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Is it cheaper to print pictures at home or the store? Which costs do I add together? - swtprncess23 My math is horrible. Now at walmart 4x6 photos are 17 cents/photo. My tricolor ink cartridge is $34.99 yeilds about 400 color graphic pages (nine cents a page) . My photo ink cartridge is $24.99 yeilds about 140 4x6 photos (18 cents a photo) . The paper is $15.00 for 50 sheets so I get two 4x6 photos on each sheet (15 cents a photo). I'm not sure exactly how to add all this up. Do I add up the 9, 18 and 15 cents to get the costs or what?

Best Answer: The inks you specify for at home use are not UV resistant and will bleed when in contact with water (not that anyone plans on showing pictures in a rainstorm or shower). The prints from a good photo store are usually water resistant and UV resistant (still wont stand up in months of sunlight, but less fading). When the photo store runs out of ink and your prints come out funny they replace for free, when you run out of ink and you just printed 20 pics you have to redo them at your expense. Even if the cost of ink were a wash you still have the cost of paper and the printer and the computer, which the printer will eventually wear out. It all costs money, your decision is to decide whats better, the convienence of printing at home at 3 a.m. or the savings of letting someone else do the dirty work for you. - cabbiinc

I personally used to use a film camera, switched to digital. I've been printing my own pictures ever since. I used to use our family's Dell All-In-One printer; if you know how to adjust image quality and whatnot, you'd do better doing it at home. If you're not too "friendly" with photo editing programs and/or unsure about how to adjust the quality of an image to be printed, I'd say leave it to the professionals and do it at the store. It's more about the quality than the price, in my opinion. - smallcola642

16 cents at the store 29 cents at home - Elvis

Yes, i agree with the fisrt guy, if you print pictures at home, it uses up alot of ink, and you will constantly have to keep buying ink, and i think pictures from the store prints out better then any other home printer, cause mine just keeps getting mess-up and sometimes the color is off. So i would rather go print at the store. - Girlish

I'm not particularly good at math either but I will tell you this: I bought a digital camera so that I could print my own pictures which I did for several years. My problem was that no matter what I did, I couldn't get my pictures to come out as good as the ones printed by a store. Plus, when you add together the cost for photo paper and ink AND the time you spend fooling with the printing process, to me, it's easier to let somebody else deal with it. Now I only use my printer to print copies of pictures that I need to be in odd sizes for my scrapbook projects. - Jane F

Without doing the math; I was told that a photo print at home uses a great deal of ink. So I have store do it. - VINTAGE MUSIC

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