No perfect solution for home photo printing

There’s a good solution for practically every single aspect of IT today, except for one perhaps, which is to print top quality photos at home. It is strange that such an otherwise justified need is not well addressed by the industry.

Not that there aren’t home photo printers in the market, quite the opposite actually, there are countless models around. However, most provide average or just acceptable quality output, or are limited to small size paper or are very expensive, or are terribly slow. Some can take up to eight minutes for one single printout.

A photo printer that would produce true high quality prints, that can handle paper up to for example A5 size (half of A4) in a reasonable time, and that would cost less than say JD300, simply is not available, by any brand or manufacturer.

This is true whatever the technology, be it laser, dye sublimation or inkjet, the three main ones found today. There’s always a limitation, a “but” somewhere. If you are demanding and accept nothing less than real photo quality, you either have to bear the hassle of going to the lab and ask them to print the picture you would have saved on some digital media like a USB flash drive or CD, or spend unreasonable money to own a high-end photo printer. Unreasonable money is in the range of JD600 to JD1,000, not taking into consideration prohibitive ink cost — definitely too much for most homes. 

The dilemma is here. Laser printers by design do not produce true photo quality and are rather made for large volume printing. Dye sublimation printers produce a very pleasant “continuous tone” result, very close to the real thing, but affordable models only handle 10cm by 15cm paper, or smaller. If you are satisfied with this limitation dye sublimation technology could be a viable solution for you. But then again, these printers are only good at printing photos, not text; not a very versatile solution for home users.

Inkjets can generate top quality photos, and on rather large size paper, but only the models that use eight ink cartridges are able to produce the entire gamut of colours required to make your print great; skin tones in particular. Moreover, these high-end beauties are not only very expensive to buy and to maintain, but also take several minutes to make a good print.

Contrary to all other IT equipment, home photo printers have not really evolved in the past five years or so. The technical characteristics are more or less the same and prices haven’t gone down in any significant manner.

The reason for such stagnation could be an impossibly difficult technical challenge, combined with not-so-important market demand, the trend being obviously to share and enjoy photos on smartphones, tablets, TVs, and on electronic displays and monitors of all kinds in a general manner. It’s understood, we print less than ever.

Epson is still the leader in inkjet photo printing technology. Sony and HiTi, followed by Canon and then Polaroid have excellent reputations when it comes to dye sublimation models, whereas Hewlett-Packard remains the undisputed king of laser printers.