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..."

Comments

Why print?

[JanneM]

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.

Re:well....

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is they don't use ink. In the machine is usually a laser or led that exposes normal photographic (silver halide) paper, then it goes through the traditional chemical process. The checimal and paper cost is always going to be cheaper than what the inkjet printer manufacturers charge for their ink and paper. A lot of consumers got duped into thinking the convenience of printing at home was much greater than the price of the print. How wrong they were. When you stuff around trying to make the colour look right by trial and error, the cost of the print is a lot higher than getting it printed in a lab.

I work in a lab and this is what we have experienced. In Australia, Harvey Norman (consumer electronics) started off as the Computer Specialists, then they went to Digital Camera Specialists and now they are Digital Printing Specialists. When they were the computer and dc specialist, they were pushing that you must have an inkjet printer, but now they are telling you that you must have the photos printed on their Fuji digital labs. People who "specialise" in so many areas are really not specialists at all.

We do quality comparisons in our area by getting a digital file printed from a range of labs to compare quality and really, Harvey Norman's is really just shit. Although the industry has gone to a digital production, the underlying science of chemicals has not changed. Balancing the chemistry and what not is a daily manual job. There is no point creating the printer profile to bring it "back into balance" when the chemicals are so far out of whack.

Re:No advantage in privacy, convienence, time, etc

[rynthetyn]

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.