[romwell]

>I don‘t understand why people keep buying these inkjet scam printers

>If I need to print photos, I go to a store with instant printing kiosks.

Your solution to inkjet printer ownership is... paying to use one.

"I don't get why people keep buying cars. When I need to use one, I just hail an Uber."

[GordonS]

I do the same, and it works well for me.

The printers they use at print shops are not the same crappy, consumer-grade inkjets that people have in their homes - the quality is much better. And you don't need to deal with a constantly "needy" printer that guzzles ink like it's going out of fashion, and needs cleaned/declogged/realigned every time you look at it.

[ahartmetz]

According to my Wikipedia research, the photo kiosk printers are not even inkjets at all. They are thermosublimation printers. In any case, their output looks just like chemically developed photos, no comparison to any inkjets I have seen.

They might also be wax printers. When I worked (student job) for a medical imaging company, they had their customers use wax printers IIUC. At least that was what they used internally.

[tomatocracy]

At the other end of the market, if you're putting photos on your wall, specialist photo printers who target the art market have quite a few different process options and some very interesting paper options, although you'll be looking at maybe GBP10+ or equivalent for an 8x10 print.

Many will give or sell you cheaply a sample pack - it was a revelation to me how good and broad the options were. This includes printing using old fashioned optical photo paper and a machine which is effectively a projecter to expose the image on it - I like this for black and white prints especially.

[vanniv]

I have one of the Canon PRO-1000 printers. There was a really good sale going on a couple years ago, where I could get the printer + 2 full sets of inks for just the price of the inks.

It is incredibly expensive to operate, especially at low print volumes. If I were printing on it all day, it would probably be fine -- but I end up wasting probably half the ink in startup cycles.

But, when using good papers, it produces the most amazing prints I've ever had.

Now that I've used one, I'd never buy it again unless I had some sort of business that produced more volume -- but until I use up all the supplies I bought, I have the most amazing prints!

[rmetzler]

I think it doesn’t work like you said. The GP has a printer, but one where he doesn’t need much maintenance. It just works. No need to have a 4 color printer that doesn’t print black and white when yellow is run out. No need to buy a new cardridge when the one you bought together with the last one is dried out. No need to buy original manufacturer cartridges because of some kind of DRM.

And frankly I do the same as the GP. I have a b/w Brother network laser printer and all computers in my home print to this. When we need to print photos once or twice a year we go to a shop and get 100 different photos at once.

If you want to compare this to cars I think it’s more of a “buy a good car that is reliable and works most of the time and rent a bus or get an uber for a special case”. Like these VW Bullis I hear about. They are great when they work but you don’t want to own one.

[james_s_tayler]

We do the exact same. Hands down it's the best solution.

[pergadad]

No the solution is that inkjet is not needed except for a few rare moments where it delivers better results.

I have an oki laser colour printer, quality is on par with any inkjet I've seen except professional photo printers.

[Piskvorrr]

"Don't do it then" might be the most reasonable option,depending on the frequency of use.

If I had to buy a color printer for all the color printing I did during the last decade, it still would have cost me at least 10x more than paying through the nose for each printout - and that's for a cheap printer, never mind maintenance and the quality of the results.

In other words, ownership makes sense only from some level of usage.

[ogre_codes]

If you only drive a car once a month (or less), then you should probably just hail an Uber. Color prints aren’t a big part of my life... I suspect this is pretty common. If I want to share a photo there are plenty of ways to share it them without committing them to paper.

[tensor]

If you rarely need a car, using an uber is absolutely the right solution. Most people don't print high quality photos at the frequency to justify owning an ink jet.