A daft question...

[FUDGEY]

If anyone can answer this I will be amazed, but it's worth a try. At the moment I am selling photographs in a few shops, cafes etc. I do not have a printer up to the job and it's costing me around £3 a print for A4 size. In my 1st week I've already spent about £50 for 17 enlargments. What I am wondering is how much roughly it is for a printer that would provide excellent quality and also how much would an ink cartridge be for such a good printer? Now for the question that I'd be gobsmacked if anyone could answer. From one of these cartridges how many A4 prints would you expect (roughly) to get? I'm basically trying to see how much saving it would be per print if I did go ahead & buy a new printer. You would never believe I was Scottish would you? Lol I doubt yous will be able to answer this one but thanks for reading this and apologies for wasting a minute of some peoples lives :-)

[DavyG]

Being a good Scot myself, I've wondered the same thing.

I currently use a Canon i905D to produce my A4 prints, I'm not sure how many A4 prints I get per set of ink cartridges however, when anyone wants to buy one, I charge £10.00 for an unframed/unmounted print, I'm fairly sure this covers my costs.

I believe that it costs more per print if you only produce one print each time, as I do, I understand the printer will clean the print head if it hasn't been used for some time and this uses more ink, I'm sure someone with more knowledge will correct me on this if I'm mistaken.

I'm now considering buying a Canon 9000 Pro A3+ printer, maybe I should also work out how much each print actually costs.

I'll watch this thread with interest!

Dave

[big bill]

Fudgey and Dave your both going to give us Scots a bad name
I use the Epson Stylus Photo R285 it takes 6 inks and print out quite a lot of pics for the family and self and it does a great job.
As to cost per print never workred it out ,but do find it cheaper than paying high street prices have always used Epson printers have never had any problems with them ,although there own ink replacement prices are a bit high so use I use compatable inks and have no problems on image quality at half the price of Epson own brand inks.
But for photographic prints you want a printer that will give photographic results

[earthdragon64]

Have you tried any of the photo processing websites, such as Snapfish or Photobox?

You can bulk pre-buy photos in certain sizes on some of them, for example 6" x 4" can be as low as 8p per print, not including postage which is about 99p for up to 50 6" x 4" photos.

With most of them, as long as you buy one print per year, you get up to unlimited photo storage, which is a pretty good extra back-up for your best pictures.

[FUDGEY]

Quick replies folks, thanks. Earthdragon64 I got told (perhaps incorrectly) that you lose quality with photobox & the likes as you can't send the photos in their original size. Maybe you can enlighten me whether this is the case or not?
Bill re giving us a bad name, bit too late for that on the penny pinching front lol

[Geoff F]

Well I live in completely the other end of the country; but I have been printing my own photos since I went digital about 8 years ago.

I agree that doing your own printing enables complete quality control and flexibility of being able to print what you want when you want it. Sending off files for printing isn't really an option when you get into larger sizes and top end quality.

I wouldn't really want to send a load of A3 TIFF files at 300 ppi over the internet and the alternative of sending a CD is just too long winded for me. And you have to be at home when the prints arrive, or risk the postman folding them up to fit through the letterbox.

So cost: I usually reckon £1 for a sheet of top grade A4 photo paper plus 50p for the ink. But you should really add on the cost of purchasing, and replacing, the printer; or the difference in buying a pro printer against a £50 home paper printer.

And from my experience, if you get 3 years life from your printer you are doing well.

If you are selling prints I would definitely suggest that you think about investing in an A3 size. I find that bigger prints sell best.

I went A3 with a Canon 9000 which worked OK but when that died after producing less prints than I expected my next choice was the Epson R1900 which is about the same for price and quality but the Epson ink is claimed to last a lot longer without fading.

But whatever you decide, shop around for price; I found considerable difference. The same applies to ink cartridges.

I always use genuine ink cartridges as I found there is a slight difference in quality and variability, which probably doesn't matter for home use but I always think if you are selling prints you should use the best.

The same applies to fade resistance. I have seen cheap paper and ink fade after a year. So I don't want someone waving their fist at my grave and shouting 'You promised 50 years but it has faded after only 45 years'.

So all in all, you won't save much (particularly when you add up the cost of all your mistakes which get thrown away) but I would always do my own printing simply for convience, speed and the flexibility to immediately produce difference sizes to suit the customer's whims.

[earthdragon64]

Originally Posted by FUDGEY

Quick replies folks, thanks. Earthdragon64 I got told (perhaps incorrectly) that you lose quality with photobox & the likes as you can't send the photos in their original size. Maybe you can enlighten me whether this is the case or not?
Bill re giving us a bad name, bit too late for that on the penny pinching front lol

I always upload the original file, the only thing I may do is crop, I don't resize. So far I've always found the quality to be excellent on 6" x 4" and 7" x 5" prints from Snapfish.

The only time I tried something bigger was when I wanted a print of a stitch landscape of the Cairngorms, although I had to use a different website, Photofactory, as the size was very unusual. From memory the height of the print was 4", the width was about 14" or 16", maybe more.

Including postage in a sturdy cardboard tube, the total cost was £7.49 and it was with me within 48 hours of ordering, and the quality was excellent.

I tried a few different companies, the quality was very good on all of them, and they all sent the prints in good quality packaging that the postman couldn't possible fold to fit through a letterbox. Uploading is pretty straightforward and takes very little time. A lot of these companies also do Mousemats, mugs, calendars, T-shirts etc.

[FUDGEY]

Everything I needed to know in last two posts! As ever brilliant advice... If carlsberg made forums it would be this one. Cheers folks.