Printers and PowerMacs- April 21, 2003
I finished up printing my mountain lion brochures last night. (You can see the brochure in the Cougar Zone in the Downloads section; download the kids' brochure.) As usual, no matter what I did, I had significant paper misfeed problems. Even though I was using both my HP Photosmart 7150 and my DeskJet 940C printers, I lost 30 of 120 brochures to misfeeds. While the newer Photosmart printer had fewer misfeeds and was faster than the 940C, they both seemed to get worse the longer they were used.
The job also ate one complete set of ink cartridges and damn near depleted another. All told, I spent about $130 in ink completing this job, not to mention spending just about all weekend baby-sitting the printers. Not only did I need to be available to handle paper jams and misfeeds but printer errors that seemed like they were due to timing problems with XP.
This is the last time I'm going through all that using inkjets. I built my mountain lion brochures in PageMaker, and there are plenty of online printing bureaus that can print them using those files. I'm still deciding whether I'm going to invest in that or go out and buy a color laser printer that's under a grand. Right now, the HP2500 has my interest since it will work with both PC's and Mac's; but the odds are I'll just have a printer work up the brochures.
Oh, and by the way, I'm sure someone out there is thinking I could buy either Epson or Canon inkjets and solve the problem. Possibly. I did try an Epson C80 but found that its printouts wouldn't color match the screen closely enough; most things had a bit of a red or pinkish tone in them. I also looked at doing them on an Epson Photo 820 I used to own but that got even more expensive and I don't believe the color matching was much better. In any case, I'm looking for a way to break down the time I'm spending and the expense; and I'm not sure any inkjet would make those better.
One other note before I leave the subject of the brochures completely. I opened the brochure file in Adobe PageMaker 7.0 on my PowerMac and found that Pagemaker could not find one of its fonts (kids.ttf). I had loaded the font on both the OS 9.0 and X side of the system, though being a newbee to the Mac, obviously I missed something. However, In Design did find the font. In you're using OS X, In Design is definitely the way to go.
While buying my replacement ink cartridges, I breezed through the Apple section of my CompUSA store and took another gander at one of the new 17 inch flat panel iMacs with a 1 Ghz G4 CPU. Very nice! I REALLY like the larger screen, the speed of the 1 Ghz CPU, and the 4X SuperDrive (DVD-R/-RW). I like it so much so I talked to my wife about the possibility of trading in my little 15 inch 700 Mhz G4 flat panel iMac for one of those. She's not real hot on that but not totally against it either. PowerMax (http://www.powermax.com), an Apple retailer in Oregon, will take older Macs in trade for newer ones; I sent them an e-mail note describing my machine and am waiting to see what kind of trade-in they'll offer. It probably won't be enough to make me take the plunge, but I'll just have to wait and see.
Another thing giving me pause is that Smalldog.com has some refurbished G4 PowerMac towers for pretty good prices. They have a dual processor 1.25 Ghz model for the same money I'd spend on the new iMac and a dual processor 867 Mhz for several hundred less. We'll have to see what I decide to do., but this is probably "all talk". More than likely I won't do anything. Too many other things are going on.
Put a new keyboard on my PC. It's a Memorex MX3300 Office keyboard. It has multimedia keys, Microsoft Office keys, keys for My Computer, Calculator, Outlook Calendar, and keys to Log Off and Shut Down. Pretty slick. Really nice key feel, too. While it retails at about $30, CompUSA had some instant savings and some rebates going. I think my final cost on it will be about $10.
The job also ate one complete set of ink cartridges and damn near depleted another. All told, I spent about $130 in ink completing this job, not to mention spending just about all weekend baby-sitting the printers. Not only did I need to be available to handle paper jams and misfeeds but printer errors that seemed like they were due to timing problems with XP.
This is the last time I'm going through all that using inkjets. I built my mountain lion brochures in PageMaker, and there are plenty of online printing bureaus that can print them using those files. I'm still deciding whether I'm going to invest in that or go out and buy a color laser printer that's under a grand. Right now, the HP2500 has my interest since it will work with both PC's and Mac's; but the odds are I'll just have a printer work up the brochures.
Oh, and by the way, I'm sure someone out there is thinking I could buy either Epson or Canon inkjets and solve the problem. Possibly. I did try an Epson C80 but found that its printouts wouldn't color match the screen closely enough; most things had a bit of a red or pinkish tone in them. I also looked at doing them on an Epson Photo 820 I used to own but that got even more expensive and I don't believe the color matching was much better. In any case, I'm looking for a way to break down the time I'm spending and the expense; and I'm not sure any inkjet would make those better.
One other note before I leave the subject of the brochures completely. I opened the brochure file in Adobe PageMaker 7.0 on my PowerMac and found that Pagemaker could not find one of its fonts (kids.ttf). I had loaded the font on both the OS 9.0 and X side of the system, though being a newbee to the Mac, obviously I missed something. However, In Design did find the font. In you're using OS X, In Design is definitely the way to go.
While buying my replacement ink cartridges, I breezed through the Apple section of my CompUSA store and took another gander at one of the new 17 inch flat panel iMacs with a 1 Ghz G4 CPU. Very nice! I REALLY like the larger screen, the speed of the 1 Ghz CPU, and the 4X SuperDrive (DVD-R/-RW). I like it so much so I talked to my wife about the possibility of trading in my little 15 inch 700 Mhz G4 flat panel iMac for one of those. She's not real hot on that but not totally against it either. PowerMax (http://www.powermax.com), an Apple retailer in Oregon, will take older Macs in trade for newer ones; I sent them an e-mail note describing my machine and am waiting to see what kind of trade-in they'll offer. It probably won't be enough to make me take the plunge, but I'll just have to wait and see.
Another thing giving me pause is that Smalldog.com has some refurbished G4 PowerMac towers for pretty good prices. They have a dual processor 1.25 Ghz model for the same money I'd spend on the new iMac and a dual processor 867 Mhz for several hundred less. We'll have to see what I decide to do., but this is probably "all talk". More than likely I won't do anything. Too many other things are going on.
Put a new keyboard on my PC. It's a Memorex MX3300 Office keyboard. It has multimedia keys, Microsoft Office keys, keys for My Computer, Calculator, Outlook Calendar, and keys to Log Off and Shut Down. Pretty slick. Really nice key feel, too. While it retails at about $30, CompUSA had some instant savings and some rebates going. I think my final cost on it will be about $10.
posted by Andy Foster at
3:47 PM
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