I wasn’t kidding last year when I said it was cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy new toner. Now you can get this Samsung laser printer for $40. I still remember buying my first laser printer more than 10 years ago for nearly $900 which was an HP 2100. That was better than an old friend of mine that bought an HP 2 personal laser printer for $2000+ in the late 80s. It’s still a great printer and handles printing better than my one year old Samsung color laser. I still dread the day I have to buy replacement toner for the 2100 though.
My wife just started going back to school again. Her teacher sent out a massive (100 or so slide) PowerPoint presentation. Get this… he told them to print it up and take notes in the margin. I am horrified. The only saving grace in this, is that I have a laser printer here. I can’t imagine what a student with an ink jet is supposed to do… spend $40 on ink every two weeks? To make matters worse, the teacher used a dark background. So not only is 90% of the surface area of each page 100% black (waste of toner/ink), but there is now no place to write the notes! I am going to tell my wife to print to OneNote next time, and take notes there. Either that, or I am unplugging the printer.
When I worked at the college computer lab, I would see this kind of thing all the time. The student who had to hit “Print” on every Web page they saw. The person who insisted on printing every time they made a minor change to a paper, even though they weren’t near handing it in yet. And so on. I see it in the business world too, but there is something magical about the world of academia that they seem to think that printing is both free and environmentally kind. It is neither, not by a long shot.
J.Ja
Archive for the ‘Printers’ Category