Photo Printer

[Dan_K]

Seeking advice on buying a printer. For many years (decades), I have been sending out photo prints to labs, drug stores, or the like. I have decided that I would like to buy a photo printer. Is anyone here printing their own photos, and willing to advise me? I see that Canon is offering a rebate. If you buy the Pixma Pro-100 there is a $200 rebate ($250 if purchased with as a bundle with photo paper.) This brings the cost down to about $150. Seems like too good a deal to pass up. Is anyone using this printer? Any general advice about choosing a printer and/or printing photos at home?

[xlxo]

Additional things to research....

• how much is a set of ink packs?
  
• how many prints can a set of ink packs do?
  
• how many prints do you plan to make?
  

 

Canon is famous for expensive ink. They sell the printers cheap and blind side customers with the ink costs. I send my images to Costco for quantity and a local pharmacy for quality.

[pierces]

Seeking advice on buying a printer. For many years (decades), I have been sending out photo prints to labs, drug stores, or the like. I have decided that I would like to buy a photo printer. Is anyone here printing their own photos, and willing to advise me? I see that Canon is offering a rebate. If you buy the Pixma Pro-100 there is a $200 rebate ($250 if purchased with as a bundle with photo paper.) This brings the cost down to about $150. Seems like too good a deal to pass up. Is anyone using this printer? Any general advice about choosing a printer and/or printing photos at home?

 

If you print several photos a week, nothing on the market beats a good inkjet. If you print an enlargement monthly or so, you will spend more on ink to clean plugged heads than you will printing. I have owned a few Canon and Epson dedicated photo printers and finally just gave up and bought a color laser to do the small volume of regular printing that I do. For 4x6 to 20x30, I rely on Costco to do their usual excellent job of printing my photos. Since they now do canvas and metal prints, I have pretty much given up on owning a photo printer. The exception would be the Canon Selphy CP1200 that I plan to pick up before the Christmas gatherings start. It is not economical for volume printing but will produce superb 4x6 dye-sub prints on demand if needed for family hand-outs.

 

I don't mean to be negative about inkjet printers, but I thought I'd share my personal experience as an occasional printer and let you know that unless you print regularly, they still haven't solved the clogging head issue completely and cleaning cycles can drain a set of ink cartridges in no time. You can solve this by printing your regular stuff like letters, recipes off of Pintrest and shopping lists but that becomes expensive as it chews through expensive photo ink tanks.

 

Dave

Edited November 29, 2016 by pierces

[tommui987]

I thought I'd share my personal experience as an occasional printer and let you know that unless you print regularly, they still haven't solved the cloggin

Dave

 

As usual, you are a font of good advice!

[Dan_K]

Thanks for all the input so far.

[GUT2407]

Basically Pierces nailed it.

 

Back in the day when I did a lit of printing I had the best Canon and Epson made, but was printing about 500 7x5s a week, plus probably 25 ranging from 10x8 to 30x20.

 

Even with that volume I'd still sometimes get clogging, changed to just sending them to a lab, cost me a tad more, but saved hundreds of hours and many gray hairs.