I have gone from installing a new printer driver for my Win98 which helped another color problem I had been having to cleaning the printer with Qtips! I also installed new color and black and white cartridges. I am still getting a very poor quality from my printer. My output is excellent when I take a disk in to a professional devt. shop but it turned out to be $8 for 4 copies. I am sure my printer can do a better job on these photos but I don't know what the problem is. I have also tried Photoprinter paper too but that doesn't improve quality. Help!

-- Liz Clark (liz.clark@home.com), December 23, 1998

Answers

I don't know your specific printer model, but streaks can sometimes be a problem with alignment between the color and black heads. Epson has a calibration utility for their printers to deal with this: It's a time-consuming pain to use, but does make a difference. Again, I don't know about the HP, but you might want to check to see if there's anything about "calibration" in the manual. Check the driver settings for "quality" or "resolution" modes, as that can produce huge differences. It's also possible you're getting as good as your printer can give - don't expect to get photo-equivalent quality from a standard inkjet printer. Hope this helps, good luck. (Any other folks out there with an JP 660C? What's your direct experience.)

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), December 26, 1998.