There are many alternative ways of printing digital images from home and the lowest cost option will depend on your answer to two questions:

1. How many prints you make

2. How long you need them to last.

Digital photo printing.

Given a good enough image and the right materials and settings, all these systems can make high quality prints. Here are the pros and cons of four popular ones.

Digital laboratory

If you only make a few prints a year then this is by far the cheapest way as you don't have to buy any equipment to do this. Send images over the Internet or take them down to your local shop for high quality long lasting digital photo prints.

Photo-quality inkjet printer

Potentially the cheapest cost per print, especially if you make lots of prints. Even the cheapest photo-quality inkjet printer is capable of producing very good prints, in many cases, they are just slower than the more expensive versions from the same manufacturer. The downside of these is that the prints will fade, in some cases, very quickly indeed. Printer manufacturers’ claims for long lasting prints only apply to their specific ink and paper combinations and using these brings the cost per print up to the same levels as other systems.

Photo-quality pigment printer

Identical to inkjet printers in operation but use different materials (pigments as opposed to dyes) which makes the prints last much longer. If you need prints that won't fade, this is the best option for printing at home.

Dye Sublimation (Dye Sub) printer

The newest addition to the marketplace and, because of that, these are relatively expensive. Expect the price to drop significantly if and when they become popular. The big advantage of these is simplicity, in some cases you can print directly from a camera or memory card - no computer involved. The price per print is fixed (after you consider the cost of the printer itself) because you buy the paper and ink together in a pack. You use exactly the same quantity for a full colour photograph as you do for a few lines of text. Currently, there appears to be no alternative to the manufacturers’ brands of paper/ink.

Of the above, only inkjet printing allows you much choice about the cost of materials but, if you do a lot of printing, there are enormous savings to be made.

Next page - Cheap Inkjet Printing

Printer Speed

The speed of any printer is normally given as a certain number of pages per minute (PPM). There will usually be two speeds, one for black or text printing and the other for full colour.

These numbers can be useful when comparing printers if speed is important to you. However, don’t be surprised if the actual time it takes to print an A4 size image at maximum photographic quality is a lot longer than the speed figure would suggest.

As a general rule, the higher quality setting you use, the longer your print will take. The manufacturers seldom quote the slowest speed of their printer but, if you’re going for maximum quality, that’s the speed you will get.

Some printers will even warn you when you select maximum quality that the printing will be very slow.

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