I need help with printers for my home. I'm an amateur photographer who loves to take pictures and give them as gifts or hang on my walls. I previously had the Kodak home dock with my first Kodak camera and loved it. I have since switched to the Canon Rebel and have been using the HP Photosmart 8150 but don't like the quality of the prints. They seem to fade quickly and are not as crisp as the Kodak I had. I just got the HP Photosmart A826 for Christmas but am hesitant to hook it up. Does anyone have experience with this printer or recommendations for another one? I want crisp photos that won't fade but I also don't want to spend a ton of money. Please help
i'm going to go against the flow here and reccommend returning the printer if you can and get credit towards a better lens for the camera reason: i had a very good epson printer when i first got into digital, it made nice prints and they seemed to last, but the cost of inks and glossy papers got so expensive that by the time something broke and the printer by then was old enough to write off and put the repair dollars towards a new one, that i just started going to a photo service IE at target or cvs for anything up to 8 x 10, all my larger stuff i get a custom lab to do how many prints do you make in a month, i probably print less than 12 of 8x10 a year, avg 1 a month, less than 20 of 4x6, and i do about 3-5 a year of the larger sizes, 16 x 20 or larger, printers need to be used regularly to avoid nozzle problems, which in turn means more inks and paper purchases if you can reconstruct how many you gave away over say the last 6 months, then price out what it would have cost using a service, you might be surprised at what those prints are costing you might be better off spending the printer $ on a monitor calibrator, that should give consistent results when taking a jpeg on a cd to the local print kiosk also don't forget that a printer depreciates fast, almost as fast as a digital camera, so in 4 years, it's almost obsolete
I am a HUGE proponent of the new Kodak printers that have come out. Their black ink is $10.00 and the color is $15.00. They are also a pigment and not an ink, so they are dying the papers rather than covering it, and they claim that this almost eliminates the fade problem. I say check it out, and if I get mine before you do, I will let you know how they are printing my images. If it wasn't for the fact that I am trying to buy a house right now, I would already have it.
I read the paper they reference. It seems that HP and Epson make pigment-based inks, and Kodak is pushing their porous paper to go with their inks. With that being said, honestly, the price of the ink is right. It's still more expensive than oil or bottled water. Maybe even gold.
I’m also in the market for a new printer. Mine died a few days ago and I miss it already. Not that it was a great printer. It was old, very old but it did the job. I print mostly color documents yet I’d like having the option to print photos. I keep reading the reviews and it sounds like most of them are real ink hogs. I’m just a point and shoot kind of gal and I chuckle when I read that you all go to places like CVS and Wal-Mart, because that is where I go. I’m happy with their processing most of the time but I am tired of always having 4 X6‘s. Sometimes I want odd sizes.
