An embarrassingly long time ago, we had a trip to the very lovely Maggie and Rose in Kensington to meet with HP and learn all about printers.
It was a lovely day out. There was fabulous (marvellously instagrammable) food. And lots of tech toys – it was hard to pry the kids off the large touch screen computer, particularly the keyboard game.
But pry them off I did, so that we could pretend to be printers, via some target practice, and dotty drawing, among other activities.
(There are more shots from the event on instagram via the tag HPInstantInk
The point of the day, other than to have fun, was to introduce us to the HP Instant Ink service and HP e-Print. This is where your intelligent HP printer, hooked up to the internet, monitors its own ink levels and orders ink to arrive before you run out, and you can print to that same intelligent printer wirelessly from your phone. (More details on the different subscriptions levels and so on on the HP Instank Ink website here We all take hundreds of pics these days, but if you’re anything like me, they stay on your phone (and twitter, and facebook, and instagram ;)) but they’re never actually in your house.
All that has changed here now.
Our challenge was to #FreeYourPics and update the fridge with pictures of the family now.
Turned out there were 0 photos on our fridge before this. A lot of magnets, but no pictures.
So armed with a bunch of props from the goodie bag, a huge gallery of pictures from my phone, and a HP Envy printer (sleek, shiny, wifi enabled!) we got going.
(Props including
HP Instant Ink and HP ENVY printer – to free your pics from your mobile, at little cost and never worrying about running out of ink
Magnetic Polaroid Frames – to frame the printed images on the fridge
Sharpie Fine Point Pen – to personalise the Polaroid frame with the occasion i.e. Fun in the sun!
Magnetic Note Holders – to be used to hold images on the fridge, as well notes which could provide further detail on the selected images
Magnetic Letters – to allow for more creativity and personalisation
HP fridge magnets)
Regular readers of the blog will probably recognise some of the pictures. We do love our beach trips, and had to get at least one Christmas shot in there. It was quite hard though balancing it out, it seems I take a lot more pictures of the younger children than the older children (probably down to physically being in the same location as the younger children more of the time – we won’t say it’s because they’re cuter 😉 ) and Tim is hardly ever seen by camera. All of these points were noted and will be rectified.
The only difficulty I had in printing was that one of the pictures insisted on being the opposite way around to how I put the paper in. And I tried and tried to crop it down, but the phone app fought back. If all you want to do is print the exact picture though, you’re laughing, it is *so* easy. (Do remember to swap to photo paper though. Doh.)
And finally, the work in progress fridge.
Isn’t that better? It makes me happy. And we keep adding pictures, so it’s a living gallery, which pleases me. And the other thing, the little letters make Smallest very happy, and she’s forever doing different decorations with them. So yesterday I found this, which made me smile.
If you’ve got about a billion pictures on your phone that no one else ever gets to see, you might want to consider this kind of solution. The HP Envy 5530 that we’re using retails at around £60 (eg at Amazon
affiliate link) and the HP Instant Ink subscription packages start at £1.99 a month for 50 pages, although we’re on the moderate plan which is £3.49 for 300 pages. That’s a lot of pictures, educational printouts, maps and colouring sheets 😉 Then you too could have a beautifully decorated fridge that makes you smile every time you pass it, like mine does for me.
Disclosure – we were supplied with a HP Envy 5530 printer, Instant ink package and the goodies pictured above for the purposes of review. I have received no further recompense, all opinions and pictures are mine.
Linked up with Tried and Tested
Leave a Reply