As a lot of you probably know, it’s hard to buy a computer-type gift for a computer-type person at Christmas time. So my wife gave up on that idea a long time ago… at least picking out the gift on her own. So it’s one of my challenges each year to decide what I want Santa to bring me. Of course it would be easy in this day and time to ask for a new computer but I’m still happy with what I have. So more thought was put into solving this dilemma for this year.

I will admit that after seeing the demonstration of the Alps line of printers at one of our recent user group meetings I was tempted to ask for one of them (one of which I hear our newsletter editor was fortunate enough to get). Hands down the Alps line has the best output I’ve seen for photo quality pictures, and if I wanted nothing but a photo printer I would have asked for one of those. But I was interested in finding a good photo quality printer that was also good for printing pages with heavy graphics and text, such as web pages. I personally think it’s unrealistic to use an Alps printer to do this. The speed is too slow (up to 20 minutes to print a full-page photo), and the cost per page is too high (the Alps uses special paper to get the best quality output). Enter the new Epson Stylus® Photo 700 ink-jet printer. (The one I asked Santa to bring me.)

This new printer not only prints sharp photo quality pictures but it also has crisp looking text that rivals any laser printer that I’ve ever used, so that makes it perfect for printing other things like greeting cards, calendars, reports and web pages. The Epson 700 prints up to 1440 dpi resolution and uses something called enhanced Super MicroDot™ technology that creates a lot of detail on the image. Its 6-color print cartridges print photos as smooth as those I’ve gotten from the photo-lab. Also, Epson's Micro Piezo™ print head creates clean, consistent printing, no matter what type of paper I use. But obviously, the better the paper, the better the output. The monochrome print head has 32 nozzles while the color print head has 160 nozzles (32 x 5). I have found that printing in 1440 dpi the paper tends to ripple on the backside of lighter paper. On a heavier card stock type paper, it prints just fine.

It can print a standard 5" x 9" photo in about 90 seconds and an 8" x 10" photo in about 5 minutes, which is about ¼ of the time of the Alps printers. While it can print 1440 dpi its standard resolution is 720 x 720 dpi and will also print 360 or 180 dpi. The input tray can hold 100 pages or 10 envelopes. By the way, it prints envelopes better than any printer I have ever used. It can print on single sheets from 3" x 5" all the way up to a panoramic of 8.3" x 23.4" and can print on plain bond, photo paper, transparencies, iron-on transfers, and a bunch more.

The EPSON Stylus Photo 700 also came with Digital Photo Lab™ software suite, which is a pretty decent photo project package for editing and organizing photos, sharing photos on the Internet, and creating personalized calendars or panoramic images.