The standard to choose a good photo printer varies on your requirement, size of paper, quantity of supported color, budget, etc.
Now printer is becoming cheaper to be purchased, some model even is sold at less than 200 USD, thanks to advancement of technology, the cheap one still have good quality.
But you should concern about the ink cartridges ink consumption of the cheap photo printers, because usually the cheap printer will run out of ink cartridges very soon, because the manufacturer will try to make a profit from selling them other than directly from selling the printer which make it expensive in term of ink consumption.
Many users will use third-party ink to replace the original ink as long as the one you buy is of a quality product, however most good replacement inks are the same price as the original one.
If you have more budget, you should consider buying more expensive photo printers which rated between 400 and 1000 USD that have much better printing quality, longer life and will greatly save your ink cost.
Ink spillage is another issue you should take into account, you have to the clean the print heads of inkjet photo printer especially the cheap one from time to time. The cleaning of print heads is to use a little of ink to flush the head, but a few printers would need huge amounts of ink for cleaning.
The printing quality of a photo printer relies on many factors, but the capacity to uniformly fill a patch with color and color accuracy will be the most determining factor. A good printer should print color accurately. Most cheap photo printers are able to print your photos directly from the digital camera, but if the photo quality is not so good, you may need to edit it on your pc.
In summary, if you have high demand on photo printing quality, and budget is enough, don’t choose the cheapest printer, you will have more cost on ink consumption, just choose the high-end photo printer. Canon and HP are reliable choice, Epson is also good in term of large format photo printer.
