Printing photos at home

For a number of years I've been printing my photos at home with an HP Photosmart printer. It has a black cartridge and 5 separate color cartridges, and I have to say I'm really pleased with my photos. Unfortunately, it's been around a while and the feed for the 4x6 photo paper is on the fritz. I'm thinking about whether to replace or just print photos at Costco or elsewhere.

Does anyone else print at home? Do you have a photo printer you really love? I feel like I'll lose a lot of flexibility with photo size and just scrapping whatever I want when I want if I go back to sending out my photos for printing. And I want good quality, too.

I use an Epson Artisan1430. It will take 12x12 paper and prints photos beautifully.

Printing at home gives me so much flexibility and as you said, you don't have to wait for your photos.

The downside is the cost of ink, of course, but if I'm careful it's not a deal breaker. Actually, it probably costs the same or less than store photos. This printer is in my scraproom and isn't used for everyday printing.

I use the Canon Selphy for 4x6 photos. If I need a larger size, I use the Canon Pixma ix6820. It prints as large as 13x19. The Epson Artisan series prints beautiful photos as well

I print mostly at home for the flexibility...If I have a lot of photos I will upload them and pick them up but not too often...no favorite printer-right now I have a HP 6520....

I use a Canon Pixma printer and I love it.

I would never need to send photos out to be printed, nor would I ever want to be restricted to a single 4 x 6 size.

I have a Cannon Pixma printer which works great. I also use my WORD word processor to copy and print images in any size I like.

I copy images from my camera's card to my computer. I use WORD to insert images from the hard drive to my document. From there, I can resize or crop images as desired. I usually fill up one or more pages with multiple images of varying sizes from teeny-tiny to full page, and print to photo paper.

I have two HPs and they both print wonderful photos. One is wide format, so I mostly use it for printing 12x12 LOs, sometimes printing photos right into the backgrounds. The main printer's photo tray has never worked, but I didn't want to bother getting an exchange. I just put my 4x6 papers into the main paper tray and it prints fine...as long as I remember to change it from auto-print which tries to print from the photo tray because of the sizing.

If I'm getting a bunch of photos printed, I use snapfish, but those are for plain photo albums. Most anything I use for LOs are printed at home so I can do color editing, cropping, sizing, frames, etc.

I have always printed my own photos. Currently I have a Canon Pixma

I would not want to get rid of my home printer. I do sometimes print at stores, but prefer picking and choosing my sizes. I love to print smaller photos and fit more pictures on a page. When I print from stores I mass-print 4x6's but don't like that they take up so much page space.

DH surprised me with a Canon Pro-100 which to me was pretty expensive and more than I'd really wanted to spend. But then he mentioned the rather large mail-in rebate that made the printer a really good deal. And I can print on 12x12 paper if I want. It's an awesome printer, as I'm sure all the Canons are, but my reason for posting is just to mention looking for rebates and offers on different sites...that might make a difference.

I use an Epson 1430 and I love it - plus it prints wide format so I can print directly on my 12 x 12 layouts.

Which Canon Pixma printer do you use? We have the MG6620 for printing documents, and I don't like that it can't print cardstock. My sister has another pixma and doesn't like the photo quality. Is there a better pixma for photos?

I miss my HP Photosmart. I have a HP 2540 and I don't really care for printing my photos on it although they don't turn out so bad at all.

I've started actually using Walgreens and I can pick and choose the sizes I want for certain photos. I also do a ton of printing photos so it is more cost effective for me to use Walgreens. I recently figured out the cost of ink for my printer versus printing the same amount of photos at Walgreens...I actually spent less at Walgreens. But that's a ton of photos too.

If I had my HP Photosmart, I'd probably might have kept on printing at home.

Cool VaeIII I have the canon pro-10 and i love it.

So funny ddc, I was thinking of asking a similar question. BTW, LOOOOVE your avatar. Such a great photo.

To answer your question, I have an HP photosmart printer, but i've never even tried printing photos on it because the ink is 30$ for a cartridge (and the photopaper isn't cheap either), and I can never get more than a few pages worth of photos before the ink starts to run out. So even if I got 8 or 9 photos per page, and I got 5 pages, that's 45 photos for $30.00. That's almost a dollar a photo compared to snapfish's 15 cent prints. Or during their penny prints days I can get 500 prints for a penny each. So basically a printer costs 10 to 100 x more than snapfish. Then there's the quality. I've never seen a home printer come close to a professional service. It's like the difference between studio portraits and snaps with a really nice camera--you're comparing a product done on 10k dollar equipment vs. 500-1000$ equipment. Snapfish also garauntees their ink to last for 200 years.

But I'm really, really picky about my photos. I'm used to the old film days where there was no such thing as a pixel. I will use a photo printer for quickie albums and smaller or bigger photos when I don't have the money to go out and order prints. But most of my photos I save for snapfish. I'm trying to find a way to figure out which photos I want larger prints of and how to get a system so I can coordinate ordering the photos I like bigger and smaller with knowing which ones will look better bigger or smaller in my layouts. That's where a home printer comes in really handy. You can cater your photos to your layouts instead of vice versa.

That having been said, does scrapbook.com sell photo printers? I'm just curious what the good ones run for.

I use Canon Pixma 8120. I need the flexibility of printing different sizes of photos. I do find that it prints better with the Canon toner cartridges.

I have never printed at home cuz I'm cheap and costco is 3 min from my house. I print a variety of sizes the by putting miscellaneous sized photos on to a standard 4x6 background. I use PSE or Picassa (free) to create these "collages".

I pre plan all my pages and use sketch so I know exactly what size I want each photo to be before they are printed. (I print a contact sheet on regular paper to help me plan each lo.) I also do this for several, 8-10, LOs so that if I do have a missprint/wrong size I can just move on to the next LO while I wait to order the corrected photo. However if you are not a planner then my system won't work for you.

I load all my photos to a folder on my desktop. I delete the garbage. I select the photos I want to print and load those to a flash drive and drop it off at a photo place that has a sale, and go shopping for an hour or so.
If I need some special treatment, (very seldom) I have Photoshop to do what needs to be done.