If you have gone to the expense of purchasing a color laser printer, take the time to find the right paper for the job. All paper is not created equal. If you are putting your printouts in your filing cabinet you don't need to be too concerned with paper quality. When creating brochures, flyers and other documents that you will send to your customers you should use a good quality paper for the highest quality print. Many paper companies will send you free samples so you can run a few tests and see which paper works best with your printer.

Two excellent papers for folded brochures are Microprint Laser and Microprint Digital Publishing Text. These are bright white, lightweight papers that can be easily folded. This paper is manufactured by Georgia Pacific. Their web site has a large selection of paper and a FAQ page that will help you decide which paper to choose for your type of printing.

Weyerhaeuser premium First Choice is recommended for general color laser printing. This bright white paper will provide vibrant color for crisp text and images.

Futura Laser is a gloss coated paper that provides a gloss finish and bright colors that you would expect from 4 color printing. This is an acid-free, archival quality paper. You can order samples from their web site or purchase online at Paper2u

HammerMill has a wide variety of laser paper for every possible use. Visit their OfficePaperSystem page to choose the right paper for your particular printing needs.

Now that you have a nice color laser printer and the right paper your images should be looking much better. People always tell me that their images never look as good as the sample printouts at the printer store. The reason for this is probably because the images were not handled properly. Scan your images at 300 dpi and save as an uncompressed tif file before you put them in your page layout program.

If you are still using a low resolution digital camera it may be time for an upgrade. Prices on digital cameras have dropped considerably over the past few years.

I own and recommend the Minolta Dimage S404 Digital Camera. This is a mid-priced 4 megapixel camera with an aluminum body and will take uncompressed tiff files. Finding a mid-priced, mid-sized camera that doesn't have a cheap plastic body is not easy. If you plan to print any of your images you should have a camera that will save your images in tiff format. Minolta Dimage S414 is the new upgraded model of the previous S404

This camera can be used in fully automatic mode but also has manual mode for people who want more control.

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