A few hours ago I picked up an Epson Stylus R1800 for the great price of $549 CAD, normally $699 CAD. Long story short, I was using my local Wal-Mart to do some holiday greeting card prints, and the colour reproduction was horrific - we’re talking truly pathetic. I couldn’t even find anyone that knew anything about colour to talk to, so I gave up and printed the photos myself at home on my R200, which turned out great. The reinforced my belief that being able to create great-quality output at home was of great importance to me, and being able to do larger prints has always been on my geek lust list. It’s also part of the re-configuring of my work area to better serve my goals of upping the game of my photography.

So, tonight I drove across the city to the one place in Calgary that had this printer that was open late on a Sunday, and picked it up. I was looking for a printer (available locally) that would do 13 ” x 19″ prints, but also printed on CDs and DVDs - and the list of printers that met those requirements was one item long: the R1800 (unless my research was inaccurate). I was initially a bit hesitant on getting this printer because it was released in February 2005, so it’s a bit old, but Epson made no move to replace it with a newer version at Photokina 2006, so it seems it’s still the most modern printer of its type - especially for $549. I haven’t even un-boxed it yet, but I’m really looking forward to it! Much to my dismay, the store was out of Epson 13 x 19″ paper, because someone bought an R2400 the day before and all of the 13 x 19″ stock at the same time. So I’m off to another store tomorrow AM to pick up some big paper to make my first prints.

Ok, this absolutely rocks: a Superman-themed Alienware notebook! The colouring and design of the case is simply awesome. I thought at first the logo was raised plastic or resin, but it turn out it’s flat and airbrushed. Still very cool. The laptop itself is no slouch - the base config sells for $2239 USD, but you can deck it out with a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.33 Ghz, two 200 GB hard drives in a RAID array, 2 GB of RAM and dual TV tuners…for a mere $4206 USD. This would be one fast notebook, and it looks so damn good! I’m not notebook shopping until Q1 2007 when the new Vista models come out, so I won’t even consider this…but it sure looks nice! I’m intrigues by the branding partnership here as well - it’s not something I’ve seen very much of, but I’d sure like to see more. I’d kill for a Wolverine-themed notebook.