I know I've said in the past that I'm not a big believer in printing at home. I'd rather just upload to the likes of Ritz and have them print my photos instead of having to worry about ink, paper and so forth, especially when the price difference is essentially nil for what usually seems like a decent step up in quality.

That said, we recently bought a new photo printer. Don't look at me like that...I have my reasons!

My daughter's First birthday party was this weekend. Over here, that's a big deal, and it's not uncommon for the parents to throw a party for several hundred people. We weren't that bad - we figured we were just short of a hundred.

Anyway, my wife thought it would be a fun idea that instead of a normal guest book (boring!), she wanted to takle pictures of everyone that signed in, print them there and then, and glue 'em into a scrapbook along with their name and address. She figured (correctly) that nobody bothers with a boring old guestbook after the fact, and that doing things this way would mean that our daughter would have something much more interesting to look at when she grows up. It also gave anyone that was interested something to look at on the way out at the end, too.

Needless to say, the onus was put on me to make the minor technical detail of printing stuff on-scene happen. There are definite drawbacks to being the geek of the family.

I figured I didn't want to have to deal with a laptop at the party. It's just one more thing to go wrong. Knowing that many photo printers can take memory cards directly and have little colour LCD screens on them, I figured I'd look for a cheap one of those.

What I ended up choosing was Epson's now-discontinued Picturemate Deluxe (model B351A). This was partly down to the fact that refurbs can be had for a song and partly because this isn't some run-of-the-mill four-colour cheapo inkjet. It takes six-colour dye cartidges instead, which usually gives better results than four-colour.

So how cheap was this thing? Try $40 for a refurb. That's a far cry from the $200 asking price from as little as a year ago. Heck, I can see some places on the web that are still looking for $190 for one.

Buying ink and paper is a little unconventional for this thing. Epson sells packs with an ink cart and paper combined. The idea is that they match the amount of paper to the number of prints you should get from a cart. While this might sound like an licence to go bump the price up to ridiculous levels, these packs are actually quite reasonable. I bought a 100-print pack for $20.

The bit where it really gets weird is that they more or less guarantee the number of prints, to the extent that if the ink runs out prematurely, they offer to buy back any unused paper at the relevant fractional cost of the whole package per page. I'll have to see if that turns out to be necessary, but it's not a bad idea.

Anyway, back to the printer. When all the hatches are closed, it looks like a little hard cooler, to be honest. There's no room inside for beer, though - I checked.

It has a little 1.8" LCD screen that's fairly low resolution, but is fairly bright and contrasty, and is certainly good enough to make sure you're printing what you think you're printing.

On the side there are slots for pretty much any type of flash card you could name. While the printer is on, if you plug a card in a light comes on to show that it's being accessed and a message pops up on the screen saying that the printer is checking for images. You can then scroll left and right to view images, use the up and down controls to mark a number of copies for each image, and there's a big, friendly go button for when you want prints made.

The printer also has some basic editing controls, including redeye, colour tweaking (including black and white and sepia and junk like that) and some basic sharpening controls. The only thing I messed around with was to sharpen everything.

With our Panny TZ1 and two SD cards, we were able to keep things flowing pretty well. The idea was that since each print takes about a minute to do, we would take a photo with one card, then throw that into the printer and use the other while the printer was busy, and then swap back as needed. In the end, it all worked out pretty well.

Overall, the print quality is pretty good. It's not quite as sharp as what I expect from Ritz, and there's the usual thing where white areas on the print have a different glossiness to them than the coloured areas. However, until they invent a Ritz shop that you can set up on a table, this worked quite well, especially given what it cost.

Compared to the overall cost of the party, the $60 we spent on the printer and paper/ink was a drop in the bucket, and I don't think there's another alternative out there that's nearly as cheap while not compromising too much on quality.

Maybe one day I'll even consider connecting it up to my PC...

My brother does this with his "BapCam" set up over the font at his church for baptisms. A camcorder provides live video feed (recorded) for the creche etc, while he snaps a couple of shots with his Nikon D200, uploads them to his computer, slaps the church logo on it, and prints off a couple of dozen from a similar printer (I think he uses one of those Hi-Ti dyesub ones) and gives them out to all the family guests...

Great idea -