A high quality photo printer? Are they out there?

Why?

Why would you want one?

They're a lot more expensive than having your photos printed at a lab when you consider ink cartridges/paper/wear and tear.

My lab corrects color and exposure and makes a real print for a minimal fee.

In fact, you could use my lab, in Oregon, and have the prints shipped to your house for $2.00 extra. From start to mailbox would be less than a week.

I'm sure there are labs in your town that would save you the $2.00 and a few days.

I agree with boomerang.

Actually, I use very rarely my homeprinter (an HP), and then with photo ink. (And larger photo paper [10x15 cm] - costs me about 70 cent in best possibilties.)

We have a couple of excellent service, where you get your photos printed after you've send them ... online, mail delivery, for a couple of cents per photo.
My local photo shop does the sam (50 cents when done at once, 29 when getting it the next day) - much cheaper than at home.

[That's EURO-cents = +30% to convert intot US-cents :wink: ]

Most consumer printers are to some extent or another compromises - the idea being to provide acceptable performance both with text and with photos. Laser printers, for instance, particularly those designed for high-volume office work, produce very crisp, readable text, but even when color-capable generally don't do a very good job with photos - because that isn't their job.

Inkjet printers, on the other hand, almost all do a reasonable job reproducing text, and some do a very acceptable job of reproducing photos - given the proper ink and paper combinations, of course. Unsurprisingly, best photo results tend to involve the printer manufacturor's own proprietary premium photo paper and purpose-formulated photo inks. Naturally, as printer capability moves upscale, and supply costs mount, price of printer and price-per-print goes up accordingly (pretty much another case of you get what you pay for).

One of my printers, costing about $400 a little over a year ago, does a fine job - given proper ink and paper - with photos, producing prints up to 8X10 which are to unaided viewing at normal viewing distances all but indistinguishable from conventional photographic prints. While I rarely use that printer for text, it does an outstanding job with that, even at lower quality settings. At top-quality settings, with premium ink and paper, a very-near-true-photo-quality (meaning most folks can't see any difference) 8X10 costs about a buck to produce. I find it perfectly satisfactory - and I ain't all that easy to please.

Fairly recently generally available are consumer printers optimized for photo output - not intended for text reproduction, these machines are able to do away with some of the compromise common to general-purpose printers. One caveat - without getting real pricey, these purpose-designed consumer photo printers generally do not accommodate formats larger than traditional 4X5, sometimes 4X6 "Snapshot" size. Never the less, if the size deal is no big deal to you, their output is very good, the best of them about as good as anuthing you'll get from a photo finisher - provided, of course, you don't scrimp on supplies.


A decent compendium of lotsa good info pertaining to current photo printers may be found HERE

i'm paying 16 cents (canadian) for a photoprint at a local photoshop and i only have to take the pictures i like . it seems way too expensive to get a good-quality photo-printer .
hbg

the printers seem to pretty slow too . if you want to print more than a few pix it'll take longer than going to the photoshop .