Photo printer adviceFollow

I've used HP printers for the last 6 years or so. My wife uses it to print photos for he scrap booking and what not, I have a few prints hanging on the wall. The ink isn't the cheapest out there, but it looks fine to me. The nice thing is that you can get one that does all sorts of stuff for under $200.

Nah, printers aren't that much. I been looking at the Cannon Selphy line. The ink and the paper come in one cartridge.

I know ink will be the limiting factor for me in getting pictures printed. The ink will either run out or dry up and I'll be instructed, by some Staples geek-child to purchase the wrong cartridge, not realize my (their) mistake until the package has been opened and I'm unable to return it. Then I won't want to spend all that money AGAIN on cartridges and I'll shove the printer to the back of the shelf to collect dust...while I go back to sneakily printing off my photo at work.

We just bought a Canon Pixma MP560 about a month ago for my wifes scrapbooking and she's loving it so far. The cartridges are all marked with the number that you need and there is a display that shows you how full/empty the cartridges are. They are easy to take out and seem to last a long time. Think the printer cost about $150. I'm not enthusiastic about the HP brand. I've owned a few and they gave me all sorts of trouble.

Just like anything else we ship seconds to Canada.

Order your photos online from a decent company.
Not as quick as a printer at home but you're not going to get the same quality as professional printers.
A lot of sites will also offer to optimize your photos for you (as in added contrast and fixing and boosting colours) which will improve your photos by quite a bit unless you fancy diving into Photoshop yourself.



For reference, compare these two images:
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I threw the second through the basic automated quick fixing in Photoshop, which I assume is similar to what a professional company will do.

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.

The issue is cost. Ink jet cartridges are ridiculously expensive. They produce few prints before needing to be replaced, and the prints tend to fade far, far quicker than a professionally done print. They're great for diddling around with digital photography as a hobby, but it'll cost you. If you print even a moderate number of photos, you're going to be spending a lot of money on ink jet cartridges. Hell, you get 50 free 4x6 prints from Snapfish just for signing up. Beyond that, they're as cheap as 9 cents each. A single HP 60 color cartridge (chosen at random), costs 27.99. At 9 cents a print, you'd have to be able to produce 311 4x6 prints to come close to Snapfish's price from that one cartridge. You'll be lucky to get 1/8 of that number.f

The only advantage to printing your own photos, is convenience. You get better quality and far, far better value for your money by having them done by someone else.

Depends on the need of the printee I guess. Most reasonable color lasers are great at creating high quality non glossy prints, similar to what you would see in a textbook, or a magazine. They don't do high quality photos or glossy photos thouhg. If you don't print all that much, the energy costs of the laser at standby will eventually exceed the cost of the ink, since the inkjet doesn't have to maintain a heating element. If you print regularily and don't need a true frameable photo print quality, than color laser is the way to go for sure, though the initial cost will be somewhat higher, around $200 more.

Snapfish does it.

I haven't used them all that much, but I did get one shot blown up to 10"x17" in 2005 and it still looks perfect today. I don't recall what it cost, but I do remember that I thought it pretty reasonable at the time.

I'm sure there are many others out there that do it as well. You my even be able to get it done at your local drugstor/Walmart etc.

I'm a cheap black and white laser sorta gal. I don't really see the point of printing out photos.

Even your papers smell bad.