I found this excellent article on Ray Shaw’s website. Ray Shaw is a computer expert based in Brisbane. His site can be found at http://www.rayshaw.com.au/
| Don’t print photos at home |
Created: 09-Jun-2006 |
| I defer to the PC Authority May 2006 magazine and it’s in depth test of inkjet printers. I highly recommend you buy this excellent magazine.They tested a range of popular inkjet printers for quality of print, ink usage efficiency, cost of a 6” x 4” photo print and cost of an A4 photo print. The costs include paper and ink and ignore the purchase price or replacement head costs (unless the head is part of the ink cartridge).
There are some very real shocks about the cost of using inkjet printers in real life (versus controlled testing in a laboratory). Perhaps the most shocking outcome is that using inkjet printers sporadically really increases the cost enormously as most have to clean the heads (using your precious ink) each time you turn them on. I immediately went into my printer’s driver and disabled auto power off – the cost of electricity is far lower than ink. In some printers around half the ink is used to flush the heads (my favourite Canon is one but Epson did not fair well either). Print costs were also well above manufactures claims (used sporadically instead of printing continuously until the ink runs out).
Bottom line is that store based photo printing at anywhere from 20 cents to 50 cents is well below the real cost. Please note that these photo printing exercises don’t equate to normal black and spot colour printing but the ink wastage from turning on or off a printer will have a major effect |
Australian Photographic Engineering 
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