Two questions - first, what would you recommend for a good home printer? Low volume, mostly B&W, handful of family photos every once in awhile. El cheapo PIXMA I got on sale is just a POS with poor design and poor quality print.
Second question - photo editing and printing software. Minor editing (cropping mostly). I like to be able to go into a group of pictures, grab 2 or 3 and print them on one page with 3x5 size or 4x6 size. Can’t seem to find anything that let’s me do that.
I printed out the occasional photo on a Canon Selphy and… it was OK (maybe the newer ones are more OK, or even “good”?). Seems more geared towards CMYK rather than B/W, though.
For trivial editing like dragging and dropping several pictures onto a single canvas a free program like Inkscape and/or GIMP is more than enough. Some Selphys advertise a “Party Shuffle” mode that composites multiple photos, which I have never bothered with but may be of interest to you
I would advise NOT to buy Hewlett-Packard printers. Whenever I wanted to print anything, I’d have to disconnect cables and reboot because Windows couldn’t find the printer. Then after printing a few pages, one of the cartridges would run out of toner. HP overprices toner to make up for cheaper printers. I finally had enough and threw that POS into the dumpster.
This is probably a good choice for the OP. I do a lot of photos and have an Epson ET-8550 that does a great job, but at $700 probably not cost effective for you.
Qimage Ultimate is a great piece of software for printing various sizes of photos. You choose size and drag and drop. The software with automatically fit them onto the least amount of paper. Three 2 by 2 and five 4 by 6, and a 5 by 7. No problem.
Seconded. The extortionate price of inkjet ink often makes it cheaper to buy a new printer than to refill the ink carts. And if you ony use it occasionally, you’ll find the jets dry out and you have to waste a lot of that precious ink to clear them. It’s a racket.
Brother brand laserjet. If you expected to do lots of color, the Epson EcoTank is supposed to be better but not super cheap. I have an HP and have used other models at work and will not be replacing it with another HP if this one dies.
In Windows 10, just select alll your photos, right click and Print. Change “Full page photo” on the right to any of the multi-image options. I’m sure Mac has this too.
I have a monochrome Brother laser printer and a color H-P laser printer. Bought the first and was gifted the latter. Both are about ten years old and continue to work great using off-brand toner cartridges and drums.
If I did not have the H-P, I would send my color printing to a specialized shop via their website for printing color images. When I print color photos at home, I use a quality semi-gloss paper intended for laser printers. (I use standard letter size paper, often with multiple photos on a single sheet, and then trim the photos to size on a paper trimmer.)
I use IrfanView for 80% of my image manipulation. For the remaining 20%, I use GIMP. I do have Photo Shop, but very, very rarely use it.
Another vote for this. At least, it has been my approach and I’ve liked it. I have a Brother monochrome laser printer and added a similar Brother color laser printer which I use for printing maps, small signs, diagrams, and articles that use color. It’s not supposed to be good for color photos, and it isn’t, though it works well enough for a few photo things.
Color inkjets used to build the jets and the ink tanks into a module that you could replace whenever the ink ran out or the jets clogged. I had one and used to get around to printing a bunch of photos only occasionally, generally with a new cartridge, though the unopened replacement cartridges seemed to keep quite well. I gave up on that inkjet printer because of worsening paper jams. (While we’re mentioning HP printers, I’d like to propose to HP that they try not having any sharp edges projecting upstream into the paper path – I generously offer this idea free of charge and they are welcome to use it without paying me for my apparent novel inventiveness in the field of printers.)
But the last time I tried to buy an inkjet printer, it was extremely difficult to find out whether the jets were part of the replaceable ink module, and the few I could find this out for all had permanent jets built into the printer instead. This just seems like a non-starter to me.
The good color inkjet printers use something like 12 different colors of ink… (which means black-and-white prints, too, will come out well, so why not take them to the print shop with the $$$$ printers anyway?)
BTW the little portable photo printer I mentioned using was a dye-sublimation printer, not a laser printer.
