ch3.org.uk

man can only win by lying.

I've just spent around an hour trying to get a photo printed on a piece of 10x15 photo paper.

I now have 5 versions of the print, of varying success, in front of me:

Before printing:
i) note that all my cameras have different aspect ratios and that said 4Mpx image is about 12x15.

Crop it.


ii) Note that my printer has no "10x15 (tabbed)" paper size.

Create one.


Print 1) Printed at 10x15.
Came out in the top-left corner of the paper with a few mm border to the bottom and RHS.
Measured paper, discovered 10x15 cm paper is in fact the standard photographic size of 6x4" and that HP are lying. (Legend has it that they had to rebuild part of my old school hall because the girders were in inches and the bricks in cm, at a 2.5 ratio).

Resize image to 6x4, set "borderless print"


Print 2) A beautiful borderless print, 6.25*4", right over the whole paper including the tab and perforation. Aesthetically acceptable, but not the print I asked for.

Turn off borderless print to prevent width-scaling.


Print 3) A beautiful print in the 6*4 page area, perfectly centered, and with a neat, perfectly symmetrical white border. Again, very pretty, but if I want a white border, I'll composite one.

Turn borderless printing back on, and re-create the 6*4 (tabbed) paper size to lie about the tab and pretend it's not there.


Print 4) Pretty close, but with a quarter-inch overprint into the tab. Not a problem on this image, but possibly more problematic on more precisely framed images. And I want to know how to print exactly what I ask for.

Set "borderless expansion" to "small" and save settings.


Print 5) A combination of "Eureka" and "Eubastard". 1.5 mm overprint into the tab; tauntingly close to what I wanted; a very nice print, but a quiet "neener neener" from the printer as it shows that, however nicely I ask, there is *no* way it will print exactly to size.

Which is, I suppose, fair enough, as a home machine is unlikely to have the required degree of edge-detection accuracy.