My Photo Printer.net - Tips for Choosing a Personal Photo Printer

There are a million and one inkjets and other photo printers from which to choose. These tips will help you narrow down the choices to find the photo printer for you!

Choosing a home printer is a tough decision. While digital cameras and accessories for them are, for the most part, a one time purchase, printers have both initial and operating costs to consider. Here are a few My Photo Printer.net tips for helping to cut through all of the marketing to choose the best personal printer for you!

For most people who intend to print more than a couple thousand pages over the life of the printer (i.e. most professionals, college students, computer intensive families, etc.) I would generally recommend having a laser printer around the house. You may not think that you go through enough print volume, but you may be surprised - especially if there is a university student in the house! For less than $300 you can get a great laser printer which will generally be more reliable and cheaper to run over the long-run than any inkjet. However, unfortunately black and white doesn't really work well with photography, eh? (Well, monochrome does have a dynamic for some photos, but that's another article entirely.) So, for this article, we'll assume that we are considering a color printer for home use. More specifically, we'll go with ink-jets. Color laser printers are quite pricey, and they don't do a very good job with photos. Specialized photo printers aren't that popular yet - and they don't do any other printing! And the other options that exist like thermal wax transfer are pretty rarely used in the home.

Get a "Photo Quality" Printer

If you are set on purchasing a printer to reproduce your digicam photos, then you might as well limit your printer choices to those offering 'photo quality' prints. What's the difference you ask? More colours. Traditional ink jet printers have three colours, plus black. This works well enough for printing slides or clipart or webpages. However, when it comes to printing photos, the visual difference between a photo quality printer and "regular" inkjet printers is dramatic. The number of additional colours varies by model, some of the latest colour printers have six unique colours. More colours gives the printer a lot more flexibility in mixing inks, in turn, the printer can then produce a much broader range of colors with smoother shading. It does cost more in ink to print in "photo" mode, but you always have the option of using 'normal' colour mode, and saving the 'photo' mode for special prints.

Consider the ease of refilling or availability of 3rd party ink

If your city is anything like Vancouver (where I happen to reside), you probably have many ink-refill companies throughout the city. Most malls have kiosks where helpful attendants will fill your used ink cartridges for you - even standalone stores exist in most business districts. Why? Ink is expensive. Rather, ink from manufacturers is usually expensive. One of my personal rules for success is to "Understand thine enemy", in this context, what you want to do is figure out why a printer can cost $100 but ink cartridges $45. It's the same old "give away the razors and sell the razor blades" story. Enough rambling, my point here is that you should investigate the ease of refillability of the printer that you are about to purchase, even if you don't initially plan on using refilled ink cartridges. This keeps as many options open as possible in case you change your mind in the future, or end up printing a lot more than you initially anticpated. Printer manufacturers have started to use many tricks to prevent refiilling, so doing some research before hand can make life easier. The easiest way to check if you can refill a particular ink cartridge is to have a look at what those kiosks will refill, or if you'd rather click your way through life, there are a lot of online references for ink cartridge refilling. Generally speaking, people have figured out how to refill all the major printer manufacturers cartridges; however, some are definitely easier than others - I speak from experience on this one. A limited selection of links including references, tutorials, and possibly suppliers relating to ink cartridge refilling is being assembled on our Photo Links pages, under the Ink Refill Links category. For what it's worth, I've seen many recommendations (some first hand) for Canon branded printers with respect to ease of refilling.

Check the price of consumables (i.e. ink and paper)

Like I mentioned in the introduction, choosing a printer for your photos is probably harder than choosing a digital camera. You have to take into account the cost of consumables, i.e. ink and paper. A couple things to keep in mind, on average, printers usually use comparable amounts of ink to print the same image; thus, you should compare ink cartridges per volume (mL for Canadians and most of the world). It's not a perfect comparison because some printers are more efficient at using ink that others, but as a rough guide it works OK. Quite often you will find that cheaper printers (AKA "razors") use smaller ink cartridges and will require more frequent replacements (AKA "razor blades"). It all depends on your print volume, if you don't print much at all, then it might not matter. Keep in mind that the number of pages per ink cartridge are usually based on 5% coverage of an 8.5x11 inch standard sheet of paper. Five percent coverage being roughly equivalent to an average page of text. If you are printing photos, you'll have to recalculate your pages per cartridge and reduce the number significantly. For example, a 5x4 'print' of a photo on your printer would equate to approximately 21% coverage. Actually even this is probably a little optimistic, since you are printing in color, the relative ink usage considerably because the basic ink colors get overlaid to create the full range of colors in the photo.

Some printers can print your digital photos well on any type of paper, including regular photocopy stock, while others require much more expensive "photo" paper to get nice results. Make sure to factor this into your decision - you may discover that it's easier and cheaper to just upload your photos to an online photo developer.

Print a sample at the store yourself!

A walk through the printer aisles of the average (large) computer retailer will nice, glossy, laminated "sample printouts" from each respective printer. You should remember that these samples (and I'll assume they are legitimately from the same printer model) are created under ideal circumstances in some centralized office where people spend a lot of time picking the perfect paper and image samples to put make their "samples" look as good as possible. They sure look good don't they? Even the cheapest printers can print a few good images when given the right TLC. Do not make your printer decision based on the laminated samples they provide! Insist on getting a fresh sample printed from the printer itself. If possible, create your own print content rather than use the manufacturer provided defaults - a couple quick ways to do this are to find a nice colorful website and print it out, or take a screenshot of a good desktop background and print it from a basic paint program. Besides image quality, you can also get a feel for the speed, noise level, ink drying time, performance on 'regular' paper, and other things when you see the product in action. Unfortunately, many of the smaller retail stores can not provide live printer demos, so the next best thing (or possibly even the better thing) is to read a few reviews.

Read some unbiased photo printer reviews

Speaking of reviews, these are probably the best way to quickly narrow down your choices. Just make sure you keep away from 'sponsored' reviews. They aren't going to give you any objective information. What does this mean? As a simple rule of thumb, it's probably best to avoid reviews that cover a single printer model rather than a comparison of different models from multiple manufacturers. A lot of the most objective comparisons today are from the smaller internet-only specialty sites. Some good sites for reviews we've found are available in the Photo Printer Reviews category of our Photo Links section.

Comments? Questions? Please post them in our forums!

Leonard

Published on: 2003-08-04 (37965 reads)

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