I’ve just finished printing the first batch of contact sheets for my digital negatives and I must say I am pleased with the results.
Printing at home is something I will never try to do –it just isn’t worth the hassle and I will never get good results with consumer-grade equipment– but I do have a colour ink-jet printer and it does come in handy sometimes.
In this case I use it to print the contact sheets for the digital negatives I store on CDs and on my big (well it doesn’t feel that big now but it did seem huge when I first bought it) hard-drive. I use photoshop’s ContactSheet II “script” to create full A4 contact sheets of all the photographs I put on a folder and then cram as many folders as I can into a master folder and burn a CD with it.
This way I can continue to use my favourite method of organising pictures and finding them later on (I still print contact sheets for my silver-based photography and I guess I always will).
Life is good. Now if I can only buy the definitive hard-drive and never have to upgrade again I’ll be really happy!