I'm on it twice--once in our family photo and once from my trip to Washington, DC. It has pictures from my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary, my dad's job, and our bicycling trip. What is it? It's our '94 Christmas Card, which we sent to over a hundred friends and relatives this holiday season. We made it at home with commercial software and printed out all the copies on our brand new HP 560C printer.

Our Christmas card is in full color--bright and vibrant. The images are sharp and clear; you can see details as fine as the light bouncing off people's pupils. Sending eight photographs to a hundred people would be prohibitively expensive, but with a color printer you can produce as many images as you want and combine themwith text, patterns, or other decorations to make personalized cards, letters, and posters designed to your own personal whims (and, don't tell your relatives, but it's actually much less work than writing out things by hand).

The HP printer is the best I've ever used. It was easy to set up and worked right out of the box. It uses a black cartridge for text and prints about four pages a minute. I think that the text quality compares favorably with a laser printer. When you want to use color, a separate three color cartridge does the job. However, the printer automatically chooses which cartridge to use so you don't have to switch artridges. Color is a bit slower so it took us a while to print all those Christmas cards but it was well worth the wait.