NOT long ago I donned a vest and a top hat, gathered my pocketwatch and monocle, and rode my penny-farthing to the general store. The get-up seemed appropriate because I was on the hunt for one of the old-timiest machines still floating about our digital world: A photo printer.

I had been looking for a printer because I’ve grown weary of digital images. Once, all our photos were displayed on paper; a picture was synonymous with its print. But as soon as we all got screens in our pockets, printing fell out of favor. I’ve mostly been a fan of this shift; I appreciate the convenience of seeing photos from anywhere, and I like the casual intimacy of snapshots shuttling about Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

But we snap so many pictures nowadays that it sometimes seems as if we’ve forgotten to savor any. I miss a printed photograph’s capacity to arrest the attention. A good print is more aesthetically pleasing than a photo on an LCD screen — the colors are more vibrant, the light against paper more favorable than against glass — and because it is a permanent, physical object that can be mounted in a place you’ll see regularly, a print tends to pack deeper emotional resonance.

Image An image using the photo-editing programs

But these days the most common way of creating prints is to send your pictures to an online or drugstore lab, and that process rarely works well. What you get back from the lab always looks a little bit off from what you’d pictured on the screen.