HP SitePrint

(1) As much as people complain, home inkjet printers do a remarkable job of printing high quality art reproductions and photos at low cost relative to alternatives, (Sure offset litho is cheaper… if you are running 10,000 prints)

(2) The key to this using quality materials. You’ve got to use good coated paper (which is relatively expensive.). You can mostly trust OEM ink although I found low-end EcoTank printers use ink that fades in six months although the higher end models like the ET-8550 are better. Look at forums and you will find many versions of “I was trying to print borderless and all I got was this inksplosion” and the common denominator is third party inks. There could be testing of third party inks that proves they are comparable to or even superior too the OEM links but as it is there is no testing because… they target a consumer who doesn’t care.

It's not about the technology itself, it's about everything that surrounds it, the software, the commercial side. I will go out of my way to avoid HP.

The fundamental problem with home inkjet printing is that people just don't print that much.

The average home user probably wants to print a set of 10 holiday pictures once a year. This means that every time they want to print those ink cartridges will be dried out and have clogged print heads - so they have to buy an expensive set of new cartridges to replace their barely-used ones.

It is why laser printing is so often suggested for home users: you can let a printer rot for several years and still reliably print a couple of dozen pages when you finally need it again. The downside is that they do a rather poor job at printing photos so now there are even fewer reasons to use it, and you only need it once every couple of years to print out a contract to sign or something.

I've personally given up on owning printers. They don't make the rock-solid HP / Brother workhorses anymore, and I can't be bothered to deal with all the proprietary "smart" crap they are pushing these days. If I want something printed, I'll just go to the local library.

I'd agree the average person who wants some photo prints is better off just sending the job out to Wal-Mart, some pharmacy, shutterfly or one of many competitors.

When I got a 'free' inkjet printer I realized I couldn't just make 10 anime prints and come back six monhths later and make 10 more so I committed to print something every day which I did for maybe 2.5 years and it turned out to be quite an adventure. To feed that machine I got serious about taking photographs, when that sucked up all my time I fell out of the printing habit!

See https://www.behance.net/gallery/232344867/Life-is-Better-Wit...