Troubleshooting Photos –
About Print Sources
For many people, viewing photos on a computer or in a digital frame is all they ever want to do. For others, the print's the thing, whether displayed on a wall, stuck to the refrigerator or kept in a photo book. Printing can be expensive, but adopting multiple paths to printing will save you a lot of money.
A useful strategy for economically savvy print-making is to ask yourself, How long do I want to keep this print?
- Long-life prints are the ones you want to hold on to for years or decades. These may be examples of personal creativity or records of important moments.
- Short-term prints are ones you want to make a point in business or a school project, to remind you how to re-assemble something you're fixing or where you planted the daffodils. They may be photos of a fun gathering (a type of photo that in some cases might creep over into the first category, particularly if your other hobby is blackmail). You may well chuck them out in a year.
Long-life prints
If you want to display your creative skill or to preserve important moments, you'll probably want the prints to last years or decades.
At this time, the longest-lived prints are those made on high-quality photo printers. What's a high-quality photo printer? This is a moving target, but rather than bog ourselves down in checkpoints that will outdate rapidly, let's use this broad definition – it's one with six or more ink cartridges and it is probably explicitly advertised as capable of making long-life or archival prints when used with specific combinations of ink and paper. A high-quality photo printer will also allow you the greatest level of creative control, the broadest gamut of color and the greatest print longevity.
Other options
Sometimes you may not want all the advantages of a high-quality photo printer. If you don't, there's a lot of incentive to shop around for other options. According to one source, photo-ink cartridges cost you around $10,000 per liter. There are two alternatives:
- find less expensive ink to use in your printer; or
- have a digital photofinishing service, on-line or otherwise, do the printing for you.
On the surface, this seems a simple pair of choices – there must be cheaper inks available in these days of discount everything, right? And it's got to be cheaper doing it yourself than having someone do it for you, right? As it turns out, alternative sources of ink range from slightly cheaper to significantly more expensive for lower quality.
Remarkably, having someone else print your pictures actually turns out to be less than half and sometimes just a few pennies over one-third of the cost of doing it yourself. The only reservation here is that you have to wait to get your prints, or you have to go and get them, and that while the quality is not as high as doing it yourself on a good photo printer, it ranges from acceptable (particularly given the price) to just fine (for the price).
Buying cartridges
Consumer Reports tested cartridges (September 2005) from major manufacturers and from third-party suppliers, enough of them to print 35,000 photos. They bought ink from big-box office suppliers and specialist Web retailers. While they achieved good results when using third-party ink to print black text, once they moved into photos the third-party suppliers faltered and sometimes fell flat. They found that:
- Savings are modest (US$0.35 per print using third-party cartridges vs. $0.40 per print using manufacturers') despite prices for individual cartridges that were 25% to 50% off the price of manufacturers' cartridges. Because third-party cartridges don't print as many photos as manufacturers' cartridges, price-per-photo ranged from modest savings to a significant price premium – $0.45 to $0.55 per third-party print.
- Quality is better with manufacturers' cartridges. Only one third-party supplier produced really pleasing color, and that only for one of the brands it covers; other brands were so-so. Most third-party suppliers' inks produced photos that were just acceptable to dreadful. Not only were the pictures not as good right out of the printer, they were much less resistant to fading. There were issues with leaking cartridges from third-party suppliers; these were always replaced without question, but there would be the cost of some turnaround time, if you don't have a spare.
- Third-party inks may cause problems with your printer; it seems to depend on the make and model, but there's no way of predicting which models will be affected and which will not. One consumer writer sensibly suggested that if you have a good, new printer that performs well with OEM inks, you should stick with them, but keep the older printer it replaced, using less expensive inks in it.
Regrettably, the complete report is no longer available from the Consumer Reports Web site. Discussions on a variety of Web sites devoted to photo printing appear to confirm the general line of its advice: use OEM inks for photos that really matter to you, and third-party inks for incidental printing (children's projects, prints that will only be needed for a short time).
Buying prints
While you're reading up on ink, also see their report on photofinishing (July, 2006), where they found that you could have someone else do the job for $0.15 to $0.20 per print. There is a slight drop in quality compared to using your own printer that they didn't dwell on.
- On-line services gave the best quality. The semi-hidden costs are time (5 to 7 days) and shipping (about $0.10 per print). Another gotcha is the time required to upload your photo files; uploading a dozen pictures on a dial-up connection could take hours, so you really must have a high-speed connection. On-line prints are almost always water-resistant.
- Chain photo stores and stores with mini-labs give a good blend of price and quality. The Fuji mini-lab gives the best quality. For real convenience, choose a location that allows you to upload your photos to an outlet near you, then pick them up an hour later. Mini-lab prints are almost always water-resistant.
- Kiosks (stand-alone terminals that you may find in places like grocery stores) are fast, but the quality is lower than any other option. Not water-resistant.
Recommendations
Use your own printer with its manufacturer's inks for photos that are valuable to you. You'll have better, more consistent color and the prints will be more fade-resistant. If you can't resist the lower price tag of third-party inks, use them for limited-lifespan prints, like children's school projects and lost-budgie posters (or if you have to print a lot of plain black text – Consumer Reports did find a combination of value and quality in some black ink cartridges). Incidentally, use of third-party inks cannot cancel your printer's warranty (in the US, at least), but there is apparently some truth in the assertion that they do clog the printer more often.
Use on-line or store services for photos that are good enough to print, not important enough to slave over with image-editing application and printer – the "here-we-all-are" holiday snaps that you look at every five years, photos you took of your garden to help you remember where you planted the daffodils, pictures you took as you disassembled a motor in the hopes of reducing the number of parts left over when you put it back together, etc.
Another thought – consider having two printers. Photo printers typically have five or more ink colors plus black while general-purpose ink-jet printers have three colors plus black, which makes general-purpose cartridges slightly cheaper. Depending on how much photo printing versus general-purpose color printing you do, it just may be worth your while to keep two printers on the go.
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