Canon’s new SELPHY line of photo printers are cute little contraptions.

Available in apricot and white, the SELPHY CP770 looks like a picnic basket because it has a compartment inside to stash paper, cords and ink (see more photos below, gratis Canon). Nifty feature: “IrSimple,” which allows you to wirelessly send photos to the printer from a mobile phone or other gadget that supports the technology.

An even more compact model, the SELPHY 760, has the same features but is even smaller than the 770. It’s $100.

But is this worth the price of prints? Canon’s photo paper is expensive: 36 sheets (of 4×6 paper) plus ink is $19.99. That’s 56-cents a photo!

Photo ink is never cheap. And I usually run out of it long before the photo paper. Not so in this case, a Canon customer service rep told me. She said that Canon only sells photo paper and ink together. Each kit has enough ink for the amount of photo paper included.

That means the $29.99 economy pack (108 sheets plus ink) contains three sets of paper and ink. At minimum, each photo would cost 28 cents to print — and this excludes the cost of the printer ($100 to $150) plus shipping and taxes.

Say you print out 1,080 photos, you’ll be out a minimum of $399 or 37-cents a photo!

Lesson: Invest in a photo printer to save time. If you’re terrible at planning ahead, it’s nice to have a machine at home to print photos on demand.

But otherwise, sending them off to a professional printer saves money. I, personally, use Costco’s service since you can upload photos at home and pick them up at the store an hour later or have them delivered for free. Costco charges 17-cents per 4×6 photo. (Alternatives, like Shutterfly, offer bulk discounts as low as 12-cents per print but charge for shipping.) No muss, no fuss.

Related stories:

• OC Register, August 2006: Cheaper ink refills making their marks
• New York Times, October 2005: Why do-it-yourself photo printing doesn’t add up
• June 2007: Home Printing vs. Photo-lab prints
  

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