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.

It’s essentially a cut-down printer, made by HP, with its own email address. Send an email to the Presto’s inbox, and it reformats the message, stripping out the header details and reflowing the text and images into a nice, easy-to-read style.

It can also be setup to print news headlines, a photo of the day, Sudoku puzzles, comic strips, a collection of Andy Rooney columns (I’m not making that up) and reminder messages — basically, it’s the internet printed out on paper for tech-baffled seniors (and to be clear, I don’t think most seniors actually feel this way — my own remaining grandparent certainly doesn’t).

The Presto doesn’t even require a broadband connection; it will pick up messages over dial-up on a standard phone line five times a day

The Presto doesn’t even require a broadband connection; it will pick up messages over dial-up on a standard phone line five times a day. Only approved senders’ messages will get through, so your parents won’t be found buried under a pile of paper spam.

There’s no scanner or other method of input, so the device is useless for sending a reply — which may be a good thing for some. The company’s spokesman noted his firm’s research suggested people who don’t get — or like — PCs prefer to reply by phone, so the Presto is set up to print contacts’ phone numbers at the top of the sheet.

The most intriguing use of the Presto is sending automated reminders, such as for appointments or to take medications. However, it’s hardly telemedicine: there’s no way of knowing — short of a phone call — if your ancient, tech-fearing great-grandmother got the message and popped her pills as told.

Simplicity isn’t cheap: the device is $99, and the Presto service costs $14.99 a month — it might be cheaper and easier to set up a fax machine, although the photos wouldn’t come out so nicely.

Arguably, it’s time to stop assuming older folks are incapable of learning new tricks; email isn’t the hardest skill to learn, and touchscreen smartphones and tablets are designed to be intuitive to use.

However, Presto’s apparently proving popular, with sales of tens of thousands globally over the past few years — while such a device isn’t necessary for readers of this website for obvious reasons, some people will doubtless find a use for it. Indeed, Presto is starting to be sold in Best Buy stores in the US, and is also available over Amazon.

Despite such popularity, it’s hard not to find the marketing a bit sad. The brochure quotes Sherri, from Chicago, who says: “My mother LOVES it! She is 84, and has never touched a computer and has no interest in learning. She says that getting her Presto mail is like someone coming to her house for a visit.”

Sherri: go visit your mother. And, while you’re there, set up a Gmail account for her.

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.

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.

A hunt around the website eventually gave a clue as to the problem. Some users had reported the same issue when using A4 paper, but when loaded “front to back” in the paper tray, rather than “side to side”. When the paper isn’t the full width of the tray, it appears that the printer has to slow down after a dozen pages and drop into go-slow mode.

This is because the paper isn’t the full width of the output heater rollers, and hence there is a significant possibility that the rollers will overheat if the engine runs at full speed. Remember that the paper moving through the rollers removes a significant amount of heat from the fuser rollers. With A5 paper, it’s even worse of course.

So there we have it – a printer whose rated speed collapses if you use undersized paper. I never thought this would be the case, but reality has proven me wrong. It’s worth thinking about if you need a mix of paper sizes on your new office printer – do not assume that full speed is available on all sizes.

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…”

It has taken four pick-ups before this latest innovation contained anything other than “home user” inkjet printers. I think this is one of the great hidden crimes of our industry – I strongly doubt there’s one printer in those four dumpster-loads which is more than five years old. I’m not entirely sure how many households this dumpster is serving – it could be as high as 3,000 flats -  but four dumpster-loads of printers is (at a guess) maybe 80 units.

By contrast, I’ve been getting a client sorted out with some bigger printers. Not because they print a lot, but more because it’s too much hassle to set up four different types of printer driver across 12 machines and then battle with the irritating tricks that bottom-end printers can pull on you when you try to share them. So I ordered these guys four Xerox Phaser 8400 printers – monster corporate full-colour machines that print by melting solid wax blocks for a very classy middle-resolution finish, which is ideal so long as your printed output isn’t on shiny labels or subject to lots of flexing (the wax “ink” can crack off the paper).

These are, on first sight, the antithesis of a “green” printer. They have to be left powered on, in a background heater mode, or else they consume about 20% of a wax stick in an arcane nozzle-cleaning mode. On the other hand, all that heavy metal and wax-handling technology is refurbishable. Parts are swappable between the four machines, so users can print to a working unit while the refurbishment is under way.

I realise that having four ex-corporate networked paper mills is hardly a usable solution if you only want 10 pages a week (or even a month), but perhaps the Lesson of the Dumpster is that it’s easier to be green the larger scale you get. In a move which I am hoping to see many more companies follow this year, my client has said that any member of staff can print personal documents on their pool of big refurbished printers, with “honesty boxes” left by the printers for them to drop some change into: a much better “green” approach, than investing in a personal printer with a short life-cycle.

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.

So Lexmark is taking a different approach, one that makes choosing a printer so simple for consumers I can only beg and plead with Canon, HP, Epson and the rest of the inkjet world to flagrantly copy it.

Put simply, whether you buy the base consumer model for $99, the premium $399 business device or any of the six models in-between, you’ll get the same underlying print engine.

Yes, that means the cheapest budget model will print at the same speed and produce the same quality prints as the dearest premium all-in-one. They’re essentially the same printer. They’ll also all accept ‘XL’ high-yield cartridges to cut print costs.

Where Lexmark will differentiate is in features, beginning with a basic all-in-one and progressively adding document feeders, ports, LCD screens, a 4.3in touchscreen, fax capabilities and all the usual extras as you move up the price scale. So, if you don’t want to pay for Ethernet and extra print trays you don’t need, just don’t buy them – the price you’ll pay is determined solely by the feature set, with quality and speed a reassuring constant.

That delightful approach aside, Lexmark was here to show off its touchscreen interface more than anything, and I have to say I came away impressed. It’s only on the top models, but the large 4.3in panel has room for nice, clear icons, and the designers have ensured the main copy, scan and fax menus contain the bare minimum of major options. Should you need to dig deeper, standard list menus can be accessed from there. (Click the image for a closer look.)

But many business users have specific copying tasks that they repeat on a regular basis, so Lexmark has come up with an innovative PC-based time-saving solution. Create an account on the website and, in a browser-based version of the printer’s menu, you can pre-select all the settings for a particular print, scan or copy job. Give it a name and save it; it will be pushed out across the internet to your associated Lexmark inkjets where it will appear in the custom job menu as an icon.

For example, if you regularly copy and resize your day’s invoices two-to-a-page and in draft mode to save paper and ink, you just choose those settings online, save the job as ‘Invoice Copy’ and it’ll be sent to your office printer’s menu. Next time you place your two invoices on the platen, instead of going through the copy menu you simply press the Invoice Copy icon and the settings are chosen for you. It’s exceedingly simple and saves both time and money.

There’s also a range of Eco options that can be enabled to save paper and ink, along with a similarly pre-configurable scan-to-email option that goes one step further by actually sending the email itself – no PC required.

It remains to be seen if Lexmark has significantly redesigned its laboured menu system on the non-touch devices, but premium users will certainly see a huge improvement. And the move to individual inks has long been required; sample photo prints I was shown looked promising but only our tests will tell for sure. A claimed 90-second top quality 6 x 4in print also piqued my interest.

They’re due to launch officially next week, and we’ve been promised a top-end Platinum Pro905 as soon as Lexmark receives them in the UK, so look out for a full review in the next few weeks. I didn’t think I’d be saying this following our last Canon-dominated group test, but Lexmark could well be stepping up to the plate at last.

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.

That might well reduce the wastage, but the problem is it also punishes the conscientious workers too. If I could reclaim the amount of time I’ve spent standing by our office laserjet, waiting for the thing to warm up before my document came sliding out of the roller, I’d be 21 again. Putting another delay into the process would drive me up the wall.   

However, I’d argue the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the 5% of orphan documents, but the other 95% that are usually only printed on one side and come with needless wasted pages at the end. The vast majority of my printouts are web pages. Nine times out of ten, the text I want to read is on the first sheet. What follows on the second is a blank centre column, with the website’s navigation running down the left and banner ads running down the right. That’s 50% of the printout going straight into the recycling bin.

Now, I know Firefox has a Shrink to Fit option (in the File | Print Preview menu) that can solve this problem, but this makes the print so tiny that I’d need to borrow Deidre Barlow’s specs to read it.

So here’s a challenge for Mozilla, Microsoft and the other browser makers: find a way to print only the interesting bits of web pages and make me feel a little bit better about myself.