James Stanway from the UK is overflowing with photos:

There are probably a great number of people out there who like to take photos of their family and friends on birthdays and special occasions, being those rare times in the year when everyone can celebrate, dine, laugh and maybe exchange gifts, but more importantly enjoy one another’s company. Naturally you will want to remember days like this and the easiest ways are of course videos and photos.

The main problem nowadays with digital photography is that most of the pictures either never leave the camera, spend their whole time tucked away safely on your computer’s hard drive or worse, you lose them somewhere in that little nonsensical box called your computer.

Now, I have over four thousand images on my computer and, as you can imagine, it can be a nightmare to find them sometimes when you want to show someone the pictures from your Christmas party at the office of something, which is why I, and probably many of you print out some of my photos. Only the really good ones though.

The problem with this when you’re starting out is that you may not really know where to start as the whole world of digital photo printing is quite diverse now. You can buy a SPECIAL printer for your SPECIAL camera, that needs SPECIAL paper and SPECIAL ink cartridges and will most likely put an extra SPECIALLY SPECIAL hole in your bank account for the privilege. As you may have guessed, this is not my favourite option.

Option number two is that you use the printer you already have. This then brings in some other important factors, such as; What size of paper should I use? 4×6 or 5×7? What’s so special about the special photo ink cartridge they want me to buy? What dpi should I set my printer to? What’s colour matching?

Or, instead of all this hassle, you could just go down to your local store and get them printed for a fraction of the price. Then all you need to worry about is whether to have them glossy or matt (I prefer matt as you can’t see the finger marks on them). This can save you around four fifths of the price of doing it yourself at home, which does confuse some people when they sit down and work out how many prints they get out of their ink cartridge, and how much it all costs.

So, give the hassle to someone else and save more!

What do you do?

Photo Printing Options