To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever proved that printer manufacturers have kept the prices of ink cartridges artificially high. There was an EU investigation a few years ago and wrists were briefly slapped over the practice of putting identity chips in ink cartridges, but nobody was actually charged or fined for illegal activity.

But when it costs more to replace the ink in your printer than it did to buy the printer in the first place, you know there's something strange going on.

Consumers have put up with this situation for many years. Some have gritted their teeth and paid full price for branded cartridges, while others have wandered into the arms of unbranded cartridge manufacturers, despite the dire warnings from printer companies that such cartridges will cause your printer to fail, bathe you in radiation, steal your wallet and run off with your first-born.

Now, though, it looks as though the printer companies - innocent though they undoubtedly are of any wrong-doing - have shot themselves in the foot. They're being beaten on price and quality from an unlikely quarter; high-street photography shops.

It took me a while to notice this, because although I take quite a few photographs, I rarely print them out. Recently, though, I needed to get some high quality prints of a selection of photos. Fearing that my own photo printer would absorb a fortune in paper and ink to print out nearly 200 photos, I did a bit of digging and found a local print company. I dropped my CD of photos off on the Monday and collected the prints on the Wednesday.

The quality was superb, better than that of any home photo printer I've yet seen, and the large format prints (10 x 8-inch) cost me just 25p each. If I'd wanted 6 x 4-inch they would have cost me less than 10p each. Compare that with a home photo printer, where small format prints can cost anywhere from 12p to 30p each, taking into account paper and ink costs and the depreciation of the hardware itself.

Obviously there may be occasions when you'd prefer to print photos at home rather than trusting them to a third party, but some shops have self-service photo kiosks so that nobody even sees your pictures. And if there's no shop near you, t'internet will gladly take your photos and post the prints back, without you leaving the comfort of your chair.

Without doing the necessary market research, I don't know whether or not there's a trend towards having digital photos professionally printed rather than printing them at home. Looking at these prices, though, printer companies must be getting just a bit nervous. The economies of scale still apply.

We'll be reviewing photo printers on this site for as long as people continue to buy them. But I've now sold my photo printer. I doubt I'll ever buy another.