Why Should You Print Your Photos at Home? It Suddenly Got Cheap

I’ve always thought that home printing was convenient but too expensive. That’s not the truth anymore if you are smart about what you buy. Here’s why you should print your photos at home.

I never thought I’d be able to print photos at home for cheap! (Josh Hild for Unsplash+; used with permission.)

I’ll always remember when I figured out printing at home was “not for me.” I’d started a roof cleaning* company, which I knew nothing about, and decided that I needed reference encyclopedia of how to clean roofs.

(*For those not familiar, most homes in the U.S. are covered with asphalt shingle roofs, and those tiles tend to get ugly staining on them after 10 or 15 years, which is only about half of their up to 30-year or so lifespan.)

This was the year 2009, and there was no Obsidian for me to organize a knowledge base into. In fact, I wasn’t using any technological solution more advanced than browser bookmarks. I just wanted an easy-to-use reference guide that I could take with me to the job site.

So I went to my parents’ little trusty HP inkjet printer, which honestly had always seemed kind of totally fine. Because I was printing paint color photos, in some cases to show the roof cleaning process, I emptied the ink cartridges within less than an hour…