There really is no reason to be printing photos on your own printer (for consumers, though I suspect it’s similar for pros). Every corner drug store (in the US) can print them with better quality and at a lower cost. Maybe it’s a slight hassle, but how many people are printing a significant quantity of photos anymore?
What you say is not true for professional photographers or designers. For one thing, pro-level printers are in fact better than what the drug store has, which are optimized for speed, economy, and vibrancy — none of which are major concerns for professionals. They want accuracy and quality above all else.
For another thing, being able to print proofs in your own office is important. Having to run to the drug store to check color output is an awful pain.
Lastly, professional photo printers are often larger than what a drug store has, or at least higher quality at that large size.
American society in a nutshell. Need to drive 20 min to reach civilization so instead you end up buying inkjet printers that are likely end up in the trash every year due to their low quality production and because the corporation is scamming you with overpriced cartridges.
Yup. Socio-economic and geographic forces are powerful, and there is a reason why many things are different in the US from denser locales with historically stable and established urban centers like Europe or Asia.
Have two of them, youngest under 3, and a full time single parent. If you don’t plan ahead and direct them usefully, they’ll roll you hard (not out of malice, but because they’re kids) and everyone has a much tougher time.
My middle schooler often doesn't have more than a couple days between when he has everything necessary to complete an assignment, and when it is due. He has other workload, too, so there's no guarantee he's working on it that night. Getting to the one drugstore with a remaining photocenter near me in the evening is a pain. Even with notice, it's a pain.
People have legitimate reasons to want their own high quality color printers, even if that is its own pain, too.
I’ve done extensive price comparisons based the cost of paper and ink. For different brands and models of printer, I’ve done comparisons of the number of pictures you have to print to break even, compared to the cost of taking it to a shop and having them print it for you. I included discount online printers as well.
These comparisons include the cost of paying for all consumables—usually ink, but some printer models have additional consumables which you have to include. These comparisons also factor in the difference between the included inks and the ink refills (some printers ship with ink cartridges that are less full than the refills).
It is not hard to come out ahead, doing your own prints. When I was doing this comparison, it was only economical to go to the store if you were sporadically printing the smallest picture sizes. For a medium picture size like 8"x10", you could be using high-quality paper and inks at home and still spend less money than bargain online print services.
As a rough estimate, printing yourself with high-quality inks and papers can come out to around $0.02 per square inch, or $1.60 for an 8"x10" photo. Right now, an 8x10 is $3.56 on Shutterfly, or $2.99 on Snapfish. That’s a pretty stark difference.
So you save about $1.40 per photo, and you can use this to calculate how long it takes to amortize the cost of the printer hardware. For a $250 printer, like a reasonable low-end Epson or Canon photo printer, that’s just 180 prints.
YMMV. I expect most people don’t print photos at all these days, and only put photos on their phone. I personally don’t see the point in printing out 3.5"x5" photos if I own a tablet or phone with a screen that large. So, my expectation is that people who print photos are making albums of family photos, or perhaps they’re amateur photographers or digital artists. Someone with a passing interest in photography or making photo albums, who prints, can easily blow through 180 prints to break even on a printer purchase. If you just have a few picture frames around the house you want to fill, obviously just go to a shop.
When I purchased my printer, I was comparing against more expensive local photo labs, rather than the cheapest online services. I was also comparing 11"x14" prints, which typically cost around $10 each, versus $3 at home. The purchase of a $700 printer is amortized after only 100 such prints, in this scenario.
Color laser printers don't have acceptable quality for photos, IMO. I used to work as a tech in a lab with tons of these printers and, unless laser printing technology has changed a lot, it just doesn’t cut it for photos.
I mean, you can see the photos, and they’re clear enough, it's just nowhere near the quality that you can get for the same price.
Every Walmart can print photos in a hour for cheap, and if that’s not an option Shutterfly and friends are always doing sales (or free with shipping prints).
If you’re doing more printing, you’ll come out ahead buying inkjets + ink + paper (factoring cost of all the consumables, here). Except for the smallest sizes (like 3.5"x5") which can be churned out by Noritsu machines at high speed—it’s hard to beat the price of 3.5"x5" lab prints.
There some thermal dye sublimation printers targeted at the home market for making 4x6" prints. The cost-per-print is pretty hideous compared to a local store's photo dept. or online photo printing services, but the quality is pretty good and the units seem to get good reviews. I've seen them used for print-on-demand at events (think "photo booths", etc).
Dye sub at home is more expensive, per photo, than going to the lab.
You might get refill for 100 photos for like $40, maybe a bit less. Then you pay for the paper. Limited size options. Looks great, though. Drugstore prices are around $0.25 and local labs are around $0.40, which are more economical options.
I’ve only ever used dye sub for photos that needed immediate turnaround.
If you need to print photos is cheaper to get them printed by a photograph shop or if you need a lot of them even order from a service that prints them and sends it to you. Not only it's cheaper, but it's a far better quality than the shitty quality of consumer inkjet printers.
If you print photos yourself then you are doing it wrong. Send them to a service that actually has a photo printer that is not a piece of shit and you will find your prints actually lasting longer than the ink cartridge you used to print them with.
A photo service is just somebody else who owns printers and charges you a markup. If you print one-off photos of decent quality, probably going to be RA-4, inkjet, or dye sub. This is true whether or not you own the printer yourself.
> It's somebody else who owns much hiqher quality printers that you would buy,…
This is just completely untrue. What kind of machines do you think they have back there?
Photo labs typically have two types of machines: something like a Noritsu which prints onto standard RA-4 paper with lasers, and ordinary inkjet printers, like the ones from Epson or Canon (like what I’ve purchased for myself—I’ve occasionally seen the same exact model behind the counter at photo labs—the same printer I have at home).
The advantage of the Noritsu style machines is that you can churn out hundreds of 4"x6" photos per hour. It’s not higher-quality than inkjet… actually, inkjet prints are better, and you can do that at home. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense—the Noritsu is constrained by RA-4 chemistry, but the Epson / Canon ink can be anything that you can squirt out an inkjet head.
You can calculate the break even point for inkjet printers. If you’re printing, say, 8x10s, then break-even is somewhere around 200 prints, over the lifetime of the printer, compared to using the cheapest discount services online. This is if you decide to get a photo inkjet printer (around $300), account for the cost of ink ($0.01 per square inch) and high-quality paper (also around $0.01 per square inch) and compare it against online services (around $3 for the cheapest 8x10s).
If you aren’t printing many photos or are sticking to the super-cheap 4"x6" size, go ahead and take your photos to the lab. But the photo lab ain’t magic—it’s mostly just equipment that you could reasonably buy for your home.
