Last August I moved from Ohio to Massachusetts. Jan & I planned on taking about 3 weeks for the trip so we could get in some sightseeing photo time on the way. For the trip I packed my computer tower, 3 DSLR's and about 8 lenses plus an assortment of other odds & end. The remainder of my equipment was packed and shipped with an anticipated delivery date of 4 to 6 week. For my photo business I usually deliver the end item in digital format on a memory card or I have prints made through Adorama but I did need a new monitor for my computer so about a day after arriving in Massachusetts Jan and I went to Staples and got a nice flat screen(I had been using one of the old desktop boat anchors..LOL). Jan is just a beginner at photography and she said she wanter to get a photo printer for her computer, so we looked around to see what our options were. One a display in the isle they had the Kodak ESP 7250 All-in-one on sale. Normal list for the wireless model $129 and the hard wire model $99 less 25% for the next 2 days. I didn't know a thing about Kodak printers but in my mind it had three things going for it. 1.It was the cheapest printer in the store, 2. It is advertised at using the cheapest ink, 3. Would Kodak put their name on a photo printer that doesn't do a descent job of printing photos? When I got it home rather than mess with a detailed Wifi setup I just plugged in a USB cable from the printer to my router. Inserted the setup disc and sat back. Within moments I was watching a setup video that said it was all set up and went on to explain the features. Two paper trays. The top tray will handle up to 5x7 photo paper or business envenlopes and the bottom tray handles up to 8.5x11 legal size bond or photo paper. When your printing photos it will ask you which size you want and select the paper automatically. I had a pack of 8x10 generic photo paper so I loaded a sheet, went to my pictures and pulled up a photo then hit print. A couple clicks as it loaded the paper then it went silent. "What is wrong" I thought? About 10 to 15 seconds later I got my answer. nothing wrong, it just prints so quiet you can't hear it running till the finished print pops out. I then checked the print, and to say I was not happy would be an understatement. I can only eplain it in one word...trash. The print had way too much ink, was still wet and actually smeared when I touched it then the thought hit me, those are new ink catridges and usually you have to run a test print to set up the print heads. I checked the book, and sure enough, there is an easy test print to run, but I found something even more interesting. You only need to run the test print if you use non-Kodak photo paper. So here is the catch I thought. All genuine Kodak photopaper has a bar code printed on the back of the paper that tells the printers processor how to set the print head for that piece of paper. This means you can easily switch from gloss to semi-gloss or matt without changing the setup, but how much does genuine Kodak paper cost? To my complete surprise, while Kodak Paper is a bit high in Staples, at WalMart it is the same or cheaper than HP photo paper. When I began running prints on genuine Kodak paper I could not believe my eyes. The prints look better than those that we had printed at Walmarts 1hr service. To get a good test of the prints I selected 6 photos and put them on a memory card, then I printed them on this machine. I then took the memory card to 4 different 1hr photo service places around town and had them printed again, being careful to mark the back of the photos to know where they were printed. I then took all the photos to the photoclub meeting at our senior center and spread them on a table and asked everyone to select which they thought looked the best. Over 90% of the people who participated selected the prints from this printer. The printer also has built in memory card readers so it can be used as a stand alone printer, and the Wifi model will work directly from Ipods & Cell phones. Would I recommend this printer? Absolutely YES. in fact since I bought this one over half the people in our photo club have also bought one. I primarily use 4x6 paper, which is $7.00 per 100sheet for brilliant glossy white at Walmart. I have not priced the ink at Walmart but at Staples the ink is $19.89 for the color and $9.98 for the Black, but staples also gives a $2 rebate for any used cartridge you turn in. (Up to 10 empties per month). I just found a website this morning for cheaper ink cartridges for almost all printers. Thru the site I can get color cartidges for this printer for $9.98 www.inkjetSuperstore.com

I've never had any problem with tile but would not use on wood. I moved into a house once where the finish on the wood floor in front of the sink had been damaged by a rug. I currently have some rubber backed rugs on the vinyl flooring in my laundry/back entry but it's not a color that you'd ever notice discoloring plus it will always have some kind of rug there. I always get the thicker area rug type rugs that have the woven back for places that I don't want rubber backing. I don't care for the thinner rugs with no backing because they don't stay flat and are a tripping hazard. I get a color that doesn't show every little thing and get them professionally cleaned once in a while.

I upload my from the camera to the hard drive, save them in my pictures by date, as in 03-27-08. By using the 0 in front of a single digit month, it keeps it in the correct order, datewise. If you just type in 3-17-08, when you get to October, which reads 10-17-08, it will put October first in the order saved. I delete the really bad ones, or ones I know I don't want even if they aren't good. I about killed DH one day. He decided to go thru and delete some of the bad pics we had from something, after I had saved what I wanted. Before I had them backed up, as in the next day! I had purposely kept some of the blurry ones, as they were the only ones I had of that particular shot. And I had a use for them. He deleted them. He won't do it again!!!!! I keep them backed up, but unless it's a huge video file, like our trip to Vermont 2 weeks ago when he took video with the camera, I'll leave them on the computer for the whole year, then do another back up of them on a DVD and then I will go thru and delete the ones I don't want to store on the hard drive to show someone when we travel. The video DH took on our trip I will save to DVD and delete, because it takes up so much space. I print all I want printed at home. I have a photo quality printer, and only use the ink for that printer, no refills for priniting pics!!! I don't want to spend that kind of money, even at Walmart to have them all printed, and no where to store them if I did. If there is something I want to give mom & dad, I print my own. I can see all the rest any time I want to by opening that file on the computer, and do so quite often. Tami...whos camera has died, and has to be sent back.

I already subscribe to Amazon Prime (although I think there are changes to their policies that I don't like). One of the things I really dislike about Snapfish is the difficulty with sharing photos. Photobucket or Tinypics are good for that. I use them for pictures I really don't want to keep. My son keeps telling me to get an external hard drive. Right now I save my documents to Google Drive so I am not at the mercy of a dying hard drive. Oh man, life used to be so much simpler.