[davidmanze]

If you don't mind, I'd like to recap some points from my past experience in case they can be useful for others (but also for me):

• my latest printer was Epson Photo Stylus 2100 and I was pretty satisfied by the prints;
  
• the ink cost per A4 print was roughly 1€ (take it as a reference, I don't have written notes and I'm recalling by heart; it could even be the cost per A3 print);
  
• I see that e.g. Blurb asks $205 for 33×28 cm, 200 pages, dust jacket hardcover (the cheaper softcover is not available for this format) — that's roughly 1€ per page and I have roughly 200 photos to print per year; so 1€ per page is my cost reference;
  
• the problems were the extreme slowness and the fact that the printer didn't work well in unattended mode (I have a dedicated computer to handle printers and technically I could submit dozens of prints to the print queue, leaving me free to do other things with the laptop): I mean that when an ink cartridge was empty and I replaced it typically the current unfinished print was ruined;
  
• also, the low capacity of the cartridges caused the replace operation to happen often; I'd like to be able to submit 20/30 prints to the queue early in the morning and have the prints complete by the evening, with — say — at max. 1/2. cartridge operation changes per day;
  
• of course services such as Blurb also include cover and binding, but it's no something I need; the print I did in the past are stored in the original paper box and I'm fine with that;
  
• on the other side, printing by myself would allow me to select the desired paper for each print; and of course the print quality would be higher.
  

Lots of questions there ......

Firstly it's main drawback is it's slow when printing at the highest quality .... ie 10 minutes for an A4 ... but it's worth it ......less for high quality and fast for ordinary documents .....
   Print costs, at a guess, I would put it about 5 cents (euros) per A4 .... it may even be less than that .... as I said I've printed loads for two years and have still 1/3 rd of the original ink left .... basically you never have to worry about an ink cartridges running out ... and you are never temped to buy cheapo no brand cartridges  ......  if someone wants a print I just give them away so make of that what you will!
  Unfortunately there is no short cut memory settings but I think you can batch print though I've never have tried it.
   Resolution is better than my previous Canons with no striping. I also have to boost colour saturation  ...... however, no good for B/W printing.
 Blocked nozzles isn't an issue ..... and cleaning which I have only done once, doesn't waste ridiculously expensive ink .... reliability seems excellent in spite of the ridiculous amount of dust here at the moment.
  I use modestly priced heavyweight paper from Hyper you at about 50 cents a sheet ..... lighter paper costs about 30 cents a sheet ..... so,nice and shiny and reliable.
 In short it lacks the bells and whistles of high grade printers but it does have WiFi built in and you can copy print with or without a computer.
  The A3 version would be nice !! around 500 euros.

[stoppingdown]

Thanks David, interesting stuff. 10 minutes per A4 means 20 minutes per A3, which are 3 photos per hour and in 10 hours this makes 30 per day. It's compatible with my goal. For what concerns B/W I know it's hard stuff; in any case only a small fraction of my photos are in B&W (and most not precisely black and white, but monochrome or bichrome... in any case this fraction of photos could be dealt with a printing service). So I'm going to look at it.

[toni-a]

If you don't mind, I'd like to recap some points from my past experience in case they can be useful for others (but also for me):

• my latest printer was Epson Photo Stylus 2100 and I was pretty satisfied by the prints;
  
• the ink cost per A4 print was roughly 1€ (take it as a reference, I don't have written notes and I'm recalling by heart; it could even be the cost per A3 print);
  
• I see that e.g. Blurb asks $205 for 33×28 cm, 200 pages, dust jacket hardcover (the cheaper softcover is not available for this format) — that's roughly 1€ per page and I have roughly 200 photos to print per year; so 1€ per page is my cost reference;
  
• the problems were the extreme slowness and the fact that the printer didn't work well in unattended mode (I have a dedicated computer to handle printers and technically I could submit dozens of prints to the print queue, leaving me free to do other things with the laptop): I mean that when an ink cartridge was empty and I replaced it typically the current unfinished print was ruined;
  
• also, the low capacity of the cartridges caused the replace operation to happen often; I'd like to be able to submit 20/30 prints to the queue early in the morning and have the prints complete by the evening, with — say — at max. 1/2. cartridge operation changes per day;
  
• of course services such as Blurb also include cover and binding, but it's no something I need; the print I did in the past are stored in the original paper box and I'm fine with that;
  
• on the other side, printing by myself would allow me to select the desired paper for each print; and of course the print quality would be higher.
  

Lots of questions there ......

Firstly it's main drawback is it's slow when printing at the highest quality .... ie 10 minutes for an A4 ... but it's worth it ......less for high quality and fast for ordinary documents .....
   Print costs, at a guess, I would put it about 5 cents (euros) per A4 .... it may even be less than that .... as I said I've printed loads for two years and have still 1/3 rd of the original ink left .... basically you never have to worry about an ink cartridges running out ... and you are never temped to buy cheapo no brand cartridges  ......  if someone wants a print I just give them away so make of that what you will!
  Unfortunately there is no short cut memory settings but I think you can batch print though I've never have tried it.
   Resolution is better than my previous Canons with no striping. I also have to boost colour saturation  ...... however, no good for B/W printing.
 Blocked nozzles isn't an issue ..... and cleaning which I have only done once, doesn't waste ridiculously expensive ink .... reliability seems excellent in spite of the ridiculous amount of dust here at the moment.
  I use modestly priced heavyweight paper from Hyper you at about 50 cents a sheet ..... lighter paper costs about 30 cents a sheet ..... so,nice and shiny and reliable.
 In short it lacks the bells and whistles of high grade printers but it does have WiFi built in and you can copy print with or without a computer.
  The A3 version would be nice !! around 500 

Epson ET-2710 has only four inks, if you do portraits you will notice color transition is a little bit harsh sometimes, six ink printers like L8xx series are basically the same printer with added light cyan and light magenta. To be noted that when it comes to ink consumption, my L800 required frequent refills to light magenta tank, almost two to three times more than others probably I was printing a lot of portraits.

[mike]

I gave up on home printing on what seems like a millennium ago. Gave away an inkjet and die sub.

There's a local owned print shop down the road from me. They do it all. Even local artists send their work there. IMO, I just couldn't beat the price, quality, and convenience of just downloading it to them and picking it up.

[stoppingdown]

Unfortunately I don't have local print shops at hand, but in the past I tried some facility that offered remote print and delivery services. I was a viable option, and I'm investigating again prices to compare with other solutions. The quality was generally good, but in some cases not at the same quality of home-made prints — don't get me wrong, clearly their printing technology is superior to prosumer printers, but at home you can easily tweak the single photo. You can do with printing services too, but the feedback cycle is longer.

In any case, yesterday I added these two models to the evaluation list:

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B08Y98MLMG/
https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0BZ93GFQB/

800€/950€. They are pretty expensive, even though the former is well below the 1000€ threshold.

[mike]

That's too bad. The place by me is great! I haven't mailed anything out for processing since I was shooting chrome back in the day.

Sometimes after vacations I download my pics to the nearby Walgreens. They're very inexpensive for 4x6's and easy to get doubles. Their quality is generally very good. Sometimes however, there's something just slightly off. They're not bad by any means, but just not as good as usual. I think the mass production places sometimes get lax on maintenance.

[toni-a]

1000 EUR that's quite expensive unless you will use it on daily basis or for commercial use. if you don't need A3 then you can get same quality below 400EUR

As for lab printing, there's the delay to receive the prints, also some special media are not available in all labs I know , like printing on true matte photo paper, in fact what they commonly call "matt" is actually semi glossy paper. Printing on true Matte paper is very important for me .
Besides, after taking the photos and editing them, friends come to my place and choose the photos to print they are printed immediately, I even once printed a photo from the camera directly barely minutes after it was taken, impossible to do that with a lab.
In the past I used to do all printing in the lab, it was close-by and very friendly, he even allowed me to edit the photos in the lab on their computers using their calibrated screens, after having kids and far less time, I switched to printing at home.
One more things, just discovered you can print on magnetic paper, that makes awesone fridge stickers, your friends will just love them. Labs don't do that

[stoppingdown]

Yes, 1000€ is expensive. 800€ a bit less, but still expensive... but there could be a special offer in the next months (it's a brand new product). In any case at the moment I'll start printing some stuff with the remote printing service.

[mike]

Sure, the instant gratification isn't as fast downloading. However, by me, turnaround is still less than a day. The labs around here do everything you asked for. Even the drug stores do magnets prints. OTH, I'm not sure the higher end places do that! At least I never notices.

For vacation type pics where I'm printing a lot of pictures, and possibly doubles for my GF, I would never want to do this at home. I download them and pick them up a couple of hours later (if that) less than a km from my house. It would be a nice walk. For quality prints, I'm not usually in a rush, they're usually larger sizes, so picking them up the next day is just fine.

But I do agree that there are times I would like to print like one or two photos and having a home printer is nice. For me, I found I was printing so little that I was having issues with ink, dust, etc, and it would end up taking more time and $$$ than I'd like it to. I live in a desert. It's windy, dusty, and very dry.

[stoppingdown]

First printed sample bad... Ok for the paper and detail, but colors are definitely off: too warm. And of course I used the provided color profile.
Monday a new sample for another print service...