Stefan had replaced his old Epson Stylus Photo R300 printer a long time ago and dropped it off at my house. It’s a USB Epson inkjet printer that has been replaced a couple of times over. I don’t even know what the current model is, but this one was free so who cares?
Naturally, I hooked this up to my Linux server in the basement. I could not get CUPS to agree with me so I’m printing via Samba.
I went to Costco and picked up replacement inks and glossy photo paper. The Epson inks were $60! The paper was the Kirkland knock off so I’m assuming the price was good. I connected my laptop to the print queue and shot off a test page using plain paper. That came out okay, so I loaded up the glossy paper and printed a couple of photos.
The photos looked like crap. There was banding all over the place and it looked like the ink had not decided to adhere to the glossy surface. If I looked closely, I am sure that the ink was about to slide off the page. So a few more test prints later and I set the default as premium glossy paper, Photos only, and enhanced photo processing.
The next photos looked stunning. The colors jumped right off of the page and the detail in the photos was just plain amazing. For my color test, I printed this photo of some fish statues. I had forgotten that some of the fish were actually not blue. I’m printing more and I have lots of paper and ink. The only downside is that the printer often has problems grabbing the glossy paper. It requires a lot of “take out the paper, insert the paper the exact same way”. But the output is really good and as I said, I got the printer for free.
What? No, I did not read any of the printer instructions or documentation. Why would you ask?
On Monday I’ll update the photos in my cubicle with these new printouts. I can look at them and admire the photos I took.
Let me know what ink it uses. I may have some new (still sealed) Epson ink around here. E-mail me the cartridge numbers.