Progress marches occasionally on
Jun. 6th, 2008 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwiceI may have previously noted here that printers give me the rage. By and large, they are flimsy plastic pieces of crap, prone to gleeful jamming and inventive modes of bustage. Also, the market in which they're designed and sold is filled with perverse and depraved incentives, resulting in such divers sins as competing on features rather than on quality, spending huge development resources on preventing people from refilling ink cartridges, crafting some stupendously ugly-ass software UI, and abandoning driver support for perfectly functional hardware because staying solvent requires breathtakingly wasteful obsolescence cycles. If we're talking about multifunction printers, take all that and multiply by four. The next time I personally spend anything on printing equipment, I'm going to buy some industrial hulk of a black-only laser printer that I can expect to work with every OS upgrade 'til kingdom bloody well come, because honestly, I was sick of this shit after the first three hundred printer catastrophes I had to deal with.*
Nevertheless. If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely need a printer-scanner with a fax function,** you could absolutely do worse than the HP Officejet J6450 that the nursery just bought. It's pretty cool. You know how "sharing" a printer over the network in Windows is totally frustrating and difficult? Nuh-uh. You just plug this thing into your router -- you don't even have to bother with a USB cord, you just chuck an ethernet cable into the thing or use the built-in wireless link -- and it works, equally well for every computer in the house. Modulo installing the drivers and what have you, but it fucking works. It's got a built-in duplexer, print-to-fax seems to work great (although for some reason it's not mentioned anywhere in the manual?!), and the print-head alignment routine seems to be totally automated by some kind of robot eye inside the casing.
All told, I am favorably impressed, and will remain so until it inevitably starts getting drunk and slapping me around at the breakfast table.
_____
* This is the point where I call out the tendency among nontechnical sorts to expect the resident Software Whisperer to be able to fix the printer. People, family members, NO. This is like asking that cousin who's good with pre-1989 Fords to help get your salvaged flying saucer off the ground, never mind that it takes no fewer than eight prehensile tentacles just to pop the hood on the damn thing.
** Because, see, the nursery business still runs almost entirely on fax, and we can't operate without the capability to send a document to 15-20 people's machines directly from MS Word/OpenOffice. If there were any other way to do this that wasn't worse, believe that we'd be using that, but instead here we are.
Nevertheless. If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely need a printer-scanner with a fax function,** you could absolutely do worse than the HP Officejet J6450 that the nursery just bought. It's pretty cool. You know how "sharing" a printer over the network in Windows is totally frustrating and difficult? Nuh-uh. You just plug this thing into your router -- you don't even have to bother with a USB cord, you just chuck an ethernet cable into the thing or use the built-in wireless link -- and it works, equally well for every computer in the house. Modulo installing the drivers and what have you, but it fucking works. It's got a built-in duplexer, print-to-fax seems to work great (although for some reason it's not mentioned anywhere in the manual?!), and the print-head alignment routine seems to be totally automated by some kind of robot eye inside the casing.
All told, I am favorably impressed, and will remain so until it inevitably starts getting drunk and slapping me around at the breakfast table.
_____
* This is the point where I call out the tendency among nontechnical sorts to expect the resident Software Whisperer to be able to fix the printer. People, family members, NO. This is like asking that cousin who's good with pre-1989 Fords to help get your salvaged flying saucer off the ground, never mind that it takes no fewer than eight prehensile tentacles just to pop the hood on the damn thing.
** Because, see, the nursery business still runs almost entirely on fax, and we can't operate without the capability to send a document to 15-20 people's machines directly from MS Word/OpenOffice. If there were any other way to do this that wasn't worse, believe that we'd be using that, but instead here we are.
j6450 printer/scanner
Date: 2008-07-08 09:01 pm (UTC)Thank you.
Re: j6450 printer/scanner
Date: 2008-07-10 06:17 pm (UTC)(What the hell? Is this person going to just keep polling this page, or what?
The thing I hate most about drive-by blegs is that they make my brain start running in circles trying to figure out the solution, despite the fact that the questioner is unlikely to ever see it and probably figured it out themselves eight minutes after posting in the first place. Dammit.)