Printing at Home or at a Lab

Every few months someone asks me whether they should buy a printer. I give a different answer each time, which tells you something.

What the desk at home gives you

Control, mostly. You can make a print at eleven at night, look at it for a day, and make it again with the shadows a touch lower. You learn fast, because the feedback is a piece of paper on your own wall.

It also gives you waste. Paper, ink, a Saturday. My first year of home printing produced a cupboard of near-misses that I still can't throw out. If you've never calibrated a screen, don't expect the print to match it. Mine didn't for months.

What a lab gives you

Consistency, and somebody else's eyes. When I send a batch to the Fenwick Street Print Room, I get back the same paper, the same black point and the same careful handling every time. Their operator once phoned me about a file with a dust mark I'd missed across forty frames. A home printer has never done that.

A lab is also the honest answer when you need ten identical prints for an exhibition. Doing that at home means ten chances to be tired on the same afternoon.

Where the line fell for me

I stopped asking which was better and started asking which job I had.

• Proofs and tests: home. Cheap paper, fast turnaround, no precious files leaving the building.

• Anything for a wall that isn't mine: the lab.

• A single print I'm unsure about: home, then lab once I'm sure.

• Sizes beyond what my desk will hold: lab, without discussion.

It's a dull answer. It's also the one that stopped me losing weekends.

A small test before you decide

Pick one picture you love. Print it small at home and have the lab print it small too, on the same paper if they'll tell you which they use. Put them side by side in daylight and look at the darkest corner.

Whichever one you'd rather live with is the answer for that picture. For the next picture the answer might change, and that's fine.

There's one more thing the lab can't give you, and it's the reason I won't sell the printer. A print you make yourself is a conversation with the file. You find out which pictures were only ever screen pictures, bright and clever and thin, and which ones hold up when they're ink on paper in your hand. I've retired whole series after one test print, and I'm grateful every time.

I still keep the printer. It's where the pictures first become objects, and I don't think I'd want to give that up. But the prints that leave the house now mostly travel in the lab's grey boxes.