In Business
===========

Monday 11 May 2009 15:13

HP Officejet J4680

There is still this weird cultural aspect of having
something in print is making it more believable.
You can digitally sign emails or documents, but a
simple fax or A4 sized piece of dead tree is
usually the only officially accepted way to make
sure something is real. So a believable business
operating in this culture needs a magic
believability increasing machine, a.k.a. printer.
And since I'm freelancing I need to send out
invoices on real paper, so I was forced to get a
printer.

The last printer I bought was an Epson Stylus 800,
for about 1000 guilders, in '93 or something. Now
I've bought a HP Officejet J4680 wireless color
printer/scanner/fax for about EUR 125, like 1/4 of
the price of the Epson and about four times as much
functionality. I don't expect much from it though,
because I will only use it to print some official
documents, which wouldn't even need to be in color,
so I don't care about that it doesn't offer the
quality of a EUR 8000 color laser printer. What I
do like is the wireless stuff, which means no
network cables and the freedom to put the machine
near any power socket I want. OS X support is good,
but it would have been nicer if it wouldn't show
the printer for both the USB and wireless
connection. I don't know what happens when you
connect multiple of them simultaneous to USB and
wireless though...

If Sony would release PS3 firmware that can use
these network printers/scanners, this would be an
even more perfect solution to my setup.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2009/05/11/in-business/