Monday, January 21, 2008

Dead Cartridges For the Last TIme

Dead ink cartridges again. I went to print a page on my Lexmark Ink jet printer and the ink cartridges were dried up. I think I got 25 pages out of these but 20 of them were clean the head pages. So what's a guy to do? Why rant grumble and complain of course. Which I did. The dogs ignored me but Ellen started looking through the flyers. Staples has nothing on for ink cartridges (how is anyone ever going to do their Christmas Thank-you cards?) But they had a Color Laser on for $170. This weekend only.

Well off to the Staples Office Supplies store I go to get a new set of cartridges (and yes I need both). They are $79. About 3 bucks per page not counting paper. It's my own darn fault because I don't print that much at home and if you don't the darn ink just dries up. And in the winter in Canada with the relative humidity hovering around 0% those cartridges just do not last. While I am there I decided to check out the laser. And what it came down to was that for the cost of 2 sets of cartridges I could get a Color Laser. Even with the starter toners I should be able to get 500+ pages. And the toner likes to stay dry. So I broke down and bought it.

Now I know I won't be able to print pictures on it (yet). But I can still edit the pictures I want the way that I want and then fire them over to Wally Mart to get them printed for 20 cents each which is cheap. And I read about photo paper that works in a laser that will soon be coming to an Office Depot near you. So the Laser was a good idea.

It is a Samsung CLP300. According to the stickers the smallest color laser in the world. According to the manual a small printer with big printer capabilities. Full color or black and white, poster printing (it prints your picture /poster over several pages then you glue them together a nice to have) double sided printing, Booklet printing, all kinds of things. I can even configure it as a network printer so I would be able to run it over the wireless net without having my desktop computer running should I decide to do that. It kind of reminds me of a little dog that thinks that it is a German Shepherd. A small package with big features.

I played with it for part of Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon and I like it. Yeah it's just a printer but in this case at least I think I got my money's worth. We will see over time how well it works but for now I am a happy camper. I'm going to give it a big test and print out the User manual double sided and in full color. Just think How much more I will be able to do if I actually RTFM (read the freaking manual).

Sitting here sniffing printer fumes....

Randy

1 comment:

The Phantom Hack said...

One of the staff in my office brought in some matte photo paper for laser printers, and printed some photos on that. They actually turned out looking pretty good, and the resolution of the printer here is no different than the resolution on that little Samsung.
I doubt the quality will be anywhere near as nice as the photo lab printing, however with some good quality paper and the printer settings pushed to image optimization, you should be able to produce pretty good results in home.