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..."
There's a reason to print at home and on-line. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a near and dear issue for me. I've eagerly slurped up all the new generations of printer technology each time more amazed than ever at the quality of prints, finally achieving indistinguishable quality from lab prints.
But, a disturbing parallel trend came with each new generation of printer. The printers became:
but at the same time:
I still jump in every generation or so of new photo printer technology but not with rose-colored glasses anymore. I still need to on occasion get a quick print for home or some guest, but that's mostly it. For my serious stuff, I send it out to be done:
I think the costs for high quality prints from services will remain competitive as there are plenty of competent "players" out there. Just read the reviews, sample a few prints yourself before you commit big time to any of them. Also, maintain your storage of prints yourself, lots of services offer storage, but I'd highly recommend if you value your pictures, you keep archives of your own. (Aside from reliability issues, what happens if any of them go out of business? Where do your pictures go?)
Why would I? I'll tell you why... (Score:2, Insightful)
ink is overpriced (Score:5, Insightful)
If not, consumers are getter better longevity with lab prints since they are done on photographic paper. I know all the statistics about 100 year estimated print life on newer inkjets. There's always the little asterisk about not exposing the prints to air unless this they are inkjet pigment printers. Epson has some but pigment ink cartridges are usually even more expensive. Not to mention clogged heads, smeared prints and all the other problems you get trying to print at home.
Simple rule (Score:5, Insightful)
1) If it's standard 4x6, print at a lab. You won't be able to beat the price
2) If it's larger - up to A4, print at home on modest priced photo printer that lets you refill individual tanks, and using cheap photo paper (Where I live Kodak's the cheapest and the quality is good enough for my needs - and I consider myself a serious amateur photographer).
3) If you're likely to be printing A3 or A3+ often it's worth buying an A3 or A3+ photo printer. Since they're considerably more expensive (or were last time I looked), you have to be printing A3 at least an item a month to make it worthwhile. (ie one poster a month). Otherwise find a cheap lab.
4) If you're printing larger than A3 the photos get ridiculously priced. A lab is going to be cheaper but not cheap (unless you are a specialised printing firm). Avoid these.
You don't have to drive twice or wait (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're overlooking two key options:
1) Upload photos to a site, then pick up. For instance, you can upload your photos via Yahoo and then pick them up in as little as an hour from Target (http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/thatadamguy/print_
2) Or, if you don't mind waiting a week or so, order photos online via Fotki, Shutterfly, etc.
As for privacy... I suppose there could be some issues, but particularly with mega-printers like Ofoto and Snapfish and such, I just don't imagine that the photos are being seen by many human eyes (perhaps not even by one).
Assertion belies facts (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
The author appears to be 48 percent deaf.
Re:No advantage in privacy, convienence, time, etc (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No advantage in privacy, convienence, time, etc (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm maybe. However, I'd have to drive 600 miles to make up for the cost of just the printer itself.
That said, I have to wonder why home printing is all that popular in the first place. Me personally, I keep and view all my photos etc on my computer. My girlfriend puts all her favorite photos onto her website with a neat freebie gallery app she downloaded. Neither of us are terribly interested in hard copies of photos. I can't help but think over the next few years, more will feel this way. Maybe I'm narrow minded, but I think this particular market is doomed to die in the not too distant future. Between cell phones, PDAs, e-paper, and iPods with fancy-ass screens, the benefits of hard copied prints are diminishing in the face of digital convenience.
It still makes sense for some... (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, if you just want a whole roll of 3x5's, then sure, standard printing is cheaper. But I bet a lot of those people look at them once and then enlarge one out of 100.
The advantage of home printing is not raw price, it's control and selection.
Cheers.
I've realized for years this very story (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy 30 sheets of photo paper at $20, and your sheet cost per large photo is 20/30 = $0.66.
Then with the HP Laser Jet 2550 colour printer, you get about 4000 sheets and ink is about $100 for black, and $100 for each of the three colours, and there's an imaging drum to replace too, so it's at a minium $400/4000sheets, so $0.10/page of ink expenses.
In this example, it's nearly 80 cents per 8"/10" photo page, and that's with the traditionally MORE economical laser printer. A crappy buble jet that HP makes these days, gives you 15mL of ink for your 3 colours, and 13mL for the black, and that costs $35 and might last, well I'm guessing since I'm not rich enough to buy and use one, 25 pages at 8"/10". So with the photo paper that means you'd get about 35/20 for ink + $0.66 for the paper = $2.06 for my example. Compare that to Walmart, and I'm sure that box store is going to kick the pants off of the price for printing at home.
I can think of only two reasons... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You need the best possible quality but have no access to a print shop which can deliver it. Reality is that most cheap print shops will not deliver accurate color even if you jump through all the hoops. More expensive print shops can (provided your image meets some criteria) but these can be harder to find. If you're living in Alaska; your may be off a little bit cheaper buying your own printer if you need high quality prints.
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. So if you have, say, private (intimate?) pictures or other material which may be damaging or not intended for public viewing (secret?), a personal printer is essential. This is basically akin to one of the major reasons digicams became so huge; they allowed you to make pictures without any third party ever being able to watch them.
Re:Why would I? I'll tell you why... (Score:2, Insightful)
As for printing, my
Re:-5 Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the major consumer printers are still dye-based. If you wander into a branch of PCWorld or Staples and pick up a printer from one of the displays, it will probably be dye-based. The pigment ones are still quite a bit more expensive. (I was eyeing up the 8-colour epson pigment printers like the R1800 but I couldn't justify the cost).
It has nothing to do with the cost (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't have anything to do with cost. It has to do with the time it takes to print. Forget the stats they print, it takes at least a minute for most printers to spit out a picture. When I go to print, I don't have 36 pictures - I have a big fat memory card full of them. I don't want to spend an entire night watching to see that the paper feeds properly or whether or not the ink is full, I want to go online and spend a few bucks to have someone worry about that for me.
That's not to say consumers don't want a photo printer or they'll never print one at home. People want them. It's nice to be able to print up a small amount of photos, or reprint one that's damaged or missing. Or even print up a batch when they want one right away.
But come on now. These things have been around for 6 or 7 years. How many photo printers do you want them to buy? People who want them have them. The technology has changed a little, but even so, it's not like people are picking up USA Today and finding out there is new technology available and they need to buy it. The Photo Printer market is nothing like the PC market. People don't care about stats or features. They want a printer that prints pictures and at least 70% of the photo printers out there will do just that. And after they print their third batch of pictures they'll see a sign at Costco that says they do digital prints and the photo printer will end up getting a lot less usage.
what if you edit pictures (Score:2, Insightful)
This will first of all cost you quite much: they often charge a start-up cost of eg 2$, independantly of the number of pictures you have taken. If you only bring one picture, this cost can not be neglected.
Then, you see that the colors are not exactly what you desired and you can go home, change your picture and go back to the shop... (you could of course buy a calibrated monitor, but that is not very cheap either)
Editing pictures can take quite some time. So if you wait until you have eg 20 edited pictures before going to the shop, you will have to wait quite long to actually see your results.
Who prints 100% anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:well.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The article misses some points... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, once you get into larger prints, an inklet printer become cost effetcive. Another way to reduce costs is to buy larger packages of paper and get the paper on sale.
And then there is print quality. I get much better prints at home than I do from the inexpensive labs. And as for the more expensive labs? Unless you have a profile for their printer, you can get better results at home. An example is something I had a lab print at 2 different times - the prints looked way different. At home the output is consistant.
And of course, at home I can get a choice of paper to use. Most print labs have at best one or two types of paper you can choose from.
Re:Simple fact: Longevity (Score:4, Insightful)
Which _will_ produce the better print?
The important question is, where is the printer, and who is operating it? You wager on the mini-lab printer in Wal-Mart, run by a minimum wage employee who transfered over from sporting good last week?
I'd wager, speaking from experience, that a photographer that does more than snap family photos, understands all aspects of photography from exposure to print, envisions his end result and adjust his equipment accordingly and uses a decent quality photo printer will get far, far better results.
Cheaper is not always better.
Re:-5 Wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't this a bit of a red herring? If you value your data, you will move it from one medium to another as your available technolgy changes. I know I have *nothing* on floppy disc that I want to keep. Its all moved to HD, and/or burned to CD/DVD. When I move to whatever is next, one of the first things I'll do is move my archives.
Data is so cheap & easy to move from one digital medium to another that the only reason it can become unreadable through technological progress is carelessness.
Re:Reason 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
I simply remind him that he needs to do all assignments when he gets home from school instead of waiting until the last minute. A zero on the gradebook serves as a good reminder of this.
Anyway, I find that leaving an inkjet printer idle for too long will cause the ink to dry in the head rendering the printer inoperable. At a minimum you need to clean the heads to remove the cake, and sometimes they just cannot be restored to produce a decent print. I've tried Canons, Epsons and HPs. They all have had this problem. Infrequent use is not their strong suit.
Makes perfect sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Where can I sign up for that?