The beauty of digital scrapbooking is that you can keep your memories in electronic format. But what if you want something to leave on the coffee table for friends and family to view and scrolling through a laptop just won’t cut it? What if you want to carry something around but you don’t want to put it on an iPAQ or other handheld computer? Then you just print out your pages. After you’ve printed out your layouts, you can even add real ribbons, brads, found items and multiple paper layers to your digital layouts.
Most personal printers, however, are not using archival quality inks and the printed colors degrade rather quickly. Also important: the standard scrapbook paper size is 12″x12″ and most printers will not accommodate that.
Epson claims that its line of printers such as the PictureMate Personal Photo Lab and Stylus Photo R1800 will-when using genuine Epson inks-produce archival quality photos and 12″x12″ scrapbook pages. Looks like the Stylus Photo R1800 runs about five hundred dollars (check bizrate.com or your favorite shopping comparison site). The replacement cartridges aren’t any more than any other ink jet printers’ replacement cartridges-but there are eight of them. In order to provide photo-quality, the printer uses five color cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, red and blue inks. The other three cartridges are photo black, matte black and a clear gloss-optimizer “ink”.
So are the claims for real? Well, the fine print says that “prints can last up to 200 years when stored in archival album/dark storage conditions. See wilhelm-research.com for test details.” Hmm.