By: John Dow
Submitted: 2009-12-14 11:57:59 | Word Count: 673
The holidays are once again upon us. Which means that my wife is going to go crazy printing out photos she takes of all the events, parties, kids, and grandkids. We discuss this on every holiday, the difference in cost between getting prints done by the local drugstore, photo shop, or online services and printing them at home.
And the time it takes to print each photo is brutal, even at a 4 X 6 print. Printing 30 or 40 photos can easily take over an hour if everything goes just right. But that never happens around our house. You run out of ink, the photo doesn t come out as expected, or the software does something weird and it slows you down.
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In my case, I m just as happy to view the photos on the computer or television for free. But I understand how some people want to hold the photo in their hand and show it to anyone they can corner. And many people keep photo albums and scrapbooks so they want a physical print.
Printing photos at home with your inkjet printer can get expensive. If you just do a few, the convenience is probably worth the few extra dollars. But if you have lots of photos to print, you will pay up to 5 times the cost of getting them at some retail photo printing center or online.
Now I have made some progress in this never ending battle of the holiday photos. I have finally convinced my photo loving wife to review the photos and take out all of the ceiling or floor shots. And to be a little more selective and not print out five different photos of the same subject matter. That cut down the number of prints by at least 20 .
The math is pretty simple. If you buy 100 sheet pack of glossy photo paper that is 4 X 6 it runs about $13. Each set of inkjet printer cartridges (one black and one tri color for our printer) they cost about $40. They say you can get about 75 4 X 6 prints out of each cartridge but that never happens at my house. More like 45 or 50 tops.
So if you add the $40 and the $13 you get a total cost of $53 and if you get 45 prints the cost is $1.17 each. Ouch, that hurts the billfold. If you go down to the local drugstore or retail photo printing store you can usually get 4 X 6 prints for about $.15, and they often have specials for $.10 each.
Now it doesn t take a brain surgeon to see that you can save about a $1 per print if you wait for a few hours to get your prints. Even if you go with alternative ink cartridges and no name photo paper for half of the brand name prices you still save $.50 per print at the retail stores.
But the economics of printing at home start to tip to the home printing side of the equation on the larger print size. On an 8 X 10 print, the retail price per print is around $4. Even with the expensive inkjet ink and glossy paper, you can generally get the cost of 8 X 10 print down to around $3 or a little less doing them at home.
Of course you may wait 10 15 minutes for each one to print, so it s still not fast. And you may only get about 8 to 10 prints out of most sets of ink cartridges. And you don t want to start a print unless you know there is enough ink in the ink cartridges to finish the print. Always check the level of ink; most of the newer inkjet printers give you an ink level reading.
So the bottom line on saving money on photo prints is to not do the 4 X 6 prints at home, go to the retail printing places and get them for 10 to 15 cents each rather that over a dollar each at home. On the 8 X 10 prints, the cost is less than the retail photo shops but don t be in a hurry since they take a long time to print.
