Page 12 - July 2018
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(Continued from page 11) I still have an old HP Deskjet 5650 printer and
an Epson Stylus Photo R340 printer in my of-
doned the personal printer. My son and daugh- fice, but I’ve not used either in over eight years
ter, both in their late 20’s, each still own a laptop and should probably get rid of them. The
in addition to their smartphones, but have no in- Deskjet is old and slow, and I get better quality
terest in having a printer. They have no need to for the few photos I need printed by going to the
print photos, preferring to post them online or photo center in Costco, rather than using the
display them on their phones. The few hard cop- finicky Epson. I also have a Samsung ML-2510
ies they need to make can be printed at work, or low-cost black laser printer, but I don’t use it
at the copy center at Staples or Office Depot (or much. Laser printers use heat to fuse powdered
at Dad’s house). toner to the paper, and this printer seems to
generate quite a lot of heat. I can feel an exces-
sive amount of heat coming off the top of the
I started my work life in the early 1980’s, so I’ve printer when it has been on for just a few
witnessed the evolution of the personal comput- minutes, so to reduce energy usage (and fire
er and the personal printer. I’ve owned dot- risk), I only leave it on long enough to print.
matrix and daisy-wheel impact printers, as well
as ink jet and laser printers. When my children
were young, they had their own individual print- One thing I have always wanted in a printer is
ers and desktop computers for school work, re- the ability to print on 11” x 17” paper. I have this
sulting in four printers in the house. Every com- capability at my work and find it is really useful
puter needed its own printer as each stood when printing CAD drawings and diagrams, as
alone and disconnected in the days before the well as large spreadsheets. Another useful fea-
Internet. Since the development of modern ture I’ve been looking for is the ability to scan
home networking and networked printers, my double-sided originals automatically (this is a
wife and I have been sharing a single printer for special feature of the scanner’s document feed-
the past eight years. er). Late last year I saw an HP OfficeJet 7740
all-in-one printer advertised with a great price at
Fry’s; it had both features, so I bought it as a
The HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 all-in-one network birthday present to myself. I planned to set it up
printer I bought for my wife in 2009 has always in my office in place of my scanner, so I would
resided in the downstairs bedroom that is her have printing and scanning at hand. Unfortu-
home office. She uses it weekly to print stock nately, my life is often too busy, and so this new
lists for her job as a retail seed merchandiser. It printer sat in its box for most of 2017.
is a printer / scanner / fax machine in one unit,
with a single-sided scanner feeder in addition to
flat-bed scanning capability (it can automatically Over the years, the HP8500 printer served us
scan a stack of pages on one side only). It can well with few issues. Occasionally the print
also automatically print double-sided to save pa- quality would drop, with blank streaks in the
per. It has a wired Ethernet connection to my printed output. Using its diagnostic software to
home network, so I can print to it from my clean the print heads usually solved the prob-
“office” upstairs. It is not so useful for me to run lem, though with time multiple and more fre-
downstairs to scan, so I have kept my old USB quent cleaning cycles were needed. Finally, this
flat-bed scanner in my office. spring, even three head cleaning cycles didn’t
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