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.
-------
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
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?)
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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
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
...to have the clerk looking at my photos...
While I don't care too much about this (perhaps I'm not taking the same, uh, genre, of photos you are), there are other solutions.
I'm not sure what service the submitter was referring to exactly, but many stores including WalMart and others have automated Fujifilm or Kodak kiosks that let you input your photos via a large number of interfaces (flatbed scanner, USB, compact flash, SD, etc), view and edit them, and then print them on quality photo paper for 10-25 cents each. My mother who owns a Kodak picture printer does this because not only is it a lot cheaper and the quality of the prints is very good, but she can crop, resize, adjust brightness/contrast/saturation, etc, without trying to learn how to use graphic software.
It prints the pictures instantly along with a UPC you stick to the envelope and pay at the cashier. Nobody really sees them.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
...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...
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.
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 develop all my digital pics at Costco. which happens to also be my primary grocery-buying place. Some clear advantages:
1. New/Better developing equipment. Costco (and probably most other retailers) have developing stations FAR better than my g/f's Epson photo printer. They update their machinery every six months or so, too, so I get excellent color reproduction, high quality print paper, etc.
2. Price. I pay 12 cents a print for 4x6, or something nearly as stupid. Maybe it's 14 cents; who cares? Much less than the costs people are posting here for home photo printers. I like money, don't you?
3. Convenience. I happen to do most of my grocery shopping at Costco (love dem 12-packs of Campbell's Chunky Soup -- mmmm, MSG...). They also do developing in less than an hour, most of the time, so you can develop while you shop. And if you'd rather sit in your jammies, Costco.com will let you send your pics from your home PC for pickup in store, or they'll deliver by mail (like Snapfish, etc.). It's not 3 minutes from concept to wall art, but if you want immediate results you're gonna pay in $$$ and quality.
4. Customer Service. This may be a Costco-only thing, but they'll refund your money if you don't like your pictures FOR ANY REASON. My father (bless his tech-inept heart) once developed all 200 of his pics from Europe. Problem is, he developed the thumbnails. Costco explained his error, refunded his money, and developed the actual pics instead. Try getting Epson to send you a replacement cartridge because you did something stupid.
Of course, home printers have their uses. Off the top of my head, Costco is terrible for:
1. Blackmail/Kidnapping Photos. I'm pretty sure they've got to report this kind of thing. Besides, if you've kidnapped anyone of signifigance, you've got a hefty payday coming. 50 cent prints aren't a big expenditure for you.
2. Pictures of your naughty bits. No need to traumatize the adolescents working the shop at Costco with pictures of your wang. Plus, hard copies are so 1970s. Just post the high-res shots anonymously to craigslist like the rest of us.
Outside of these two, admittedly rare, categories, I just can't fathom why people are spending hundreds of dollars on home-developing. My two cents.
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?
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.