Slashdot Mirror
Why Do-It-Yourself Photo Printing Doesn't Add Up
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..."
WEll part of the issue is the cost of the ink. Print shops buy more and therefore it's cheaper, they also have higher grade equipment that doesn't break as often as our home eqipment (broken heads come to mind, then oyu have to replace the whole cartridge, OR buy a new printer in the case of Epson).
However, despite it being cheaper elsewhere, if you need a print right away for some reason, I would hate to not have the ability to push one out every 2 minutes.
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Support Indy Music. Buy
I own an HP camera, and HP PhotoSmart 7760 printer. Here's some real world data for you:
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!
My ZooLoo
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 2*3*5 percent in the last few months thanks to a savage price war, buyers are going to pay at least 2*2*7 cents a print. This is if you believe the manufacturers' math. It could be closer to 2*5*5 cents a print if you trust the testing of product reviewers at Consumer Reports. In the meantime, the price of printing a 2*2-by-2*3-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 2*2*3 months ended in July, home printing accounted for just 2*2*2*2*3 percent of the 7*11/(2*5) billion digital prints made, down sharply from 2*2*2*2*2*2 percent in the previous 2*2*3 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 2*2*17 percent from the year-earlier period - but retail labs clearly have the advantage..."
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?)
Because I don't feel like burning gas and calories driving to Sam's club or wherever to have some snot nosed kids running around me, to have the clerk looking at my photos, to have to drive back or wait around an hour to pick up the prints. At home, I can take my pictures and in about three minutes have it hanging on my wall. Screw going to the store.
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..."
Everyone who feels like they have a say in this should go and watch "One Hour Photo" before they open their reply windows.
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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
... and higher-capacity, higher-quality, more-robust printers.
Not to mention being nickled and dimed to death for inkjet cartridges and glossy paper.
Don't print, use something like Flickr That's where I upload my "art"
Go Away! Not for Sale
Now ya tell me, a couple days too late! Already bought one!!! :-(
Now you tell me. I just got back from europe and discovered it was cheaper to buy a cheap hp that does photo prints than buy new ink cartridges for my existing printer. Luckily I also shot 15 roles of film. At least with those I don't have to worry about the inmages fading of media becoming obsolete - they'll only ever need one print.
perhaps when online printers offer panorama (a brief recent search shows no one does yet)then I won't bother printing anything at home....
My pictures are too dirty to have developed by anyone but me.
is a dime?
Have you looked at the photographs you've been printing at home over the past few years lately? I've noticed a trend which is why I never recommend in-home photo printing.
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.
Kriston
The chemical processes used to print digital prints are usually the same as printing from negatives.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Printer manufacturers charge ridiculous amounts of money for ink. I'm glad consumers are wising up and having pictures lab printed. Perhaps these numbers will convince Epson, HP & Canon, they can not gouge us on ink forever and they will lower prices.
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.
Is so you'll actually have decent prints in 20 years.
:)
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.
I agree with the AC. With special emphasis on the fact that these are the exact same prints that are made from film -- the front end processing is different of course, but the end prints are made of the same chemical processes and materials. So they will last exactly as long as traditional prints, i.e. a whole lot longer than the vast majority of inkjet prints.
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.
uhmmm, film *can* become obsolete...
every once in a while there is a new color process created. the current color print film process is c41. the one before that is c22 (i am not aware of any c's from 23-40). besides each process having it's own processing chemicals and steps (boy are you in trouble if you have unprocessed c22), they have their own color balance.
most color printers have several channels with a channel devoted to a particular brand and speed of c41 process film. i took some old (1970s?) negatives in and couldn't get good prints. why? they didn't want to spend the time and paper to create a color balance for a handful of photos. i don't blame them. that was the first c22 stuff they had ever seen. i had to send it to a specialist to get it printed. and it was not cheap.
i also feel sorry for people who have negatives that are not 35mm. there are a lot of labs that can't print from 110, disk, 126 (it's close) and other small sizes.
eric
Illegal 18 wheelers?
Half-nude pictures of half-children?
Half-hearted terroristic threats?
???
Why print at all?
Ok, a bit overstated, but I'm serious. Of all the pictures you take, how many actually _need_ to be printed? I'd say those few you want to hang on a wall, or put in a frame. For most people that is a precious few photographs per year; if nothing else, the amount of wall space and kindly relatives to foist the prints off to is very limited.
I take on the order of 10k pictures a year, thanks to the ease of digital photography. Perhaps 1/10, or about 1000, is actually worth saving at all (since it's so easy and cheap, it's usually a good idea to take multiple exposures of any one subject to avoid duds). Of those, maybe 2/3 are purely archival - they are a memento of some event or something, and I'd like to keep it, but they aren't really of any significance. If I lost them it would be a shame but not really a big deal. Of the rest (interesting enough to actually post-process), most of them will end up on Flickr, or emailed to people that may be interested, or simply shown on-screen. The number of images I would actually want to have hanging number in the single digits - and I have yet to go to the trouble to do so.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Here are my rules:
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...is Costco. They don't have the cheapest 4x6 (17 cents), but everything else is a good price. $0.39 for a 5x7, $1.49 for an 8x10/8x12, and $2.99 for a 12x18 print. The quality is fantastic too.
And I swear, they didn't pay me to post this...I just like sharing a good deal when I find one.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
You and other posters here have lamented the inconvenience of driving to the store to drop off your photo-data-cards and then waiting an hour or driving back a second time.
s plash). I seem to recall that other stores also let you upload-'n'-pick-up, too. With the aforementioned Yahoo/Target option, it's 20 cents per print, first 20 free.
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).
Only the truly shameless shill their blog in a Slashdot sig
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.
I have no reason to invest in home photo-quality printing when I can go to the local CVS and print 8x10s for 25c a piece, and get them in only 10 minutes.
The problem is the whole idea is misleading. This does not factor in the countless prints that I have from when my kids grab the camera and take pictures of TV shows and really close-up, blurry pictures of the family pets doing exciting things like sleeping. If you factor in accidental pictures and just plain bad pictures that you wish you didn't take, the price per print can shift quite dramatically in some cases. I would dare say when the kids don't touch the camera and only me or my wife take the pictures there is still around 4 prints on a 24 exposure roll that end up just getting thrown out. Add in the ones that my wife sends to her crappy grandpa that won't acknowledge she exists (you can bet we don't send good ones there), We can easily waste 25% of a roll of film. If the kids get the thing, all bets are off.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
"At those prices, why bother printing at home?"
Well damn. There goes my digital photography/image manipulation business.
Take 20 rolls of film.. yeah its cheaper to take em to a photo developer if you want hard copies of all of the pictures. But buy a digital camera.. take 1000 pictures and you find that you only want to print one? I wonder what would be cheaper.. a buck or 2 to print it out on your own or having 20 rolls of film developed.
You can buy a great printer and great paper and what you print at home still looks like shit compared to what you can get at a store. Unfortunately store photos aren't the best either and seem to degrade fairly rapidly. Regular photos reign king.
My parents just visited us (after about 3 years) and my dad had a Kodak camera with the docking / printing station and that worked just great. The prints cost around .60 a piece, but that was ok, since we had them right away. (80 prints are about $37.98 here, vs 48.99 in Arizona) Granted, he could go to Wal-Mart with the SD card and get them for .20 a print, but sometimes it's just more convient. Personally, if he would have remembered the computer cable, I would have just copied the images to the PC. ;)
Dana
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Then the mouth breather at the local photo store will unilaterally decide that "hey your violating teh copywrites, lol" and not make your prints.
I saw this first-hand just the other day. Not at wal-mart either, but at Wolf Camera. Lady insisted she took the photos, started screaming and yelling, manager just smugly told her "sorry, we can't make copies of copyrighted content". Even if she *did* download something off the net and wanted it printed for her own *personal use* I don't see what the fuck difference it makes. Thank god for the first-responders who protect the rights of photogs everywhere.
Anyway, I can't even comprehend how non-linear I would become if some pimply-faced prick that makes less in a month then my camera costs won't print a goddamn $.10 4x6 for me.
For the safety of the camera store owners and other shoppers, I can't risk this, so I do all my printing at home.
Hell, sometimes I download and print out an Ansel Adams JUST BECAUSE I CAN. Then I tear that shit up because I think I hear him crying in heaven ("Have you ever even heard of a contact print, you fuck? That's not a photo, that's paper with some stains on it.").
By the way, just wait until the thought process of these clerks is EMBEDDED IN YOUR FUCKING PRINTER. *BEEP* YOU'RE NOT THAT GOOD, I AIN'T PRINTING THIS, YOU PIE-RAT! *BEEP* "Artificial Stupidity". I can't wait.
I have a great B&W laser printer with a toner cartridge that works great for 99% of what I need to do, which lasts about a year or more between replacements. If I absolutely positively have to print color, I email it to Office Depot's printing center for $0.52 a copy. Pictures get printed at my local Wally World for $0.23 a print. At least I don't have to worry about wasting ink, resetting the color settings to B&W from color, crazy printer drivers that may or may not work, etc etc etc.
moox. for a new generation.
What os they mean by just 48 %? That means HALF of users are printing at home!!Thats ceratinly not insignificant !
Why does yahoo do this
But think about it... at home do you print every picture on your digital camera? No way.
Not to mention the quality of prints from Sam's Club is questionable at the least. DIY printing can provide much greater quality and easily done custom sizes for framing or wallets.
Printing at home gives you much more control, which makes it worth it in my opinion.
...and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser printers attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
... Right.
Number Two: Inkjets.
Dr. Evil:
Number Two: They're photo-quality inkjets.
Dr. Evil: Are their cartridges refillable?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Or, even things that aren't illegal might run you some trouble. I once had a roll of film take weeks to come back (it was panoramic, so it took a bit longer anyway), the store ended up claiming that they had misplaced the pictures in the back of a box. I really don't believe that story though, I think they got investigated before they made it back to me because I had a bunch of pictures of my family's burned out car, which had caught fire while my mom was driving it down the road one day. I think that the clerks saw the pictures, got suspicious, and forwarded it on to authorities. Or maybe I'm just paranoid and they really did temporarily misplace my pictures.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Wow, CVS can do colour prints? I'm sure neither subversion nor bitkeeper can do that...
Oh well, what the hell...
Desde instituciones internacionales hasta ayuntamientos y organizaciones no gubernamentales, desde Estados Unidos a Afganistán, la respuesta a los llamamientos de ayuda no se ha hecho esperar. El objetivo, de momento, es dar respuesta a las necesidades más perentorias, como las tareas de rescate y la atención a los supervivientes.
Tanto la Cruz Roja Internacional y la Media Luna Roja como la Oficina de la ONU para Asuntos Humanitarios han enviado equipos a las zonas afectadas para evaluar las necesidades. Por lo pronto, la ONU calcula que 2,5 millones de paquistaníes necesitan con urgencia un lugar de refugio, y ha solicitado 200.000 tiendas de campaña de invierno. Un primer cargamento con 10.000 mantas y 3.000 carpas fletado por la Cruz Roja Internacional está en camino.
También Estados Unidos ha destacado a un equipo de expertos para coordinar las tareas de ayuda, mientras fleta dos aviones de transporte militar C-130 cargados de material de primeros auxilios y ocho helicópteros para los trabajos de rescate.
Dos nutridos equipos de especialistas enviados por el Reino Unido trabajan desde el sábado en Islamabad, la capital paquistaní, mientras Londres ha comprometido una primera aportación de 145.000 euros. "Estamos muy orgullosos de nuestros lazos con Pakistán, reforzados por el gran número de conciudadanos de origen paquistaní", recordó el primer ministro británico, Tony Blair. Equipos de salvamento y material de emergencia han salido, además, desde Francia, Alemania, Grecia, Suiza, Japón, Turquía, Rusia y China, que además ha ofrecido una ayuda de cinco millones de euros. Dinamarca, la República Checa e Irlanda han destinado un millón de euros cada uno para tareas de rescate.
España se ha puesto también a disposición de las autoridades paquistaníes. Por lo pronto, dos aviones, uno con ayuda humanitaria fletado por la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, y otro enviado por la Comunidad de Madrid con personal médico y de rescate, saldrán hoy rumbo a Islamabad. Un grupo de Bomberos Sin Fronteras, apoyado por el Ayuntamiento de la capital, emprendió viaje ayer.
Al margen de las iniciativas de cada uno de sus miembros, la Unión Europea se ha comprometido a desbloquear 3,6 millones de euros para las víctimas de Asia, según dijo ayer el presidente de la Comisión Europea, José Manuel Durão Barroso.
El Banco Mundial y el Banco Asiático de Desarrollo han anunciado igualmente partidas de emergencia por valor de 16 millones de euros y de 8 millones de euros, respectivamente, para la reconstrucción de las áreas devastadas, que se ampliarán en función de las necesidades.
Algunos países musulmanes, como Arabia Saudí, Qatar y los Emiratos Árabes, organizan ayuda de urgencia. A pesar de sus enormes carencias, Afganistán se ha comprometido a enviar helicópteros y medicinas a su vecino paquistaní. También Israel ha propuesto el envío de expertos a Pakistán, país con el que no mantiene relaciones diplomáticas.
An amateur photographer who doesn't really care how their prints look. The prices as the professional photo labs will make you shoot your drink out your nose, but you DO get what you pay for, too. Unfortunately there aren't usually enough professional photographers around to support the labs in the area and so the professional labs are always going out of business. It would appear to me that the professional photo developer is something of a dying breed. Well not to mention that the industry doesn't seem to pay enough for anyone to actually make a career out of it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sure, it costs 50 cents or more to print a 4x6 photo when the cost of the ink is more than the cost by ounce of Dom Perignon. Maybe the printer makers will get a little less greedy, but that hardly seems likely. Particularly when there is still a good and growing market for office and home color printing. I certainly would do 4x6's at a local store, but the sad truth is that most of what I print is larger format and/or special formats (like half fold photo cards). And the retail outlets are still gouging as badly as the printer vendors on anything larger than 4x6, if not more so. It also doesn't seem likely that the retailers will extend good prices to anything but simple 4x6s, but one can hope.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Look, it is hard enough for her to find her camera cable to connect to her powerbook, much less launch iPhoto, pick out the prints she wants and then order them (by clicking on one-click ordering no less). If she does manage it (without putting the powerbook to sleep while the pix upload for an hour over DSL) she has to wait 3-5 days and pay about ~18 cents per print (including postage). This is not acceptable for a digital camera to "normal" people! It is supposed to be easier than this, the "normal" people don't even realize that not paying for the film should be enough to go digital. They think it is supposed to be more convienant than film even. Printing with an Epson PictureMate @ 23 cents a print whenever the hell she wants to by slapping in her CF card is the only thing that will satsify her and besides the prints are awesome. Yes it would be nice if the print cartridges were cheaper but you can't beat the ease of printing at home with one of these suckers and my wife (she) gets to handle the photos and send them to people in the mail which seems to be a requirement of any digital image management system. P.S. Posting as AC in case I'm vastly underestimating her secret powers. She has been known to use that "internet" thing before.
Convenience.
For most it's not about price, it's about being able to print your photos in your own home any time you want. It's the same reason Polaroid is still in business (they are still in business, right?).
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
The inconvenience, gas, time and so on however is silly. You seem to assume that one can only order photos printed at a bircks-and-mortar store and have to fetch the result there too.
In reality, ordering a copy of a selection of photos is as simple as selecting them in konq, rigth-click and select "Order photos", then fill in what size and what number I want and click Go. All done in maybe a minute, much *quicker* and easier than printing myself. (which requires finding and inserting photo-paper, making sure there's enough ink, and then printing the pictures one by one.)
The results are in my mailbox the following morning assuming I ordered by noon, if not, the day after.
Print shops also get to use real photo paper and RGB lasers (which use no ink)
Really? I wonder why no one mass-produces RGB laser photo printers for home use.
You've got to watch out for professionals who like to meddle with your art as if it was the usual overexposed party picture. I can't count the number of times I've seen the people at Ritz Camera (Wolf Camera out west) mess around with brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.
I'm sure it helps careless photographers but occasionally the results can piss you off extremely. The worst part is that these people think they're doing you a favor when they're not. They're ruining your effort and creating a disincentive for people who suck at taking pictures to get better at it.
Ironically, the cheaper photoshops like Sam's Club barely glance at your stuff. For a reliable print it's often better to go with the bulk operator rather than risk your picture getting mangled.
I dont understand why everybody wants to print everything...
:P
a: ssh in, show them the pic / text
b: get a laptop.
c: Use a pocketpc as a quick photo viewer / text editor + viewer...
Last time I checked, paper didn't have integrated spell-check
I've heard that if ones digital photos are good enough, many clerks will refuse to print them on the slim chance that the photos were taken by a professional with a penchant for launching copyright infringement suits.
"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."
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.
"Derp de derp."
You might be happy getting prints from WinkFlash. Their FAQ for Pros says they do not do any type of "correcting" to your photos. Plus they only charge $0.12/print plus shipping (I think $1).
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Frankly I think hopme photo printing is only useful for one-offp prints like long-lost friends dropping by unexpectedly and you grab a group shot with your digi and ant them to have a copy before they leave. Or if you only have one or two photos you want and the extra 80cents is worth the less hassle or if a photo is needed in a hurry. Perhaps it also has some commercial value in theme parks or cruises when you pay for photos.
Frankly I don't ever see home printing being cheaper than store printing since it is by its nature ineffecient since you are duplicating infrastructure instead of sharing the costs of a development machine. Very are the savings supposed to come from?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Scratch that, you're also paying for convienence
I just got back from Hawaii. I had 160 photos printed. It was very convienent not having to wait hours for the job and having to run out for several more ink cartridges. It was cheaper and faster to take in a camera memory card than to pick up a bunch of ink and paper. Double prints are only slightly more than single prints at Costco. The prints were ready when I finished my other shopping, so it was still a single trip.
Convience is letting the printing get done while you are shopping instead of baby sitting a printer, clearing paper jams and watching for streaks in prints.
The truth shall set you free!
1) set up a darkroom with a secondhand enlarger.
2) print a few 8x10 RC/FB silver prints (black and white).
3) hold the prints in your hand. admire tonality. drool over oldschool provenance.
4) profit.
A few years ago I had clogged heads in an Epson printer. Cartridges were running around $55 a set. I blew through a complete set trying to clear the heads. I tried solvents and everything I could think of. That was the last straw and I gave up on ink jets. Sorry but paying $25 for $1 worth of ink is obscene. Ink is fairly cheap to manufacture. By the gallon it would seem expensive but there is only an ounce or two of ink in a cartridge. It isn't made of bloody silver folks. The pigments need to be ground fine but that's about it. I'd rather pay twice as much for a printer and get my ink for $10 a cartridge. They'd still make a killing and I wouldn't have to decide between rent and a new set of cartridges for the printer. The buy in is expensive on lasers but the prints are a fraction of the cost and don't require special paper. Also they are radically faster. The ink is a scam and I hope sales drop like a rock. If they priced gas and cars like ink and printers cars would only cost $5,000 but gas would cost $30 a gallon. You might be able to aford a nice car but you couldn't aford to drive it.
You're a braver man than me, I'd never let my girlfriend put pictures of herself on the internet :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Also, the obligitory story to confirm the privacy worries are real:
My friend's father used to take "dirty" pictures of local strippers. One day a friend of his was walking behind the shopping center where he had his stuff developed and saw a bunch of photographs laying buy the dumpster. They were his photographs. Someone had developed them and threw them out.
Now, most people don't take or condone the taking of hundreds of photographs of nude women. However, it's certainly something to think about if you decide to take a picture of your girlfriend in her birthday suit for the next time you're on a business trip.
I saw that movie with Robin Williams. It's about an obsessed lonely guy. Everything else int the movies is fiction :)
A whopping 42.7% of all statistics are made up.
God Bless home printing! A digital camera, photo printer, rover and a jar of peanut butter....
At those prices, why bother printing at home?
Mainly because it's fun. Some people like to tinker with their cars. Some like to print their photos at home.
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.
Semi-illegal? I know a guy who spent four years fighting through the courts over production and possesion of child porn charges after he took some photos of his kids playing with some other kids at the beach. He had his house raided and his (legal) fetish porn stash seized. His kids were taken away for a week to be 'evaluated' for signs of abuse. He spent a fortune on lawyers. All because some photo clerk got a hardon over pics of small kids in bathing suits.
The paranoia is so bad you don't need to do anything wrong, you just need to not be seen doing everything right.
For the serious hobbyist or pro, it's much more about control over the process than the cost. Grandma should take her snapshots of Billy's soccer game to the local Walmart. But, for me, photos from my 6 color inkjet have much better detail, gamut and accuracy. RA4 printers used to have such a huge advantage as they are continuous tone. But today's inkjets have such high DPI and small droplets that they are continuous tone except when viewed under a loupe.
I tried various on-line labs and found that the biggest problem is consistency. Even if I was pleased with the initial results (happened rarely) the re-prints or follow-up prints were often way off. The other problem is Gamut. My 6 color printer blows away the gamut of any RA4 printer. I'm guessing 8 color printers widen the advantage even more. Lastly, most of these printers are between two or three hundred DPI. My printer is 600 DPI. For very high contrast areas there is a huge difference.
With a monitor calibration, printer calibration and profiling I have controlled, reproducible results that are better than most labs. With generic inks and careful paper selection I've got my 4x6 prints at about 25 and 8x10s at around $1.
I'm using a Canon i9900, not just for photos, but for art. If I don't get overpriced photo paper, I can produce pretty decent photos at a reasonable price.
Part of this is, of course, that the Canon uses cheap plastic instead of expensive electronics for ink packaging.
Anyway, a friend of mine bought me a steak to do up some prints once. Why? Because the local photo lab was unable to do a decent job. They brought in a square picture and asked for an enlargement, and got a very nice full-page picture that chopped the guy's head off. Well, not very nice; not much color correction.
Pretty much every print I make on my printer is pretty much the print I intended. The photo labs can give me prints cheaper IF they give me the right ones; otherwise, it's not so cheap.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Doing our own prints makes sense for me and my wife. She takes a ton of pictures and only prints a tiny fraction. The rest are just enjoyed on the computer or online. Plus, with home printing you can print retouched pictures. She usually does some tweaks to at least the color and exposure, and oftentimes does more than that. And then we print 8X10's. For our usage pattern, digital and home printing works out far cheaper.
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.
printer/scanner/copier: ~$150
ink cartridges: ~$50
knowing those pictures of you and your spouse, from that vacation where you never left the bedroom, aren't decorating the employee lounge at WalMart: priceless
However, even machines at costco or walmart now have automatic color profiling. Every morning the machine prints a set of test prints and makes adjustments to keep colors consistent. In addition it is somewhat easier to maintain color accuracy with the chemical process used in these machines.
I use http://www.adoramapix.com/ and I'm very happy with the results. You can get photoshop color profile for their machines from their web page.
About two years ago, I did an extnesive analysis of photo printing: test prints of a digital SLR photo I took of a Dave Chihuly glass sculpture (among other scenes) on the latest and greatest from Canon, Epson, and HP, as well as two area drug stores with printing kiosks and two online services.
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.
It's simple math to determine how much it will cost per page for your ink, and paper.
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.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
what about color matching? I can get a pic to look good on my monitor, and by now I can get a pretty decent replication of it on my printer, but how do those of you that send pics out for printing deal with the color matching issue?
ôó
... Economy of scale.
I'm sorry, but my only comment to this story is "No duh".
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Do you really want your off-line backup of your porn be viewed by the staff of your print-shop? Or even worse: to be picked up by someone else by mistake?
--ac for a reason.
35/20 is supposed to be 35/25, which is what the total is, although I put in my less optimistic 20 sheets instead of 25. 20 sheets makes the price per page much more horrific, and possibly true.
I swear I just saw an ad for Walgreens or CVS or Rite-Aid or something, where you could upload pics to their website, pay with a CC, and then pick other Walgreens to have them print out at, for people to pick up. Its possible you could send your digital pictures all over the US to friends and relatives (and yourself of course), while still in your pajamas.
Stuff like that will surely hurt in-home printing.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
What if you want to print on media that the local printer doesn't support, such as fine art papers (Epson Velvet Fine Art, Entrada Fine Art Bright, or Canvas?
Also, the color balance of the local mass printers are hit or miss. In order to get decent color out of some of these places, prepare to spend some effort in manipulating your photos to get good quality. If you want good quality, of course... OTOH, at home you can set up your own workflow and get good color on the first print every time.
Otherwise, if I just want a bunch of 4x6s of the last birthday party to some people, and I'm heading there anyway, then Costco is just the thing.
Every technology / service has it's place and doesn't fill all needs
Actually, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy over 4 years ago.
This article talks about the problem many photographers are now having...for many (like myself) digital has made it cheaper amd easier than maintaining a professional darkroom (Kodak in my case)...
I got rid of the equipment before I got my digital camera, but it just became too expensive with the cost of chemicals, photo paper, bulbs, etc...not to mention it takes up way too much room...
Now, professional photographers (the ones in the phonebook) can probably afford their own digital photolab...and many of them still use large format (which is higher quality than digital right now)...Medium format digitals have just begun to appear...but the "backyard" photographer can't afford that and so the choice you are left with is to print them yourself (with a photo printer) or trust someone like Walmart/CVS to print them for you...
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.
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 for over 100 years in good display conditions, and over 200 years in dark storage.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
the benefits of hard copied prints are diminishing in the face of digital convenience
You must not have kids if you think that paper photos are chasing the dinosaurs.
Does anyone know what hardware the professional "photo printers" use?
What their costs are, and what volume is neccessary to motivate "professional" printers (whatever that is)?
What technology do they use?
At christmas time, I bought a new Epson R200 Photoprinter for my wife. We printed off two pages on christmas day when we opened it, but then stuck it on the desk (with all of it's dust covers closed)
The next time we came to use the printer was august, after we'd been on holiday and took a lot of nice pictures. However, when we tried to print in august, many of the print heads had become blocked. We ran the print-head cleaning cycle over and over again until eventually, we had emptied the entire of the ink cartridges traying to clear the blockage, but it wouldn't shift. Epson's ever so helpful support people suggested that we buy some more ink cartridges (at a cost of £70 - nearly the same cost as the printer) and try again. As a result of this, the printer is now gathering dust and will probably never be used again.
For us, the at-home printing cost has been around £30 per print.
Don't buy Epson printers!.
By contrast to this, we also have a very old large-format HP Colour Inkjet. It's around 8 years old now, and has never had a blocked nozzle.
Don't buy Epson printers!.
Um, for the 300 dpi "real" (dye sublimation) photo printers, each "dot" is a pixel of any possible color and shade.
With your 600 or even 2400 dpi inkjet, each dot is a droplet of ink of a base color (one of six, eight, whatever), no shade, no nothing. Everything else is done by dithering, which is why they need so much resolution to even attempt to match the lowly 300 dpi dye sub.
I own a hiti (Hi-touch imaging) photo printer. It's a dyesub printer that cost $250 (deluxe version) at the time (they have cheaper models) that's standalone (just insert the memory card) and the cartridges that have the dye-sub "ink" (includes 50 4x6 photos sheets) cost only 20 bucks - so it costs like .40 per photo. Plus it's as good or better than the professional places - it prints on a clear coat and the ink doesn't run plus the estimated life is 99 years or something ridiculous like that - I can't tell the difference between "real" photos or these ones except for the perforated edges.
I like it better, no running back to Wal-mart if I don't like the prints (I like the clear coat, many places put on some matte finish I don't appreciate) nor running back if I find out the photos suck (often they are darker on the print than on my camera). My gas and time costs more than the per print cost.
It's great for a professional, but they probably already know that. It's also great for someone who wants a photo here and there. But if your someone that processes a roll a couple times a year - I recommend to keep going to Wal-mart or wherever.
Why don't you guys use a CIS system for your printer (approx. value of $15.00) and aftermarket ink that can be as good as OEM ink, using these two in combination can save your printhead ?
Aftermarket ink costs approx. $7.00 per kilogram, having this system and printing every few days will give you a longer printhead life (no ink clogging in the printhead).
You can also use aftermarket high glossy paper which costs aprox. 2 cents for an A4 page when ordering in value of $3000.00 from the manufacturer, I'm sure you can find for few more cents each page in lower quantities.
As for the print protection you can use something like PremierArt Eco Print Shield:
http://www.inkjetart.com/premier/eco.html
Of course, there are other substances that can be imported A LOT cheaper and mix it yourself with solvents then use a liquid laminator for your home made laboratory.
I was reading reviews that the Canon ip6000D printer is as good as photolab prints, it's printhead is guaranteed for the life of the printer (3600 4x6 pictures) and this beauty is a real workhorse.
If you're trying to say that using aftermarket ink and paper will ruin your printhead, printer and void the warranty then continue using expensive inks and paper or just go to the corner photo lab. All the big websites will say that prints using aftermarket inks are lower quality than the OEM inks, these are only statements backed up by manufacturers money which don't earn a dime (they even lose) from selling printers, but from all consumables for these.
You can always apply different colour schemes for the pictures using aftermarket inks and the result will be 99% close to the original inks or 100% if you have a good eye.
You can read some interesting stuff about aftermarket inks here:
http://www.neilslade.com/Papers/inktest.html
http://www.neilslade.com/Papers/inkjetstuff1.html
This guy talks about it and has some other interesting tests. It seems that he is not affiliated with any manufacturer.
One more thing. Don't try to buy a CIS system, ink and paper from your corner shop or regular website, there are companies in Asia that sell exactly the same thing for prices 20 times lower.
It will take time to match the paper and ink but when you finally do, you get your own home photo lab with a merely 3-4 cents per A4 picture, not including the price of the printer.
Good luck.
Wouldn't they just have made duplicates for the cops instead of sending the originals around? No use in tipping you off to an ongoing investigation, if that were the case. You're probably just being paranoid. :)
I can think of only two reasons why you'd want to print at home.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Breaking it down to 15 cents versus 40 cents is one thing, but for most of us, we just want some photos printed sometimes and it's much easier to do it at home, even if it's slightly more expensive. It's so easy now with the photo printers - many of them don't even require a PC if you don't want to edit them first. Plug in the camera, stick in the memory chip, whatever.
For the professional or the person that makes a LOT of photos, sure, in bulk you're definately better off with a printing service. But how many of us fall into this category? If I can go out on a weekend vacation, and then come back and print out the pictures I want, when I want, from the comfort of my own house - that sounds pretty good to me and worth the extra cost. I might only want one print from the whole set. I might want to do some small customizations and print a few copies until I get the one I want. I might not want to deal with driving to the store no matter how "kiosky" it might be.
People also like things of the "do it yourself" nature. It's not because it's cheaper to do it, it's because people like to feel independant and in control of what they do.
This is why at-home printing has taken off.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"You must not have kids if you think that paper photos are chasing the dinosaurs."
You're right. I don't have kids. My gf has a nephew she's quite proud of. She wants to keep her photos backed up, so digital is far more convenient for her.
I'll happily admit that I may be missing a key ingredient here as you're implying, but I still stand by why I said. Heck, I remember when my uncle got his fist digital camera shortly after the birth of his first grandson. He immediately bought an app that rotates through all of his photos and plasters them up on the wallpaper. I see the photos all the time, but he's only actually printed a small handful of them. His laptop is with him at all times, as are his photos.
"Derp de derp."
I take a lot of photos and I use photoshop to edit them. Now I'm not happy with going to a photo place with a and having them decide if the picture is too dark or need some more magenta in it. I know how I want my pictures. Plus with all the picture I take and keep; there are only a few I want to print. So for me it is better to print the pictures at home where I have the control to print the picture as_I_see them.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
You can save a *lot* of money by refilling your cartridges. I have successfully used www.jrinkjet.com in the UK, I imagine their are similar outfits in other countries.
I have absolutely no idea how the archival qualities of the replacement inks compare to the official ones. The print quality is pretty similar on all printers I've tried it with.
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a perl script.
It's true that inkjets today do a great job, especially compared to a few years ago.
However I found that it was extremely difficult to maintain consistancy with an inkjet. I had to recalibrate each time I swapped cartidges, paper, etc.
Now, if you compare this to an online site such as ofoto, you are comparing apples and oranges. They don't care about your prints, they don't maintain good equipment, etc. I have no idea what systems they are printing on.
I used to take my digital prints to a professional lab. I could download their weekly color calibration for Photoshop, I could trust them not to steal or abuse my art, and I ccunted on ecellent service, attention to detail and outstanding images. And I could also count on insanely high prices.
About 18 months ago I discovered Wolf and Ritz had standardized on a Fuji Frontier printing system. I have found it to be an excellent compromise. Their prints ar cheap (as low as $.19 4X6s, $5 8X10) and the prints are usually terriffic. Most stores have caring employees that will rerun/recrop your images if there was a problem. I have found a couple stores where they could care less though, and that makes it harder. But I would say I am very happy 9/10 times I go there. (I am sure there are other chains or small stores that are just as good. Photoworks here in SF, I think?).
BUT you really need to know what you are doing- FOR ANY PRINT LAB! Crop your pics to the final output ahead of time. Make sufre you account for differences in resolution and final aspect ratio. Make sure you account for white borders, if that is what you want. Know and understand any image manipulation/enhancement techniques they use.
So here's my suggestions:
InkJet: Use for discreet pics and for messing around. If you really want to put time and effort into it, do so. I have several images that I printed on an inkjet that I think are wonderful. But I would say that a *good* chemical processing beats ink jet in most situations for color range and contrast.
Online mail-back (ofoto, etc): You have got to be kidding.
Walgreens/Costco/Walmart: You might get decent stuff from one of these, but the people runnning the machines most likely have no idea what they are doing, and could care less about your prints. I have never been happy with prints from these places.
Wolf/Ritz/Other amatuer/semipro store: I find these to be a good compromise. If you find one near you that you trust, with employees that will work with you and care about your order, I think it's a good way to go. Some of these places have online submission sites, so you can pick up the prints. I DO NOT RECCOMEND having them mail them back. If there is a problem, it's usually harder to get it fixed.
Pro Color Lab: This is what you do if you want the best image possible. But can be expensive (although I know a lab here in SF that will do $.25 4X6s- but anything bigger is still pretty expensive).
Note about black and white digital:
I have done quite a lot of BW chemical printing, some inkjet BW and a lot of RGB black and white on color systems. My opinion is that if you want the best looking black and white print, you have to enlarge it on silver-based chemistry.
I also feel that color digital cameras are not suited to general BW photography. This has to do with the nature of a three-color digital imaging chip (CCD or CMOS).
My choice for BW is to shoot on BW film, scan the negatives in a grayscale mode, manipulate and then have an image output back to negative film for enlarging on silver-based emulsion. I have done this on several occaisions, usually after having inkjet or RGB-BW prints made to test first. The other methods do not compare. I know this sounds insane, but there is no substitute at the moment. And those silver prints will last 1000 years if cared for.
I have had an HP Business Inkjet 1200dtn which is the dual-tray, networked version of the BIJ 1200d. Costs of running this printer are very, very low. It has four ink cartridges and separate print heads for each. The cartridges are huge and cost $34.00 each. The print heads have the same price and I get about 2000 pages off each black cartridge and plenty off the colors. In fact, I still have the original half-sized yellow ink after printing 5600+ pages. I am about to install my third full black cartridge. I have replaced the Cyan and Magenta colors once. All the print heads are still original and are doing fine. They should last quite a long time.
I'm pretty happy with this guy. It works well and is robust enough to handle large volume work. The second paper tray is large. Print quality is very good.
I cannot speak for its performance printing photos, but it may be a good benchmark for expenses. Note, that this is a *large* device.
There's no satisfaction like the satisfaction i get when I adjust my photos in picasa2 to perfection, and print them out just the way I want them on my sony dye-sub photo printer. The result is lab-quality prints. Yes I could print these photos at a store for much less, but as others have mentioned, convenience is what people pay for.
The same goes with buying expensive televisions such as projectors for watching movies. Sure you could pay $9 to go see a movie at the theater but for a ~$1000 projector and a ~$15 DVD movie you could watch the movie right in the comfort of your own home. With photos, you could drop off your photos at the lab and pay 10cents per print OR pay ~200 for a dye-sub photo printer plus 30cents-60cents per print in the convenience and comfort of your own home immediately. However, that's not to say I never use the lab. If I had to print 150 photos say from a wedding I'd go with dropping off a cd at cosco because buying 150 prints at a time for my little dye-sub would render me broke. Obviously, I use my little dye-sub for when I want one or a few photos printed for a friend or for my albums immediately. 48% photos printed at home would make sense if people followed my logic. But it could just as well be split entirely. Just remember, convenience is a wonderful thing to have.
The cost per print doesn't mean anything to most consumers. Most people don't run around reading seven different magazines to find the best quality for the best price - they buy the printer that's available when they happen to be at Staple's or Best Buy or wherever it is they happen to be. If the consumer is worried about price, they usually don't shop for the printer with the cheapest ink, they buy the cheapest printer.
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.
Unless you're using (even more expensive) archival inks, the magenta and yellow components fade away to nothing in as little as three months when exposed to strong light. You're left with a pale cyan image. Commercial prints are done on conventional photo paper with much more colour-fast dyes. As for convenience, you just upload the JPEGs over the Internet after doing any manipulation and cropping, then wait a couple of days for them to arrive in the mail. I can live with that. Is it worth mentioning that the printer manufacturers apparently design their machines to screw up every third piece of expensive photo paper, thereby increasing their profits?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I often like to really mess around with my digital images in Photoshop before I print them. Often, what I do goes beyond simple cropping and red eye removal. I often fix levels, clone out mistakes, among other things. Home printing can never be replaced for the real enthusiast b/c digital printing services probably don't bother to fix problems with the images too much when you order. Even if they do, it will probably cost you extra, and they aren't going to fix every little thing you want them to, so to get it done right you have to do it yourself.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Besides, the HiTi printers are dither-free continuous-tone dye-sublimation (plus clear overcoat) for just 40 cents per print in consumables.
That's correct. Julia Sommerville, a British primetime newscaster, got busted by the cops 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.
Don't know about the US but in Europe DIY printer stalls that accept most memory cards and bluetooth are becoming increasingly common.. of course there's a chance the machine keeps copies of the photos printed. *tinfoil hat off*
The second part of that obfuscated post could be summarised:
"Digital printing has increased in popularity over the last year. In 2004, home printing was favored, but in the past year it has grown much more slowly than retail printing. Retail printing grew so fast that it overtook home printing."
Boosted, no doubt, by the amazingly obvious facts that:
(1) more people have digital cameras than last year.
(2) more places are now offering digital printing than last year.
(3) home printing has always been expensive.
There is no epic "home vs retail printing" scandal because just as enthusiastic chemical photographers still run home darkrooms for convenience and control, enthusiastic digital photographers will still run home printers for convenience and control. But Joe Snapshot can now get his pictures printed cheaply when he might not have bothered before because he didn't have a printer.
I personally think that not having to go to a shop or wait for the mail to get photos processed or printed was an advantage of digital photography as I can do it all at home.
Bottles of Dom Perignon don't come with brand new electronic printheads attached.
:-)
Not that I think that justifies current cartridge prices (I remember the past!), but it's still worth pointing out.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
It looks the parent didn't hear about pigments.
Ah, the memories.
Back in the late 90's, some college friends of mine got together to do math homework into the wee hours, and eventually one of them fell asleep on the floor. The bored/evil individuals that we are, we found some masking tape and put an outline around him on the floor and proceded to take pictures. His girlfriend got into the act, making threatening gestures towards him with a sword.
We never did get those pictures back. I suspect if we tried that nowadays, we'd all be in Gitmo.
I've sort of had to print some at home lately since I'm taking a painting class and the teacher wanted us to do some from photos. I might send some off to snapfish or flickr if I have time, but it's just more convenient to print out large sheets from home to take to class.
Anyway, I found at the office store Staples, they're now offering cartridges that are cheaper and have more ink then some of the name brand cartridges. In my case, I have an hp DeskJet 952c and I saved quite a bit by buying the staples brand. I would recommend looking into it next time you have to get replacements.
... why bother shooting at all?
I'm not talking about family pictures, but there is a lot of professionally shot and professionally printed photo albums of everything you can think of, why don't just buy them?
As observed in the list of replies there are different trends going on in printing images. While the quantity of pics taken increases exponentially and the need for prints may diminish (the estimation is that up to 80% of phone camera pics never get printed), the total amount of pictures printed increases still and the amount of pictures printed at home also increases. Yet archiving of the images may be worse than it ever was. Color film, negative or slide wasn't a stable medium but at least there are traces of the colored past kept in homes and in archives, some dating back almost 100 years now. B&W photography scores much better in both aspects. It has to be seen whether digital archiving is much better. So it may not be a bad idea to get prints made of the important pics you have. But checking the replies I see little information that is correct on which prints last and which fade or degrade in time.
Whether you print at home or in a lab, get the information about the media used. For labs Fuji Crystal paper and chemistry is scoring the best in prints that still use chemical processing. Framed behind glass they should last 40 years without much change. It is used both for analogue and digital images. Actually better properties than Cibachrome/Ilfochrome.
In inkjet printing, at home or in the lab, there are more choices. Pigment inks are much better and less dependent on the paper quality chosen. 70 - 200 years is the range. Yet the tests done are always related to the paper used. HP offers a dye inkset that comes close but only on a small range of suitable HP papers. A very proprietary solution. The other dye inks with or without suitable papers are way behind in fade resistance.
Anything from Kodak should be avoided. Kodak and some minor suppliers do not test their prints (chemical, inkjet or dyesub)to ISO standards or more severe testing. Their tests are actually substandard. Kodak's analogue color prints have a bad reputation as well, a reputation they already got in 1970-1990 period and didn't do much about to this date.
It is surprising to see that so few are actually aware of the fade properties of prints made at home or in the lab. The best information on this subject is available at www.wilhelm-research.com. Both for analogue prints and digital prints, with chemistry and without.
Printing at home can be done cheaper by using third party inks and papers. There are good pigment inkjet inks (color and B&W) and papers available but for that you should search some mailing lists to get the right information. It will never be as cheap as lab prints (especially the smaller sizes) even when the lab uses Fuji Crystal paper.
If you only print a photo once in a while, a photo printer is unusable.
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/ 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!
To me the major advantage of at home printing, is that you can control the size and texture of your prints. Printing 3x5 may not make sense financially but when you compare the price of printing 18x24 on a pro-grade printer versus taking it to the printshop, you save 25%.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
Yeah, but Walmart won't print my home prOn.
If Snapfish's privacy policy is representative, I don't think I want them to own any copies of my prints.
You can also cancel your Snapfish membership by writing cancel@snapfish.com. . If you request cancellation of your account, Snapfish may (but is not required to) remove any and all content (photos) or other personal information from the Snapfish site
I recall Shutterfly was also unable to promise photo removal. If you've ever destroyed an inconvenient photo, then you can imagine why you might want to keep something out of the hands of lawyers, government, or hackers.
I'm not saying I'm that important, but the delete button should always work - all the time.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
When I read the article, I noticed hardly a mention of the at home dye sub printers. These may still be a bit more expensive than sending them out to be done, but there IS a difference between those and inkjet prints.
I'm waiting for 8x10 dye sub printers to come down a little bit more and that's what I'm getting for my photos. I like the control of doing it at home, I like not having to wait. I like knowing that if it comes out nice I can get a reprint immediately. I like the quality -- unless you go to a REAL lab you risk crappy color and tones. If you look at Smugmug's search for someone to do their prints you can see the vast differences between companies -- it's a risk I don't want to take. And yes, I like the privacy. I can't say I've made prints of anything I wouldn't take to the local store, but I like knowing the option is there.
Most folks using digital cameras aren't printing their photos anyway. Most photographers I know take thousands of photos and never even think of printing them. IMHO, the reason for the availability of volume printing of digital images is to maintain a comfort level for those used to conventional (silver-halide based) photography. Your mother/father/grandparent/elder has had a lifetime of experience taking LOTS of bad pictures and then waiting for results. They don't understand the intricacies of image manipulation / printing / etc (e.g. laser vs inkjet vs dye-sub vs ...) So the industry has migrated from "let us print all your pictures cause most of you can't do it yourself at home" (to) "how can we convince the picture-taking public that they should continue to purchase consumables by getting them to print EVERY picture they take - regardless of the quality of the image?". So what if I can get all my crappy images printed for 0.10c each @ snapfish? How many crappy pics do YOU want to print?
manufacterers of photo printers could easily get more people using their devices if they didn't skimp so much on ink. the ink cartridges have so little ink it's horribly pathetic.
it's for this reason that i switched over to a laser printer for my normal stuff and i just use a supermarket/WalMart for my photos (when i even bother printing them)
with the particular laser printer I bought, which was about $99, I get 2500 prints per $30 toner cartridge ($50 if i don't buy online).
there's more money to be made for the photo printer companies in getting more people to print at home (because they find it more convenient/faster anyway) than there is money to be made by ripping off consumers with small amounts of ink. if they doubled the amount of ink, they could advertise that their prints cost 13 cents a piece to make and they could at the very least double their sales for that particular model.
everybody knows that the price of a printer doesn't matter, it makes more sense to look at the price/size of the ink, because after a few refills the price of the printer is insignificant.
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 - primarily because I like the luster finish better than the gloss that Epson includes with their cartridges (and the Profile 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 $0.178 a print.
It's convenient. Beats having to go to the store to deliver the pictures, or to deliver them over net, and then go to pick them up later, or having them mailed.
It's instant. I can print it now, and give my friend a copy before he/she leaves the house.
It's full control. As a control freak, I like the ability to print, adjust and try again. To get it just right. You won't get that consistency from the cheap stores.
It's cheap. It's even cheaper in the stores, ok. But I am not printing a lot of photos, and the few I do print is not going to seriously affect my budget in any way. A weeks food budget is way more than I will spend on ink cartridges. And if I get the need to print a lot of photo's I can still go to the local store.
Flexibility. I can bring the printer with me on holiday. Wherever I am, I can in a matter of minutes produce my very own personal postcard and send it to some friends.
If budget is first, then buying a photo printer is not good advice. But if it's convenience, flexibility and control you want, then a printer is a great thing.
Oh... and about durability of the prints. If the pictures start to fade... I can instantly make a new print. The digitally stored originals will not fade.
Things change if you edit your pictures. This take quite some time and after your work is done, you often like to verify what you did on paper. So you go to the shop with one picture and ask them to print it.
This will first of all cost you quite much: they often charge a start-up cost of eg 2$, 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.
I've been refilling my Canon printer tanks since I got it. Before that, an Epson (PITA) and before that, two HPs. I've never bought a cart for my Canon. It's trivial to refill (hardly harder than putting in a new tank). I've refilled all the tanks about 25 times now.
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.
Yes, they are more expensive, but I probably print out less than 1% of what I take pictures of. That's where the savings swing back in my direction, I'm not paying to develop 100% of the pictures I take (only print out pictures to give to friends who don't have e-mail (poor souls!)).
it might be cheaper to go with home printing in that case
Seriously - my family will not touch at home printing unless you do it the Kodak way which is to place the camera on top of the printer and press one button and walk away. Even the pressing of one button might be too much for them. Otherwise it winds up being my problem and I don't want that job. Also the printers are fairly expensive and it's another inventory of ink I have to manage. Most snapshots are better left unprinted anyhow.
Most mini-labs (I'm looking at you, Costco, Wal-Mart, and everyone with a Kodak kiosk) have pretty lame quality. If you have a photo printer with card slots, ie. you're not going to f it up in photoshop, print a picture at home, then print the same picture at your minilab. If the minilab print looks better to you, consider yourself lucky. In my experience as a studio photographer, and as a family snapshotter, the quality from most minilabs is very inconsistent, mostly due to operator error or poor maintenance. What's worse, is that every web site I've used that doesn't do their own printing (I'm looking at you, sites with online submission and local pickup) recompresses your high quality image to a tiny low quality jpeg such that you can see artifacts that weren't in the original on anything larger than an 8x10.
If you want really good quality and consistency, spend a little more for a higher end place like mpix.com or whcc.com, or probably dozens more, who understand their own equipment, and pay the operators more than $7/hr. Or print at home.
1. Mailing photos to people across the country sucks. Digital for the win.
2. Failing digital for the win, home printers suck ass, unless you spend a small fortune.
3. Even though that small fortune is less than it used to cost, ink prices are now more ridiculous than a Slashdot poll without a CowboyNeal option.
4x6s may be more expensive, however if you just want a few at a time, the gas (or postage) will make using a photo lab the same price or more expensive. And remember going to a photo lab can be two trips and the time required for the trips.
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.
I find quick printing needs, when quality doesn't matter, to be my primary reason for keeping a photo printer around.
Home printing is way better than online. A correctly profiled home printer has a way larger gamut (=color range) than online. And with good paper and ink, the quality of home made is bigger. And of course, brand name 3rd party ink is way cheaper than the original.
And A4 size prints (20x30cm, or 8x10 inch) is way too expensive online compared to home print.
Personally, I print only few 4x6" photos at home. They mostly go to the online shop, or the 1 hour service (which is a $0.20).
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/perso naltech/20050530-9999-mz1b30snap.html
http://progressive.org/mag_mc100405
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This is a very nice alternative to plain photo prints and a nice gift: qoop flickr photo books. Upload your pictures to Flickr and let it print by qoop as a book.
Ever worry about the way online photo services encourage their customers to save all their photos online? (and of course with a number of added expenses for doing so). Hack into any of those accounts and you'll instantly know a hell of a lot about the family it belongs to - license plat on the car, lay out of the home, what the pets look like, maybe the pet's name. If you're looking to either rob the place or abduct their kids you couldn't get better information. 60 Minutes just ran a piece on jewel thieves from the 70's and 80's who used profiles and photos of the wealthy from Forbes, Reader's Digest, and Architectural Digest to plan their operations - and it worked so well they were in and out in 3 minutes. That was old school and apparently now there are a whole new generation of jewel thieves who are using the same kind of techniques to start a robbing spree again. I wonder if anyone is tapping into the onlien archives for criminal research and if they are, if any of the photo companies will disclose it? Privacy concerns aren't just for people who like to take dirty pics of themselves.....
A local pharmacy I frequent seems to always have young women printing photos with these machines. Now, I'm not cynical by nature, but wouldn't it be easy to fake interest?
Nah, that could never happen; the laugh tracks for sitcoms are just there for "atmosphere".
Even having a published ICC profile is not a guarantee for the printer being calibrated as I have found out by correcting and submitting the same image to different local shops. Costco has great print prices here but their profile appears off - what one could expect I suppose (you get what you pay for).
One way to find shops offering supposedly calibrated printers is looking at http://www.drycreekphoto.com/ although I suspect that many just publish a default profile there.
1. Connect your camera or insert your media card into the reader.
2. iPhoto launches. Import your photos.
3. Click the order prints button. (Charge it to the credit card you use with your Apple ID for iTunes)
In a few days, you get nice prints for a reasonable price.
DPI quality hounds can precede the procedure above with opening the pictures in Photoshop or The GIMP and saving them at 200+ DPI, then dragging the files into iPhoto as Step 1.
Despite owning a photo-capable inkjet printer, whenever I want high-quality and/or long lasting prints, I just use iPhoto's service.
I also use iPhoto to create immense 20"x30" posters in 200 DPI quality. Accomplished in mere mouse clicks and something not even Walmart can't do. Kinko's and the like tend to charge greatly for a similar product.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
...is that you won't get hassled by the staff who force you to prove that you are legally entitled to print copies of your own photos. It seems that staff at many places are suspicious of you if the quality of the photos is too high. For example, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/perso naltech/20050530-9999-mz1b30snap.html
It isn't just the price that keeps home users from printing.
For every tech-savvy person you know, how many do you know that still look for the "Any Key" key on a keyboard?
I know several people who have the gear to produce studio quality prints, yet are not even technically inclined to transfer pics from a cameras memory stick to a printer or docking station, or a pc.
This is odd given the "insert stick here" nature of todays consumer gear.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Then I'd get act all holier than though and spout out bullshit about how it "makes ZERO sense" to go to a garage and pay $19-$39 when you can do it at home for $10 a pop. And how your all suckers for wasting your money. Yawn.
.30 to .50 a print isn't that a big deal.
Newsflash people, consumers are well aware that it costs more to print at home. Those that decide to do it anyway are well within their rights to do it anyway. Just like you ubber nerds who spend $500 on a video card, plently of people think paying an extra
Sure if you know someone printing 60 prints a month on a HP inkjet(god do they rape you on ink, buy a Canon already) you should suggest that its much cheaper to use Costco. But enough with proving its cheaper to print at a lab. Everyone already knows.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I started to read the comments on this article, and got disgusted even more quickly than usual. Maybe it is time for a new slashdot with geeks instead of morons that have their heads up theit butt and think they're cool.
First of all, anyone that uses a Lexmark or an HP inkjet deserves the screwing they're getting. Because that's what they're getting, and with a little bit of sense, they could have known that before buying.
If you want to talk about sensible photo printing on an inkjet, you're talking Epson. And Canon has decided to come play in that game too.
Now, does that mean that printing your own prints with Epson/Canon is cheaper than Costco? No (at least not for 4x6). But the difference in price isn't nearly as huge as with the other brands. And your prints WILL be higher quality, and quite possibly have all the longevity. Of course, this assumes something about your ability to pick papers and print settings..
Beyond that, there's lots of other factors. But lord...
+5 Insightful, really!
i've had good luck with costco's printing... the 12x18's that i printed there were beautiful, and cheap. you must be sure to turn off the color-correction when ordering...
... hi bingo
and will continue to do so. I use a high-end Epson printer with archival paper and inks -- the photos don't fade over time. There's no need for trial-and-error printing -- that's what color management is for. I use a color calibrator to calibrate the monitor and had a color calibration done on the printer. What I see on the screen is what I get from the printer.
I typically use Super B sized paper (13" x 19"). The resulting prints are spectacular. Are they expensive? You bet. But worth it.
Ink cartidges with or without electronic printheads can't give you a buzz!
EDGE: Dom Perignon!!!I would never use inkjet for photo printing. I have a Hi-Touch PhotoShuttle. It is dye sublimation, which gives outstanding quality and costs about $0.40 per picture. I've only had about 5 misprints in the last two years.
My wife loves our digital camera. She takes the best shots, crops them, then prints at the size she wants for the particular scrapbook project she's doing. On film, the same project would cost 10x more.
Think of of your *.jpg collection as a stack of negatives. When's the last time you tried to make a print from a Kodak Disk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_film negative? 110?
The only real long term archive format is paper.
Right, like I'm going to take my intimate photos into Sam's-- or worse, email them to snapfish. I'd see pictures of me and my special lady friend all over the place.
No, I'll stick with my crappy HP output. And who says inks that degrade over time isn't a desired feature?
digital sucks for archival reasons though... i've lost several hundred with dying IDE's...
and then my cd's were eaten by mold, so the backups were toast.
prints tend to hold up much better.
... hi bingo
"At those prices, why bother printing at home?"
Because I really don't feel like having Fry's/Snapfish/etc. see naked pictures of my fiance? *shrug*
All this talk about ink jets blah blah blah and no one has really discussed the other technology that is being used in many of the new generation (though I have a sony udp10 from 5+years ago) printers: Dye Sublination.
What I would like to hear is any info any experts have on longevity of dye-sub printers, as well as some discussion of the various printers' quality. My old sony was seriously state-of-the-art when I bought it. No inkjet could touch it in quality or price even at 75c per print back then. they are 29c now.
But now it is either showing its age, it obsolesence, or both because I'm just not as in love with it like I used to be.
So what do the "experts" think of the new consumer dye-subs.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Thant and you don't want the minimum wage employee down at Wallgreens starting up a new web site dedicated to showing those naked pictures of your wife. VCRs became popular because people doing things that they were embarassed to do in public. Same with home photo printing.
One good side effect of users uploading photos to labs is that joe consumer discovers his upload bandwidth limit. Very few other joe-consumer activities on a computer reveal it. When he goes to upload the photos from the 8 megapixel camera the boy at best buy convinced him he needed, why does it feel like dialup when comcast told him he gets 3Mbps? Hopefully he demands more upload bandwidth if he can figure out that is the reason. Then the internet might not turn into TV all over again, after all.
They broke off their engagement last week. Where the fuck have you been, man? ;)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The entry in the wikipedia is vague enough to also describe the inkjet process. "ses heat to transfer dye to a medium" happens to be how inkjet printers work as well. aside from the posibility that the "ink" may be solid in a dye-sub printer, (a description I have only seen on slashdot) I fail to see any real difference. I wonder if this is just a case of buzzword envy.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Most home users are not savy enough to be able to print their own stuff at home. And they fall to the marketing schemes used by Walmart/Costco/etc, to make them travel over there to print their photos.
Picture processing is still something I'd rather take a few minutes to ask someone else to do rather than do myself. As much as I love DIY projects I finally realized that I can't do ALL of them and this one, printing pictures Now instead of picking them up in an hour at CVS, is low priority.
Where can I sign up for that?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Hey... What package do I need to install to get that, and what services does it support?
I still prefer to make photo "prints" in a darkroom though photo printers do offer convenience and speed.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Let me preface my comment by mentioning that I've used all the methods of photo printing extensively. I used an actual chemical color darkroom setup at home in the years before color ink-jet printers - and yes, that was very expensive and time-consuming, but it was the only way to do it at the time. I rushed out to buy the original Epson Color Stylus (one of the first practical photo ink-jet printers) back when it first became available. Since then I've used dozens of Epson, HP, Canon and Lexmark ink-jet printers, and few color lasers and dye-sub printers as well. I also use the services of several local digital printing labs, most of which produce pretty good results these days. There's no question that printing at home on glossy photo paper is only for people who can't do basic math, especially with the latest Epson and HP printers (don't blame the messenger, Epson and HP owners, I'm speaking from experience). The costs are much higher than better-quality professional photo printing. I can go to a store and get 1-hour turnaround at lower cost - or I can send the photos by internet to the lab and get them in the mail a few days later at even lower cost. Anyway, these days why would you bother printing dozens or hundreds of little 4x6 prints to show your photos to your friends and family when they can see them faster on the internet at no cost, or you can do a TV slide show for the few who don't have PCs.
But there are good reasons for printing, and options to reduce the cost. I usually print only large-format 8x10 prints of my best photos. At that size the cost equation changes a bit compared to the photo labs. Also the resolution at that size is better than the computer screen, and they're worth putting in a photo album or mounting on the wall. These days I use only Canon ink-jet printers, because their ink cost per page is significantly lower than the competition (a factor often skipped in reviews), and they are a lot more reliable (I get a perfect print first time, every time - even if it hasn't been used in a month - try that with HP or Epson). That wasn't the case a few years ago, and it might not be true next year, but that's the way it stacks up today. I almost never print on glossy photo paper - I use selected brands of high-quality matte paper that offer equivalent quality at a fraction of the price. And then I slip them into a 2-cent plastic cover sheet that makes them look glossy and protects them from the damaging effects of atmospheric gases and UV light.
Or, even things that aren't illegal might run you some trouble.
This brings up something I've heard a number of tymes, I've heard reports of people being investigated or harrassed because they had the gaul to photograph their child in the bath or in some "compromizing situation" like playing on one of those slippery slides in the yard without wearing clothing and then dropped the photos off to be developed only to be acused of child pornography when they pick them up again. It's amazing how something that used to be considered normal is now looked at as sinister.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I can ride across town on a bus for a fraction of the cost of doing so in my nice selfish car.
I did it every day when I was a kid and my parents wanted to save money and were willing to give me the "character building" experience... whilst they carried on with the convenience of driving themselves. Once I was paying my own way, even though it was more expensive, I took to driving rather than deal with the hassle.
With digital photography and home printing, when my in laws come to visit and I want to show them pictures I have sitting around of say my new born nephew while he was still in the hospital, I can quickly print up a copy rather than huddle around a screen. When it suddenly occurs to my in laws they'd like a copy for their wallets, twenty minutes later, I can throw out a couple of quick copies. When they want a larger one for framing, I change paper and do that too.
Alternatively, we don't look at the pictures because it's a totally different experience huddling around a monitor than it is sitting and talking whilst a stack of pictures are casually handed around without interrupting the conversation. They decide they'd like copies for their wallets so we either order on line and pay a premium for only wanting two copies or we drive to the nearest store. Then we drive back. Once home, they realise they want a larger copy for framing but the first store doesn't do anything other than 4x6 so we have to find a different place.
But we do save $0.30. Sure, the wasted gallon of gas is currently up around $3.00 and our collective time, across all of our jobs, is billable at $100+/hr for that wasted half hour. But the important thing is we saved $0.30 on print costs.
I also don't keep my own chickens and weave my own clothes. I guess I'm just a bad person.
There are several people out there who must get free memberships to Sam's Club or Costco. Last time I checked it cost ~$35/year to join these membership type stores. Add that to your cost/print and the cost goes up. Also, I look in the discount bins at Wal-Mart and CompUSA for paper and ink suplies. (I've found some good deals at Big Lots also.) I've found I can regularly get paper and ink for less than 1/4 the regular price. I've done the math and can usually print 4x6 prints for about 10 cents not including electricity. Add to this that it is about a 1 hour round trip from my house to anywhere and it's a no-brainer.
Wouldn't they just have made duplicates for the cops instead of sending the originals around? No use in tipping you off to an ongoing investigation, if that were the case. You're probably just being paranoid. :)
It may seem to be paranoid but when you're accused of child pornography because you took photos of your child taking a bath it can destory your life.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There are, in my experience, only two reasons to make prints of photos.
1) Grandparents and the technologically challenged. For me, this is really only grandparents. They want photos of their great-grand-kids, and telling them "go online to get them" doesn't work when, IF they have a computer, they're afraid to touch it.
2) large prints for framing. I'm looking forward to some sort of cheap, thin, easy digital photo frame LCD, but until then, if you want a picture hanging on the wall, you'll want a print.
That's it, though. Albums are silly- they take up space and aren't easy to find photos in. Most of the time, if we want to show a guest a photo, or see one ourself, it's to the computer we go...
Most retail photo shops have a policy that if your photo looks too "professional", you will not be able to print it there. There is no definiton of "professional", which means that it's basically the judgment call of whoever's working the register. Instead, for the bit extra it costs to print my own 4x6's, I can print whatever I like. Any 4x6 image in Photoshop, regardless of the contents, can be printed. I don't have to worry about being second-guessed and told "you obviously didn't take this picture, it looks too 'good'".
FC Closer
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.
Ah, so they all offer the convenience of a photo album you can just grab off the bookshelf and leaf through? I don't think so. Once a print is made it requires nothing more than light to look at, but if all your photos are on you computer then you have to bootup, launch an application, and open a file to look at a photograph. Plus in some cases (not all) sharing is easier having prints than having a digital file. Personally I'd rather have a photo album I can share than have only digital files.
FalconShould there be a Law?
prints tend to hold up much better.
Prints only hold up better for archival purposes if the paper used is of archival quality. Regular printer paper as well as photo paper doesn't hold up well as it ages.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've got a 4 year old Epson Stylus 1280. That plus pics from my Nikon Coolpix 990 have served me well, older generation tech notwithstanding. biggest problem is having to exercise/clean the heads before each printing session, usually 3 or 4 times lest you get streaky printouts, thus wasting ink and paper. But... the pay off comes when it's 2am and you realize you need a gift for your mother-in-law in the morning and the local photo shop or drug store is closed. A quick printout of the grandkid's latest foibles always does the trick (recommend keeping a small store of 3x5 photos on hand just in case).
People are suckers for wasting their money getting their oil changed. Changing your own oil is cheap, very cheap - and doesn't take long to do. The oil and filter is only going to cost about $20.00 for the amount needed in most cars, and it only takes about a half-hour to change. Unless you are making more than $40.00/hr (most people don't make that much), it is a better deal than having someone else do it (and still taking a half-hour to perform). Plus, you *know* what went into the car, and that other crap hasn't been messed with (this happens at some shops - things get "tweaked" so they break down the road, and you have to come back).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This chunk of text is begging for a graph. (Didn't RTFA.)
Though C41 may be the current process for color film as you say, it's been around for years, and isn't going away anytime soon. Personally I used to use C41 film but have been thinging of using E6, that's what we had to use in my photography classes. While it's possible to use the C41 process on E6 I've heard the result can be pretty funky.
i also feel sorry for people who have negatives that are not 35mm
What I have now is a Canon EOS Rebel but I'm hoping to get a 645, I'm leaning towards a Mamya, perhaps a Mamiya ZD as well as a digital back along with film backs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Why? Well I did the math and the numbers came out about even. The one thing someone has to take into consideration is that on a roll of film, you can't trade in bad pictures for good ones, like you can with a digital camera. That's where the scale tips in favor of printing it yourself.
...you can't tweak an image and get it "just right" when you send it off to a lab who is just going to print it with whatever flat tonality was in the image you took. Sure you can modify the files before you send them off, but then can you be certain they'll come back exactly as you adjusted them on your monitor at home without needing to use color calibration tools? I don't see how they can compete. Now if all you want is ten cent family photos printed to stick in an album, then you're part of a very small market. Most people want to play with their photos and highly customize them for specific applications and printing. Again, this is something that a photo lab can't provide. Now... the one thing photo labs CAN do that you can't typically do at home without investing in really expensive equipment is print large formats. But that's about the only thing they've got over home printing at this point. I just don't see it.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
the store ended up claiming that they had misplaced the pictures in the back of a box. I really don't believe that story though, I think they got investigated before they made it back to me
That might be true... but that couldn't happen where I live (in the US), because clerks at the local drug store aren't so caring or aware.
They're always losing prints (or even receipts). And if they'd see something suspicious while carefully quality-inspecting all of those thousands of photos they deal with (doubtful), they wouldn't report it to the local cops (because they just happened to bust them last week for possession).
I find all of this almost silly.
1) modern inks such as Epson's ultrachromes have very long lives on good media.
2) do you REALLY print every image you shoot? It's not like you have to take in a 36 exposure roll of film, have it printed, toss the ones you don't want (talk about a waste of resources) and keep maybe one or two per roll that are really good.
3) it's right there for you to learn on. Printing, like any other aspect of photography, is a skill and an art form. Embrace it if you want to have images that really look good. Explore printing on matte-finish papers, learn a little bit about dodging and burning (and I'm NOT talking RIAA here). Good color management exists on both the Mac and Windows (okay, maybe a bit harder on Windows) but the printer drivers are excellent. HP makes some printers that do fabulous work on black and white.
So yeah, if you print every image you take it's expensive. So don't do it and do a bit of editing.
Convenience. that is the magic word, not "cost".
Think about it, people are spending far MORE $$$ on digital cameras that have far LOWER quality than traditional film cameras. If it was all about cost, they'd stick with disposable 35mm funsavers.
People are paying more for digital because it's convenient. It's convenient because you don't need to go to the freakin 1hr photo to get pictures back. Printing them at home is just another extension of the same convenience factor.
Sure, it may not be as cheap, it may not be as high quality, but it's already been established by the market that these are NOT the primary considerations. This article is so far off the mark that it makes me wonder if the author even owns a camera.
I pay under $7 for a set of four 3rd-party carts for my i560.
The printer probably cost about 4 times the equivilent lexmark, but it's a great little printer. Probably even beats out laser for running costs since the black carts cost me $1.79 iirc.
"Ah, so they all offer the convenience of a photo album you can just grab off the bookshelf and leaf through? I don't think so."
Um, yeah, actually they do, and then some. My gf has her photos up on a gallery she can (and does) share with people. Also, those books get damaged and decay. It's a click away from a bookmark. No biggie. Add photos? No prob! No need to deal with photo developing or printing. [UPLOAD] *click*.
"Derp de derp."
Because who wants to print out in public stuff from their own webcam or that they downloaded from ChicksWithD*cks.com? And who wants to wait that long?!?!?
Actually, neither do the Canon ink tanks that I buy. Just a hunk of plastic, a sponge that takes up lots of the space, and a little ink. Highly profitable. And I've learned the hard way that if I use replacement ink then the jets stop working and I do have to buy the whole print head assembly, for a little more than I originally paid for the printer (wish I could buy more of this printer at that price, but it is no longer offered).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
For me print durability isn't really vital - the archive version is the digital copy. I only print occasional photos and don't tend to keep much in an album, and certainly not the older prints.
For a few years, I've only used third party paper and inks. 100 sheets of A4 photo paper costs £12.99, colour cartridges for Epson Stylues Photo 830 cost about £3.99 and do about 50 sheets of A4. So thats about 20p per A4 sheet and I guess under 10p to do a 7x5 print.
Um, yeah, actually they do, and then some. My gf has her photos up on a gallery she can (and does) share with people. Also, those books get damaged and decay. It's a click away from a bookmark. No biggie. Add photos? No prob! No need to deal with photo developing or printing. [UPLOAD] *click*.
If you print then you don't have just a digital file, the print is hardcopy. And that was my point, I'd rather have a hardcopy than just a digital file. As far as uploading to share, what if one of the people being shared with doesn't have internet access, or even a computer? I know it may seem untrue for some but not all people have internet access or, shock, computers.
FalconShould there be a Law?
the "ink" may be solid in a dye-sub printer, (a description I have only seen on slashdot)
With a quick Moot I found this:
Dye Sublimation Printers
At the high end where quality is very important, you'll find dye-sublimation printers (called dye-subs, but more accurately dye-diffusion). The "dye" in the name comes from the fact that the process uses solid dyes instead of inks or toner. "Sublimation" is the scientific term for a process where solids (in this case dyes) dyes are converted into a gas without going through an intervening liquid phase.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"If you print then you don't have just a digital file, the print is hardcopy. And that was my point, I'd rather have a hardcopy than just a digital file."
Not intending to be argumentative or anything, but the reason I'd prefer to have the digital file is because I find the hard copies inconvenient. They require storage space. Kinda scary when compared to simply burning a backup CD or uploading files to a webserver. The hardcopy would be more valuable to me if I spent much time where I wasn't near a computer, but honestly, I just don't live that sort of life. Computer at home, computer at work, stuff centralized on the net so I can hit it anywhere, etc. I've also moved a few times and lost a few hardcopy photos in the process.
"As far as uploading to share, what if one of the people being shared with doesn't have internet access, or even a computer?"
I can't speak for most, but I don't have a member of the family that doesn't have a net connection.
"Derp de derp."
I can't speak for most, but I don't have a member of the family that doesn't have a net connection.
I do, my mom. She doesn't like computers at all. And yes she uses them, she has to at work. She's a lab tech in a hospital. And though it may of changed, the last tyme I saw them most of my friends didn't have computers either. Admittedly though that was 4 years ago.
the reason I'd prefer to have the digital file is because I find the hard copies inconvenient. They require storage space.
I've had people complain that my book shelves take up too much room but I dispute that, if there's not enough room then I need more space. Actually I already do, for a decent garden if nothing else.
Ooh, I need to make a correction. I'd rather have my film, both negatives and positives or slides, than a digital file. With the film I can always print them out, or scan them if I want a digital file. Actually, as I don't have a darkroom or access to one right now, when I turn in film for processing I almost always order a cd as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Ooh, I need to make a correction. I'd rather have my film, both negatives and positives or slides, than a digital file. With the film I can always print them out, or scan them if I want a digital file. Actually, as I don't have a darkroom or access to one right now, when I turn in film for processing I almost always order a cd as well."
:)
I can understand that, man. The huge benefit there is that you have the originals to work from. I like my stuff digital, but as an artist I can understand wanting the highest quality one around.
"Derp de derp."
I can understand that, man. The huge benefit there is that you have the originals to work from. I like my stuff digital, but as an artist I can understand wanting the highest quality one around. :)
Though I'm not now, I want to be a pro photographer, er make money from photography. Though I only have a film 35mm I've been wanting to get a digital camera. When it came out I was drooling over Canon's EOS 1Ds Mark II. I like that it's full frame. I'd also like to get a good 645 medium format with both film and digital backs. Actually what I'd really like to get is a back that was both film and digital, capturing both digital and film at the same tyme would be awesome.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You can mirror disk very cheaply by means of hardware of software.
If one disk crashes you replace it (quickly) and you are ok.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Albums are silly- they take up space and aren't easy to find photos in.
Computers take up space as well as all the peripherals, and just like an unorganized photo album, a photo in an unorganized filing system on the computer isn't easy to find either. Unless you have Spotlight perhaps. Just as with files on the computer, if you put effort into organizing photo albums, they are easy to search for specific photos. As I take photos I also record the shots, date and tyme taken, the subject matter, fstop, shutterspeed, and so on. I'll use one log page per roll then put the log and the corresponding film into a binder. I can then later create or update an index.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Is called DVD, you can put pictures there and play them in something called DVD player in the comfort of your sofa, the same sofa where you would otherwise sit ot browase a paper photoalbum. They show up on the box in front of you. Its name is television (or TV for short).
WHo would have thought such a thing exists?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I recently had to replace my old printer, and would have loved to get one of the new canons - The duplex, cd-printing one, probably.
But, as canon does not want us non-windows customers, I now have a HP. And, yes, it produces better-looking prints that anything else available in this town - kiosks with over-saturated dye-sublimation printers.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
.... that could be grandparents, learnt to use a computer in their 40s, in their 60s they have no problem to us one for what many other people use them (email, Web, pr0n, games, etc).
/. is pretty shameful.
I think the strain of ageism in
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Has no one thought of using the continuous ink systems on the market? Quite cheap when you compare ink costs...
I can understand that, man. The huge benefit there is that you have the originals to work from. I like my stuff digital, but as an artist I can understand wanting the highest quality one around. :)
So get a digital camera that can save raw data. All DSLRs can, as well as a lot of higher-end point-and-shoots. Basically, at least with the Canon DSLR I have, this saves the full 12-bit data exactly as it came off the sensor. You can then "develop" this into a JPEG or even a TIFF (16bpp if you prefer) as many times as you want, adjusting settings such as white balance, contrast, etc. You can do exposure adjustments easily too, and better than you could do if all you had was a JPEG.
This is even more "original" than a film negative is, since the negative has already had processing done on it by the lab.
Sorry, I don't own a television. Televisions are for losers. Intellectuals read books.
It always surprises me that people don't do this type of math for themselves. : )
The only major things I can think of that make sense, currently, as a reason to do your own photo-printing, is if you need your output _immediately_, or if you plan to print out stuff you'd rather your photo shop clerks not see.
Having your own photo-printer is probably more of a convenience thing than a cost-effectiveness thing. At least some people are probably enamored of them because they are a neat gizmo that has "cool factor."
My personal concern is nearly always price, and from a price-standpoint, the cost of the media and supplies has always made the per-copy cost too high, and the quality is usually too low to justify it for me.
On the other hand, I can do my own photo-editing and touchup, to get the particular results I want, and see instant results.
For many people, perhaps the little bit extra they pay per-print is worth it to not have to wait, go to a photo-mat, or take a chance that the neat boudoir pictures they made with their spouse will end up in some photo-lab's scrapbook. ; )
Personally, I'm simultaneously amused and dismayed that there are now so many printers that cost less than their refill supplies. Seems like a case of "Give away the razor for free, so you can sell the refill blades."
Thus selecting in konq, rigth-clicking and selecting "Action/Order prints" require nothing more than a 3-line shellscript. ( echo "What size ?"; read $size; europhoto_upload -s $size -n 1 "$@" basically.)
I'm sorry that I have no experience with unix-friendly printshops in the US, I'm sure they'll exist, but I wouldn't know which ones it is. Look around I guess.
Not to burst your bubble, but maybe you just don't know where to shop. Do you honestly purchase paper at almost 66 cents per sheet? Even for 8.5x11, that is retail ripoff.
I buy photo paper (in the convenient 4x6 size) for $13 per 100 sheets. I have almost 1,000 sheets on hand right now just in that size.
Let's clearup some misinformation: You CANNOT use a consumer laser printer with 'photopaper'. The coating sticks to the fuser assembly. Very messy and mindless. 'PhotoPaper' that you purchase at the store is for Inkjets only (they are NOT called 'bubblejets'---that is a Canon term for a specific printer they market).
For photo printing on a laser, I use an Aficio 6513 here in the office. Sure, it cost over $27,000 but 80lb glossy paper turns out images like magazine ads (the shiny surface comes from an additional layer of silicon oil applied after fusing). Lasers do NOT use ink. They use 'toner'. Toner on a 6513 costs 6cents per page. You don't buy cartridges, they are in a maintenance contract.
Anyway, for my PSC2600 Photosmart, the cartridges are $35 for high capacity color and $30 for photo cartridge (with free delivery to my door). Prints are indistinguishable from the lab (or the B&W ones I develop myself from the Pentax K1000 I still have around).
These prints should last for at least 50 years using quality pigment inks (not dye ink).
As far a price-per-sheet, I figured it out once to be on par with taking them to Wally world. I would rather digitally retouch my photos before printing, so it just works FOR ME.
Whatever works for you, that's fine. Just wanted to clearup some mis info in previous post.
On a quick side-note regarding cartidge costs:
I have been refilling inkjet cartridges for about 7 years and
this HP did not want to be refilled.
After topping off the yellow, the printer failed to acknowledge the color cartridge being installed at all (through the software or the LCD screen ).
When printing from it, it would print the Magenta and Cyan, but refused to print yellow.
HP as well as xerox are going to great efforts to ensure that you purchase new supplies and only purchase those supplies from them (hence Dell's entry into the printer market as well).
The printer market in general is a racket.