Photo Prints

[#1]

I got it free when I bought my last DSLR, (Olympus E500)
Consumables packs look to be around £20 for a pack of 50, although I've not used the first lot up yet!
Looking on the Curry's website, they'll sell you a new PS100 printer for £19.87, with a 50print set, so the price of 40p per image would include the cost of the printer!
Its not particularly fast, but having done a bit more research it seems around the upper end of the average print speed for a Dye-Sub - the lower performance presumably being down to the tiny footprint of the thing.
So, seems pretty much ideal for what I use it for; occasional prints of images for scrapbooks and the like - not so great if you want larger images, or faster or cheaper prints.

[#2]

Quote from: Be3G

Whilst home printing does indeed cost a lot more for small 6x4 prints - it costs my printer approximately £0.33 to print a borderless semigloss 6x4 print - I disagree that getting them printed online is doing it 'properly': from my experience, a good home inkjet printer provides considerably better quality. The longevity issue is a good point though... you have to get quite an expensive printer to have the use of pigment inks, and then they only work their best on a limited selection of paper.

I have to disagree as when my pictures are being printed at a lab, they are being done on the same machines used for doing prints from negatives and I know the quality control used there as they are doing prints for profesional photographers, and I use photobox for prints when I cant just get to the local lab and in my experience the quality is just as good.
Last year I did an experiment during an event with some inkjet prints done on an expensive and really good quality inkjet and ones done at the lab and the lab ones won hands down and even just a week on display you could see the inkjet prints didn't have the same punchy colours and cost more to print.

[#3]

I guess it all depends on the labs/processing companies and printers we're comparing, but certainly my experience is as given in my earlier post. I am intrigued by your experience with the inkjet prints on display though... I really don't think a pigment ink printer, as all good inkjet photo printers are these days, should have had noticeable fading after merely a week, provided it was used with the correct stock. Some inkjet printers though - in fact, particularly pigment ones - do have a slightly smaller-than-ideal gamut, so I wonder if that's what you were observing rather than any actual fading.

[#4]

I've seen the same effect as bud mentions when inkjet prints are displayed next to lab produced prints. It does vary between printer ink types, is exascerbated by direct sunlight, and can be reduced by displaying the print under glass (you can get UV coated frames which should further this protection, but that adds a penny or two to the price).
@James_H
The two types I've seen in use both had impressive outputs... the first used the film approach - consumables came in a pack with N postcard-style sheets and a roll with the ink on it in page length blocks ie a page of yellow, then a page of magenta, a page of cyan, and an overlay layer. When you printed a page, the card would feed in, get printed with the yellow, then feed back and in again for the magenta, etc. Took a minute or two per print, but that was a few years ago now.
The second was a big unit... paper came on rolls about 6ft wide and the ink came as solid "wax" cylinders. When printing, a tiny piece of the inks needed to print a particular colour would heat up and be vapourised together, then fired at the paper.
Apart from the size, the main difference was that whilst the first produced flat prints, the second could be set to increase ink density to produce a raised surface on the paper (similar to that on some solicitors stationery).
This was mostly used for colour prints of maps from what I recall.

[#5]

dye sublimation printers ... never seemed to catch on, samsung had a go marketing them a few years ago. Guess the online services became good enough to be not worth the effort/cost.
SW.