New Printer

After being without a printer for over a year now, I'm so tickled to have my new printer.  Well, I should say "photo printer", because I have a huge workhorse of a printer that I use for my everyday printing. I just haven't had a printer for my photos. 

 

I've had 2 HP "all in one" printer/fax/copier/scanners and I was seriously considering getting a dedicated photo printer, but after reading reviews for two days on all these various "all in ones" and dedicated photo printers, I finally decided on getting an Epson XP800. What can I say? I LOVE IT! I read reviews from many sources, but tended to stay with PC Magazine and CNET for the professional reviews, but there were also a lot of customer reviews on both websites, too.  I also read the customer reviews on Amazon.com, too.  After crunching the numbers (so to speak), the Epson XP 800 came out in 1st place. And at $280, it was well within my budget.  As a stand alone photo printer, I would have had to get up into the $800 range before finding something that the "professional reviewers" and customer reviews could agree on. That is just a bit above what I wanted to spend on a printer just now.

 

I'm sending a couple of prints that I printed to my Dad to see what he has to say about them. I printed out a couple of photos that I had printed at Shutterfly.  The comparison was amazing! My butterfly photo was even better (I think) than the print I got from Shutterfly. The others were very, very close, so I'm well satisfied with the printer!

 

And after a year of not having a photo printer, I have a lot of photos to print out, but not as many as I figured that I would have. I have been ordering my photos from Shutterfly and Snapfish, but after several orders, I began to wonder which one printed my photos better. So... I did what Mike and I did when we first got our 1st digital camera. We sent the same prints to both Shutterfly and Snapfish. So that's what I did again. This time I sent in 10 photos and had 8x10's made from them. Ordered them and also received them on the same days!

 

The difference was very easy to tell on most of the prints. There was only two that they were even close. I tried to pick photos that would represent all the various colors (purples, reds, blues, greens, etc). Hands down, Shutterfly won. So if you're interested, my money will go to Shutterfly when I need to have prints larger than 8x10s made.

 

Things have been going well around here. Jackson is growing like a weed and is so much fun to have around.

 

Hope all is well with you!