A couple of months back my wife completed a photography course and following the course she purchased a Canon 450D digital camera.

Taking photos, getting the right light, getting that perfect shot, is all well and good, but looking at the results on a computer screen does not always do the photo justice.

The normal process to print the brilliant shot was to save it onto a flash drive, take that drive to the nearest (half decent) print lab and have them print the photo to the size needed; this process is all well and good if the photo lab gets the print right, the lab is open, the lab is currently able to print and you have the right amount of money. Photos are sometimes ridiculously expensive (especially for the A3 size)

So how do you avoid the above troubles?

This large printer is widely available and although not super cheap – the printer comes in around R 3500 (~$ 450) it does the job superbly. (Even if it does eat through R 200 ($15) cartridges at an alarming rate when printing full A3 borderless prints)

This printer has a few drawbacks, with the first and most obvious one is the sheer size of an A3+ printer. You will need a large desk to accommodate this baby. This isn’t really all that bad though, as you would have a similar issue with almost any A3 printer.

As the name implies the Epson Stylus Photo 1410 is a photo only printer so it is not recommended as your only printer and definitely should not be used for normal text on plain white paper printing- although it can do that too.

You should spend the extra money on the Epson Photo Glossy Paper (between R 400 and R 800 for a 10 pack A3), in my tests printing on HP photo paper was a complete failure with the Epson ink not drying and in places flaking and cracking.
Generic photo paper did work and the prints were superb, but in comparison to the Epson photo paper, the generic paper prints were bland.

Drawbacks aside, this printer is amazing. It is simple to setup and install and with the built in PictBridge support you can even print directly from your camera without setting up the PC.

Printing borderless images was easy, almost silent and extremely quick (to print the image on A3 and for the ink to dry on the page)

The printer has 6 different ink cartridges (one for each colour) so it does help with keeping costs down as you only need to replace the depleted colour, and not the whole set when you run out on one.

The Epson Stylus Photo 1410 is not going to be the printer for everyone but for any photo enthusiasts, if you’re looking for a good photo printer, I believe this one is it.