New Printer and chaos.

After much deliberation about whether I should buy a new printer, I finally did the deed. I've been looking into it for quite a while and had decided on the Epson R2400 which is sort of the upgrade of my old and trusty Epson Stylus Photo 1270 which I've had for about 6 or 7 years. I wanted a machine that would still do A3+ and wanted full bleed and archival inks and this fitted the bill. Full of resolve, we headed off to Calumet, my new favourite photo shop and were immediately persuaded to look at the HP Photosmart Pro B9180 which does everything the Epson does plus some extra stuff which I liked. The print samples were stunning. The printer can take a really wide range of paper and media going from tissue paper up to canvas which the Epson didn't. As I will want to use thick fine art papers and photo rags, this was just what I wanted. It was a bit cheaper too.

Yesterday we also bought an iPhone each and that's what we concentrated on getting sorted last night so this morning the full horror of the work involved in getting the new printer installed finally hit. It's much bigger than the old Epson and I'll need to access the back for the hand fed papers, which meant that the position of the old printer wasn't suitable as it was against a wall and the daft layout of my work station didn't really give many options for repositioning. Peter then had the great idea of putting the beast onto our redundant but much love tv trolley and having it based in teh living room next door. I must explain that we're not exactly the soft furnishing and pretty living room types, pretty much every corner of the flat looks rather like a design studio with books, pictures, computers and assorted other junk all over the place. Therefore, unconventional as it may seem, having a chunky metal trolley with a huge printer in the living room isn't such a weird thing in our lives. Peter's gone out to get a longer USB cable and a new powered hub for me which gives him a quick escape and a chance for a coffee and a quick read of the papers before Maplins opens leaving me to tidy my disgusting dusty desk, with it's rats nest of cables, and generally have a bit of a sort out which has made quite a difference really. He'll be back soon and then we can really get the show on the road.

I can't wait to make some really lovely prints and hopefully my new Spyder2 will help with the colour management and calibration as I've not been too satisfied with my colours for a while now. A new slate.