So I broke down and bought a high resolution photo printer last night. A lot of people, myself included, would note that it may not be the smartest idea to dump $250 right before a convention and trip to Las Vegas; however I had a choice...

I wanted to print up some business cards to hand out at MFF if I find people who want to contact me or watch my photography. I found out I had the business card stock, but it was not designed/would have issues being fed through a lazer printer which was the only known working printer I had. I have a stack of old inkjet printers of various qualities sitting around that were all in unknown states of operation and had not been used in anywhere between one and 5 years. So I could run out, spend money on ink and play printer roulette; potentially blowing a lot of money on ink before I found a working printer or got lucky... OR

Say screw it and buy a new printer. Well if I'm buying a new inkjet printer I don't want nor need a Multifunction POS I have a high res photo scanner which runs circles around anything on a MFD save for a high end office Ricoh or Xerox or something. I have no need for an "okay" scanner. I also am not interested in a cheap printer that is good for things like business cards and greeting cards and documents and is hit or miss at best with small photos.

So I figured out what I wanted and went for it. A dedicated photo quality inkjet printer. I also do not have a ton of space on my desk so while a 13x19" monster sounds nice for a lot of people I don't have the room for it. I also want something I can easily transport from home to the studio to do onsite prints at some point. I don't need to do anything bigger the 8x10 for photography- this is my standard size for proofing. Anything larger... its cheaper to use an online mail order place for specality huge prints.

Without going with a printer that was no longer made or working with a dye sub printer- nice in theroy till you realise how hard it is to get the special photo paper in stock... there was only ONE printer that met all my criteria. Sad isn't it? Everyone either wants enormus photo printers that fill an entire desk or tiny ones that print 4x6. The legal sized photo printers are a dying breed.

The Epson Artisan 50 is one of the last medium form mid range photo printers on the market. So there was another reason to get it now. Microcenter only had 3 in stock. They were all in the back- not displayed in the front so it wasn't an item they carried as regular inventory any more. They only had one canon monster sized photo printer as regular stock; all the other Epsons they had were either the very cheap home user or the small business grade workforce printers- in their own right are good at what they do, fast and reasonably cheap color document printing; but not the best for photo printing.

Outside of the business cards; I printed one 8x10 photo last night and was quite shocked at how well it turned out. For not knowing how the printer works... and fiddling with the RGB etc etc... the printer provided a vibrant photo print with very minimal fiddling. I wanted to do my own printing for awhile now but was always scared of how complex a lot of people make it out to be. In this case, it wasn't any more difficult then getting the image as I wanted it and putting it on an SD card to bring to walmart. Everything done to the photo was done in lightroom before it was exported. I did nothing to the photo during the "print processing phase" and it turned out fine.

Granted... I'm very much a beginner at photo printing. I won't debate that. And I'd much rather keep it as simple as possible as I already do a lot of work to my images in post in Lightroom. But if I can get consistant results with simplicity then I am happy. I can also now make prints of any of the fursuit photography I do either roaming or in the studio without worrying about the... uh... awkward questions at the photolab c.c.

So yeah, onto MFF. Then Vegas; and when I get back home... time to make more use of the studio now that I have another step on the voyage done- the ability to do prints :)