Brand New Toy
Jan. 21st, 2005 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ggreigI’m quite chuffed with my new printer. It’s an Epson Stylus CX6600 all-in-one (i.e. colour inkjet printer/scanner/photocopier) acquired for less than half of what my trusty black and white HP Deskjet 500 cost a dozen years ago. Admittedly I have had a fairly decent printer in the interim which cost me nothing as it was a cast-off from work - an HP2000C inkjet with separate cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges - but even so this is a step up.
The Epson - also with four ink cartridges - will work as a standalone colour or B&W photocopier without having to fire anything up on the PC, doing a reasonable selection of things in its own memory like printing 2- or 4-up, poster prints, and scaling up or down - to one of a helpful selection of pre-set percentages (e.g. 69%: A4->A5), or a randomly entered one.
As a straightforward printer or scanner, it seems to do its job well with no fuss - I haven’t pushed it to any extent yet.
It will also read from a number of types of memory cards, none of which I care about at the moment but never say never.
What really sold it to me, though, was this. If you choose to do so, it will print right up to all four edges of the paper. By default, it has hard margins, like the printers we are used to, but you can select “borderless” and it will give you what is, in effect, full-bleed printing. How cool is that? Our £20,000 printer at work won’t do that and I could have had it for a two-figure sum (though I did pay three figures, going for a model with more bells and whistles).
There was one significant disappointment - the usual one with new hardware. The accompanying software was a bit of a let-down. The basic drivers seem OK; the bundled utilities are about as good and useful as ever - i.e. I might as well not have bothered installing them. This is particularly frustrating as one item refused to install no matter what else I killed off in the hope of giving it a free run, so I wasted quite a bit of time on it.
In the interests of completely pointless technical dickering, this entry was written in Notepad, printed, scanned and OCRed back in before being pasted into the LiveJournal edit box.
The Epson - also with four ink cartridges - will work as a standalone colour or B&W photocopier without having to fire anything up on the PC, doing a reasonable selection of things in its own memory like printing 2- or 4-up, poster prints, and scaling up or down - to one of a helpful selection of pre-set percentages (e.g. 69%: A4->A5), or a randomly entered one.
As a straightforward printer or scanner, it seems to do its job well with no fuss - I haven’t pushed it to any extent yet.
It will also read from a number of types of memory cards, none of which I care about at the moment but never say never.
What really sold it to me, though, was this. If you choose to do so, it will print right up to all four edges of the paper. By default, it has hard margins, like the printers we are used to, but you can select “borderless” and it will give you what is, in effect, full-bleed printing. How cool is that? Our £20,000 printer at work won’t do that and I could have had it for a two-figure sum (though I did pay three figures, going for a model with more bells and whistles).
There was one significant disappointment - the usual one with new hardware. The accompanying software was a bit of a let-down. The basic drivers seem OK; the bundled utilities are about as good and useful as ever - i.e. I might as well not have bothered installing them. This is particularly frustrating as one item refused to install no matter what else I killed off in the hope of giving it a free run, so I wasted quite a bit of time on it.
In the interests of completely pointless technical dickering, this entry was written in Notepad, printed, scanned and OCRed back in before being pasted into the LiveJournal edit box.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-21 10:18 pm (UTC)Thanks for making me smile.