Buying inkjet printers and cost

I’m not going into a lot of detail here.  There’s a buyer guide on PCWorld that is pretty good. I wanted to focus on printing your own pictures.  Some rules of thumb:

You need at least 600 x 600 px/in for a good print.  This means for a 4x6 you need 2400x3600 or a file of about 3.5meg.  Pictures can look huge on your computer, but your computer only does somewhere between 60 and 95 dpi.  So a 4x6 print at the right pixel density would be, for the 95dpi, about 24x36 inches.  In other words, it looks huge on your screen at its native resolution, but it is small when printed.  (Note that photo viewers can “automatically” reduce the picture size by mathematically manipulating the pixels, so you get a picture that “fits” in the viewing area.  But you’re not looking at the picture in its native form.)

If you print the picture at a lesser resolution, then you will need to print it smaller or expect the picture to be grainy.  Some printer software will attempt to “fill the gaps,” but the results will be mixed.

Inkjet printers are notoriously expensive / photo.  The cost of the photo can be calculated by adding the cost of the paper and taking the yield of each cartridge and dividing it into the cost of each cartridge.  (Link to some example costs.)

Don’t trash your old cartridges.  On the other hand, refilling an inkjet cartridge is risky, at best.  I’d be interested if you found a way to do it.  Around here, call Cartridge World and see if they support your cartridge.  Other than shops that specialize in businesses, Cartridge World offers the best price and value of any of the refill alternatives.  There’s a store in Greenville near Whole Foods in that new mall complex and another in Spartanburg near Kohl’s at 29 and 26.  For us on the mountain, the Spartanburg store is much easier and faster to get to.

To get rid of your cartridges, take them to a store that pays for them.  I think Staples pays $3/cartridge.

What about store brands?  I’ve had no luck with them.  What the stores do is refill those cartridges you sell to them and stick their own label on the cartridge.  I’ve tried 3 different times to use the Staple store brand and none of them worked. 

In general, my recommendation is to send your photos via email to Costco or Walmart.  They will print at a lower cost than you can.  Pick the prints up the same day or the next day.  Just remember, use a large enough pixel count to get a real photo quality print.