
All-in-one I-have-no-idea - alecst
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1612-all-in-one-i-have-no-idea
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mdasen
The really big thing to look at is ink prices and ink capacity. Some printers
have cheap ink made by third parties that lasts forever. Some printers have
expensive ink only made by the company that only lasts 100 pages.

That's really the only thing that I research when buying a printer.

~~~
potatolicious
Another important thing to look at is where the ink jet nozzle is placed. Some
printers have this as a more durable part that's separate from the cartridge,
whereas others have it in a more disposable form on the cartridge itself.

One lasts much longer, and the other will crap out shortly if you try
refilling it too many times. It's a great way for them to keep you going back
for the "real" ink.

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GavinB
"Buying a printer remains the last confusing part of modern computing."

Graphics cards are just as bad. RAM can be tricky with all the different types
and price points. And how are you supposed to compare between the different
CPUs with different numbers of cores, processor speeds, L2 Caches, bus speeds
. . .

Everything about buying a computer is complicated for the uninitiated. Even
hard drives, which should be a matter of picking the biggest one, have
different speeds to complicate matters.

Of course, once you've bought a few printers it will all make perfect sense
and you'll forget that it seemed confusing.

~~~
there
normal computer users don't buy graphics cards or care about cpu l2 caches.
they buy things like laptops and imacs that just work and they never upgrade
them or take them apart.

unless you're an avid gamer, graphics designer, or building your own pc, i
don't know why anyone would even care what kind of graphics card their
computer has.

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betageek
The solution to the colour printer problem is not to buy a printer. I've
probably spent as much time trying to get home colour printing to work well as
I have re-installing windows. These days neither thing (colour printer or
windows pc) exists in my life. Use a cheap laser for black & white and when
you need a colour print send it to the copy shop/bureau.

~~~
mcav
That's a good idea, but when I bought a laser printer (a Brother) last year, I
was disappointed with its quality. (Seemed dim and/or pixelated.) Any
recommendations for a reasonable laser?

~~~
cameldrv
If all you want is a printer, the old HPs are really good. The Laserjet 4 in
particular was a high water mark in quality. You can find them fairly cheaply,
and if you fix the one problem they have (accordion jams), which is not very
difficult and requires about $20 worth of parts, they will basically last
forever, and are cheap to run.

The output quality from these printers is about the best I've seen from a
laser.

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snowbird122
Printing needs the equivalent of the ipod or flip video camera: something that
was redesigned to do the most common stuff really well and is dead simple easy
to use

~~~
patio11
Most printers _are_ simple to use and do the common stuff (printing black text
on white paper for non-critical documents) really, really well.

That being said, if you want the iPod experience on a printer, come to a
Japanese showroom some time and look for the ones aimed at women. ("You can
sell electronics to women?!" -- US tech industry)

Sleek industrial design, appealing bright colors, focused mainly on easy
integration with cameras (another consumer electronics item Japan does really
well) with every single sample print being "three of the girls having a fun
day out" or "the loving family, perfection captured on film".

Printers are not _about_ putting ink on paper. That's just what they _do_.

~~~
jasonkester
_Most printers are simple to use_

They were 5 years ago, but they're hard again for some reason. Not too long
ago you could plug a printer into your router, find it on the network from any
machine and print to it. No software install. Just find it and print. If you
weren't on a network, you could just plug the USB jack into your machine and
print just as easily. Remember plug and play?

For some reason, it doesn't work like that anymore. You need to find the CD
and install the drivers, and even then chances are you won't be able to
connect to it over the network. Even if you have the USB cable plugged into
your box, it's not smart enough to pretend it's a memory stick and give you
the drivers you need.

Anybody know what happened there?

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quilby
This problem isnt limited only to printers. In my opinion it is also present
when buying internal PC components.

For example how do you choose which graphics card to buy? The model number /
name of the product isnt gonna help you at all. So you would think that the
specifications would help you compare products. They do, but only to some
extent. For example is a 4 core processor at 2Ghz better than a 2 core at
4Ghz? And then sometimes the specs even "lie". For example graphics card RAM
is cheap so companies like adding a lot of it to their products. It has come
to the point where a 8600 nVidia card I saw had 1 gig of RAM, where Im pretty
sure that it can only use half of that.

So all we are left with are benchmarks... which also have their downsides.

More:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7xiub/buying_a_g...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7xiub/buying_a_graphics_card_is_a_lot_like_buying_a/)

~~~
potatolicious
High graphics card memory has its benefits - it allows the use of high-
resolution textures (which has the maximum benefit at high display
resolutions). It also allows developers to do more work without hitting your
bus, which is the _real_ benefit.

Nowadays all games use shaders, which are GPU programs that can transform
images (and geometry, but that's another story). One of the chief pains in
graphics programming is the necessity to feed data to the card, run a shader
on it, and feed the data back into RAM for lack of graphics memory, so you can
make room for something else.

Bus speed is _the_ killer of 3D performance. Pushing and pulling data cross
PCI-express 16x is really, really slow compared to how fast your shaders run.
More memory really does give you significantly higher performance.

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there
i found it ironic that jason ended the article asking for suggestions, and
there are now as many suggestions for different models as there were on the
page he took a screenshot of.

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cool-RR
"they all come from reputable brands. We have options from Canon, HP, Brother,
and Samsung."

I think HP printers are junk, at least in the below $500 range.

I recommend buying a Xerox laser printer. In my country I've seen a Xerox all-
in-one color laser printer for about $500. It's more expensive than ink
printers but you save a lot of money since toners are cheaper than ink.

Aside: How can HP be called reputable? I think they're just living off on
what's left of their reputation. Every HP device I've seen was shitty and full
of bloatware.

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hs
don't buy samsung (korean) ... unless you only use windows

i bought scx-4100 3 yrs ago, later on misteriously the mac driver (no scanner,
printer only) disappeared from the site

the linux driver is also ugly, breaks security, dirty uninstall, etc ... such
a pita

korean loves windows, so don't expect much for mac and linux from them

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Tichy
Maybe they are all mostly OK. Personally I would look for Linux support.

