Photo Printer

Well, I finally broke down and bought myself a photo printer.

I’d been surviving until recently with a close to 10 year old, increasingly finicky laser printer. It’s served me well, but I’ve had paper feed issues with it for quite some time (ie years) and have been somewhat limited by its inability to make pretty color prints and its dismal speed (did I mention it was an old parallel port model). Fairly recently, my computer up and stopped talking to it out of the blue. Everything looked ok. Printer powered up, the computer thought the printer was ok and could read its status, but when I tried to print it acted as if the printer wasn’t responding (and the incoming data light on the printer didn’t blink like it should).

Decided that was my opportunity to retire the old beast and look into something new. Hadn’t looked too hard when my Dad told me about a printer deal he was getting for my Mom for XMas. She’d apparently been eyeing the Epson photo printers when they were in CompUSA recently, and the following day he saw a deal for an Epson Stylus Photo RX500 via CompUSA.com. The RX500 is one of those all-in-one dealies that couples a high-res scanner, with a decent 6-color photo printer to meet all your scanning/printing/photocopying needs. Since it came out to $100 after all is said and done, I figured what the heck. Just received mine today and it looks pretty slick. They were kind enough to include a few 4x6 premium glossy photo pages to get you hooked. Printed out a few pics from our honeymoon in Ireland, and have to admit, I’m hooked. :)

Prints on regular paper don’t look too bad (don’t even remotely compare to good photo paper, but not too bad if you get far enough away and don’t examine the details much). I think I’ve still got some “premium inkjet paper” or something similar in one of these boxes, so perhaps I’ll give that a try too. I’m afraid I’ll find myself at the store in search of high quality photo paper now to make some nice big prints from my new Digital Rebel. Should be able to get some nice 8x10s from that bad boy. Will probably have to wait for spring before I can take any really good pictures again with it. Well, at least pictures of things that aren’t all dreary and depressing like good wintery shots of naked trees. I’d like to take some of those, but I suspect Amanda would appreciate some cheerier stuff too. :)