PRINTER

     A printer is almost necessary for a home PC these days. You do not need one, and unless you use it for business or school you probably will not use it very often. However a good printer with photo capabilities these days is a good choice. If you own a digital camera, you will find it a good money saver. Simply print your photos out on photo paper and you will be very impressed, you will never go get pictures developed again! Printers measure their printing capabilities by DPI (dots per inch) a good photo printer will be about 1200dpi. The printer that you see here is a Hewlett Packard DeskJet 970Cse, it is capable of printing 1200x2400 on photo paper. I must say that it is photo quality. Now you cannot expect to just print out any size picture any way you want. Pictures are measured in pixels, while printers print in dpi. If you have a picture that is 320 x 240 pixels and print it 8"x10" on paper you will see the pixels. If you want it to be nice and smooth you would have to make the picture print at about 1/4" on the paper. So if you want to print out good 5"x4" photos make the pictures be about 1600x1200 pixels. It came with a back attachment that allows me to print on both sides of the paper, so that will come in handy so you don't have to worry about flipping the page over by hand.

     I give the HP DeskJet 970Cse a 93% for greatness. It only cost me $250 and it prints great pictures. The only problem is that it did not come with a printer cable or a USB cable, so I had to buy that extra. It also prints a bit slow in photo mode, but what doesn't?