26 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Has this ever happened to you?

Printers can be cantankerous contraptions, fickle and unreliable. Even worse, they can be aggressive, like this one that spits toner:

Even worse, some have been known to attack and EAT people!

But humanity will not accept being taunted and disrespected by lazy, insolent machines!

It’s been one page jam, one faint and smudgy page, and one “what the heck does this error me” too many! Even mild-mannered professionals have been pushed over the edge:

We’ll do whatever it takes to put these machines in their place. Even if that means using fire:

Or high-caliber weapons:

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18 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Two months ago, my wife came to me with an interesting complaint about our home printer. It seems that she often needs to print “handouts” for our 4H club meetings, and these handouts are often used at the club’s ranch. Unfortunately, there are young kids–and sometimes damp hands–involved, which ultimately led to smudged ink and unreadable handouts.

So, the challenge she tossed in my lap was to find a way to print handouts that wouldn’t smudge.

Our printer, an HP Photosmart 3210 inkjet printer has been a real workhorse for us, and I’m generally very happy with it. We have it on a wired network connection, and it’s shared between the three computers we have in the house. It’s mostly used for “general” printing, but we also occasionally print photos on it.

Thinking that the smudging might be related to the ink or paper, I set out to investigate. Of course, there are few choices on ink; you either go with the OEM HP02 print cartridge family from HP, or find compatible ink cartridges. I just decided that it wasn’t worth investing in a complete set of compatible print cartridges at this point, and I assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the HP ink was probably as good as you could get, if more expensive than compatibles.

As for the paper, we were using an inexpensive office superstore “house brand” paper for our everyday printing. I knew that paper quality could have an impact on the print quality, and thought it might also contribute to the “smudgeability” of the printed output. After spending about an hour in the paper aisle of our local Office Depot, I bought a ream of the HP Bright White Inkjet paper. It advertised “HP ColorLok” technology which supposedly offers “brighter colors”, “bolder blacks” and (the real winner for me) “Up to 3 times faster drying inks for less smearing.”

We put this paper in the printer and printed a few test documents. Then it was off to the sink to dampen hands and handle the paper. The result? Handouts that still smudge…maybe not quite as easily, but still smudging.

I basically arrived at the conclusion that we weren’t going to find an ink/paper combination for an inkjet that would pass the smudge test. So, what to do?

Many of you may have already jumped to the next conclusion I drew—that inkjet technology is not really the best for this purpose, and that I should look at a laser printer instead. So, it was off to the Internet to research laser printers.

Our needs, in addition to being able to pass the smudge test, were to get a printer that:

• Was networkable, preferably with built-in wireless networking
• Was “affordable”, meaning that I wanted to pay less than $150 for it
• Was physically small, as I wanted to put it on a cabinet in our family room and still leave room for other things
• Was reliable and easy to operate
• Was “print only”—we didn’t need faxing, copying or scanning on this printer
• Had a sleep mode to conserve power when it wasn’t printing

Of course, I had to tell my wife that she’d be limited to black and white printing. The prices of color laser printers with the features we wanted were way north of $250, so I just ruled them out.

After looking at many options, from HP, Brother and Samsung, I settled on the Brother HL-2170W and bought it through one of Printer.com’s affiliate partners, PC Connection. The list price of the printer was $129.99, but I bought it in March when a $30 rebate was offered, so the out-the-door price to me was $99.99.

It’s “print only”, has built in WiFi networking and is only 14.2 x 6.7 x 14.5 inches in size, perfect for sitting on the family room cabinet. There’s a power plug right behind where I put the printer, so I just plugged it in, set it in place, configured the WiFi networking, installed drivers and we were ready to print! I must admit that the front panel controls (one button and three status lights) are pretty simple, and the driver installation went very smoothly. Also, it has a sleep mode, and just sits there quietly with its comforting blue status light on when not in use.

Of course, one of the first things we did was the smudge test. The results? Even with almost waterlogged paper, there was no smudging seen! Since then, my wife has happily printed many 4H handouts, and all remain readable.

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11 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Is there paper in your future? We’ve often turned to the world of science fiction to tell us what we can expect in the world of tomorrow. From Jules Verne’s submarine voyages beneath the North Pole to Arthur C. Clarke’s geostationary communications satellites, the creators of science fiction have been giving us peeks at the wonders of futuristic technology. So let’s take a spin in the sci-fi time machine and sample some printers of the far distant future.

Babylon 5
Print is clearly alive and well in the Babylon 5 universe. Somehow, newspapers survived the online assault and the readers of tomorrow still suffer ink-stained fingers as they peruse the sports page. Readers of the Earth-based “Universe Today” feed the previous day’s copy into a recycling slot, where the paper is reused to print today’s paper, with the sections personalized for your interests. Unfortunately, looking at the first few minutes of this clip from second season episode, “Divided Loyalties,” it seems toner cartridges still need the occasional shake to keep the print quality even.

Dr. Who
The Time Lords of Gallifrey, of course, don’t worry about such things. Their psychic paper makes you see printing that’s not even there, saving their civilization billions in ink costs. Even better, psychic paper shows you what you want to see, making everyone far happier and more mellow. Unfortunately, this may have lead to the destruction of their civilization since the psychic paper probably never told them, “Hey, the Daleks are coming to KILL YOU ALL!!!”

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

The Babylon 5 folks have it easy compared to the humans in the latest iteration of Battlestar Galactica. The printers on board the human vessels have joined forces with the Cylons as something of a fifth column. With the corners carefully snipped off, every page of paper has eight rather than the normal four sides, increasing the number of razor-sharp edges. Was it an outbreak of painful, stinging papercuts that led to Starbuck’s mysterious disappearance at the end of the show? Only the printers know for sure…

Firefly
Not to be outdone are the sinisterly secretive paper products of Firefly. Who can forget River Tam’s one-woman war against Blue Sun can wrappers and food packaging in the episode “Shindig”:

There it is, there it is. It’s always there if you look for it. Everybody sees and nobody sees it… These are the ones that take you! Little ones in the corner that you almost don’t see. But they’re the ones that reach in and do it. They’re the ones with teeth and you have to smash them! A million things, and the hands go everywhere and when you brush your teeth all the little blue things are there but no one says it because, because sometimes they’re afraid. And then they come… The hands go everywhere. Two by two, hands of blue.

Just what is the link between the sinister Blue Hands and the paper packaging of Blue Sun food products? And why does River hate them so much? Was the threat of paper cuts used to keep the children at the mysterious academy in line? Or is there something far more sinister going on?

Star Trek
When creating Star Trek, however, Gene Roddenberry imagined a kinder utopian future. One of the hallmarks of this more perfect tomorrow is the complete lack of paper products. Yes, the Enterprise is a paperless starship. Even in the relatively low-tech original series, Captain Kirk set stylus to a paper-free data pad and information was stored on brightly colored microtapes. Which was a good thing. We can only imagine how a papercut incident might have played out on the Enterprise :

You’re dripping your cursed green blood all over my sickbay. Damn it, Spock, I’m a doctor not a… Oh, right. I’ll see if I have any bandaids…

But fear not… Captain Picard boldly goes where many have gotten papercuts before as evidenced by his treasured collection of books. Truly, only the bravest of starship captains would dare to employ such ancient and dangerous technology.

Photo credits: dalangalma, free-ers, thegreatgeekmanual, rojer.

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04 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

The web’s gone 2.0, your floppy drive has been replaced with a DVD burner, and your monitor has gone from a big clunky box to svelte elegance. But what about your printer? What new tricks can we expect from that old dog in the near future? While the business of staining paper with meaningful symbols and art is thousands of years old, there are still some neat new ideas brewing for our future.

Among the companies imagining what that future might look like is Hewlett-Packard. Vyomesh Joshi, head of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, recently gave a few hints as to where that company is headed. It’s less radically transforming printers themselves and more about giving you new and more compelling reasons to use them. “We don’t want to be thinking about a printer attached to a PC as the opportunity,” he said. Instead, HP is focusing more on how you use that printer.

In alliance with social media sites, HP wants to give you a one-button solution to do fun things with your printer, such as print out your friends’ pictures, or create posters or books without having to cut-and-paste or launch additional programs. Taking your social media experience out into the non-digital world seems like a winning idea, but only time can tell if it will catch on.

And speaking of books, book seller Blackwell brings us the Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds books at the blazing speed of 105 pages per minute. This means it can print out most paperbacks in less than five minutes. The Espresso Book Machine is an industrial-sized printer, so you won’t be plopping it on your desk anytime soon. The idea is that people looking for out-of-print or hard to find books can order it at the machine and pick it up a few minutes later. Writers can also bring their own work on a CD and have it turned into a professionally bound paperback. Blackwell reports that the cost of these books will be about the same as if they were in stock.

While the Espresso Book Machine takes advantage of some cutting-edge technology, the emphasis again is clearly on taking printing beyond single-sided loose pages of text. The two-pronged strategy aims to give you more compelling reasons to create physical artifacts from your digital life while at the same time making it easier to do. If these forward-thinking companies are correct, the Digital Age won’t kill print, but co opt it, turning the printed page into a bridge between the physical world and our online lives.

Photo credit: Mess of Pottage

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