Source:www.jimippolito.com

Gone are the days when printing photographs at home required a special "dark" room and chemicals and an enlarger and the patience of a saint.

Digital cameras have made home printing available to everyone with room for a small printer; but is it worth doing from the standpoint of economy?

Do I print digital pictures at home? Yes, sometimes, but only for special reasons.

I have most of my digital prints made at Sam's Club because the price is right, the results are at least good to very good, and I have choices as to turn around time and paper surface.

Sam's currently charges $.13 for 4X6 prints on glossy Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with a turnaround of 2 days, and $.16 per print on semi-gloss, more or less, paper, using their 1 hour service.

I opt for the glossy, with a two day wait, but not because I'm that much of a penny-pincher. Glossy paper delivers more detail IMHO. If I want prints to give to some ham-handed lummox, who's going to put his thumb in the middle of Aunt Henrietta's face, I get the semi-gloss, or whatever it is they call it.

That's, by the way, how these paper finishes, other than glossy and true matte, came about. They were designed for prints that could be handled and passed around without showing finger prints.

While in Sam's I noticed Kodak paper for sale at $21.50 for 100 sheets of 8½X11, that's probably a good price. They also had Ilford Galerie for a few bucks more. 100 sheets of 4X6 was around 14 bucks. Wait a minute, that's already $.14 a print, and then there's the ink, which is expensive, unless you use generic, which still adds to the cost.

So what are the advantages of home printing? Well, for one thing it's as instant as a Polaroid, although you can use a self contained kiosk that spits the prints out immediately, but they can cost as much as $.29 each. I've used them when they were on sale and my results varied from really good to quite bad.

Home printing allows you to make infinite adjustments and see the results immediately, but testing different settings gets expensive very quickly, which is why printers are relatively cheap and consumables are expensive. Consumables are where they make the real dough.

What I do like about home printing is the ability to print on anything you can safely feed through your printer, no matter what anyone says. I like that because I'm a frustrated artist.

I've printed on artist's watercolor paper and achieved some really cool results, at least I liked them. So if you're into "artsy" prints, that's a way to do it.

So what's the answer? If you like the results you get at home better than at a commercial outlet, do it that way, and consider the added expense part of the cost of entertaining yourself.

But if you just want routine prints of a vacation, or need a lot to give away, find a good, inexpensive commercial printer.

A few weeks ago Long's Drugs dropped their prices on 1 hour prints uploaded over the Internet, and on glossy paper too! They were $.15 per 4X6 and I liked the convenience of uploading the files from home. That saved me a trip, so there's the gasoline and time factor to consider too. The results were very good and my wife agreed that they were in some ways better than Sam's.

What I find really funny about all of this is that after all these years, I'm back to getting prints done at the drug store; it's all sort of come full circle.

My advice for using commercial printers is to put a few test files on a memory card and load them into the kiosks, or upload them over the Internet in several places to see whose output you most prefer before you commit to any large orders.

I took today's picture during September, 2006, in Red Rock National Preserve, which is about 20 minutes from my house. A wildfire had ravaged the area a few months earlier.