Buying a printer - advice please

[PH]

I'm in the market for a printer. I haven't got a clue, so i need some advice.

Right, there are 2 musts.

- My wife will want to be able to print out her digitial camera snaps, so it must be able to print out photographs (i assume you can buy printers which will print photos to a photo-lab standard??)

- It must be able to print at upto 8x10 inches.

Any ideas?

[Super Stu]

Just some generic advice. Nip down to your local PC world had have a butchers at example printed stuff. That's what I did when trying to find a reasonable cheap printer for my sister the other day. Whilst you're there, you can eye up the cost of runnig them quickly by looking up the ink costs (because as much as we'd like to think we'd all order online and save a packet on ink, when the **** hits the fan there's rarely anywhere other than PC world to go in an ink emergency).

Possibly also of use to you, a lot of these photo printers now have various flash card, compact flash etc slots on them, so you can print direct from Camera to Printer without faffing on the PC.

Yup, printers are pretty lab standard these days. They print right to the edge of the paper and give extraordinay results on the specialist paper. I guess it might even work out cheaper in the long run if you do a lot of large prints, compared to getting standard 35mm pics enlarged.

[Shimmyhill]

Inkjets cost much more than lab printing and are not in the same league yet !

average cost on 8x10 print is ?1 on a epson printer and remember this will not last all that long (10 years is best considered guess) remember lab printed stuff has been printed via chemicals and is much less resistant to fading.

However i just picked up a Epson Photo 900 (on offer @ pcworld for ?75) the quality is amazing and running costs are as cheap as you will get on a inkjet. I belive the offer is off and its ?99 now but there is nothing at that price point that comes near it in terms of quality and costs.

Remember the cheap phot printers cost much more to run, my advice would be a Photo 900 or 915 (it has card readers built in)

[Super Stu]

Depends on your interpretation of lab quality innit

Out of interest, what's the cost of having a 35mm photo reprinted to 8x10? (factor in convenience).

[Shimmyhill]

Depends on your interpretation of lab quality innit

Out of interest, what's the cost of having a 35mm photo reprinted to 8x10? (factor in convenience).

Around ?1.25 - will last for ever and be of much better quality.

I own and use my photo printer alot, however the prints done @ jessops are far higher in quality and will last 10x longer minimum.

To conclude, Jessops use a ?500000 Fuji printer, so no, no inkjets come anywhere near lab quality or jessops would use a ?400 Epson

[Kirby]

No ink jets are lab quality, not even the ?500+ ones. Even the ?10000 colour laser printers using their best paper aren't lab quality.

I just got a cheap ?80 Epson C84 "Photo" printer which looks pretty good, it can print pretty much any size and does borderless prints (on special 6x4 'Photo' paper too). Photo print outs using maximum settings are much better than the HP i had, but its colour reproduction is pretty iffy, its normal colour printing (text+images for example) is average and the resolution is nowhere near lab quality. Good enough for the price though. It fooled my sister who thought the printouts i had done were photos from the lab, but anyone with a trained eye (my dad for example who was a photographer) was less enthusiastic.

[Super Stu]

To be honest lads, I remember using a 9pin colour dot matrix, so it's all relative. To folk that don't give a stuff, know they have a copy on disk to print again should it get damaged and like to edit bits out, there simply isn't any comparison with taking your film down to Boots.

[PH]

Thanks for the advice lads.

Ended up buying a Canon I965. Its a very impressive bit of kit. Not for one minute suggesting thats its upto photo-lab standard, but the quality of the photo prints are extremely good. Better than what i was expecting tbh.