Why We Love Our New Printer.

1. Custom sizes? Yes, please!

We're trying to make this DIY/T invitation process as easy as possible, and that means I don't want to sit with a paper cutter and painstakingly cut 5 x 7 rectangles out of 8.5 x 11 sheets. It's not how I want to spend my time, we don't have space in our little apartment for a paper cutter that we'll only use for the wedding, and there's really no need when you have an Epson Artison 810 printer! We don't have 5 x 7 card stock yet but we did have a few sheets of 4 x 6 photo paper that Epson kindly included with the printer. We test printed our invite on that and it was very simple. We didn't even need to print more than one sheet to get it right. The printer is made to print on 3.5 x 5, 4 x 6, 5 x 7 and 8.5 x 11 paper, as well as whatever custom size you set up. Instead of having to fiddle around with the manual tray to figure out how to position the paper, we simply placed the sheet on the section of the tray designated for it. SO EASY. We're going to order paper in the sizes we need, which I'll write more about in another post.

2. Border-less Printing

The key to printing invites on your home printer is border-less printing. If your invitation or whatever you're printing has white around the border anyway, this isn't important. Our invite has a graphic around the border so we want it to print directly to the edge of the page, like a professionally-printed invitation would. This printer has a setting for border-less printing so it won't take any extra effort on our part.

3. Color Me Happy

This printer is meant for printing high-quality photos so our cran-lemon invites will be perfectly vibrant. You can even tell the printer what color quality you want, and it will use more or less ink depending what you choose. Our test-print on the photo paper looked so pretty; I'm almost sad the real thing won't be on similarly glossy paper. I wish I could show you, but I'm keeping our design under wraps until after we mail our finished invitations to our guests.

If you're looking for a new color printer to print invitations, pictures or other projects, you should look into the Epson Artison 810, which we purchased on Amazon for just $200. It's been easy to use so far, and I think our invites will turn out great. It has other features like scanning, photocopying, double-sided printing and it even prints on CDs. We haven't tried every feature yet but I'm sure we will soon. In terms of our invites, all we have left to do before we start printing is decide on paper and stock up on extra ink.

Anyone else printing their invites themselves? Let me know how it's going and if you have any tips or advice, let me know!

(Epson has no idea that I've written this post...I just like our printer and wanted to share my review with you!)