One of the more common things I come across in the photo lab is people scoffing when they hear our prices and then claiming they can print whatever they want cheaper at home. I never really bother arguing with them because I know from my personal experience that they are wrong.
Modern Inkjet printers have progressed a long way in the past few years, but the commercial printers available in your local supermarket are still not a match for the minilab traditional Silver printing process. However professional inkjet systems are of a better quality of print and the lifetime of the prints is usually as good as traditional Silver printing, if not better (www.wilhelm-research.com), but the downside is these systems can run into thousands of pounds.
Traditional Silver printing has been shown to last in excess of 100 years however most inkjet prints will tend to fade after 5 years or so, and even quicker if left in a sunny place such as in a frame on a wall. One way to increase the lifetime of inkjet prints in your commercial printer is to use the manufacturer inks as opposed to the cheaper refilled cartridges as these tend to print less pages and fail to work more often than manufacturer inks. (http://www.hp.com/sbso/product/supplies/printer-ink-refill.html)
So one day whilst bored at work I decided to work out how much it would actually cost per print to print your images at home and then compare this to the cost of printing prints at the supermarket minilab I work at. The Prices used in this were taken straight from the shelves on the 19th of November this year and for comparison the prices in the minilab at the time were:
I decided to compare the prices of two different types of printers, a good quality photo printer, which would produce a decent quality print and would be a relatively common level of printer for people to use to print their images photos on at home, as well as a cheap and nasty version, choosing the cheapest printer on the shelf and calculating the costs for that as well. Both using the Manufacturer cartridges to get the best possible prints from each printer.
For both the methods I used an assumption, from my personal experience of printing inkjet prints, of 100 prints from a full set of cartridges before the first cartridge(s) need replacing. As a lot of the time more than one cartridge will run out within a short space of time and more often than not most if not all will need replacing soon after the first one requires replacing.
However I also found on the Canon website a .pdf document with their recorded average page yield using an international standard for measuring page yield, including an estimated yield for the black cartridges. So I recalculated the costs again using the Canon figures to see the difference they made.
I think that the numbers above really do speak for themselves, it just goes to show that the people who scoff at the prices in store really don’t seem to know how much it costs to print their prints. I have put all of this together into a PDF File as well for downloading and sharing.
InkjetPrinting.pdf
If you want me to write a post about a certain subject, please feel free to Contact Me