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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I splurged on a color laser. It's brilliant and cheap for printing color documents. It's also really bad at printing photos.

Know what's great for printing photos? The Walgreens up the block. It prints them waaaaayyyy more cheaply and nicely than any inkjet I've ever owned. The 2 times a year I want to frame and hang up a nice photo, I upload it to them and then walk over an hour later to pick it up.

There's no plausible reason I'd ever buy an inkjet again.

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If you found Walgreens quality satisfactory, I'd definitely recommend checking out dedicated Photo Print websites (eg. bayphoto.com). They are much better than Walgreens and only slightly more expensive.

Thanks for the link. The main thing going for Walgreens for me is that there’s one a quick walk around the block away from me. If it were less convenient I’d be more exploratory.

I’ve wondered why email to print to post isn’t a bigger thing.

We’re quite spoiled by instantcy, aren’t we? There’s usually no rush when I go to do such things.

If you need same day/local service, I’ve found our local Walmart to be cheaper and much higher quality than the Kodak kiosk inside the local CVS stores. Not sure how Walgreens compares.

Bad at printing photos for framing, sure.

It’s perfectly good for photos for elementary-school projects though.

Sure is! The end results are recognizable as what they’re supposed to be, just not beautiful. That’s fine 95% of the time I want to print a photo.

> It's also really bad at printing photos.

Yours in particular or generally laser printers? If the last one, that sounds surprising

> If the last one, that sounds surprising

Is it? Soho color laser printers are calibrated and designed to print color documents, not photos. They use CMYK (4) colors and inkjets designed for photos use 6 or more. It's possible to do photos with it but generally the laser printers most people have are not really designed for high quality photo (where a cheaper inkjet would be), they will show banding and be less color accurate.

Inkjets use 6 colors? I've never seen that at consumer retail. I see 3 color plus black.

They can, yes. Here's a HP doc on 5 color ones with photo cartridge that are fairly common: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01839024

Light cyan and light magenta are usually the additional colors added https://www.macworld.com/article/152010/6inkhetprinters.html

There are 7 color printers from Epson that add a dilute black.

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