But for me, there is one big factor of having a printer at home:
convenience.
I know that I can quickly put together and print a birthday card for a
friend in the morning, before going to a party.
I agree, but it took Bay Photo only 4 days to deliver my prints to my door
from the time I placed the order!
Kenneth Waller
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/kennethwaller
----- Original Message -----
From: "Igor PDML-StR" <pdml...@komkon.org>
Subject: Re: OT - To print or buy ?
Ken, thanks for the pointer. I don't remember hearing about Bayphoto.
For the small sizes, 4x6, and probably 5x7, ordering it from almost any
[reasonable] print shop is cheaper. For the larger sizes, depending on the
prices and amounts, it can go either way.
But for me, there is one big factor of having a printer at home:
convenience.
I know that I can quickly put together and print a birthday card for a
friend in the morning, before going to a party.
I haven't checked recently, probably it is no longer the case, but it used
to be that not all print shops would have some specialty paper (or it
would be unreasonably expensive), - e.g. metallic or canvas.
But even having a printer at home (Epson R2880), I place some orders to a
print shop. E.g. recently, I had a bunch of invitation cards printed at
Walmart's 1-hour shop. Yet another convenience of using Walmart's 1-hour
shop is that I can submit it to be printed at the Walmart near my
relatives across the country, and they can pick up those photos there.
At some point, I ordered photos @Mpix.om to be shipped to other people.
I'd share a small hint for those who have printers:
I discovered a source of _very_ cheap paper that one can use as a sort of
"scratch" photo paper: Dollar Tree (in the US) sells some generic gloss
paper: 20-pack of 4"x6" for $1 or 8-pack of Letter size (8.5"x11") for the
same $1. It's lightweight, only 9 mil., but it is suitable for some
non-demanding testing.
The curious fact is that the batches I've seen in the past half a year are
branded by Polaroid.
Igor
Bruce Walker Mon, 12 Oct 2015 16:11:22 -0700 wrote:
I came to that conclusion a few years ago and have avoided ever buying
any printer at all. Between the supplies costs and the regular
maintenance nuisance, an in-house printer ain't worth it. If I printed
a lot, _maybe_.
What I will do someday here is get a colorimeter that can read paper
so I can calibrate my various print houses. Then I know I'll have the
most accurate rendition I can get.
On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Ken Waller wrote:
I was getting ready to start printing 4" X 6" prints off of one of my
Epson
printers for 2016 calendars I am in the process of producing, but I had
to
buy some ink & paper.
I've had really good results from Bay Photo & have been pleasantly
surprised
at their very reasonable prices on large prints so I checked out their
cost
for 4" X 6" prints & found that I couldn't print myself for the cost of
their prints, including postage. With postage, Bay charged me $.30/print.
Using Epson 4" X 6" photo paper would have cost me $.33/print, not even
including the cost of ink! I ordered them last Thursday & they arrived
this
afternoon.
While I like the control I have over my in house printing, I've given
nothing up by having Bay do the work for me. I sent them the highest res
jpegs I could, after I had perfected the images thru Photoshop. I
requested
no changes from Bay and the results are every bit as good as I have
gotten
in house in the past with out my time to sit by the printer and feed
paper
to the machine.
Just thought others might be interested in my findings.
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