I can get the 8.5 x 11 stuff at costco for 20 bucks for 100 sheets, it seems I should be able to find the 4 x 6 stuff for similar price (or even less) somehwere, but Costco doesn’t stock it.
It is terribly convenient not to have to cut the 4x6’s off the larger paper, so I am willing to pay a little bit more, but most places want 10 bucks for 20 sheets or something ludicrous like that. A little bit of convenience is worth it, but when I can get 8.5 x 11 for 20 cents per sheet (for Kodak paper), it seems ludicrous to pay more than twice as much for less than half the printable area.
Be careful with matching different make paper with different make printers.
You can have noticeably unpleasant results if you use, say, Kodak paper with a newer Epson printer. I tried to use cheaper generic paper with the new Epson RX500 and it just does not print at the quality you see with Epson paper.
Our old printer was an Epson CX5200. At one point, not knowing that our printer wouldn’t print borderless photos, my mom gave us some packs of epson 4x6 paper. We never used it. The new printer is a Canon, and it prints very nice pictures onthe Epson paper.
However, Epson printing on non-Epson paper led to prints that were not “Dura-Brite” quality…the ink would wash off at the slightest hint of water (I carried a print to the car and got a tiny drop of water on it. When I dabbed it, there was a spot on the photo).
Anyhow, anyone buy paper online from somewhere that sells it cheap? In the wek we have had the pritner, my wife has printed 60 4x6’s and we’re um, running short on ink and paper. The ink is cheap, the paper isn’t
After years of printing my own photos, dealing with clogged printer nozzles and hunting down bargains in cartridges and paper, I decided to try one of the online photo processing services the other day.
I uploaded 36 images after I had made all of the adjustments I wanted and told them I wanted them 4x6 prints with matte finish.
Five days later they arrived in my mailbox in a nice protective envelope. If you were to compare them with standard 35mm prints, you wouldn’t see any difference – they use the same equiment to print them. The dyes are traditional photo dyes, so they are much more stable than inkjet printer ink.
The place I used charged 0.19/photo + $1 flat rate shipping.
I’m sold!
I’ll keep the photo printer around for one-off stuff that I need right away, but the rest I’ll order online. So, to answer your question, I find it easier to purchase my 4x6 paper with the pictures already printed. Saves printer ink and aggravation.
I did this once, too…and everything turned out pretty nice. However, we’re really into the on-demand thing so we can have them now. We’re willing to pay a little more and not have to upload etc to get the prints.
that being said, printing anything other than 4x6s at the online places is not very cost effective. Most charge at least a buck, sometimes more for a 5x7, and 8x10s come in usually at 5 to 6 bucks. Dang.
What I want to know is, obviously somebody is getting the paper pretty cheap by buying in bulk…how could they sell the entire photo, processing and all, for 19 cents when I can’t even buy the paper for that? So where do I find these deals? I’ll buy a few hundred sheets if I need to, because I know we’ll use them (we have an 18 month old).
Point taken. Of course, when we returned from South America with a few hundred photos of family and friends, I had no desire whatsoever to spend the rest of my days continually babysitting the printer, so I never printed them.
I’m printing them now
As far as the big pictures go, I’m willing to spend more for real photo processing to get stable dyes. I have an 8x10 picture of Stonehenge on my desk that I have had to reprint twice because over time the Epson blues fade, causing it to turn yellow wherever air seeps in under the glass (around the edges).
Can you explain this? The technologies for printing a traditional 35mm print is nothing like the technology for printing a digital photo, so I don’t see how either the equipment or the dyes could be the same. Unless they project the digital photo on photographic paper?
From their website (intentionally left vague since I don’t want to sound like I work for them):
I must agree with their claim of quality. I cannot tell the difference between these prints and ones that I had made from 35mm film years ago. They are much higher quality than the ones I can print at home. They seem to have fairly amorphous grain, so one cannot see individual dots anywhere. The matte finish is great.
The 5200 may be many things, but one thing it is NOT is a photo printer.
There is now Durabrite paper, which is optimised to work with the 5200’s pigment based ink. Howeverm this does not make up for the fact that there is only 4 inks involved, where 6 or more is prefered for photo work.
Epson garentees that their paper will work with anyones printers.
I have heard dissapointing results from almost everyone useing the Big Yellow brothers paper (names changed to protect the guilty)
