Tech Tip 70 - Print Your Snaps With PictBridge
Article by Roy Davis

The digital photography industry saw the big-picture problem and set up a committee to resolve it. The result is known as PictBridge, a way to bridge your pictures from your camera to your printer. It was also a way to shift the holdouts from disposable cameras and drugstore prints into the do-it-yourself digital camp.

PictBridge is an industry standard that allows a camera from one manufacturer to talk to a printer from some other company. It also means you are not tied to your custom setup. If you are visiting relatives and snap some shots of the family you want to share, you can connect to the PictBridge printer they happen to have and pop out a few prints to pass around.

All that selecting and printing from the camera view screen is fine up to a point. It’s boring to sit around with your camera while your printer grinds out each print. The photo industry stepped up to the task again with a new specification called DPOF, or Digital Print Order Format. The concept of using the camera view screen and selecting the images to print, the number of prints desired, and the size to be printed is pretty much the same. What’s new is that you can do all this previewing, sorting, adjusting and sizing with just the camera in your lap in the back seat of the car on the way home. The printing instructions will be stored until you hook up to the printer. The printer can then do its thing while you go take a shower, and you’ll have a stack of finished prints waiting when you get back.

DPOF isn’t even limited to digital camera enthusiasts who own a PictBridge color printer. You can take the memory card from your camera to a photo service. There are even do-it-yourself machines coming on the market where you can stick in your memory card with the photos and DPOF instructions, insert a credit card to pay for it, and walk away a few minutes later with your prized snapshots on paper.

This PictBridge thing is not just puff-words from some photo industry organization. There is really equipment on the market that supports PictBridge and DPOF. An example is the Kodak EasyShare V550 5 Megapixel digital camera. PictBridge and DPOF are right there in the long list of specifications. It’s a pretty typical point-and-shoot type of camera that anyone would find easy to use. The minimum number of controls keeps your eye on the scene instead of fiddling with buttons.

Five (5) Megapixels means the resolution of your photos can run all the way up to 2,576 x 1,932 pixels. That’s plenty of image detail to fill the largest paper size your printer can handle. No worries about fuzzy prints unless you shake the camera in dim light.

There are a number of special features that make a camera outfitted with PictBridge even better. The V550 includes all of these to automate the picture-taking process even more than you realize. They save a lot of steps that normally you would have to use a computer-based photo editor to achieve.

Camera Orientation Detection sounds unimportant or minor, but if you’ve ever had to review a few dozen photos you took that were oriented in various positions other than upright, you know it can take time and effort to reorient the photos for comfortable viewing. Many times, I’ve had to go back and manually rotate the images so people didn’t look like they were lying down. This is especially important when printing more one than image on a single sheet of paper. Cameras like the V550 that come with Camera Orientation Detection can even rotate images in the camera if you want so all your photos are right-side up before going to the printer.

Another camera feature that the V550 sports is red-eye reduction. Even with a computer-based photo editor, it takes some skill to do this touch up. It’s a common photography problem most of us have had to deal with at one time or another. Red-eye shows up when the light from the flash on the camera illuminates the inside of the eyeball. It makes the subject look like some sort of demon and is very disconcerting in a photo.

The trick is to paint over the redness with a dark color that matches what the pupil normally looks like. If not done correctly, red-eye removal can make the eyes look very strange, an effect most people don’t want in their shots. The V550 can automatically detect and correct red-eye for you. That’s pretty tricky business, but it can save images and get them ready for printing without a trip through your computer.

In the heat of the picture-taking moment, it’s hard to get the edges of the image right where you want them. Often, extraneous and distracting elements are included near the edge of the photo. Most often, you didn’t even know the bad stuff was there until you see the image on the view screen, and by then it’s too late – or is it?

The Kodak V550 has the ability to crop images. That means it can trim off the unwanted parts of the photo right there on the view screen. Then, the files will be all ready to go to the printer without further work. Slice off that hand sticking into the edge of the frame. Even pick one headshot out of a group picture if you want.

Digital photography is no longer the domain of only those who are serious enough to spend hours “photo shopping” their images and waiting patiently by their printer to see how it comes out. Even if you just want a stack of 4 x 5’s to pass around at the dinner table with minimum of fuss, you can circumvent the pocket full of film rolls and the 1-hour lab and make your prints right at home.

For now, look for a digital camera and photo printer with PictBridge capability, with the view towards watching for this new technology in many other electronics that take, hold, or store digital photos. DPOF is the icing on the cake for taking total control over your digital photo printing. Even if you use a commercial photo printer, PictBridge and DPOF will let you use odd moments to do your photo selecting and get your prints done quickly instead of languishing in your camera.