Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Haven't printers grown up?

After finally giving up and getting a digital camera (see the previous article on the joys of the Nikon Coolpix 8700) it's inevitable that the fact I don't own a printer these days should rear its ugly head. While pictures can be made to look pretty damn good on a monitor, there's really no substitute for quality prints on shiny paper, so having taken some photos that were worth printing, I did some experimentation with TOTKat's Deskjet 5550. This produces fantastic prints on shiny photo paper including full-resolution 8 megapixel images on A4, but as I'm most likely moving in the next couple of months I'll be needing a printer of my own.

From the photographic point of view, therefore, my current lust object is the HP Photosmart 7960. This wondrous beast does not just do 6-colour printing (that's CMYK plus light cyan and light magenta, making CcMmYK) but 8-colour printing including two extra shades of grey. The word on the street is that this makes photo reproduction even better, including tricky things like black and white photos which have been notoriously difficult to print on inkjets before. Add to this the inbuilt card slots for printing images straight from CF cards, the ability to do some basic manipulations without faffing about with a computer, and a decent-sized LCD for previewing printed images and you've got what must be a serious lust object for any digital photographer without thousands of quid to spend on top-end output equipment.

It's not the cheapest printer in the world, but it's hardly prohibitively expensive either (printers start out ridiculously cheap nowadays, and low-end printers are effectively loss-led by the cost of consumables). For the functionality it offers it looks like excellent value for money. Sure, photo printing paper isn't that cheap, but it still works out a lot cheaper than conventional DIY photo printing from negatives as well as leading to less wastage and no need to spend huge amounts of money building a home darkroom to fry your brain with noxious chemicals.

Consumer printers have certainly a long way from dot-matrixes and daisywheels.