Does home photo printing save money?

This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.

 

During the fall of 2010, I posted a series of articles on homemade Christmas gifts. Among these were personalized photo cards and stationery and photo cubes, both of which required a solid supply of photographs.

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Thus, I had the opportunity to print off quite a few photos at home in order to make these projects happen. I purchased a couple boxes of blank 4-by-6-inch prints at Sam's Club, along with some fresh printer cartridges, and had a great deal of fun printing off photos for these projects -- complementing some prints ordered from stores. We used a lot of prints.

 

This seemed to me to be the perfect opportunity to do a cost comparison between buying prints from a store or printing them yourself at home.

 

Most of the costs were clear and straightforward.

• I purchased a Canon PG-210XL/CL211 combo pack for $59.88. Since I used only one of the three ink cartridges in the pack (the other two were black and white), my cartridge cost was $19.96.
• I purchased two packages of HP 4-by-6-inch photo paper, which included 200 blanks each, for $19.88 each. This makes for a cost-per-sheet of about 10 cents. 
• After searching around, I was able to get 4-by-6-inch photo prints from Target for 15 cents each.

The one piece of information still needed was how many prints I could get out of a single cartridge.

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Obviously, I wanted the prints to have a high degree of quality, so I turned the quality settings up pretty high for these prints. Having done that, I got 116 prints out of the cartridge before I began to notice color problems.

 

Thus, the cost per sheet for the ink was $19.96 divided by 116, or 17 cents per sheet. Add that to the cost of 10 cents for the paper and you have a cost of 27 cents per print. This was substantially more expensive than the store print offer I had in hand.

 

So, clearly, in this case, price-hunting for a service to handle the job is much less expensive than printing them at home.

 

Of course, as with anything, it pays to shop around. Some printers are going to have a lower cost per sheet. You may also be able to find prints for less than 15 cents, particularly if you have introductory coupons for sites like Shutterfly.

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What role does home printing have?

For us, home printing works for things like snapshots needed for home art projects. For instance, home printing is useful when my son needs a picture for a preschool show-and-tell about his family.

 

In short, it's a good option when convenience is at a premium. If you simply need a print or two for some immediate purpose, home printing works well. It's far less expensive and time-consuming than going somewhere to make an instant print.

 

Otherwise, use a service. Home printing is a great convenience, but it's a costly one that quickly adds up.

 

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