Now that HP has sufficiently disgraced the vision of Mssrs. Hewlett and Packard, they continued to gyrate wildly into odd business that no one wants. To wit: in a joint press release with Condé Nast, the company is offering two odd consumer-facing propositions. First, they’re going to charge you $5.99-$10 a month to subscribe to a replacement ink service, called Instant Ink. When your printer runs low, it will send a message to Meg Whitman who will personally ship you a new cartridge. Considering ink cartridges already contain less than $5.99 of ink and parts, it’s a bum deal all around but, also considering HP jacks the prices up on ink enormously, I suppose if you’re mad about printing this may work out. Oddly, I don’t see anyone spending $60-$120 on ink cartridges per printer per year (unless HP jacks up prices even more).
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Epson announced [JP] the Colorio E-820 for the Japanese market today, a photo printer and wireless keyboard set somehow designed like a computer from the 1970s or 1990s (at least when looking at the top menu). The newest in a line of similar devices, this 5,760×1,440dpi inkjet printer is suitable for printing both pictures and postcards without a PC.
Users can create postcards by choosing between 1,055 different pre-set designs and use the 7-inch LCD screen (800×480 resolution) to check their works before printing them. The keyboard is for adding comments, greetings, etc. to the pictures and postcards. → Read More
The very first generation of Google Cloud Print-ready printers have been loaded onto the trucks, and are en route to your local gadget shop. HP calls the technology ePrint, and it’s found on its range of Photosmart, Officejet, and LaserJet Pro printers. → Read More
Here’s a game you can play at home or at the office. Go over to your printer. Is it an HP? If so, congrats, you’re part of the winning team! It turns out that HP has seen both the most growth and greatest market-share over the past year, comparing Q3 2009 with Q3 2010. Exciting, no? → Read More
Canon’s Uniflow technology will read print jobs sent to it and flag documents containing words deemed unsafe or insecure by admins. Here’s how it works:
The server will email the administrator a PDF copy of the document in question if a user attempts to do so.
The system can optionally inform the user by email that their attempt has been blocked, but without identifying the keyword in question, maintaining the security of the system.
See the problem here? → Read More
Your goal in school is to use your own printer as little as possible. Most schools have their own black and white printers on call 24/7 but sometimes you may need to print out a few snapshots for friends or a nice color cover for your last-minute essay on fish farming in ancient Mesopotamia as it relates to Shakespeare’s plays. My goal with creating this guide is to offer you a few fairly inexpensive options. I’ve also selected mostly all-in-one printers that will enable you to also scan documents and images. Bottom line: printers are “loss leaders” for most companies. They make most of their money on the toner and ink which, in the end, can sometimes cost more than the printer is worth. Your goal, then is, to find a printer with inexpensive ink. Kodak has made great strides in this and Espson is a close second. You don’t really need to worry about pages per minute – most of these printers are fast enough to pump out a few pages between classes. → Read More
Despite numerous advancements in printer technology, the fundamental failing of almost every consumer printer on the market today is the necessity to install printer drivers. Usually these drivers are accompanied by all manner of essentially junk software that “helpfully” pop up reminders when your printer is out of ink, or out of paper, or whatever. Hewlett Packard is making what appears to be an honest effort to remedy this situation with their new ePrint solution, as featured in the Photosmart D110a. For a hundred bucks you can email documents to your printer, without loading drivers of any sort. → Read More
A step forward in data security: Toshiba today announced what it claims to be the world’s first technology that makes it possible to automatically wipe sensitive data from self-encrypting drives when a system is powered down or the HDD is removed from the system. Dubbed Wipe, the solution automatically invalidates the security key that was used to encrypt the stored user data. → Read More
This week at CrunchGear, we’re looking back at some of our favorite gadgets from the not-so-distant past — old phones, computers, media players, toys… those devices that still stand out in our memories despite their obsolescence. Feel free to contribute some of your own nostalgia. The Hewlett Packard DeskJet 500 was the first printer I bought with my own money. I spent a lot on it, but it was an investment: it was a new era of inkjet printing, and my hand-me-down Okidata dot matrix printer just wasn’t going to cut it any more. I was a freshman in college, cranking out papers for class, and marveling at the quality of the letters on the page. I have absolutely no memory of how much replacement ink cartridges cost back then, but I do know that it was a fraction of the cost of the printer itself — unlike today, where a new printer can be had for only marginally more than buying replacement ink cartridges! → Read More
Zink stands for “zero ink.” It’s the name of a company that has created a new way of printing that uses, yes, zero ink. It’s all in the paper, hoss. → Read More
If you thought that the whole point of the common digital photo frame was to make old-school photos a thing of the past, it looks like you were wrong. I was wrong too, so let’s take comfort together in our wrongness. If the folks at iMo have their way, we’ll look at a digital photo on their digital frame and say to ourselves “I want that photo on some sort of card stock and I’ll stop at nothing to get it!” → Read More
Yup, that gigantic Dell box contained a huge color laser printer. But to my pleasant surprise, the 100 lbs 5130cdn isn’t nearly as boring and mundane as I thought it was going to be. I really don’t know if it’s the fastest printer in the world like Dell claims, but I do know that this printer could be a serious weapon in the hands of a comic book pirate. (I would like to think they exist) → Read More
Kodak: We’re the cheapest cost-per-page photo printers on the market! Look, here’s a whole bunch of independent research proving it! Nya-nya! Hewlett-Packard: NUH-UH! You’re a big fat liar, Kodak! We’re the cheapest cost-per-page. Kodak: Pfffft! Hewlett-Packard: Stop it! I’m telling! Hey CrunchGear! Kodak is being mean!! CrunchGear: What? Huh? Don’t make me stop this car! Full disclosure: Hewlett Packard’s PR team asked us to compare the HP C6380 against the Kodak ESP 7 with the intent of showing HP’s superior quality, in addition to evaluating the cost-per-page comparison. No gifts or money were given to me. I didn’t get to keep the printers, only the photos I printed out. → Read More
Sorry for the double CrunchDeals right in a row, but you might want to move quickly on this deal because it probably won’t last too long. Dell is selling its tiny Wasabi photo printer for just $29, down from $149. → Read More
Canon has also released some PIXMA all-in-ones and SELPHY compact photo printers. Real winner is the ES40, a $149 printer that looks like a child’s radio. The best part? It talks to you! Canon SELPHY ES40 Compact Photo Printer The Canon SELPHY ES40 Compact Photo Printer is the latest addition to the SELPHY line which has become synonymous for producing high-quality photos, being portable and easy-to-use. The SELPHY ES40 is ideal for printing images of a child’s first birthday or a loved one’s retirement party which can be distributed to attendees for a keepsake as they leave. The voice guidance system, large 3.5-inch LCD screen and Easy Scroll Wheel allows for printing and navigating through menus and images to be more intuitive than in previous models. Users will now have more opportunities to personalize their photos with new frames and clip art available under the Creative Print function as well. The estimated retail price of the SELPHY ES40 Compact Photo Printer is $149.99. → Read More
So that fake USB Chainsaw from the other day is indeed fake. Hence the fakeness. It’s instead an eye-opening ad campaign aimed at educating the public about the wastefulness of printers. → Read More
There are a couple of different opinions floating around right now on how to best measure the cost of printing with an inkjet printer when it pertains to the ink. In these tight economic times, determining that cost has everything to do with how often you need to replace “consumables” like ink and paper.
In 2007, Kodak began its aggressive “Print and Prosper” campaign, which claimed that consumers could save “up to 50 percent” on ink costs while using Kodak’s inkjet printers compared to printers from other manufacturers. There is even a Kodak site complete with an “overpayment calculator” that presents the savings you could earn by going with one of their printers.
HP, as expected, did not take such claims from a rival lying down. To combat what it called “misleading information,” HP aimed to debunk Kodak’s claims through its own campaign, which it calls “The Truth Behind Printing”. → Read More
While students everywhere are preparing to rock the F out this summer, HP has just announced its line of back-to-school notebooks — a cruel reminder to you kids that summer is short and you should always be focused on studying and using your indoor voices. → Read More
Do you see that USB port right there? You know, the one on the back of my D-Link DIR-825 802.11n router? Well apparently Mac users can now use that port to share things like USB thumb drives, printers, etc, using D-Link’s SharePort software. . (Windows users have been able to do this for some time.) Well, theoretically Mac users can now use Share Port, seeing as though the installer refuses to work on my pre-unibody MacBook. Why would it be easy, right? → Read More
Cheap color printing has long been the holy grail of grade-schoolers everywhere*. As you well know, Dad or Mom usually has a copier at work. This copier, at least in my day, was used to make multiple copies of hand-drawn comic books. These comic books are then sold at school for five or ten cents each. If those grade-schoolers parents had had a color copier, however, the entire situation would change. They could sell the comics for 25 cents.
That’s why Xerox’s new color copier is so great. It uses cubes of solid ink and half-page of color would cost about three cents – down from the standard 8 cents or so for most other printers. That is, of course, ignoring the fact that the machine will cost $20,000. → Read More
