What would you look for? Our 5year old HP Officejet is going to be history soon. I can pick something for my birthday. Should I go with another multi machine? Get a separate scanner and printer? HP? Epson? I am new to digital scrapping. Have not tried to print a page that I have done. So I don't have any experience to go from... And I inherited from my Dads home, the Family Photos! All carefully put into magnetic albums 18-20 years ago. A big job ahead. Budget is fairly good. Thanks for your thoughts...

I wouldn't recommend buying any "combo" items. Many times, if one breaks down, they're both out of commission.
For my personal use and business, I have an Epson 4870 scanner (can scan film and photos), and an Epson R800 (probably has the best archival ratings of all home printers).
Note: the Epson R800 only prints up to 8x10, however Epson is expected to release the same model that prints much larger sizes.

If neither of these are in your budget range, I'd still recommend the Epson line.
Final note, my sister owned an HP combo and hated it. It was always giving her problems.

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http://www.pbase.com/vhansen

Hello,

Not to give you a sad story, but only to illustrate how important my heritage photos are to me. I am the only child of two now deceased parents. My photos are all that I have left of my nuclear (sp?) family, so for obvious reasons I plan to scrap them the best way I can. I plan to do both digi and paper scrapping with them. Even the paper scrapped LOs are going to be with scanned and printed pics, not the originals. As such, here is what I decided to buy and why, and yes it was a bit of an investment, but I firmly believe it was money well spent for both sentimental, but more importantly quality reasons.

I purchased the Canon i9900, as a printer, and the Epson 4870 photo ( I think that is the number -- I will check). I am at work and have to go, but if I have a break later on tonight I will write my reviews/reasoning. If not tonight, I will finish tomorrow.

HTH!

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Lysiane

~~ Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder ~~

~~ Go Ahead, CC me! ~~

I agree that Epson is the way to go for quality archival prints. I've also got the R800 and love it. Great customer service at Epson, too (more than I can say for HP who I've had to call a few times for printer issues at work).

Ok, this is going to be brief b/c I will probably be paged soon. If you check my posts (by clicking on the little circle next to my name) you will be able to read my GLOWING reviews of the Canon i9900 (it is a wide format printer). It only has one drawback so far and that it cannot do 12X12 borderless printing (currently no wide format printer that I am aware of can). However, there are many ways to get around that (just check my posts for solutions).

As for the Epson 4870 photo scanner, I purchased it because I wanted a photo scanner and I wanted one with digital ice and color correction software. Briefly, those softwares remove scratches/dust from old photos and color corrects. In my opinion this is DEFINITELY needed if you are going to be working with old pics. You can restore pics in photoshop (and there is an excellent book to teach you how) but it takes a LONG time, with the software the time is greatly reduced. Now the software is not perfect. You end up sometimes having to reposition the photo for the digital ice to work better. However, this scanner is the only scanner I have used where people (and I am talking about computer and photo techies) either asked me if it was a scanned pic or commented on the high quality. To boot you can connect it via firewire and BOY IS IT FAST!!!!!! If you have photoshop cs you can scan four pics at a time and then use the automatic crop and straighten function and it divides up the sheet of four pics into individual pics. WAY COOL and A HUGE TIME SAVER!!! My only complaint with the scanner is that I wished it was legal or at least 13X19 size. One cannot have it call.

Again, I hope this helps you out.

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Lysiane

~~ Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder ~~

~~ Go Ahead, CC me! ~~

I'm obviously quite biased (I teach scrapbook classes for Epson), but I do love my Epson's! And I owned both a printer and a scanner before I started working for them. Since then, of course, my collection has grown quite a bit.

First you need to decide if you want wide-carriage or not. Is it important to you to be able to print 12x12 layouts, or do you want to just print up to 8.5x11? If you don't need the wide-carriage, you can save yourself a lot of money with a letter-sized printer.

How archival do you want your prints to be? Pigment inks will give you the most longevity - the prints are extremely fade resistant (and practically water-proof), and if printed on our matte scrapbook paper, will last 200 years in your album, or 100 years framed on the wall. The R800 (8.5" wide) is an excellent printer with pigment inks. If you don't care so much about longevity, the dye ink printers produce outstanding prints with a smaller price tag. The R320 (8.5" wide) has a card reader with an LCD screen. The 1280 (13" wide) is a fantastic deal right now - I believe there is a still a $100 rebate, bringing the price down under $200.

As for scanners, we use the 4870 in class, and I do like it. I have the 1670 at home, and it's great too - obviously not quite as great as the 4870...but you can find it for less than $100. What are you going to be scanning? If you are mainly wanting it only for scanning layouts, you don't need a very high resolution (really, the cheapest scanner on the market can scan a layout at 300 dpi). If however you are interested in scanning negatives or slides, you'll need a scanner with a higher resolution. All of the Epson photo scanners have adapters for scanning slides and negative (the light source is built into the lid, as opposed to a separate unit). All of the consumer-level ones also have the color enhancement as well. The 4870 is currently the only one with Digital ICE - if you have a lot of older heritage photos that have been cracked or torn, this will save you a TON of time. I personally have zero heritage photos, so if I were forced to buy a scanner, I wouldn't worry with this feature.

Hopefully that helps some!

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Leigh

ME TOO!!!! We've begged, whined, pleaded, and cajoled - even for a 12" long bed. The Japenese will figure it out sooner or later...

Actually, they do have a tabloid sized scanner that will scan a 12x12 layout (it's actually 12.2x17.2), but it's out of most people's budget at $2800! Apparently the cost in making the scanning lamp wider is pretty significant - one of our engineers estimated that it would cost at least $1000 for a 12x12 consumer-level scanner - a price which most people would not be willing to pay.

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Leigh

Leigh -- I just bought an Epson Stylus CX3650 yesterday, scanner/printer combo. It uses the DURA-Brite inks which I thought were the more archival inks -- are those the ones you refer to in your message as pigment inks? And which paper do you recommend for printing with the DURA-brite inks for longest lasting photos? You mentioned "matte scrapbook paper" -- exactly what is the name on the box label?

The availability of Epson products where I live (in Switzerland) is fairly limited, so I'd love to know the exact name of a paper and then mailorder myself a good supply! TIA for your help!

Beth

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Beth
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