By Scott Kramer

People love digital photography. But when they want to print out photos at home, they are generally restricted to print sizes of 8.5” x 11”. After all, that’s the largest print size most everyday inkjet printers can handle. Until now.

 Epson’s new Expression Photo HD XP-15000 wide-format color printer ($350) lets you print images up to 13” x 19”. Saving you the math, that’s well over twice the size of an ordinary 8.5” x 11” sheet. As a result, your photos look relatively poster-size. I’ve been trying it out for over a month, and have made many large-format prints. Some I plan on framing. That’s because the Epson’s color range is brilliant, while the blacks are deep, and rich. The Epson even prints borderless photos, using six color cartridges of the company’s new Claria Photo HD inks — including all-new Red and Gray inks. I can’t get over how realistic and natural the skin tones are on portraits.

Of course, you don’t need to always max out the print size. There are many size options to choose from. A large, 50-sheet rear specialty media tray eases the process of special printing projects, even on cardstock or smaller photo sheets. You can even print directly on blank DVD discs or envelopes. In addition, auto two-sided printing, a 200-sheet front tray and wireless connectivity allow for easy document printing. Within minutes of setting up the printer, I was printing from an Android phone, Chromebook, iPad and Windows laptop. Never a stutter. Epson also has a free printing app for smartphones and tablets that works seamlessly with this printer. And the nice thing is, the physical footprint of the 18.7-pound machine itself is roughly the same size as most standard-size printers — so it easily fits on most desks.

Printing at the largest size, in the best quality mode, was also fairly quick. I didn’t time them, but all of the prints at that size took maybe a minute. Epson claims print documents emerge at 9.2 ISO ppm (black) and 9.0 ISO ppm (color), and 4″ x 6″ borderless photos come out in as fast as 27 seconds in draft mode. And the machine is relatively quiet all along the way.

The printer’s command center is an intuitive, clear, easy-to-navigate 2.4-inch color LCD screen that’s housed in a convenient swivel-up panel. It’s a much better interface than I’ve seen on competitor devices.

Before I came across this printer, I had been enhancing my garage man cave walls with sports photography. But to get larger-sized images, I was using the website blockposters.com — where you can take any image and print it off huge using however many sheets of paper you need. Thus, I was making posters several feet long for the walls, via the website. But of course after printing off each panel of the photo, I had to tape them together from the back so that all the edges lined up. Now with the Epson printer, I have a much more convenient, reasonable and better-looking solution.

To be honest, since getting a taste of printing larger photos like this, it will be hard returning to my conventional desktop printer.

 

Scott Kramer is veteran, Southern California-based writer primarily versed in golf and personal technology. Studying Computer Sciences in college, and then working as a programmer/software engineer for about a decade, triggered my passion for today’s high-end, high-tech gadgets. I can’t help myself whenever I see any kind of cool new personal technology. I feel compelled to further check it out and see what it’s all about. And even if I have no use for it personally, I’m always thinking who it might best suit. There are exciting new innovations emerging daily that are shaping the future and simplifying life. And I hope to be your eyes to that world, through the words of this column.

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