Bob from Newport Beach Loc: Newport Beach, Ca

For photos, be sure you buy a pigment printer. The pictures will last much longer and not fade. As for cost, it is all in the ink. Need to consider how much ink is in the canisters and how much they cost to replace. I am using a Canon Pro 10 and really like the quality of the pictures, but the ink is expensive.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

The dye ink version was the Pro-100. Canon suggests the print life at about 100 years. The Pro 10 might be twice that.

At a photo expo (pre covid!), Canon was there making stacks of prints from both the Pro 10 and Pro 100. I saw what seemed to be a little "brighter" prints from the Pro-100 and chose that one.

My goal for prints is keep a small rotating selection of enlargements on one of my walls. Normally, a print will be "on display" for up to a year! Any longer and I'm being lazy.

At 75, it is not likely that I will ever see what my prints look like when they age!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I think the desire for prints that age well comes down to preservation. But in an age of electronic imaging and electronic image sharing, I'm not sure how relevant printing is going to be. Display technologies are advancing rapidly. Our tablets, phones, and computers have already become our photo albums, sharable with everyone else at once, from a cloud server. There are still preservation challenges with digital media, but they are less worrisome when we can make multiple backup copies and store them in multiple ways in multiple locations.

That's from a guy who grew up in a darkroom to work in a lab for three decades, and now does everything digitally.

RustyNM Loc: Deming, NM

If you can afford the $700 I would suggest the Epson WF-8550. It is called a supertank and uses 6 bladders of ink rather than cartridges and makes the ink much less expensive. It is a photo printer up to 13"x19". Right now I have 2 printers, 1 for photos and 1 for everything else and if I start having problems with my photo printer I WILL buy the Epson WF-8550 to replace both.