[As seen in PC Pro – 27/2/2006]

Our 23-page investigation, combining both a feature and a group test (www.pcpro.co.uk), not only reveals the truth about ink waste but also which printer to buy.

If you’re a keen photographer, the prospect of printing photos from your own PC has to appeal.  No uploading of your images to a memory card or CD, no mixups with high-street or online developers and,  best of all,  instant results.  And if you’re unhappy with the end photo, you can get a new, tweaked version in minutes. But what’s the cost of this convenience?

This month, we’ll disprove the notion that you can print 6 x 4in pictures from home as cheaply as you can on the high street.  Once you factor in media costs and the quantity of ink a printer wastes during self-cleaning, you’ll be amazed at how large the price increases are. According to a recent survey, 91 per cent of PC Pro’s readers use an inkjet printer, and more people print 6 x 4in photos than any other size.  But nearly 37 per cent of respondents thought their photos would cost 20p each or less and 19 per cent confessed to not having a clue, so this month’s figures may come as a shock.

They came as a shock to us too.  Ever since home photo printing first became a realistic alternative to the high street, we’ve determined printer costs by running a set of cartridges down and then dividing the cost of the cartridges by the number of pages they printed. But, as we reveal this month, the true cost of printing photos runs much deeper than just running the cartridges until they’re empty.
In between print runs, whether you’re printing daily, weekly or monthly, inkjet printers perform self-maintenance routines in order to stop the print head from clogging with dried ink or dust. So the printer cleans itself with what it has to hand – ink. Any ink that’s used during cleaning is lost and will never see a page. Furthermore, nearly all inkjets use ink to prime the print head when you install a fresh cartridge – more wastage.

But we haven’t just measured efficiency and its impact on cost per page. Working with each of these 15 printers over three months means we’ve discovered minor failings in certain models that will end up costing you time and money, and we’ve pointed these niggles out in our comprehensive reviews ……….

One obvious conclusion is that 6 x 4in photos are more expensive to print than we expect, especially if you own a Canon Pixma iP5200R. In fact, only one in five people in our survey guessed the ‘right’ figure of 30-40p. But it’s also clear that if you buy the right printer, it makes good economic sense to print A4 photos at home rather than using an online service: 93p from the HP Photosmart 8750 is simply phenomenal.

How to save money!

Using our research, there are a number of ways in which you can save money. The simplest, which will save you anything from 15p to 48p per 6 x 4in photo, is to use an online photo service instead of your home printer. You don’t get instant results, and quality may not be as good, but it’s difficult to argue when it comes to photos-per-buck.