Hi all,

Having virtually NO experience at all with do-it-yourself photo printing: can anyone recommend an affordable photo printer which produces decent quality photos at a reasonable price per print?

I think A4-size will do (probably A3 would make it a whole lot more expensive) and I can imagine separate inkt cartridges per colour are a bit of a plus, but besides that, I wouldn't know whether to consider something from HP (they seem to be very cheap), or Epson, or whatever other good brands there are.

Also I think a lot of the quality has to do with the used photo paper; any recommendations there for consumer market photo paper that can easily be found in stores?

Purpose is to be able to occasionally make some prints, not full-sized albums or anything, so no large quantities involved.

Help appreciated!

I use a Canon Pixma 630 and I am pretty impressed what it can do. With decent paper it can produce very good photo's. The price per photo is a little lower than having it printed at a professional online printer like profoto.net (who also make beautiful prints).
The newer model (640) is almost the same but combiines the features of the 620 and the 630.

I paid 130 euros for mine and Canon gave me 30 euro's back last summer. Sweet deal for a A4 photo printer including scanner and duplex printing.

It depends on your plan with your prints. the cheaper printers might make nice prints, but I would consider how long lasting they are. I would spend the extra money to get a printer that use pigmented ink. The print quality is good at all brands I've tried, but some prints from the cheaper dye printers fade after a very short time. I used to test by placing a print by a window at the sunny side with a book covering half of it. On some prints the fading was clearly visible after 3 weeks.

Actually in Sweden at least it's often cheaper to order prints from Crimson.se for example than printing them yourself. Also the quality is much higher.

Agree


Disagree

;-)