So, Angela has a new iBook and I am (still) on Windows XP. Oh, and there’s my Linux box as well. We’re all still using my 5 year old HP Deskjet 1220c, a very reliable printer that is getting a little long in the tooth. I would keep right on using it, but this past weekend at Costco, we were looking for inkjet cartridges. They had the black cartridge priced at $30 and $53 for a high capacity color cartridge! Those things are good for less than 1000 pages, by HP’s description. I fear I can no longer afford my trusty old large format printer. I’ll keep it around for printing 11”x17” engineering drawings, but I need a new day-to-day printer.
I figure 90% or more of our printer needs are for 8.5”x11”, grayscale, mostly text documents. This leads me to the new generation of cheaper Laser printers. With toner cartridges roughly the price of a couple of black inkjet cartridges, this seems economical. I’ve never been sold on the page-per-minute speeds of any printer. Mostly, I am just printer one or two pages, so waiting for a Laser to warm up can be a bit tortuous. That was always a great feature of the 1220c. It could beat just about any Laser for small print jobs. Quality suffered, though. Lasers tend to be more consistent in their quality, in my opinion.
Lastly, a pal recently got an Inkjet with on-board WiFi. Now that’s a way to network a printer! I have a Centrex-network print server for the 1220c, and it always felt like a patch-work solution. You loose a lot of functionality with a print server like that. Having the print server on-board helps to restore all that, and over multiple operation systems.
Note that the toner prices below are for Staples, as it’s the office supply store about 5 blocks from my house.
