Everyone knows about and has almost certainly experienced the effects of Murphy’s Law or to give it other name Sod’s Law. You know, the law that states that something will probably happen just when you least want it to and are the least prepared for it. I have often wondered whether Murphy was a wise man, or just someone to whom the effects of this law seemed to always apply, so much so that others named the law after him.

Anyhow, however it was named, it managed to strike our household last night. Picture the scene. It is the last night before my son has to hand in some GSCE coursework. He has completed his work, checked everything and all is ready. The only thing that remains is to print off his work for the final time, put into his school bag ready to take to school in the morning.

So what happens? Well of course one of the colour cartridges of our otherwise excellent home printer decides at that specific moment to run out. That is OK I think to myself, we have spares, but no, of course the colour required is not amongst our spare cartridges. It turns out that we had only recently replaced that colour, and it had run out again. Fortunately we have a large Hypermarket nearby that remains open to midnight, and I was able to make a quick trip and buy a replacement cartridge at the last minute.

This brings me to my main points. Firstly the cost of replacing printing ink cartridges seems way too high. OK so after my last post, perhaps now I am guilty of “stating the bleeding obvious”, but in this case I think it needs to be stated.  Another thing is that they don’t last long especially it seems certain colours. The cartridges themselves don’t seem to be very big, so one way to reduce costs might be to produce much bigger cartridges. This would reduce the cost of the cartridges themselves, which could be past on to us the consumer and make them last longer into the bargain.

Of course will the printer manufactures see this as a benefit to them? I doubt it, so perhaps we are stuck with high price printing. What do you think?

I had a friend ask me the other day for advice on printers. So I give the standard line when asked for free IT support from family and friends. “What are you planning to do with whatever the device is that you are thinking of buying”. The answer I got back was just the sort of answer I look for when trying to provide help and guidance that is not likely to come back and bite me later. You know the “You said that I should buy this and it is a pile of junk”, or words to that effect, sort of comment.

The answer was. “Well what we are really looking for is just a basic printer for printing a few documents a week. Colour is not important. We don’t need a scanner. We have an PC running Windows XP.”

This is nice because it means I have a much better chance of making a recommendation that matches their requirements, than if I had just been asked to recommend a printer. So what did I recommend? Well basically, any of the low end printers like the Canon PIXMA iP1800 Inkjet Photo Printer or the Epson Stylus Photo D78 Inkjet Printer would meet the requirements. Both of these choices will actually print colour and photos quite reasonably as well if that becomes a requirement in the future.

If I had just been asked generally to suggest a good printer it would probably have been the HP Photosmart C7180 All-in-One Inkjet Printer like we discussed in a previous post.

Last week we looked at all in one computers, but the one thing an all in one computer generally does not include is a printer, at least not yet anyway, that is maybe something for the future. So in the meantime we need to find ourselves a good printer that will fulfill our needs. Of course if you combine the fact that one persons needs are not the same as the next persons, and the fact that there is a bewildering number of printers for sale, actually finding that one printer that is just right for you is not always as easy you might think. Obviously there is no one right answer so where to start?

A good way, is to ask yourself a number of questions. The first question I would ask myself is whether I just want a printer or would I like to combine printing with other features like scanning, copying or even faxing. If you have already got a perfectly good scanner and you never send faxes, then a stand alone printer is probably all you need. If on the other hand you are like me and decide that scanning and copying are always a useful function to have, then you will probably want to look at some of the very good all-in-one computers available on the market.

The next question you should probably ask is whether you want to have the printer on a network, and hence be available to all computers in the house, or just be local to a specific computer. If it is the first then a printer with a network capability is required. Another question you will want to ask yourself is whether you are going to mainly print photographs or documents or a bit of both.

At this point you have probably narrowed down the requirements enough to start looking for suitable printers and matching them against your budget. In my case when I was recently in the market for a printer, I wanted and all-in-one that was wireless network capable, that would print good photos when required, and if it could read my media cards so much the better.

In my case a printer like the HP Photosmart C7180 All-in-One Inkjet Printer would fit the bill nicely, albeit for a price. Good luck in your hunt for the right printer for you.