Which is Cheaper: Printing Your Own Photos or Using a Printing Service?

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With the rise of inexpensive online photo printing services, inkjet printers have fallen out of favor. But, as with any DIY project, some people claim that it’s cheaper to print photos at home. Is that really true?

A Quick Cost Comparison

Let’s break down the price difference between at-home photo printing and online printing services. We’re going to do this by comparing the price of online printing services and at-home printing. For the sake of convenience, we’re only going to look at the cost of 4×6 prints.

There are a lot of online photo printing services, but we’ll stick with the big four. Some of these services offer the occasional discount, but we’re going to pretend that those don’t exist. Shutterfly, one of the most popular photo printing services, charges $0.12 for every 4×6 print. Not bad, but Amazon, Snapfish, and Walmart will print your 4×6 photos for $0.09 each.

Alright, online printing services charge between $0.09 and $0.12 per 4×6 photo. Now we need to compare those prices to an at-home photo printing setup. So, let’s build a modest at-home printing setup. We need a solid inkjet printer, some 4×6 photo paper, and some ink.

nostalgic photos of a toddler at the beach — Iryna Tiumentseva_Shutterstock

Let’s start with the printer. The Canon Pixma IP8720 is one of the most popular at-home inkjet photo printers, and for a good reason. It produces pictures with a 9600 color DPI, and only costs $180. That’s a budget price for a pretty decent printer.

The Canon Pixma IP8720 comes with ink, but we’re going to buy a full set of ink carts for the sake of price comparison. That pack of ink will set us back $55. Canon claims that these ink cartridges will yield up to 780 photos (yeah right), which means that, at best, we’re paying $0.07 in ink for every 4×6 print.

Well, $0.07 per print sounds pretty good. But we still need to buy photo paper. Let’s buy a lot of it to get the most bang for our buck. We’ll grab a 400 pack of CanonInk’s of 4×6 glossy photo paper for $20—that’s $0.05 per sheet.

So if we ignore the fact that our printer cost us $180, we’re paying $0.12 for every 4×6 photo that we print at home. That’s the same price as Shutterfly, and a bit more expensive than some of the other online printing services.