Okay, I confess. I am obsessed with digital photography. Since I got my second digital camera, about eight months ago, I have taken about 5800 pictures. That’s around 25 pictures a day. Although I primarily use them for collages there has been always a need for printouts. I love my Epson 660 but preparing a graphic for that printer is a major event. Epson is quite famous in the printer world for high quality prints that offer a little bit more yellow and brown than they should. That’s why I even wrote scripts for Photoshop and Xara to optimize my images for that printer. No matter how hard I tried there was always the place for an improvement. I am not saying that Epson is a bad printer – it’s darn good unless you’re a type of a graphic designer who counts dots on a 15840 by 12240 matrix in his mind and is never satisfied unless that 6 point font is aligned to the precision of a micron. I am talking about people like me.

I’ve been looking for “the printer” for quite a while. I’ve looked at everything from Hewlett Packard to Phaser. I have bought and returned at least six of them before I visited one design studio in downtown Philly and saw it! In about four hours I had $500 less on my credit card and a brand new Alps MD 5000 on my desk. Let me tell you, in the world of printers Alps in color is what Cal Comp used to be in black and white. It rules.

Alps is very easy to install and configure, although a printer of this complexity of technology shouldn’t be. It comes bundled with a ton of software yet I did not bother to install it. All I needed is the driver and the color profile. After about an hour my screen and Photoshop were calibrated and I was able to print the first picture that made me say “wow!” in a while.

Despite it’s USB connection one thing this printer isn’t is fast. It’s takes quite a long time to print a large picture but it’s worth every microsecond you wait for it. It’s plain awesome. Unlike Phaser, Alps does not smudge the image producing image quantity you might see in very expensive art and design books.

About three hours ago I designed a Christmas card that I will be sending out to all my friends. The first thing my friend said when he say it is “dude, this is way much cooler than Hallmark”. Well, it is. In fact, it puts even $5 cards from Hallmark to shame.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 500
Operating System: Windows