Sometimes the best gift you can think of is a properly homemade photo of the family, especially if your family has a new member. To that end, Epson’s latest lets you go big without spending up a fortune.
The world of printers isn’t necessarily the most popular in the world, what with our world going mostly digital and less print outs needed.
However, we still need art, and we still want photos on the wall, and if you’re after a way of doing that on a bigger scale — and by bigger, we mean “bigger than the standard A4 sizes every other printer is meant to deal with” — you haven’t had a lot of luck unless you spent up quite big.
That’s because printers meant for A3 and higher have generally been seen only for the professional and enthusiast crowd, and the technology needed wasn’t necessarily something you could get down to a smaller size or price point, and so they’ve kind of stayed up there for ages.
And that meant if you wanted a bigger picture for the home or a poster-like printout, you had to go somewhere else, maybe an online service or your local print shop. Essentially, if you didn’t spend big, you didn’t have the hardware to make big prints possible.
But this year, things may finally be changing.
Epson has announced what appears to be one of the most inexpensive takes on an A3+ printer yet, releasing the Expression Photo HD XP-15000, a printer made for wide and long printing, but not necessarily with the expected size or price.
To that end, Epson tells Pickr that it’s one of the most compact big printers it has ever produced, fitting in the space of roughly the size of what a 17 inch laptop would take —remember those? — and close to the width of A3+ paper with a few centimetres on either side to account for the hardware doing the printing.
Inside that hardware, Epson has provided the room for six of its Claria Photo HD inks for strong colour gamut rendition across both colour and monochromatic image printing, while the printer itself sports two paper spaces, with the front tray for regular paper printing and the rear for photo printing on media ranged from postcard to poster.
Postcard prints can be printed in a little under 30 seconds (27 to be precise), and you can send them to be printed by way of a phone, tablet, or computer, and that’s because the Epson Photo HD XP-15000 supports hone networks over both wireless and wired networking.
“The Expression Photo HD XP-15000 is designed to print high-quality, wide-format, borderless photos so that no detail goes unnoticed,” said Epson Australia’s Bruce Bealby.
“Adding the flexibility to print on a range of specialty media, the XP-15000 allows consumers to print photos with added texture and dimensions, quickly and efficiently at home,” he said.
While the size and versatility of the Epson XP-15000 are made to grab your attention, it’s the price that firmly holds on, and tight, fetching a recommended retail price of $499.
Given how much A3 printers usually go — usually sitting above the $700-800 mark — that’s a fairly impressive package for the price, and one which should serve folks well, especially if they’re thinking of printing up a few big new family photos as a way of saying happy end of this year.
