My new Canon i865, which I bought for its ability to print onto discs, also has a "Photo Paper Tray" which sits above the main paper holder. It holds 6" x 4" sheets of Glossy Photo Plus, and there is an auto preset to print any image down to this size, with or without borders.

The quality is incredibly good. (Assuming the original pic came out ok, of course)

I have been in the digital photo business for many years. In my opinion, you are nuts to spend the time and money on fancy inkjet printers, unless you need prints immediately, or unless you simply enjoy "darkroom" work. You can get very good looking prints for next to nothing at Costco. They are much cheaper than any inkjet, and much better quality, except perhaps some of the top-end Epson that use the fade resistant, water-resistant ink.

While I'm sure the quality varies from store to store, our local Costco does a fabulous job at making one-hour machine prints. The cost? $0.19 for 4x6, and $1.99 for 8x12. You can't come anywhere close to these costs if you add up the price of ink and paper for your inkjet.

If you are more concerned about quality than price, the inkjet again is a lousy way to go. For example, Calypso Imaging (San Jose, CA) can make professional prints that will make you drool (but of course they charge $$$, as you would expect).

So, to summarize, inkjet is great when you need something NOW. However, you can match, and usually exceed, inkjet print quality, and you can do it for far less money -- in one hour -- at your local Costco.

John, I checked the costco site and up here in Canada they charge $2.50 per 8x10 photo. Thats a lot less than the place I was at, however, at this price, do you still think a person can't do it for cheaper at home? What is your estimate of what it costs per page to do home printing?

thanks for your feedback

I use the Canon I960. It has six individual ink tanks. None runs more than $11 or $12 to replace - and the cartridges will print far more than ten or eleven 8 x 11 prints before you have to replace them.

Based on your Costco example, John, that would be the approximate break even point in terms of ink cost.

Of course, I have to consider the cost of paper which, in my case, adds about $.30 for each print.

I haven't measured, but am pretty certain I can easily print thirty 8 x 10's without running out of ink - and I never have to buy all six cartridges at the same time - usually just one, maybe two.

So, for me, 30 x $.30 = $9.00 plus $24.00 for ink expended = $54.00.

Costco, in your example would be approximately $60.00. Allowing for an error factor from the inkjet side, I’d say our costs are comparable.

I get my prints right away, and can get very creative in terms of adjusting, editing, cropping, etc.

I've not used Costco (or Walmart's do-it-yourself), so I don't know how much in the way of alteration is available with those systems.

But, with today's better, less expensive, and faster printers, it's becoming a stretch to consider someone nuts for going that route.

As far as quality goes, I haven't done any side-by-side tests with Costco, but I do plenty of 4 x 6 side by side testing with 35mm prints (still my method of shooting pictures), and the inkjet output definitely holds its own these days. I can print on glossy or matte stock and the results are excellent. Usually, the inkjet images, having been tweaked on PS, are more pleasing to me, since I have cropped/corrected them to my own tases.

Being able to do all of this at home, IMO, gives inkjetting the edge over "Costco-ing".

Even if it did cost me a little more, the enjoyment of doing it myself would be worth the extra money.

You cited the "top-end Epsons" that use water-resistant ink. There are plenty of near-top end Epsons using the same ink - I bought one, having been a die-hard Epson user since the days of the Color Stylus 800 (which I still have and which still produces some pretty good results on good printing stock - although I don't use it much anymore), but I didn't care for the color shift that was evident in the prints it produced. The ink seems really permanent as soon as the print comes off the printer, but that machine was very slow, and everything had a reddish tint to it. B&W prints were especially off-color (I know they have a monochrome print setting, but I do a lot of combo printing - monochrome with just one or two areas or features in color).

So, I took it back to the store and opted for the Canon, instead. I've been very pleased so far.

My thoughts on the permanency issue: I've been making my own enlargements for quite some time now. If you treat those prints with the care you'd treat any photo, I believe the issue isn't that critical that one ought to forgo more accurate, pleasing output in favor of Epson's ink which, except for its moisture resistance, is no better than Canon's or HP's.

I'm sure Epson will address the color shift issue over time, and, when it becomes financially prudent, HP and Canon (and others) will develop their own water-resistant inks. It will just get better and better.

If the Costco route works for you, then, by all means, go for it. In these times, we seem to have the best of both worlds. I remember not too long ago re-inking a four-color ribbon to save money, and letting my scanner/computer run overnight to capture even modest images to one of my two 40 mb drives. Printing was line by line with multiple passes to create shades (rough shades) of color. My software (Astral's Picture Publisher) had an undo feature, but, for the time it took to undo a mistake, you'd save more time by just scrapping that effort and starting again from scratch. It was slow, but experimenting was fun, and I learned a lot in those early days.

Thanks, 4thOrder for starting an interesting thread.

Caruso

Caruso, thats a lot of good information there. I can see the expense of both at home printing and in store developing. I come up with the same questions, why can you buy a calender with 12 almost 11x17 size photos on it for $15 bucks, but you cant do the same for your own photos either at home or at the store? Must be some huge volume discounts going on.

The calendar was probably produced in a production run that printed 10,000 at that time. In that volume, the setup costs per calendar are trivial and the major costs are literally the paper stock and the ink needed for literally that calendar. If it sells for $15 then I would guess it was sold by the wholesaler for $7 and the ink cost was about $1 and the paper stock about $2.

My wife was given a nice little digital camera last Christmas. This year she wanted a printer so that she could get back to her old routine of saving 4x6 prints in a scrapbook (at least that's her intent; we have boxes of prints waiting for the scrapbook).

I tried to be "logical" and mentioned that she could simply take her memory card to Costco, where she could review her images on a really slick little display and get prints made for $.19. She wanted none of it. I then investigated one of those little HP printers that is specifically designed for 4x6. The sales rep and I figured the cost per print at about $.40 for both paper and ink. I finally bought her an HP 2410, which is not only a slick photo printer (with memory card slots and a little lcd screen for previews) but also a multifunction printer/copier that she can use in her home office.

For all my work with video and DVD production I have used an Epson C80 extensively. It prints a beautiful DVD label using Meritline stock, and as mentioned earlier the inks are uniquely waterproof, smear-proof, and fade-proof. Nonetheless the ink costs are much higher that one would first assume. At first I believed that having multiple ink tanks was a good thing; now I'm not so sure. It clearly is a good idea if you are printing a lot of just one color. But if you're doing typical photos, I've found that, when you replace one tank, the printer will take a bit of time re-charging the ink lines, and that drains ink from all tanks. Furthermore, I've been surprised to note that, at the beginning anyway, all the tanks tend to run down at roughly the same rate (again assuming typical photo use). Finally, the ink has a finite shelf life, so you are going to be replacing those multiple tanks every now and then, even if they aren't empty.

Bottom line to me is that you print stuff yourself because you enjoy the creative process and you want complete control, not necessarily because you will save money. Oftentimes you won't.

A few facts to ponder, based on above posts:

Cost

Cost of paper: Costco (generally a good benchmark for best "everyday" prices) sells Kodak 4x6 paper for $19.99 for 150 sheets. Neglecting tax, shipping, and the cost of getting to the store, that's $0.13/sheet.

Cost of ink: This varies considerably. The more expensive printers cost less per page for ink (usually). You may get quite different results depending on your printer. Based on Epson's ink consumption estimates (repeated on this page: http://www.inkjetart.com/news/ink_consume/), it costs about $0.10 per A4 page at 5% coverage. However, according to information on this same page, photos average about 36% coverage. Thus, the cost per A4 page is about 7x the Epson average cost (which is based on business graphics + text) which is about $0.70 per A4 page. Since there are roughly four 4x6 prints on one A4 page, the ink cost per 4x6 print is about $0.70 / 4 or $0.17.

Thus, ink and paper are about $0.30 per page. This doesn't count the allocated cost of the printer (which you eventually wear out and have to replace) and most important, doesn't count the cost of your time.

Some people enjoy the process. I started doing darkroom work back in the late 1950s. I like it. However, I have better things to do with my time when it comes to getting the job done. When I can get a decent quality print for less money than I can do it myself, and I have lots of prints to do, it is an easy choice: I get someone else to do it.

Quality

As for quality, that is a very interesting subject, and we could debate this all day long. There is certainly no single answer. I will point out three key points:

1. Longevity. Recent ink advances make inkjet more likely to last a long time. However, the earlier ink technology was very likely to fade. I have many prints done just three years ago on my HP Photosmart P1000 that have noticeably degraded. By contrast, I do lots of photo restoration and have restored 100 year-old negatives and prints (B&W), and also Kodachromes from the early 1940s. Some of these are in better shape than my three-year-old inkjet prints. However, just to reinterate, the newer inkjet technology is supposed to be much more stable.

2. Quality. Lots of attention is paid to resolution. Like the similar fascination with this subject when talking about digital cameras, this is rapidly becoming a completely irrelevant topic. The real issue is gamut. What is gamut? It is the ability to produce specific colors. Electronics For Imaging (EFI) got its start by producing hardware and software that profiled each device in the imaging process (scanners, monitors, printers, etc.) and describing the ability of each to produce every possible color in the color spectrum. What they found is that every device is limited, some of them severely, in what colors can be produced.

For instance, using your inkjet printer, try to reproduce the red in your local fire department's fire engine. See how well you do with indigo blues. You will find that inkjet printers have gamuts that are quite limited compared to the traditional photographic process. Reds look orange and blues look violet. The place where I notice it is pictures of people. The flesh tones are quite good, but if they wear colorful clothes, the colors on the clothes are never quite right.

Just yesterday I printed some digital photos on my inkjet printer. I wasn't satisfied, so I dumped the same photos onto a CD. (I had already corrected them in my photo editing software so I wouldn't have to do anything when I arrived at Costco). I took them to Costco. Even with their mechanized, machine processed prints, the gamut was far better.

3. Your time. Doing it yourself means you can have prints ready to go in just a few minutes. Having someone else do it means a trip to the store. The flip side is that if you have 50 prints to do (roughly two "rolls" of film), you have a lot of work ahead of you: Loading the printer, re-printing mistakes (something that should be added to the cost of print calculation); fixing paper jams; trimming the resulting prints (unless your printer does bleeds); and coping with all those little problems that the computer inevitably throws your way.

If you enjoy all this, then go for it. However, realize that it costs you more per print, so it is not an economic decision, especially if you value your time. Finally, print ten different photos, and then dump those same photos to CD and take them to your local photo store, or upload them to Shutterfly, Ofoto, or Snapfish. Set the photos created using traditional chemical-based photo processes next to your inkjet prints. If you really want to tip the scales, send your really great photos to a professional outfit like Calypso Photo. Make your own conclusions.

I would never print my digital pictures again unless I need a quick photo for a proof. Like John Meyer, I have some great pictures I took of my kids just three years ago and printed on my HP photo quality printer. All of their faces are purple now because the color in ink jet printers fades in only a few years. I understand the ink is better now but it still doesn’t make any sense to me with the cost of photo paper and ink. I send all my prints to www.ofoto.com. They come back on Kodak paper and are continuous tone just like your 35mm prints. Take a loupe and examine the prints from your printer and you will see dots and dithering. Look at a photo from Ofoto.com and you will see continuous color tone just like a photo from a film camera. They charge $.029 for 4x6 $0.99 for 5x7 and $3.99 for 8 x 10. (they also do 16 x 20 and 20 x 30). For me, the time and cost of self-printing just isn’t worth it. I shoot my pictures, upload them to Ofoto, and get Kodak prints in the mail in a few days. I’ve tried Shutterfly.com and others and I like the color quality I get from Ofoto better. (You’re mileage may vary) ;-)

BTW, Ofoto will make a calendar of your 12 prints for $24.99.

~jr

There are other issues here. I am unfamiliar with Cosco printing but I am familiar with home printing--First--I shoot with a Canon 10D and to be quiet frank, I have to sharpen my images before I begin the print process. I get brilliant images but they do require some tweaking in Photoshop---Does Cosco do this???

I get brilliant images but they do require some tweaking in Photoshop---Does Cosco do this???

I don't know whether Costco does this, but I know quite a bit about some of the online photo companies. Shutterfly does color corrections based on the EXIF information that is contained in the header of each JPEG file. Assuming you haven't removed it (there was a thread today about this), this header contains information about shutter speed, focus, and, most important, the type of camera used to take the picture. Shutterfly has profiles of the CCD and other characteristics of each camera, and makes specific adjustments to the color balance to eliminate color casts, etc. caused by each camera's unique hardware.

There are still a million variables in printing, whether to your local inkjet printer, to a service bureau, or to Costco. People have different expectations, and different things they value. As I said in earlier posts, I have been very involved in this, and when we did customer tests with one of several companies I was "involved" with, and we gave customers the choice of several different prints from the same image, most customers from the general population preferred prints that were high contrast, high saturation images, even though the highlights were completely blown out, and the colors were almost clownish in their intensity. The images that kept detail in the highlights and shadow and had color similar to what you would get from a pro lab were almost universally shunned.

Thus, I can't advise anyone here as to what is the "best" solution in terms of an image they will find pleasing, but I can say for certain that photo images will last longer than ink; be more water resistant than ink; and will have a wider gamut than ink. The "quality" of the print is something you'll have to decide on. Some people like Costco, some like Walmart (they have 40% of the traditional film/print processing market between the two of them -- up from nothing fifteeen years ago); some like one the "big three" of online processing (Shutterfly, Ofoto, Snapfish); and others have some other favorite (there were over 100 online processing options three years ago, and there are still several dozen options available now, including Fuji, Kodak, Club Photo, ePixel/Photovision, EZPrints, Fotowire, Mystic Color Lab, Photoaccess, Photoworks [was Seattle Filmworks], Printroom, and Wolf Camera online, just to name a few).

4thOrder, in your case I'd recommend that you have 8x10's commercially processed from your digital files, rather than buy a new printer:

-- You still have the satisfaction of editing your pic's, by altering the digital files before uploading them to Ofoto or taking them to Wal-Mart;

-- You'll save money, unless you plan to cover your walls with prints;

-- Your prints will be of the highest technical quality.

I use a Canon i800, which has long-lasting inks (confirmed by independent lab's). It has cost me several hundred dollars for the printer, ink cartridges, and glossy paper -- to make a dozen 8x10's and some smaller prints.

I really enjoy the editing process, but I should have used the commercial services that make prints from digital files.

I take 35mm film to Wal-Mart, getting a CD of 1.5 megapixel images for use in Vegas to make home-movie slideshows/etc.: 24 shots, with CD and one 4x6 print each, costs only eight dollars.

I take my medium-format film to a local camera store that processes it and makes a CD with 6-megapixel images (JPG files compressed to 2.5MB). Or I sometimes send the film to a lab in California (buy mailers from bhphoto.com), which costs more than my local dealer.

Brandon's Dad

Thus, I can't advise anyone here as to what is the "best" solution in terms of an image they will find pleasing, but I can say for certain that photo images will last longer than ink; be more water resistant than ink; and will have a wider gamut than ink .

I was discussing this thread with a friend of mine who is a professional photographer and he explained to me how the photos he can print on his Epson 2200 are better quality than what he can get from a Costco or other service bureau that uses a Fuji printer.

This is new to me, but it has to do with his ability to capture photos with his Canon 1D in the Adobe 98 color space, which has a wider gamut than the sRGB colorspace that is used by the Fuji (see graph in link below). For his clients he will use the Fuji (he'll download the profile of the printer and do a conversion to that specific profile) for 4x6 prints, but for his custom prints for wedding albums he can use the Adobe98 colorspace and use that profie for his Epson 2200, and he claims it is superior in quality.

He refered me to the following post regarding colorspace, Fuji Frontier profiles, etc. that goes into more knowledge than I have.

link to photo.net about colorspace