Do you print online or at home?

I've been using www.ofoto.com (now www.kodakgallery.com) for years. It's just too expensive to print at home. The last time I ordered 4x6 prints, they were 9 cents. Plus, it's a dye process, no ink fading.

I've never enjoyed printer maintenance, so I print online. For most things, I use Costco - it's quick (same day or next) and painless (you can pay at the photo desk - no big lines). Printer maintenance is their problem. If the printer's not printing right, I'm not out a thing - they eat the cost of the incorrectly printed photos.

I don't want to dedicate the space for a printer nor do I want to maintain it. I think having two cats makes the maintenance worse in my case.

I think it makes the most sense to print at home if you (1) enjoy playing with printing and tweaking it, (2) want the fine control that comes with being able to print and re-print your photos and (3) you print photos that ... wouldn't be appropriate to print at some places.

Printing at home is far too expensive for standard size wedding shots up to 10 x 8. When you add paper, ink cost and then the printer itself. A set of inks for my Epson R800 is now £140+. Plus the time and effort in printing each image. Trimming paper then the cost of a good paper cutter. Easier to send away and get back 40 prints from a pro lab in 72 hours for less tan £20.00. There printers cost over £10,000 each.

V-Wiz wrote in post #12077213
Where do you find a roll for that much?

I usually buy my paper and ink from Atlex. Almost every time I order I do competitive price checking, but I always come back to them. Fast delivery, too. They seem to have warehouses all over the place.

4x6 & 5x7 I get printed at Sams, for the time frame people tend to keep smaller images, their quality is sufficient
8x12 & up I get printed at a local lab, the 8x12 is only $1 for anything not on metallic, since you cant find 8x12 anywhere, I would have to use a 13x19 sheet everytime...I do have a Canon Pixma pro900 mkII and will use it if I need the print quicker than I can get from the lab (generally 1 day turnaround).

Home printing for me. My prints on my cheep Canon 5220 come out better than any local printer. I have tried a few online places but it usually takes me several weeks to get my prints back. the joys of living in the north. Future plans are to get a Canon 9000 when i find a smoking deal on it locally. Missed one a few weeks back for under $200

mitsu13gman wrote in post #12080007
http://www.atlex.com …preadd=action&k​ey=1161764

$80/roll, you can get roughly 33 36" prints from that 100' roll, so right around $2.50 per print for paper - ink will depend on the individual image.

After being a longtime advocate of lab/online printing (MPix specifically,) I just jumped on the home-printing bandwagon. I was amazed to learn that the current home photo printers have a much broader gamut for color than MPix did, which may or may not mean anything to an individual photographer. Certainly it makes it easier to turn out images that look fake or "cartoony." But if you're into that super-saturated HDR look, it's definitely a better way to print

I was also surprised to find that the printer I purchased (Epson 4880) seems to hold shadow detail better than the equivalent print from MPix. I realize that it's VERY profile-dependent, but I was still very surprised to see that.

If you're only ever printing 4x6 or 5x7 with the rare 8x10 thrown in, printing at home will likely never pay for itself. But I'm of the opinion that if an image is worth printing, it's worth printing 8x10 or bigger. That "or bigger" can get expensive in a hurry. Being able to crank out 17"-wide prints (either 17x11 or 17x25 for a standard DSLR image) at roughly $2 per linear foot makes the proposition of buying a printer a whole lot more digestible. Especially when you factor in MPix minimum $7 shipping cost.

Epson has some OBSCENE rebates going until the end of the month, and for the difference in price between the 13" 2880 and the 17" 4880 with roll feed, you basically are just paying for the extra ink they include with the printer. That, combined with SIGNIFICANTLY lower ink costs per-mL down the line, and it was the way for me to go.

And truly, I was the one saying that printing at home could never compete with a pro lab. And logically, I didn't believe that I could afford to put a machine in my apartment that would be able to out-perform the high-end machines MPix prints on. But with just a few prints out so far, I can unequivocally say that it does in fact generate better output. And now I can fire off a 17x25 in my living room, and 30 minutes later it's sitting in the output tray. That's a heck of a lot better than the 4-odd days I used to average with MPix.

Nice, thank you

I print my own because (a) it lets me tweak my results and (b) it's fun!

I found this thread because I just had a HORRIBLE experience with online printing. I was in a rush to send some prints to Africa and needed them today. They didn't have to be more than snap quality so I thought, okay, I'll try CVS down the road. I ordered 150 prints since I need them by tonight. Every one came back gray. Something wrong with their chemical mix. I usually print at home but it takes a lot of time. I'm never doing a rush job again this way. What a total waste.

mulchie wrote in post #12083841
I found this thread because I just had a HORRIBLE experience with online printing. I was in a rush to send some prints to Africa and needed them today. They didn't have to be more than snap quality so I thought, okay, I'll try CVS down the road. I ordered 150 prints since I need them by tonight. Every one came back gray. Something wrong with their chemical mix. I usually print at home but it takes a lot of time. I'm never doing a rush job again this way. What a total waste.

I sometimes use Walgreens when quality doesn't matter (e.g., pictures for one of my kids school projects or a snapshot to include in a note to my in-laws). The quality is certainly nothing to speak of, but I have been pleased for those kinds of prints. They turn around small jobs in about an hour. I have never done 150 prints.