A couple of years ago, I picked up a Canon S110 2.1MP digital camera. At the time my wife took to calling it "the toy camera". She has a Canon EOS Rebel SLR with a lens that cost more than my S110 all by itself and she taken a lot of photography classes and has a pretty high opinion of her photography skills (which is deserved, I think). My printer at the time, an HP 960C, did a pretty good job with photos, but they were a little blurry at times, the paper was expensive, and the ink wasn't cheap either. I tended not to print out a lot of photos and my wife didn't see the value in digital photos viewable only on a computer aside from the occassional emailed photo.
We recently took an extended trip to New Zealand (almost two months) and for this trip, and for my birthday, she upgraded my camera to a Canon S230 3.1MP camera. She still wasn't impressed with the quality of the photos, but she knew that I liked my digital camera and she wanted to load slide film for the New Zealand photos and I wasn't impressed with this, and we'd been arguing (lightheartedly) about slide film vs. digital photos with myself taking her arguement against digital photos on a computer and turning it back on her with slide film on a slide projector.
In New Zealand I took literally over 1000 photos with my S230 in the two months of the trip. And yet, when when we returned from New Zealand, we returned to find my HP printer was limping along and couldn't print photos. There was some problem with it that caused big streaks in color printouts and I couldn't figure out what was causing it - even after cleaning up the inside with isopropol alcohol and replaced the ink cartridges. Finally, we decided that I'd buy a new printer and she'd take the 960C because the black ink prints were fine.
All of this history sets the stage for my comments on my recent purchase of a Canon i950 printer. The i950 Canon printer is fairly expensive by modern prices for a printer without an LCD screen or various memory card readers attached. I couldn't find it anywhere locally, so I bought it from Mwave (after Buy.Com goofed by not shipping it) for $213 . It arrived in good shape, I took off endless pieces of orange tape and assembled all 6 ink cartridges in the carriage. Then I installed the software and started printing. The software that it comes with is pretty good. It comes with Zoombrowser for photo organization - this program is merely ok. There are better third party ones out but Zoombrowser isn't bad. The two important programs worth mentioning, however, are Easy Photo Print, and Photo Record. Easy Photo Print is a simple program for generating borderless photos and doing simple photo printing operations. Photo Record is more of a limited publishing program and it lets you assemble multiple photos on a page and, if you want, put text descriptions or add background graphics and other whiz-bang features.
I used the Easy print to spit out a bunch of borderless 4x6's using the included 5 sheets of Canon 4x6 borderless glossy paper, and the results were impressive. First it was extremely fast compared to my old HP. A 4x6 came out in less than a minute - maybe 45 seconds or so. The 4x6's were completely borderless as well - there is no white gap at the edge but the photo instead goes all the way to the edge as it would with a conventional photo. But even more impressive was the clarity of the photo. To say that it was sharp understates it. It was better than the output of most commercial photo processors. It was the kind of photo were you put it 3 inches away from your nose, look closely and still see more and more details. It was the kind of photo that you can get out the magnifying glass and see details that you wouldn't see without it. For a laugh, I printed out a few more, mixed them in with some of the (non-slide) photos from our trip and asked my wife to find the digital photos. She couldn't - or rather she didn't realize that the digitals stood out as being crisper than the rest. This pretty much completely converted my wife over that digital photography is useful in a matter of minutes. She went and picked up a couple of packs of Canon photo paper and proceeded to print out about 40 photos and she would say "Wow. Look at this. It's amazing. The detail! The colors!"
I brought in the photos to work and we had an informal, non-professional, non-apples to apples (different pictures taken with different cameras) comparison of the photos from my Canon i950, a Canon S900 (last generation from Canon), an HP 7350 with photo cartridge, and an Epson 925. To be honest, they all looked pretty good. We all had differing opinions but the consensus was the Epson and the Canon i950 tied for first and the HP and the S900 were about the same but not as good as the Epson and i950. I thought the i950 was better than the Epson 925, but most said that they couldn't see a difference.
So the Canon produces great photos - better than the big retails developers such as Target and Walmart - quickly. Beyond that, text is good - still not as good as a laser printer in my opinion, but not too far off. The printer appears to be a little cheaper to own than an HP or an Epson and especially a Lexmark. For a starter each cartridge has it's own tank. With the rest, if, say, Magenta goes out then you toss the entire three color cartridge. Second you can visually see how much ink is left rather than rely on the computer to tell you. This is better than, say, the HP method where it will declare the $30 cartridge is empty when there's still about 20% of the ink left. Lastly, the cartridges run about $10 for a new cartridge online. Since you need 6 of them, it's almost a toss up which is the cheapest. Six $10 9mL cartridges vs. one HP "57" 17 mL $35 and one HP 58 17mL $25 cartridge and one HP 56 19mL $20 catridge for the HP 7350. The Epson is similar to the HP. It's not a clear win for the Canon but it's certainly slightly cheaper than the others based on the numbers. Of course how much ink each uses per photo is probably slightly different, so it's hard to know for sure. But the Canon appears to be cheaper in my mind.
For paper there is no need to use the paper the manufacturer recommends with so many high quality paper manufacturers available online. Red River UltraPro Gloss
paper, Ilford Gallerie paper, and, heck, even Office Depot's high gloss paper are all resin-coated high quality papers comparable to the manufacturer's line at lower prices. So I don't count paper in the equation for printer cost. Ilford sells high quality paper to photo studios. Red River claims that Canon ink won't fade on their paper. It seems safe to me and the prices are certainly right.
Although you probably can't go wrong with a modern photo printer from the big manufacturers, I am extremely pleased with the ease-of-use, quality and speed of my new i950.
We recently took an extended trip to New Zealand (almost two months) and for this trip, and for my birthday, she upgraded my camera to a Canon S230 3.1MP camera. She still wasn't impressed with the quality of the photos, but she knew that I liked my digital camera and she wanted to load slide film for the New Zealand photos and I wasn't impressed with this, and we'd been arguing (lightheartedly) about slide film vs. digital photos with myself taking her arguement against digital photos on a computer and turning it back on her with slide film on a slide projector.
In New Zealand I took literally over 1000 photos with my S230 in the two months of the trip. And yet, when when we returned from New Zealand, we returned to find my HP printer was limping along and couldn't print photos. There was some problem with it that caused big streaks in color printouts and I couldn't figure out what was causing it - even after cleaning up the inside with isopropol alcohol and replaced the ink cartridges. Finally, we decided that I'd buy a new printer and she'd take the 960C because the black ink prints were fine.
All of this history sets the stage for my comments on my recent purchase of a Canon i950 printer. The i950 Canon printer is fairly expensive by modern prices for a printer without an LCD screen or various memory card readers attached. I couldn't find it anywhere locally, so I bought it from Mwave (after Buy.Com goofed by not shipping it) for $213 . It arrived in good shape, I took off endless pieces of orange tape and assembled all 6 ink cartridges in the carriage. Then I installed the software and started printing. The software that it comes with is pretty good. It comes with Zoombrowser for photo organization - this program is merely ok. There are better third party ones out but Zoombrowser isn't bad. The two important programs worth mentioning, however, are Easy Photo Print, and Photo Record. Easy Photo Print is a simple program for generating borderless photos and doing simple photo printing operations. Photo Record is more of a limited publishing program and it lets you assemble multiple photos on a page and, if you want, put text descriptions or add background graphics and other whiz-bang features.
I used the Easy print to spit out a bunch of borderless 4x6's using the included 5 sheets of Canon 4x6 borderless glossy paper, and the results were impressive. First it was extremely fast compared to my old HP. A 4x6 came out in less than a minute - maybe 45 seconds or so. The 4x6's were completely borderless as well - there is no white gap at the edge but the photo instead goes all the way to the edge as it would with a conventional photo. But even more impressive was the clarity of the photo. To say that it was sharp understates it. It was better than the output of most commercial photo processors. It was the kind of photo were you put it 3 inches away from your nose, look closely and still see more and more details. It was the kind of photo that you can get out the magnifying glass and see details that you wouldn't see without it. For a laugh, I printed out a few more, mixed them in with some of the (non-slide) photos from our trip and asked my wife to find the digital photos. She couldn't - or rather she didn't realize that the digitals stood out as being crisper than the rest. This pretty much completely converted my wife over that digital photography is useful in a matter of minutes. She went and picked up a couple of packs of Canon photo paper and proceeded to print out about 40 photos and she would say "Wow. Look at this. It's amazing. The detail! The colors!"
I brought in the photos to work and we had an informal, non-professional, non-apples to apples (different pictures taken with different cameras) comparison of the photos from my Canon i950, a Canon S900 (last generation from Canon), an HP 7350 with photo cartridge, and an Epson 925. To be honest, they all looked pretty good. We all had differing opinions but the consensus was the Epson and the Canon i950 tied for first and the HP and the S900 were about the same but not as good as the Epson and i950. I thought the i950 was better than the Epson 925, but most said that they couldn't see a difference.
So the Canon produces great photos - better than the big retails developers such as Target and Walmart - quickly. Beyond that, text is good - still not as good as a laser printer in my opinion, but not too far off. The printer appears to be a little cheaper to own than an HP or an Epson and especially a Lexmark. For a starter each cartridge has it's own tank. With the rest, if, say, Magenta goes out then you toss the entire three color cartridge. Second you can visually see how much ink is left rather than rely on the computer to tell you. This is better than, say, the HP method where it will declare the $30 cartridge is empty when there's still about 20% of the ink left. Lastly, the cartridges run about $10 for a new cartridge online. Since you need 6 of them, it's almost a toss up which is the cheapest. Six $10 9mL cartridges vs. one HP "57" 17 mL $35 and one HP 58 17mL $25 cartridge and one HP 56 19mL $20 catridge for the HP 7350. The Epson is similar to the HP. It's not a clear win for the Canon but it's certainly slightly cheaper than the others based on the numbers. Of course how much ink each uses per photo is probably slightly different, so it's hard to know for sure. But the Canon appears to be cheaper in my mind.
For paper there is no need to use the paper the manufacturer recommends with so many high quality paper manufacturers available online. Red River UltraPro Gloss
paper, Ilford Gallerie paper, and, heck, even Office Depot's high gloss paper are all resin-coated high quality papers comparable to the manufacturer's line at lower prices. So I don't count paper in the equation for printer cost. Ilford sells high quality paper to photo studios. Red River claims that Canon ink won't fade on their paper. It seems safe to me and the prices are certainly right.
Although you probably can't go wrong with a modern photo printer from the big manufacturers, I am extremely pleased with the ease-of-use, quality and speed of my new i950.