Talk About Feeling Like an Idiot

Three days ago I bought a new printer.

According to the salesman, the new printer would produce a higher quality color and resolution to my ... antiquated ... flimsy plastic beast. There would be no horizontal lines running across images, the color saturation would be better, the paper would feed like a dream come true.

Well, this morning, January 26th, I fired up the new HP Photosmart 8050, expecting miracles.

I didn't get them. The print quality sucked worse than the old flimsy plastic machine, an HP 3745. I tried upping the dpi in Photoshop -- nada, lines like the print was on corrugated cardboard. Also, the 4" x 6" photo paper carrier would not securely lodge in the paper loading tray, and thus the machine would only feed the paper through and then send an error message "Paper size too small printing cancelled." Shithead.

I packed the thing back up and took it back to Staples. Kudos to them, they accepted the full return and I lost no $$ on the mistake. I will deal with them again.

However, in the process of looking for a better machine, they sent me a sales rep who might have been all of 18 years old. I took one look at him and thought, "He could be a geek, but he is not going to be able to understand the demands of Art." He was polite and submissive, but he had plainly taken one look at me and thought, "She's someone's grandma, and has no idea about how anything works." He started lecturing me on dpi, for heaven's sake.

Then he described the print Properties, and how if you choose to run the default "Normal" you get a shitty quality print, but if you choose "Maximum dpi" you get a far better quality print. Hmm.

He was too iffy on the quality of other printers, so I just opted for a full refund, and then went home to curse at the old machine again. I decided to check out Master Young Thing's suggestion and opened a particularly troublematic picture of a red hibiscus. I enhanced its Reds in Photoshop, and then hit Print, and damned if I didn't have a Properties option of "Maximum dpi." I clicked on that, and got a brilliantly-colored picture of the hibiscus.

WhyTF didn't my Photoshop book include that in my first chapter? Stupid old printer can still come up with lovely pics, all I had to do was know how to tell it to do so.

Much cursing, for days.

Mostly at myself, for not figuring out what questions I needed to ask before I set off in search of answers. But who knew? The previous printer's Properties included "Print" and "Draft." That was all it needed to know in those days.

No, they weren't from the Stone Age.

Close.

But not.

PS. Consumer Reports says the HP8050 sucks a rat's ass, and is the second lowest printer it reviewed. So I guess I lucked out.