How to get email without a computer

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Here in Vegas, CES is overflowing with computing embedded in devices of every kind — cars, home appliances, booth girls (I’m assuming, anyway) — but one stand is touting a way to cut the computer out of your life, while still receiving email.

The Presto Printing Mailbox is the antithesis of Martha Lane Fox’s digital divide plans: it’s for people who simply can’t understand — or can’t be bothered to understand — how to get email off that infernal computing box.

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How many photos/documents do you print?

Friday, November 4th, 2011

We need your help for a forthcoming PC Pro Labs report.

To help us calculate the true running costs of the 16 inkjet printers we’ll have on test in issue 208, we need you to tell us how often you print photos and documents. Please note: we’re asking specifically for your printer output on home inkjet printers, not lasers nor office machines.

The survey will genuinely take ten seconds to answer, using the embedded form below. Your help is much appreciated.

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A5 paper puts my printer on a go-slow

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

In the realms of technology in the average office, printers are undoubtedly the most bizarre, quirky, and deeply strange devices known to mankind. I accept that tape drives are in a world of pain all of their own, but we do our best to ignore them on the grounds of maintaining some sort of sanity. So printers it is.

For the past few years, I’ve had an HP Color LaserJet 5500HDTN printer in my office (HP’s spelling of ‘color’, not mine). It’s a monster, doing A3 double-sided and having five paper trays and a hard disk. It has lasted well, and produced consistently high-quality copies, spitting them out at high speed too. That is until this week. I needed to do some printing on A5 paper, so loaded up a tray with 500 sheets. The print job was already on the printer’s own hard disk, so it was a few button presses to get 500 copies underway.

The printer ran like a racehorse until about the twelfth copy, at which point it slowed right down. Instead of the usual twenty-something sheets per minute, I was down to about five. Clearly, something was wrong. There was nothing in the printer log, no errors on the display, nothing visible in the web-server pages.

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How to stop the inkjet printer rot

Monday, January 4th, 2010

I live by the rubbish bins. Some people say you can tell that by my picture… but that’s not my point here. My point is that like everyone else at this time of year, I’ve been having a good throw-out and tidy-up.

I can say “like everyone else” because this year my local council has gone for the recycling thing, in a big way – separate bins for different materials, carefully labelled in exactly the place that you can’t read if you arrive with armfuls of junk. I can see people wandering up to the recycling pen, and hear the discussions about which bin should receive which piece of trash.

Lately the council have responded to pressure and delivered a little dumpster, fractionally less smelly than the others, labelled “small electricals”, since this category evidently produced the highest levels of recycling confusion: “well, it’s plastic on the case, but there’s some metal on the inside…”
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Can Lexmark change the way we buy printers?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Lexmark’s inkjet printers have had a pretty rough ride from PC Pro in recent reviews and Greg Caster, senior development manager for inkjet R&D, admitted to me yesterday that its 2008 range was simply a step behind its competitors. To change that, Lexmark is finally moving to individual inks for its next all-wireless range of inkjet all-in-ones, and introducing a fantastic touchscreen interface that I’ll come to later.

But the real news for me – and for anyone who ever has trouble choosing a printer – is the way Lexmark’s eight-product line has been assembled.

Currently, buying a printer is a confusing experience, with too many competing manufacturers, each with too many printer ranges that contain too many similar models and accept too many different cartridge types. Even within a single manufacturer’s product range, the variation in quality and speed can be staggering.

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5% of printed documents never collected

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I heard this thoroughly depressing stat at a HP briefing this morning: one in 20 office printouts are simply left in the printer’s output tray, never to be seen by the eyes of the thoughtless drone who pressed Ctrl + P in the first place. 

I’m not a tree-hugging, environmental doom monger, but even my green-weary soul was alarmed at the amount of wasted paper, ink and energy such needless printing consumes. Let alone the money. 

HP has a solution to curb the printer fly-tippers called Pool Printing, which ensures the document doesn’t actually print until the person physically goes to the machine to collect it. They have to swipe a card or punch in a pin number before the printer spews out the goods.

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