My Epson 4800 was due to arrive today. Apparently an error was made at Epson's warehouse in Sydney and it only left today.

The store in Melbourne has offered to deliver it to my house on Monday - a very nice gesture on their part, but did they realize we live in country Victoria?!

Given how poorly Epson has performed historically with new product shipments I won't believe the 4800 has truly shipped until I see it myself.

I've owned an Epson Stylus Photo 2100 since late July 2002 - one of the very first to be shipped in Australia. It's been a great printer overall, and has paid for itself many times over. It's never missed a beat - kudos to Epson.

The performance of the 2100 hasn't been all good though. It didn't take long to arrive at the conclusion that printing on anything other than matte paper had its problems, most notably bronzing and metamerism, and despite the hype it never really cut it when it came to _great_ black and white prints.

So for close to three years I've been happily churning out prints for sale on the 2100 in a range of sizes up to A3+ on matte papers, with the occassional panorama on 13" roll.

I've always wanted the freedom to print larger (but not huge), print on non-matte papers, print saleable black and white. I looked at the 4000 when it was released, but didn't do it for me. Size-wise it was on the money, but it didn't really address any of the issues I had with the 2100.

Enter the 4800. Maybe I'll live to regret jumping on the bandwagon early, but I'm hoping and expect that Epson have done their homework and the 4800 will deliver on all fronts for me, much like the 2100 did overall - remembering it really was close to three years ago when it was released...