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.
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.
Don't print, use something like Flickr That's where I upload my "art"
Go Away! Not for Sale
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.
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
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
...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...
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?
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.
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."
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 $0.178 a print.
Things change if you edit your pictures. This take quite some time and after your work is done, you often like to verify what you did on paper. So you go to the shop with one picture and ask them to print it.
This will first of all cost you quite much: they often charge a start-up cost of eg 2$, 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!)).
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.
For example, 5 minutes before leaving for the school bus, your kid tells you that she needs a picture of her pet fish for show-n-tell.
I simply remind him that he needs to do all assignments when he gets home from school instead of waiting until the last minute. A zero on the gradebook serves as a good reminder of this.
Anyway, I find that leaving an inkjet printer idle for too long will cause the ink to dry in the head rendering the printer inoperable. At a minimum you need to clean the heads to remove the cake, and sometimes they just cannot be restored to produce a decent print. I've tried Canons, Epsons and HPs. They all have had this problem. Infrequent use is not their strong suit.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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