First irritation was not the fault of the printer but rather Best Buy. I also purchased a ($75!!!) complete set of replacement ink for the printer - it comes with some in the box of course but as we all know, a good amount of that gets used up during setup. Well, the box they handed me was quite clearly crushed, but the guy assured me the contents were fine. I took his word for it and left. Arriving home to find the box was open, and one the cartridges was gone.
Now, I'm not going to blame the Best Buy employees for this. It was fucking Black Friday today. I waited in line for about 15 minutes to get up to the counter. There were fire alarms sporadically going off for no perceivable reason. It was chaotic. I can imagine an overworked employee seeing the pickup order come through, scrambling across the sales floor to find that printer and the ink, seeing the last remaining box of inks has been clearly crushed, and not bothering to check the contents, just grabbing it and hurrying back to mark the order as ready to pickup so they can get back to the 300 other things they need to do. I'm not mad at them. Or whoever potentially stole one of the cartridges, or just as likely any employee who - not knowig the box was open - didn't notice a cartridge falling out of it. Again, not mad at them for that.
But that single cartridge was like $20 or something. And this is one of those printers that will not print unless all cartridges are present and inked. After waiting like 30 minutes on hold (again, Black Friday), a customer support guy said I had to wait 1 business day to get a replacement, and to call back tomorrow evening with a case number he gave me. Hope that goes well - he seemed like he wanted to help and I did my best to let him know I appreciated his help, I know those poor call center people get chewed out by angry people all the time. Hopefully they can just get me one of those cartridges in its individual packaging, or if I'm lucky give me a whole other complete set (unlikely). Worst case scenario I'll ask for a partial refund in the exact amount of one of those individual cartridges + sales tax and just buy it myself, lol.
Anyways wasn't this post supposed to be about the printer. Oh yeah.
It's tiny! Positively small! Setup was a (relative) breeze, all the test patterns it kept spitting out were kinda difficult to pick out, but I think I got it calibrated as well as a $130 printer could hope to be. It printed 3 photos just fine.
It's a very bizarre contraption in some ways - the LCD lifts or lowers flush with the front of its own accord to indicate power status. Flush with the body means powered off, and when you press the power button it rises up as if waking from a sleep - a strange amount of anthropomorphization for a printer. Similarly, the output tray is entirely motorized - it ejects slowly when you print something, and has to be retracted by the press of a button on the LCD.
There are two paper trays - uncommon for a printer as petite as this - one for most sizes, and one smaller tray meant to be used solely with small things, like photo paper or envelopes. This unfortunately means both trays don't hold a ton of paper, and loading that paper is rather awkward - instead of plopping down a stack of copy paper, I had to first set the guides and then slide the stack in from the back so it fit comfortably within all the guides. I believe all of these oddities are in the name of smallness? Which is odd since I don't think this printer really sells itself on its size, but maybe that's just been a general trend in the home printer market.
Print quality is excellent from what I've seen so far (three glossy photo tests), the UI is simple and not irritating. The ink cartridges are positively tiny, but besides that first set of OEM stuff I bought for the hell of it, I do intend to purchase remanufactured stuff in the future - and I've got 4 years of insurance on this machine, so if that causes problems, it won't be a massive deal. It also cost $130. Not the end of the world.
The motorized output tray is also just... peculiar? It doesn't quite fit a letter sized sheet on it, the page kinda hangs off either side. Smaller photos rest comfortably on it though. Again, in the name of compactness, I suppose, and you wouldn't be printing hefty manuacripts on this thing in one go anyways with the thin paper tray, but just a peculiar thing that suggests heavily to the user this is a photo printer that coincidentally does normal document printing as a side gig. And anyways, I work at a UPS Store, my serious document printing needs can be serviced for free by our massive laserjets over there.
Oh! And it also has a rear page feeder! Which is super useful for photo or cardstock printing - since they don't have to be pulled and rolled over a tight point, they print a lot more smoothly and have fewer surface blemishes. So that's another nice bonus.
And did I mention it can print onto discs, like inkjet printable CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays? Because it can do that, too. I will totally make use of that someday. Considering I just bought a $75 stack of branded BD-R DLs, it might be a while before I do, but I will make use of it! (It even allows copying of disc labels, if you place a disc label-down on the scanbed and line it up right, the printer can directly copy that label onto your printable disc! Which seems... almost exclusively geared towards piracy, although there may be "legal" use cases like copying homemade DVD-Rs for which you've lost the source files for the label)