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.