As another calendar year comes to a close I’m organizing my work and printing photos.  Not a bad way to avoid the cold and listen to music.  Here are my recent thoughts on printing at home.  So I have/had a Canon Selphy CP-220 since something like 2005.  I used it a lot back in the day and even took it to Laos in 2008.  I had no idea that Canon made such a fanfare over this line of dye sublimation printers celebrating their 20th anniversary.  That’s quite the achievement for a printer that still uses the same printer ribbon essentially!  I think I used to pay $18 at Target for the KP-36IP packs back in the day.  It added up, but was so nice to have that printing capability at home.  I also had no idea that these same print packs have roughly stayed the same price after 2 decades, not being hit too much by inflation.

When I stopped using the printer in oh 2009? it sat in the closet and then basement.  I dusted it off the other day and went down the awful rabbit hole of trying to find a computer that it worked on.  For some reason it doesn’t work on newer computers and I had to boot up my old Mac Pro and the Windows 8 Surface tablet to get it to work.  Of course after all that found out my printer’s drum is faulty and only prints barely 1/2 of the image.  So that was a “lovely” trip down memory lane of drivers and CD install discs.

The prints you see here are on the modern descendent of the CP-220, a Selphy 1000 series.  It’s essentially the same printer as the one I had back in the day!  Except back then the paper was more rigid and was a postcard that you could mail out to friends and family.  I would have to say the print quality is still very good, almost great even.  The paper that comes in the print pack is not as sturdy and the perforations on each end might bug some people, but for printing at home on demand it’s still pretty good.  The way dye subs work is that there’s no worrying about wasting certain colors of the ink jet cartridge.  You can print a whole series of colorful images and be guaranteed the same fidelity.  Black though I think comes out a bit on the blue tint.  Still though, for a fixed cost you really can’t beat this type of printer.

In digging through my shoeboxes for my Nikon D70 post I found some memories I forgot about.  These photos I printed from Costco maybe around 2013ish?  Costco no longer has photo kiosks in store and their online storefront sends you to a different vendor.  It’s a shame because there was a time when I could get 4×6″ prints for something like $.09 cents each?  And these were on nice Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper too.  (I think all prints look nicer with white borders around them.)

Having said that though I found in the closet some photos that I took in Laos that I printed at Costco and placed into these 4×6″ mini portfolios that I bought from Binders down in Buckhead.  To my surprise I found that some of the photochemical process had sweated/smeared into the unprinted border.

On some photos it was slight, but on others I’ll definitely have to reprint them one day.  It’s funny, these photos that were taken in 2008 are a crazy 17 years old time wise, but perhaps only a decade old physically but due to the ink smearing now have a patina that shows that time catches up with all of us and all things.

Looking at these photos makes me also wonder about the Costco workers that I knew on a first name basis, the Lao dancers in Luang Prabang in the above image, and the unexploded ordnance excavators in the below image.

The photo above shows a young Laotian toddler in Xiengkouang province holding a 4×6″ print that I gave her, as her mother looks on in happiness (I hope).  The photo is of her and her brother.  I remember taking that image and running back into the hotel room to fire up the laptop and Selphy printer before we headed out.  2008 was before cellphones had any decent image quality for sure and the iPhone 4 was still a few years out.

While the Canon dye sub printers produce more than good enough photo prints, I still wanted something a bit better in quality so I fired up the Epson 1400 again.  I rarely use this printer except for the occasional high quality print for gifts.  It uses 6 ink jet cartridges and an OEM set is about $150 in 2025.  If you think that’s bad I also have a big Canon photo printer that does 13×19″ full bleed and it uses 8 cartridges.

Photo paper should never be bought from retail stores because you can almost always find them at thrift stores.  Like that big pack above for the low low price of $.50!  I’m sure everyone also has friends and family that have unused packs laying around that they would gladly give you.  So that combined with the plethora of non OEM knockoff ink jet cartridges sold online, I thought I would try to be slick and order some ink to try…

Like most things online, if the price is too good to be true, it probably is a waste of time and money.  I ordered 2 sets(!) of ink for the Epson 1400 for $54 and they just don’t work for me.  One black cartridge was leaking and it wasn’t recognized by the printer.  The 1400 I have is of the vintage variety and Epson did some code shenanigans blocking non OEM cartridges.

I tried non Epson paper and also regular paper and the color is just way too off for my liking.  It makes every print look like a bad filter or messed up curves applied.  Plus there’s striping in the prints.

So I’m definitely not going to be buying remanufactured ink cartridges ever again.

I will have to say though for my non serious digicam photos it does add another “filter” on the image when it comes out as a print.  For my real portraits of friends and life though, this ink is just not going to work with this printer.

It’s a shame though, I was really hoping to save money with this ink and print out a bunch of photos for myself and friends.

With the OEM Epson set of ink, one can just buy the ones that run out the quickest, but it depends on what you print (unlike a dye sub).  You can see the cartridge levels go down after each print in the monitor and that’s just another expense.  Just one color cart is about $25, which could almost buy you a 108 print pack for the Selphy!!  But hey no one ever said photography and printing was ever a cheap hobby/passion/profession.

I still think making books and other print products (calendars, mini books) via the online sites are a pretty good deal. If you don’t mind the wait and being gouged on shipping costs.  (As of this day it looks like the going rate for a good 4×6″ is about $.14-.30)

To get my money’s worth out of this remanufactured ink I’ll probably just print all of my Harinezumi and Charmera images on it.  The image quality is already so bad and the color so off, so who knows this ink might be the secret sauce for true vintage looking photos.