Contrary to popular belief, the quality of your printer paper can have a serious impact on the quality of your printer output. You can buy the best printer in the word – feed it lousy paper, and you’ll get lousy results. Most consumers just purchase the cheapest paper they can find at Staples, which is normally just copier paper. Sure, this will work fine for text print outs. Try printing images or pictures on this paper. – not very crisp, right?

Image quality on your print outs is largely dependent on the brightness of the paper and the absorption capacity of the paper. Smooth paper is best for brightness since it reflects the most light directly back to the eye. Coarser paper tends to diffuse light in all over, really weakening the amount of light that makes it back to your eye. The end result is an image with less brilliance.

The second factor that plays a huge role in paper quality is the absorption potential of the paper. With cheap paper you tend to see ink bleed or run. Rather than nice tight graphics, you get blurred images. Coated paper is really the way to go here. It prevents the paper from absorbing the ink. For true, high resolution photo printing, coated paper is required. You’d be surprised how much the paper actually has to do with the end resolution of the print out. The right paper can sometime double the resolution of your print out.