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