[geeks] Printers, postscript, networking...

[nate at portents.com]

> Nate askes about buying heap laser printer and/or color injet for
> pictures. I just went through this, and ended up with a Canon 4200 (I
> think).

I have issues with color inkjets these days - the chips they use, and the
rumored secret additives they have in their inks which prevent clogging
that supposedly cause third-party inks to eventually be a problem, to the
latest I've heard where they detect refilling of first-party inks and then
the printer driver gives the choice of replacing the cartridge right away
or disabling ink level monitoring forever and rewriting the printer
firmware as warranty voided, or having to spend $80 on third party
refillable, chip-resettable (with a $25 device) cartridges, and then who
knows if you'll get the 30-years behind glass, 100 years in archival
storage lifespan out of those prints.  Bah.

>    A friend sells printers/copiers/etc., and he shared his feelings
> about printers; I mixed in my pre-press experience; and then I smothered
> it all in my wife's sharp sense of finance (i.e., "cheapness"), and
> ended up buying this duplexing inkjet that uses five or six ink carts.

Big beef I have is that while it's nice there are five or six seperate
inks, it still won't print black and white only documents with one color
ink exhausted.  Dumb.

AFAIK, black and white lasers haven't gone to proprietary toner cartridges
yet (right???)  That's a big advantage in my book.

>    For higher-quality pictures, I send my stuff to winkflash.com:
> 99-cent shipping, fast turn-around, decent online tools, AND NO
> AUTOMATIC COLOR-MANGLING like C-V-freakin'-S).

I agree, large-volume color prints absolutely make sense to do online
mail-order, and I'd only be using a color printer at home for low-volume,
occasional stuff.

- Nate