Deathwysh wrote:
Printers are cheap. Ink gets very expensive. You'll get a better, longer lasting print if you get them done professionally and it will probably cost less in the long run.
Depends. If you're looking for highest quality, that's probably true, but then it's not going to be cheap getting them done professionally either. The advantage of buying a mid-cost printer is that you can print out our own pictures, they'll be good enough for normal quality stuff you might carry in your wallet or put on your desk, but will be much much cheaper. Also, you can swap them out and print new ones anytime you want.
There's nothing stopping you from going to a professional with the same image file(s) to get high quality pictures done for sending stuff to relatives and whatnot. I just think printers have gotten to the quality today that the cost difference between getting a baseline printer for documents, and getting one which can print reasonable quality pictures is pretty minimal, so there's no reason not to go that route, for convenience if nothing else.