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portable printer for outside shots
Bountyphotographer
Registered Users Posts: 413 Major grins
Anybody knows of a portable printer for outside shots.
I would be nice to shot and print in a park, soccer field, beach in the same day????
Just a thought.
Bounty
I would be nice to shot and print in a park, soccer field, beach in the same day????
Just a thought.
Bounty
:photo
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How large of a print do you want to make??
I know of none that run on batts but even my Epson 1400 can be used out doors with an extension cord and then I could print up to 13x17 inches......
I was hoping to print 8X10 on a printer that runs on battery.
Im shooting little league soccer and would like to sell the pics on the spot
Can you guys print straight out of the camera, or do you have to download it to a PC first???
there is a USB port on my printer....there are printers with a tiny lcd screen and card slots on them....but I shoot raw so it would have to go to computer then printer.....maybe Glort will drop by, he is like the god of onsite printing....
Thank you
Bounty
Truthfully we don't print a ton at events. We upsell bigger stuff and the prints are icing on the cake. Some people just really want to take stuff home so printing is for them. Most venues have power of some sort. But for some, like our last big event, we needed the generator.
Printing onsite can be a bitch. There are many challenges to it. One that I just found, when it is hot as hell paper might not cooperate. I watched the paper curl as I pressed the print button. It was beyond aggravating and led to many reprints and having to ship some of them.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/615086-REG/HiTi_Hi_Touch_Imaging_Tech_88_D0935_00A_P510S_6_Dye.html
I have done summer camp shots with mine.
print sizes:
4 x 6" (102 x 152mm):
5 x 7" (127 x 177mm):
6 x 8" (152 x 203mm):
6 x 9" (152 x 229mm):
btw - both have card readers built in and screens for previewing so a laptop is not essential, but makes viewing and editing a lot better!
Nikon D700, 24-70 f2.8, 70-200 f2.8, 70-300 VR, SB800, SB600
Alienbee B800x2, B400x2, Silver PLMx2
Bounty
How was your shoot last week?
I just got my 70-200 2.8 recently and have been looking for action ever since I saw your ad ha ah ha
Bounty
My suggestion for running a full size printer would be to get a car battery and an inverter. You can get a used battery from a wrecker cheap ( get a decent one, 80 min RC Min.) and an inverter. The inverter does NOT have to be a pure sine wave to run a printer, laptop or desktop no matter what anyone says.
The interneal pwer supply will correct any variations in the output. I have run modified sine wave inverters for what must be a month or more worth of hours and NEVER had an issue.
If you are happy to pay the extra for a pure sine wave inverter, then you can run anything at all off them.
An inverter of 500W will be enough to power a small 3 view station plus one workstation and a printer or 3 setup if you use laptops.
Put the inverter and battery in something like a plastic esky and you can carry them easily or wheel them around on a trolley with other stuff. This will power a laptop all day no worries and an inkjet forever and a dye sub for longer than you can flatten the thing making prints in a day.
I would suggest either making a " Volt Box" permanent setup out of the esky and fitting it with a fan or 2 and external switching etc for the inverter or just sit the inverter outside the esky when you are using it to avoid overheating ( unlikely but still) and get the thing away from any Hydrogen gas the battery may give off.
This isn't exactly built in But I know of no full size printer that has a battery built in and if it did you can bet it would cost 20 times what a battery and inverter would. Plus of course if you do it this way you can power computers and even a light off the same source.
One other power system you may find is a UPS. With these you can run anything -BUT- you must find one that will self start. A lot need to be plugged into the power to fire up in the first place. You will need one that will cold start. You will also want a pretty decent size one or one that will take external battery's. You then need to try and find one that will do 12 ( never seen one yet) or 24V. ( Much more common) You can then feed them off external batteries like car batteries or SLA's.
You really need to have an idea about these UPS things to make their use successful so if you aren't up on them, I'd just go with the inverter and car battery.
If you want to sell your images using a small onsite viewing setup like above you may want a couple of batteries depending on how long you intend being onsite and how many laptops you want to run. I have printed from the camera a few times for family get togethers and it's a total pain in the arse and well worth putting in the laptop as well. If you are going to try to sell the pics, you will want control ver precise cropping and other basic functions and you don't want to be messing around trying to do these on the camera screen.
Plus it would make you look totally amateurish. If you are selling anything even just to other parents on your kids team you need to have some sort of professional look to inspire confdence.
And don't bother trying to flog amateurish looking 6x4" prints. Do 8x12 so the things have some wow factor and leave it at that. If people want smaller prints, then offer 2 5x7's on the same page at the same price. I would suggest $30 up is a good starting point. You can also offer the images on disk which you can burn on your laptop. You could even avoid the whole printer power supply thing and just offer disks.
For printing at the most basic you could use a laptop and connect a screen for the clients to see the images.
Every laptop I have seen has the ability to turn on and off the external screen with the simple push of a button so you can show the image, turn off the screen to do your magic and then turn it on again to show the finished product for approval before printing.
If you are doing this outside, you are going to NEED a sun shade of some type. You and the customers wont see jack on a screen that isn't well shaded.
I really think event work is bit of an all or nothing tough business. I would not expect to make a lot of sales from this so don't be dissapointed if you only make a few sales a day.
Event photography is a whole other science in itself so you may want to look up other threads on that.
Thanks a lot
Bounty
Was a ton of work. But it was great. And we are still selling off of it. And we will probably have sales daily for a few weeks.
As far as 4x6" I don't even offer them anymore. Not even on my website. At events I only print 8x10. And on my site I only offer a minimum of 2 5x7 prints. I don't think it is worth selling less than that. And I do not think it shows off my work either. Small prints are for goofy stuff. I print on Ilford smooth pearl so they feel substantial and something that should be framed. Same goes for my large prints. At events for me the printing is for people who "HAVE TO HAVE THAT NOW!" Otherwise it showcases our work and generally ends up being an upsell for Custom Cds with prints and very large prints. I am surprised at the number of 17x24s we have sold off of this last event. Mostly because that is a featured item and we had them on display at the event in the large formats. I do not believe that sales at the event are the end all. We do the serious soft sell and people respond well to that. Everything is viewable online and I sell off of events that are years old. You never know what people will buy. A few months ago a guy bought a 11x17 from a fight that was 2.5years ago. I leave that stuff up.
I remember a while back when you were doing your first onsite event Zero, a Hill climb I think it was and you had some learning curve experience.
How many Vstations are you running now? Do you run these all off Tv's or are you linking them to one Big one? Are you doing any particular type of events or everything and anything?
I haven't had the paper curl issue and we have done several events in 40o+ heat at times. Not fun.
We have been focusing on motorcycles for our big events and have fine tuned the process with some fight events. This was the same hillclimb again this year. A world of difference a year makes. This year we had 5 laptops 2 of which were hooked to TV's. One 36" and one 24" 3 of the computers ran LR4 so we could use keyword searches and not lock up one system. This helped a ton. All computers ran picasa off of the main brain computer so people could view easily. We would help get them to their time area in a folder and they surfed away. We had more tables chairs under 2 ez ups and a giant sunshade. Much smoother and faster. We had last years event to pull up and show people their pics. We actually sold lots of old pics too. Yes the paper messed us up bigtime but no lost sales from it. It didn't work, so I didn't force it. Those orders that could not be printed got shipped. Could have been dust too, but printing was not a problem in the morning or late at night when it was cool. Utah is really dry. 7% humidity. I bet this is a huge factor combined with the heat. And it was probably 100F in the trailer.