Canon PIXMA Pro

Hey, don't get me wrong, I had an old LaserJet IIp back a couple decades ago and loved it dearly for the unstoppable, if often very picky and difficult, battleship that it was. I wouldn't have it back these days, though. A LaserJet M203dw serves the same role in my current fleet, with vastly higher output quality and input flexibility, and vastly lower environment and consumable requirements; I've lost count of the book blocks I've used it to produce, and the next time it lets me down will be the first. Meanwhile, the "finicky thoroughbred" role in my current fleet is filled by a Canon Pixma Pro 100, which takes eight easily refillable ink tanks and is extremely particular about which laptops it wants to be friends with. This is tolerable in a machine that produces gallery-quality 13x19 prints on demand, at incremental cost basically only of paper. For a document laser, it's been a long time since anything other than total imperturbability has been a reasonable expectation.

What really rebooted my photography is buying a high quality (well not even all that high, a used Pixma Pro 200) photo printer. There is something special about holding pictures printed on quality paper. They make great gifts (well if they are good!) They look different than on a screen. I print (good) iphone photos without any retouching or correcting on photo 4x6 and they look great! Doing this without fiddling in lightroom is the closest I've gotten to the experience of film photography but with digital.