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September 29, 2009

Printer

Right before leaving for vacation, the black and white Samsung ML-1210 laser printer I purchased in 2001 stopped working correctly. It was frustrating because the printer still functioned but I couldn't get it to grab and feed paper. I opened it up, cleaned things out, tried to adjust the feeder bits, etc., but no dice-- it just didn't want to grab paper either through the multi-page feed or the single-page feeder any more.

Since moving, M and I have found it very nice to have a laser B/W printer for quick things (like printing from the internet) and for text-based items and leaving her color ink jet for pictures and things that we need color on.

The other day M found a Brother HL-2170W printer on sale for $120. Since I still hadn't been able to get my 8-year old printer to function, we discussed it. All of the Brother's technical specs were better than my old printer and it is network-able using either wireless or wired. Rather than pay a ton of money to get the old printer to work properly again (and likely have to send it to Samsung or an authorized dealer to fix), we decided to put the repair money toward this and just get a new one.
  • Installation was a breeze. My PC is running Win7 RTM and the OS just found it the instant it was networked and installed the proper drivers and I could print immediately. M's machine is using XP Media Ed. and I had to use the installation CD, but her's too then immediately found it and could use it. This should allow friends with laptops to access the printer from their PCs, too (as long as they have access to the network, of course).
  • It prints fast... about twice as fast as my old laser and without the long warm up and page find. And we went from 600x600 to 2400x600, so the quality of the printer output is much crisper and nicer.
  • It has a 250-sheet tray paper feeder. That's about 200 sheets more than my old multi-page feeder could hold without jamming.
I think we're going to be happy with the new printer. And my hope is that it will give us the same years of service that the last printer did.

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