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pasitheaHurray spring! This winter has been a bit bumpy. Car needing repairs. Stacey battling the police with her ticket, my 'no nice deed goes unpunished' ticket, laptop losing its hard drive, cell phone getting smashed, partner getting minor surgery, not to mention buying a house and replacing a water heater, oh and changing teams at work and being thrown into some buggy code in firefighting mode and the team lead then going on vacation. Heh. When it rains it pours, I guess.
Anyhow. While all this was happening, it was so minor I didn't even bother to mention that my crappy old printer decided it was time to die and my crappy old scanner began getting so temperamental that it was also becoming nearly impossible to use. (the positioning belt started slipping so it makes a ghastly amount of noise and was giving me smeared parts in scans at times)
Meh. Turns out though that both scanners and printers have really come down in price. We ended up going with a combination unit (Epson Artisan 810) It's a glossy oppressive black cube but... Ooooh. Six color printing, double-sided printing, and my favorite, an automatic sheet feeder for the scanner. I'm thinking I can use the peg holes on my animation paper as registration guides. Toonboom will attempt to do some auto registration when feeding from a scanner but I've never really bothered with it as the interface was MUCH too slow and my digital camera was sufficient resolution but perhaps now I'll give it another go.
I'm already pretty happy with this machine. It's higher resolution, it's a LOT faster, it's much faster, the buttons on the machine work out of box and let me stand at the scanner to scan single sheets instead of scampering back and forth, the scanning software is friendly and easy to use and the default calibration is rather decent. The scan quality is very good, and finally, it's not HP!
I used to really like HP back when I was young and foolish (or perhaps when they made better stuff) but both the printer and scanner I've been using were pretty crap honestly. The hardware isn't terrible. It's not the best by a long shot but it's been at least mostly reliable. Their software and drivers on the other hand are complete rubbish. The scanner alone is a 105M download and then it didn't save configuration settings, changed settings between scans, and lots of other things that made it really annoying and a huge time sync. Scanning for the past many years has always been a tedious and fiddly affair.
The printer is slow, it still works most of the time but every now and then decides its not going to print cyan... And no, it's not a cartridge problem or blocked jet issue. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but again, the software was really wretched. The printer driver is always sitting in memory, it's about 60M, it was only in PPC mode so always running in rosetta mode and being a processor hog, and best of all, it threw up a big 'ALERT' dialog every time I disconnected the computer or turned on the computer without the printer connected. YES HP. I WON'T DIE WITHOUT YOUR CRAPABULOUS PRINTER! ... Wasn't that big a problem when I was working on a PPC G4 tower machine but when I moved I slimmed down and let go of my old machine. Much bigger hassle with an IntelMac notebook that I take to work and am frequently running without it connected to the godforsaken printer.
The new printer has built in WiFi and can just connect to our network. It cost about the same price as each of the other machines when I purchased them and, like the microwave range-hood, the combo device takes up a lot less space than two separate devices.
Long story short... Anyone interested in a mostly-functional USB scanner with really annoying software or a colorblind inkjet printer with serious codependency issues? I'm ready to get them out of my life.
Anyhow. While all this was happening, it was so minor I didn't even bother to mention that my crappy old printer decided it was time to die and my crappy old scanner began getting so temperamental that it was also becoming nearly impossible to use. (the positioning belt started slipping so it makes a ghastly amount of noise and was giving me smeared parts in scans at times)
Meh. Turns out though that both scanners and printers have really come down in price. We ended up going with a combination unit (Epson Artisan 810) It's a glossy oppressive black cube but... Ooooh. Six color printing, double-sided printing, and my favorite, an automatic sheet feeder for the scanner. I'm thinking I can use the peg holes on my animation paper as registration guides. Toonboom will attempt to do some auto registration when feeding from a scanner but I've never really bothered with it as the interface was MUCH too slow and my digital camera was sufficient resolution but perhaps now I'll give it another go.
I'm already pretty happy with this machine. It's higher resolution, it's a LOT faster, it's much faster, the buttons on the machine work out of box and let me stand at the scanner to scan single sheets instead of scampering back and forth, the scanning software is friendly and easy to use and the default calibration is rather decent. The scan quality is very good, and finally, it's not HP!
I used to really like HP back when I was young and foolish (or perhaps when they made better stuff) but both the printer and scanner I've been using were pretty crap honestly. The hardware isn't terrible. It's not the best by a long shot but it's been at least mostly reliable. Their software and drivers on the other hand are complete rubbish. The scanner alone is a 105M download and then it didn't save configuration settings, changed settings between scans, and lots of other things that made it really annoying and a huge time sync. Scanning for the past many years has always been a tedious and fiddly affair.
The printer is slow, it still works most of the time but every now and then decides its not going to print cyan... And no, it's not a cartridge problem or blocked jet issue. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but again, the software was really wretched. The printer driver is always sitting in memory, it's about 60M, it was only in PPC mode so always running in rosetta mode and being a processor hog, and best of all, it threw up a big 'ALERT' dialog every time I disconnected the computer or turned on the computer without the printer connected. YES HP. I WON'T DIE WITHOUT YOUR CRAPABULOUS PRINTER! ... Wasn't that big a problem when I was working on a PPC G4 tower machine but when I moved I slimmed down and let go of my old machine. Much bigger hassle with an IntelMac notebook that I take to work and am frequently running without it connected to the godforsaken printer.
The new printer has built in WiFi and can just connect to our network. It cost about the same price as each of the other machines when I purchased them and, like the microwave range-hood, the combo device takes up a lot less space than two separate devices.
Long story short... Anyone interested in a mostly-functional USB scanner with really annoying software or a colorblind inkjet printer with serious codependency issues? I'm ready to get them out of my life.
