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.