Time For a New Printer

I don't think a home printer is necessary unless you are used to having one. Over a decade ago I bought a Samsung color laser printer. It worked for a few years and then the ink started bleeding all over the pages. I thought new toner cartridges would fix the issue and they did for about 5 pages. Then the bleeding started again. We have limped along with the printer for a few years but my wife decided it needed to be replaced.

I did not do a lot of research about what to replace the old printer with. Instead I did what a lot of other people do and selected it from Costco. I really just went to the store on our monthly trip and wandered over to the electronics section to see what printers they had in stock. When I asked my wife if we should pick one up, she wouldn't let me leave the section until we had one in our cart.

At Costco there are really only 2 selections: a color laser printer from HP or a color inkjet printer from Epson. Both are great printer companies and neither is a bad choice. My son has the inkjet printer and thinks it is great. My wife suggested it based on his recommendation as well as the significant price difference. Unfortunately for my needs, the inkjet wasn't going to cut it. I often print maps on waterproof paper and the instructions that came with the paper say it only works with laser printers. If you think about it, it makes sense. Laser printers melt little plastic beads onto the paper while inkjets spray liquid ink. Waterproof paper will not accept the ink and I imagine it makes quite the mess.

I hefted the 45 pound HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3301cdw into our cart which effectively limited what other purchases we could make that day. I still ended up with a $750 bill as the printer came in at $400 before tax. We brought the new toy home and let it sit in the living room for a couple of days. Eventually I summoned the strength to move it downstairs into my basement office.

The new HP printer does more than print. It is also a scanner, fax machine, and copier. The one machine allowed me to remove my 30-year old copier from my office as well as my scanner and old Samsung printer. I have no need for a fax anymore and threw my old one away more than a decade ago. I now have a lot more table space in my office, which is a good thing.

Setting up the printer went something like this: pull the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, plug in a network cable, set the date and time, open the printer app on any computer in the house, scan for new printers, and the printer could print. I didn't have to do anything special as it just worked. Today my wife needed to scan a document. Because the printer was set up, the scanner was too. She put the document in the sheet feeder on top and open the scan application on her laptop. Then she needed to select the "use sheet feeder" option to automatically suck the page into the scanner bed. It saved the document as a PDF file in her Pictures directory on her Mac.

The new printer installation took significantly less time than I thought it would. It works with all the computers in the house. For those that don't have network cables lying around, The printer also works on WiFi and has a touchscreen to help set that up.

Again, I don't think a home printer is necessary. But once you have had one, it is tough not to. My wife and I love the new HP and look forward to documents where the colors don't run together. 

Which Printer for College?

My previous posting talked about which computer is best to send to school with your college-aged kid. When I was done, I realized that I left out one very important peripheral: a printer.

When I was headed off to college back in 1986, you had a choice between dot-matrix or daisy-wheel printers. Nobody had a laser printer as they were just being created. As luck would have it, my Dad was doing advertising for a new laser-printer company and they couldn't afford to pay his fee and so they gave him four units. We were living in San Jose, California at the time and were able to trade a couple of them for new computers at a local high-tech swap meet. I was headed to school with a brand-new IBM PC and a laser printer. As far as I was concerned life was perfect.

I headed off to train at Mt. Hood with the college ski team while my family packed my car and drove it to Utah for my Freshman year. When I got done with a great week of skiing, I headed down to school and met my family. As I was unpacking my stuff with my Dad, he pulled out a brand-new dot-matrix printer. I asked him what happened to my laser printer and he told me he had traded it for a new x286 computer. It was twice as fast as his old PC and I would have to survive with the dot-matrix printer.

I was heart-broken. Sure the dot-matrix printer was what all the other kids were using if they were lucky enough to even have a computer and printer. However I really wanted that laser printer and still regret not having it. So when it came time to get my daughter a printer to go with her new MacBook, I looked at all the options. Today you basically have three types of printers to choose from:

1. Color inkjet
2. Black & white laser
3. Color laser

Color inkjet printers have gotten so cheap that they practically throw one in for free when you buy a new laptop. The quality is pretty good and you have the option of printing in color, not just black & white. The problem is that the cartridges don't hold much ink and they have an uncanny ability to run out during the middle of printing a rather long term-paper.

Black & white laser printers are not much more than the color inkjet printers. However they don't print in color. They do have a toner cartridge that lasts a lot longer though. My black & white laser printer that the kids have used for doing school papers goes about a year between cartridge changes. As for quality, there is not contest. The laser printer is significantly higher quality than the inkjet printers.

Finally there are color laser printers. At the time I was getting ready to send my daughter off to school, they were three to four times as expensive as the black & white laser printers. It was already starting to be a costly month and so I quickly dismissed the option.

In the end my wife and I decided that the black & white laser printer was the best option for our daughter. My wife found an inexpensive HP and purchased it at a local office-supply store. I probably should have been there to help decide on the purchase as the printer only worked with Windows. The night before my daughter was headed off to school, I was stuck trying to figure out how to make a Windows-only printer work with a Mac.

The internet is a wonderful tool and I was able to find help from someone else who had gone through the same pain. We had to download a driver to the computer and another program for the printer. When my daughter turns on the laser printer, she has to download a program from her computer to the printer but then she is able to print.

Now after two years of essays and papers the laser printer is still going strong. Furthermore, several of her roommates have had to rely on her printer late at night when their inkjets have failed or run out of ink. One problem that inkjets have is that the ink can harden and clog the jets. Cleaning the jets at 3am when your paper is due at 8am can turn a sleep-deprived-college coed into a raving lunatic.

So far my daughter and I are happy with the choice of a laser printer for college. If I had the money I would have prefered to send her to school with a color-laser printer so she could produce those stand-above-the-rest papers. However we chose something that was a good value, has worked and continues to work. As for her toner cartridge, the original one is still being used but she has a spare for when the time comes to replace it. Toner cartridges make great Christmas gifts, in case you are interested.