I’m surprised that Walgren’s gave you bad prints. I thought they used the Fuji Frontier system, which is supposed to be excellent. Usually people are happy with prints from the Fuji system from Wal-Mart or Walgrens.
Your best bet in a standard sized photo printer is the Canon i960 IMO. It is fast and frugal with ink.
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_...anon_i960.html Photo quality prints are at least as good as anything currently available.
Steve measured 1:25 for an 8 X 10 at best photo quality. Normal for a good photo printer is in the 7-10 minute range. He got 14:35 for an 8.5 X 11 on a more expensive Epson 960 for comparison. It is at least 3 times as fast as the nearest competition.
About 3 years ago Canon went to a much stronger dye in their inks and went from worst to best in ink costs. From some older tests in Tom’s Hardware you can expect to pay less than half compared to HP and considerably less than Epson in ink costs per photo.
You can also easily refill Canon cartridges. The difficulty level is very high in Epsons because the printer estimates the ink you use and the printer will not print with a cartridge it thinks is empty unless you can reprogram the chip in the cartridge. Unlike Epson and HP, Canon actually measures the ink in the cartridge so it shows full when you refill it. Inkjet Goodies and MIS both market excellent Canon compatible ink.
Black cartridges on 4 color GP HP printers are even easier than Canon to refill, but the color cartridges are more difficult. I have no experience filling the HP 6/7 color printers but they look to be harder than the Canon. Refilling is a skill worth learning if you want to print a lot.
My digital cameras are all 4:3 and a 4 inch height print ends up 5 1/3 wide if you don’t crop. I like the prints better that way anyway. I can get 4 on a 8.5 X 11 sheet and Red River regularly puts some decent photo paper on sale so that my cost is about 6c a photo refilling my own ink. Your Digital Rebel uses the 35mm format and 4 X 6 is the proper format for you. You could get only 3 on a sheet and it is cumbersome. I print mostly 5 X 7 prints to pass around and pay about 12c each to print them.
I have a wide format photo printer and won’t ever have less. 13 X 19 prints look nice on the wall where anything smaller seems to get lost. I’m still using my older Canon S9000 and am waiting for Canon to put the heads from the i960 into a wide format printer before upgrading. The Canon i9100 is a little better than my S9000 but not enough to justify an upgrade.
Inkjet prints fade. Epson has a couple of printers with pigmented ink that fade less, but they are pricey and the quality isn’t quite as good as the best dye based printers. If I were selling prints I would get an Epson 2200 and buy a continuous inking system for it. But for personal use I can just reprint any print that fades on display. Prints stored out of the light don’t fade and seem to hold up well.
Any photo printer will give decent looking prints if you don’t look too closely. Even photo prints from my old HP 930 look good. But considering printing costs you would do better to go with a decent quality printer. The higher quality Canons with the separate tanks use considerably less ink than the cheaper Canons.
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