Why Do-It-Yourself Photo Printing Doesn't Add Up 414
Ant writes "CNET News.com and The New Yorks Times (no registration required) report that even though the prices of printers have dropped up to 30 percent in the last few months thanks to a savage price war, buyers are going to pay at least 28 cents a print. This is if you believe the manufacturers' math. It could be closer to 50 cents a print if you trust the testing of product reviewers at Consumer Reports.
In the meantime, the price of printing a 4-by-6-inch snapshot at a retailer's photo lab, like those inside a Sam's Club, is as low as 13 cents. Snapfish.com, an online mail-order service, offers prints for a dime each if you prepay. At those prices, why bother printing at home?
Consumers seem to be saying just that. For the 12 months ended in July, home printing accounted for just 48 percent of the 7.7 billion digital prints made, down sharply from 64 percent in the previous 12 months, according to the Photo Marketing Association International, a trade group for retailers and camera makers. The number of photos spewing out of home printers is up quite handsomely, however, because of the overall growth of digital photo printing--up about 68 percent from the year-earlier period - but retail labs clearly have the advantage..."
Value for Paris, None For Us (Score:5, Informative)
Photo Cartridge: $35
Black Cartridge: $20
Number of pictures printed: 68
That's just under a dollar per print. All prints were 4x6. At that rate, it's just cheaper to run up to the pharmacy and get them printed in duplicate. Yes, twice as many pictures and it's still less expensive.
This whole printing from home thing is probably a great thing for people that have to drive 40 miles to the nearest pharmacy, but for the rest of us... yay? The only good thing about printing at home, you ask?
Well, Paris and Paris can take all the nudies they want of each other and never have them leak to the press! That's easily worth $.80 a print!
No advantage in privacy, convienence, time, etc.. (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, you're paying for 1 thing -- privacy. Scratch that, you're also paying for convienence. How much $$ in gas do you burn driving to the store, then driving back to pick it up? That's a distance * 4 cost if you're doing nothing else. What's the time cost involved? Hey, how much do you make an hour vs. how long you spend driving? There are many advantages to home printing.
Plus, if you're into semi-illegal things, you'll know that the photo clerks are required by law to turn you into the cops if you try to get prints of scary pictures. I'd much rather the people with said prints do not set foot near photo equipment I run -- if I was in their position.
Convience is why 4L of milk (which I can get for 3$ at Wal-mart) is 6$ at the corner gas station. Why is it such a surprise that people use home printers? Hell, most people don't have laserjets! Inkjets sure cost a lot more per page, even though the initial cost is lower.
My suggestion (Score:3, Informative)
Re:well.... (Score:4, Informative)
and given my experience with colour lasting over the years, I'd pay MORE to get the laser ones done than crappy inkjet.
Simple fact: Longevity (Score:4, Informative)
1) Consumables are horribly expensive especially after you factor in mistakes and cutting.
2) Cutting required buying a paper cutter.
3) After about a year the ink fades.
4) The ink adheres and usually migrates from the paper to the glass/acetate in albums in all cases.
None of these factors came into play with the commercial services. I'm just happy they accept digital pictures and print them on real photo paper.
Something to be said for a chemical process (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on your photo lab, you should get a high, consistent, quality of print that you know will last as long as those shot with negatives, usually decades in good storage conditions.
This is unlike most low-end inkjets where printout lifetimes may be under a decade.
Now, if you WANT archival-quality inkjets, you can buy a printer that uses archival inks, and get matching archival ink and paper. Even then though, you are using unproven technology: You can only hope the vendor's torture-tests accurately simulate the promised 50 years in a photo album or in some cases 200 years in museum conditions. With a chemical process, you pretty much know what to expect.
The best reason to NOT print at home... (Score:3, Informative)
Home printers use ink sprayed onto paper (Unless you happen to have a very high end Dye-sublimation printer) whereas most photo labs will use a standard photo color emulsion on acetate paper process.
Unless you have specially treated paper, your prints are likely to fade and lose color to the oxidation process within 5 to 20 years. Whereas photo prints are typically guaranteed to retain their color for 100 years in moderate to indirect sunlight.
Of course, my favorite, silver emulsion Black & White prints will, theoretically, retain their look forever.
In any event, I've scanned in and restored a lot of photos that were 40 years or older for folks. There is nothing worse than trying to extract a decent image from a faded inkjet print on lousy, or even decent, paper.
Too bad my modpoints expired... (Score:5, Informative)
There are newer pigment based prints that are supposed to last a long time, but I don't really know much about their cost or longevity.
My fav place to get photos printed (Score:3, Informative)
And I swear, they didn't pay me to post this...I just like sharing a good deal when I find one.
Re:Why would I? I'll tell you why... (Score:5, Informative)
While I don't care too much about this (perhaps I'm not taking the same, uh, genre, of photos you are), there are other solutions.
I'm not sure what service the submitter was referring to exactly, but many stores including WalMart and others have automated Fujifilm or Kodak kiosks that let you input your photos via a large number of interfaces (flatbed scanner, USB, compact flash, SD, etc), view and edit them, and then print them on quality photo paper for 10-25 cents each. My mother who owns a Kodak picture printer does this because not only is it a lot cheaper and the quality of the prints is very good, but she can crop, resize, adjust brightness/contrast/saturation, etc, without trying to learn how to use graphic software.
It prints the pictures instantly along with a UPC you stick to the envelope and pay at the cashier. Nobody really sees them.
Re:Something to be said for a chemical process (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My fav place to get photos printed (Score:3, Informative)
Costco Photocenter [costcophotocenter.com] online rocks (snapfish's service, developed at your local Costco in an hour). Upload and specify when you want them and go shopping an a couple hours. Plus you can share with your friends and family and they can order and get them at their own local Costco (or they can pay to have them mailed).
I always loved the idea of getting photos developed online, but balked at the shipping costs, especially if I want just a few prints. Now, I do it all the time.
Re:Something to be said for a chemical process (Score:4, Informative)
You're not "trusting" anything -- ink on paper and exposed to light is just as much a chemical process as a cibachrome. Using non-fugitive pigments on acid-free paper has been tested for several thousand years longer than any photographic chemical. Whether it's applied with an inkjet or a paintbrush really doesn't make any difference.
Unfortunately, people who trust photographic prints should realize that pretty much any current consumer process is guaranteed to make a print that will be worthless in ten to twenty years even if kept in a sealed vault. Your original negative film might last another decade past that.
The reason I print at home: quality (Score:2, Informative)
The printers blew away the printing kiosks, which blew away the online services in quality. Seriously, ofoto.com was absolutely terrible. It looked like they resampled my picture to 640x480 before printing it, and then applied some punch-it-up color filtering to make it look "better" to the untrained eye. The picture was washed out and disgusting. The in-store printouts (CVS and Walgreen's) both fared only slightly better - it looked like someone used an LCD to expose the paper or something; definitely not anywhere close to the full potential of the source image. To be fair, the store printouts had better color reproduction than the online sites.
That left the printers - which produced results miles better than the online or in-store results. Yeah, they cost more - but the HP and Canon printouts both were gorgeous, with the Canon ending up slightly more vivid but the HP ending up slightly more accurate. I ended up deciding based on the superior UI of the HP on-printer interface, but it was a close call.
Do I pay more per print? Yep. Did I find an online service or in-store service that could come anywhere in the same ballpark of quality as printing it myself? Heck no.
-5 Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong.
Older (dye-based) inkjet printers had fading problems, but more recent models use pigment-based inksets, and the resulting prints actually tend to exceed the longevity of traditional color prints.
The Epson Ultrachromes, for example, are Wilhelm rated [wilhelm-research.com] for over 100 years in good display conditions, and over 200 years in dark storage.
Re:My fav place to get photos printed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why would I? I'll tell you why... (Score:5, Informative)
I develop all my digital pics at Costco. which happens to also be my primary grocery-buying place. Some clear advantages:
1. New/Better developing equipment. Costco (and probably most other retailers) have developing stations FAR better than my g/f's Epson photo printer. They update their machinery every six months or so, too, so I get excellent color reproduction, high quality print paper, etc.
2. Price. I pay 12 cents a print for 4x6, or something nearly as stupid. Maybe it's 14 cents; who cares? Much less than the costs people are posting here for home photo printers. I like money, don't you?
3. Convenience. I happen to do most of my grocery shopping at Costco (love dem 12-packs of Campbell's Chunky Soup -- mmmm, MSG...). They also do developing in less than an hour, most of the time, so you can develop while you shop. And if you'd rather sit in your jammies, Costco.com will let you send your pics from your home PC for pickup in store, or they'll deliver by mail (like Snapfish, etc.). It's not 3 minutes from concept to wall art, but if you want immediate results you're gonna pay in $$$ and quality.
4. Customer Service. This may be a Costco-only thing, but they'll refund your money if you don't like your pictures FOR ANY REASON. My father (bless his tech-inept heart) once developed all 200 of his pics from Europe. Problem is, he developed the thumbnails. Costco explained his error, refunded his money, and developed the actual pics instead. Try getting Epson to send you a replacement cartridge because you did something stupid.
Of course, home printers have their uses. Off the top of my head, Costco is terrible for:
1. Blackmail/Kidnapping Photos. I'm pretty sure they've got to report this kind of thing. Besides, if you've kidnapped anyone of signifigance, you've got a hefty payday coming. 50 cent prints aren't a big expenditure for you.
2. Pictures of your naughty bits. No need to traumatize the adolescents working the shop at Costco with pictures of your wang. Plus, hard copies are so 1970s. Just post the high-res shots anonymously to craigslist like the rest of us.
Outside of these two, admittedly rare, categories, I just can't fathom why people are spending hundreds of dollars on home-developing. My two cents.
Re:Why print? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually a valid argument why home printing isn't that expensive at the end of the day. Since your 80-shot CF card probably contains 5-10 photos worth printing and putting into album the costs vs commercial printing become more vague..
Plus I've adjusted my screen and my printer just the way I like it (AdobeRGB etcetera) and to send prints to a commercial printer I'd still have to crop them and convert them to sRGB and maybe adjust them to their ICC profile and..
All in all, labour involved in printing 1 photo (cropping, white balance adjustments, sharpening, shadow/highlight adjustments..) are so great it's a bit misleading to count straight cents per print consumables. Of course if you print and pray it's a different story.
Re:No advantage in privacy, convienence, time, etc (Score:4, Informative)
That's correct. Julia Sommerville [knightayton.co.uk], a British primetime newscaster, got busted by the cops [forcers.org.uk] after sending prints of her young daughter to be developed by a UK high st chemist (Boots). In some shots the girl was naked in the bath. After the police released Sommerville someone at Boots leaked the story and photographs to the UK tabloid press.
Re:Value for Paris, None For Us (Score:1, Informative)
I personally avoided the HP platform because it was the most expensive to print photos from. and searched my printer purchase based on the cost of the ink cartridges/volume of ink in cartridge.
that is how I landed on the epson... plus I get to print on CD's for free. (I can print full color on about 300 CD's with one set of ink wells. compared to 150~ 4X6 prints or maybe 40 8X10 prints in ultra high quality mode.)
True! (Score:1, Informative)
The ink is dried out the next time you're going to use it.
The quality of labs is always better, they use REAL photo techniques, no ink involved.
The price of foto labs is also always better, esp. if you take into account the price and lifespan of the printer itself.
And if you want control. Take them to a lab that doesn't do any corrections on your foto's and provides an ICC color profile of their machines.
In the Netherlands http://www.profotonet.nl/ [profotonet.nl] is really good for this (I am not connected to them in any way).
Upload you're pictures before 15:00 and receive them in the mail the next day!
Re:Simple fact: Longevity (Score:2, Informative)
With my old Epson Stylus 790 printer (dye-based inks) I noticed differnces between Epson ink and generic ink, and differences between paper brands, but they all faded after a few months.
Epsons current inks, branded Durabrite and Ultrachrome (Ultrachrome is best for photos), are pigment based. My Durabrite prints have not faded noticably in over a year on the sill. They are also water resistant, and the Durabrite inks print very well on plain paper too (rather than the special coated paper you need to get the best quality for a photo).
They don't seem to be "sticky" like the old pigment inks were, so they sit more nicely in a photo album.
Epsons Durabrite printers are all 3 colours, and don't print gloss prints so well, but for longevity, I have no complaints. I'd expect the Ultrachrome prints to be better than anything I could get from a lab, and last as long, but with 7 colours plus gloss optimizer
Here are some real numbers for another printer (Score:2, Informative)
I was testing with a compatible ink cartridge, I ran the ink through our i1 profiler and so far as I can tell, it's the exact same ink as Epson puts into the PictureMate cartridges. At any rate, you get the exact same yield from a 3rd party cartridge because it's the "level" in the chips which is dependent on the printer, not the actual level of the cartridge, that determines how full a cartridge is.
For paper, I used our own Micro Ceramic Luster [inkjetart.com] - primarily because I like the luster finish better than the gloss that Epson includes with their cartridges (and the Profile [inkjetart.com] which really makes the prints look good).
The paper was $11.90 for 100 sheets of 4x6 and the cartridge was $10.39 (these are retail prices, not the employee discount price).
Here's what we got out of the printer before it forced us to change cartridges:
4 cleaning cycles
about 10 nozzle checks
We'll just take the cleanings and nozzle checks as a part of normal use. The 183 sheets of paper cost a total of $21.77 and the cartridge was $10.39 for a total of $32.16 for 173 prints. That averages out to $0.185 for each print. So you're paying 2 1/2 cents more than Costco (usually $0.16 a print including tax) and you don't have to drive anywhere. My wife even took the printer with her to a party and printed pictures while it was still going on!
So once again, we got an average of 18 and a half cents a print. If I purchased the paper in the 500 pack, it would be $20.49 for the paper giving us $0.178 a print.
Re:Value for Paris, None For Us (Score:5, Informative)
I just don't see the benefit of home printing--if you don't print frequently you waste the ink when the printer "warms up". If you need a lot of prints and are in a hurry, then a trip to a costco/drug store is probably faster (20 minute drive each way, 30 minutes waiting for prints=70) which for a quantity of 100 is less than 1 minute per print. Some photoshops do a good job on color--and if you're unhappy with the color balance you can usually ask them to re-run them.
What I don't like about Costco (and most other 1 hour print labs) is that they don't do 4xX's. They resize to 4x6 by chopping off the ends.
...unless you refill (Score:3, Informative)
I can't tell the difference between prints made with Canon ink and aftermarket ink. In fade tests in sunlight, the aftermarket inks fade about the same as Canon, but last better than Epson (not current generation, I don't do Epson anymore).
You have to buy properly formulated inks, specifically for your brand/type of printer. If the place is selling "one size fits all" ink, stay away, it's crud. I've tried putting that stuff in printers before, and it really screws up the color balance and the stuff fades in a month.
I can fill all the tanks in my Canon for about $5, as opposed to $40 for new tanks.
I found glossy paper on sale a couple of years ago at Office Depot; one of those crazy "nearly free after discounts" sales - something like $5 for 100 sheets. I bought about 20 packs. I might even have to buy paper in another 5 years or so.
IOW, if you're frugal, you can make your own prints for VERY cheap. I think my 4x6's probably cost 5 cents each.
Re:I can think of only two reasons... (Score:3, Informative)
True, and this lets me ask the question - what online print shops *do* allow you to actually use ICC color profiles? I'm sure there are some pro-oriented shops that do, I just don't know which ones. Are there any that are as easy to use/fast/cheap as Kodak (Ofoto), or Shutterfly?
I have used both Ofoto (wish they'd kept that name) and Shutterfly, and they're easy and quick but the prints are snapshot quality at best. Shutterfly always adds a yellow cast. Ofoto at least does not add a cast but the results are unpredictable.
2) You print material isn't supposed to be seen by anybody else. Print shops have access to the images and will usually check prints.
DEFINITELY true
It's a total mistake to assume that nobody's going to handle your prints at one of these photo printers. If nothing else, it's highly likely that somebody is going to physically pick up your stack of prints from the printer and stuff them in an envelope. It's pretty likely that your prints will be quickly checked to at least make sure there were no obvious errors (like only half a photo being printed). People *are* gonna see your prints, just like they did in the days of film processing at your local drug store.
Personally, I do a mix of both home and online printing, depending on the photo. I do get the best results when printing myself, although I am *sure* I do pay more. For example, I printed out some of my and my wife's wedding photos myself to give out to close friends and family, and then printed the same photos through Ofoto to give to others. The Ofoto prints were okay, but on my own prints I was able to get the colors, contrast and brightness to exactly match what I wanted. Of course, I had to do about 10 test runs before I managed that, and even once I got things set up right, about every other print had some sort of smudge or other imperfection. (Part of that's my printer, but part of it's almost just endemic to home inkjet printing.) So I have no doubt that given all the paper and ink I used, I probably paid at least a buck a print for my own prints, vs. 19 cents or whatever it was for the Ofoto prints. But I did end up with better quality from my prints.
Reason 3 (Score:1, Informative)
I find quick printing needs, when quality doesn't matter, to be my primary reason for keeping a photo printer around.
Re:Value for Paris, None For Us (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Value for Paris, None For Us (Score:2, Informative)