Most of the photo printers are ok (read ok not great). They are cheap, and normally expensive to run. You can buy a 10x8 print from DS Colour Labs for about 60p. My sheets of paper pretty much cost that before factoring in ink costs.
Having a printer at home is very useful but to get accurate prints you'll need to get/use a proper profile and be careful with how you print. Then you get the odd messed up print so it costs you double to print that one image.
How many prints do you plan on printing?
If you plan on printing a 12 x 10, you'll need an A3 printer as A4 is smaller than 12x10.
Most A3 printers are better and you can usually find some good
second hand models around going cheaply. But again ink is very expensive.
You can buy a 6x4 on Photobox for something like 10p (maybe less) - I can't buy the paper that cheaply!! As you get bigger you start to save on the print cost when printing at home but you still have the outlay of the printer itself to take into account.....
I use an Epson R2400 and have ahad it a few years and it still produces fantastic prints on a variety of media. Not the cheapest to run so I bought a CIS system a few years ago from Fotospeed - That has cut my ink costs by about 80%.
Another thing is don't use cheap rubbish paper that doesn't come with a profile. You will likely be disappointed.
It really depends on your level of what quality is. Some people demand higher quality than others.
Cheers
Jim
