Since my old printer died a few months ago I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement. I ummed and ahhed for quite some time trying to work out what I wanted from a new device – eventually I decided that I wanted

• a colour printer
• integrated scanner
• ideally wireless printing & scanning
• cheap (<£100)

I’d almost given up on finding all these features in one device for the right price, then on Friday I spotted the HP Photosmart C4585 for £75 on the pc world website & decided it looked just the job.

Set up

Setting up the printer was surprisingly easy. Once the power was connected the printer displays easy to follow instructions for installing the ink cartridges on it’s screen.

Next I popped the set up DVD into my MacBook & followed the instructions. I was half expecting to experience pain trying to set the printer up with the Mac, but actually it was a doddle there’s a wizard that guides you through the whole process. Eventually it asks you to connect the the printer using the supplied USB cable; it asks you if you want to connect to a wireless network, if you answer yes the set up program displays the name of the network your computer is attached to and prompts to enter the network key and er, that’s it. Easy.

Note: When adding the printer under Print & Fax on your Mac OS X be sure to choose “HP Jetdirect – Socket” from the protocol drop down or you’ll get network device not ready errors when you try to print.

I thought it was a nice touch that HP provide a Mac OS desktop widget that shows you the printers ink levels.

Now that the printer was on the network it was very simple to set it up on the wife’s Windows XP rig. Again there’s a wizard to walk you through the set up, this time I told the software I wanted to install a network printer – it did a quick scan & found the printer. very, very easy.

Printing

If you buy a printer it’s a good idea to buy paper unless you’re sure you already have some. I wasn’t able to test the printing straight away. But when I did get to the shop and printed a documents I was very pleased with the text printing. I’ve also tried printing one photo (on photo paper) so far, I have to say I’m extremely impressed with the quality.

Scanning

Before setting up the printer / scanner I wasn’t entirely sure if the scanning function was goting to be available over Wifi, I was extremely pleased to find that it does. No more plugging in USB leads for me! The scan results seem very good, so far I’ve used it to upload embarrassing photos of my Sisters to Facebook.

Conclusion

I’ve only had this bit of kit for a couple of days, but at the moment I’d be more than happy to recommend it to anyone based on my limited experience.

For fiftytwo o-eight I’m planning to post a new photo each week to my flickr account. The hope is that this will encourage me to spend a bit more time on my photography this year and who knows maybe even improve my skills.

I’m not exactly thrilled with the first photo, and I had to bend my own rules a little to take it but I didn’t want the first week to pass without taking an posting something.

The plan for the rest of the year is that I’ll take a photo each week and post it by the Sunday evening.

This year (2008) is set to be a year of considerable change. If all goes to plan we should finally exchange contracts on our house move next week and move by the end of this month. Being in the new house will make life much easier as a good shops and the nursery will be within easy walking distance. It also means that Isla will (hopefully) get in to the school that we want her to attend when she starts in September.

Personally as well as spending time getting our new house up to scratch I’d like to try and get back to the gym. I also want to get back into my photography a bit more seriously. So for the next 52 weeks I am going to try and update my flickr account at least once a week with one or more good photos I’ve taken that week. We’ll see how I get on, I realise that this is not the most exciting challenge ever but I wanted to do something and felt that committing to one photo a day would frankly be unachievable.

I also plan to blog a bit more regularly and maybe even redesign this site, just don’t hold your breath.

Blogged with Flock

Isla was thrilled to bits with her camera, and actually she’s taken some pretty good photos (considering she’s just 3). I’ve put some of the photos she took up on flickr. The camera isn’t great in low light, so some of the photos are pretty under exposed but I think her composition is really good.

I think that this camera is a great introduction to photography for a small person and I’d recommend it to any parent who’s toddler is showing an interest in cameras.

Hopefully it’ll stop Isla running off with my phone to take pictures with it!

Microsoft have just launched Photosynth

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
• Send a collection – or a particular view of one – to a friend.

Photos are organised into collections, which are all taken in the same area. Browsing through the collections is an amazing and engaging experience, it’s an excellent time killer! So far there are only four collections to choose from but no doubt this will soon be added to.

The application only works in IE 6 or 7 which is hardly surprising, not good news for mac users though.

Photoshop Album has a number of features but the main thing I use it for is keeping my photos organised. You create your own “Tags” within PSA these are a short description that you apply to your photos. The tags can be anything you want, but PSA ships with a number of categories that the suggest you use for your tags, People and Places for example.

You can add multiple tags to your pictures and then search through your photos based on the tags you have added; so if I want to find all the photos of Laura and Isla together I click on the Laura and Isla tags and PSA displays all the photos of the two women in my life.

Having spent many hours adding tags to Photoshop Album I was keen not to loose that information when I moved my photos to my new network hard drive, so I set about finding a way to keep it, and better yet share the tags across the network.

First I copied the photos from my computer’s hard drive onto the network hard drive. I copied everything under “My Pictures” to “E:/Photos”.
The next thing to do was to find where PSA was storing the Catalogue, to do this open PSA and click on “help > system info” You should see this screen:

Note the location and name of the catalog. I copied the Catalog file and renamed the copy My Catalog.mdb. This allows you to edit the file with Microsoft Access.

Open the database and look for the table called “ImageTable”; do a find and replace on “fImageOriginalFilePath” and “fMediaFullPath” replace the files original location with the new location, e.g. Find “C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\My Documents\My Pictures” replace with “E:\photos”.

Close the database and change the extension back to .psa then copy your altered catalog onto the network drive. I copied mine to “E:\Adobe\PSA\”.

Next we need to change where PSA looks for it’s catalog. Click on the start button then “run” in the text box type “regedit” and press enter. The registry editor will open. Press F3 in the “Find what:” box type the old path to your catalog (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Album\Catalogs\).
Under “Look At” uncheck “keys” then click on find. The registry editor will find two or three entries with this value; when you find one double click on it and change the value to the new location of your .psa file. Press F3 to search again until all entries in the registry are replaced.

If you are planning to install PSA on more than one machine you will need to repeat the registry editing on each machine once you have installed PSA.

You can now open Photoshop Album, it will now be looking at the shared area on your network.

Note: This method does have limitations you will *probably* only be able to access PSA from one machine at a time.