Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

Printers are a pain in the butt. I have used printers for one reason and one reason only in the last few years, and that has been to print out airline boarding passes. I would LOVE to be able to use a printer to make photo prints, but that’s always more expensive pain in the butt-ness, since you blow through ink and have to use fancy paper to get decent results. The Canon PIXMA MX7600 solves half of that problem, since it’s designed with “the ability to produce crisp graphics and text on plain paper with the incorporation of the new Pigment Reaction (PgR) technology.” I have no idea how PgR technology works, but the result is that “curling, ink bleeding and printing through the paper sometimes associated with color inkjet printing on plain paper is dramatically reduced.” Cool, now explain to me why it costs MORE money to replace an ink cartridge than it does to buy a new printer, and I might start paying attention. The MX7600 can spit out a 1200 dpi 4×6 color print in 43 seconds, has six (!) ink tanks including a clear ink, can scan and copy and fax, and includes a card reader. MSRP of $400, available sometime this month.

[ Canon PIXIMA MX7600 ] VIA [ SlipperyBrick ]

By Evan Ackerman

It’s a fact: give me a piece of paper, and I will lose it. Paper is such an impractical medium nowadays, but that doesn’t stop people from printing stuff out, giving it to me, and then complaining when it disappears. I guess maybe if I had a printer like the Canon ImagePRESS C7000VP, I might start printing things besides airplane boarding passes. This is a serious, serious printer. It requires 33 feet of wallspace (!) and costs a shade over $280,000. It comes with a trimmer, finisher, inserter, stacker, binder, capacity for 10,000 sheets of paper, and can print 70 pages per minute at 1200 dpi. The internal computer is a dual core 3.0ghz Xeon with 2 gigs of ram and a couple raided 80gb HDs.

Honestly though, what do you do with a printer like this? My recommendation is to save yourself some money by getting, say, 70 1ppm printers instead, and then pay some poor sap to keep track of print jobs and do all the trimming, finishing, inserting, stacking, and binding by hand. I bet you can pay them six figures and still have tons of money left over to send to me for giving you such practical advice.

[ Canon C7000VP (In Japanese) ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Luke Anderson

One of my many bad habits is that I never label my CDs when I burn them. I use a Sharpie once in a while, but my handwriting is so bad that I never know what I wrote anyway. Sure, I could print out labels and affix them to the CD, but that’s a pain. That’s why I like this new Casio CW-E60 Title Printer.

This little device will use a thermal transfer ribbon to print the label onto your disc. The Title Printer comes with simple software to design your labels. You can choose from 8 different colored ribbons for your prints. The printer will set you back $60.

[Casio] VIA [EverythingUSB]

By Andrew Liszewski

While dedicated DVD and CD printers are far quicker and usually produce better results than an inkjet with disc-printing capabilities, they can be pretty expensive. But the labeling empire known as DYMO feels that the average household could use a standalone disc printer and have created the DiscPainter to sell to the masses.

But, if quality and speed aren’t that important to you the company has come up with another selling point they call RadialPrint technology. The best way to describe it is like that old Twirl-A-Paint toy, where the disc is printed from the inside edge to the outside edge while it spins. But instead of ending up with random smeared paint blotches, you get a high-quality finish. The DiscPainter also includes custom DYMO software for creating the label, but it can also be used with the standard design tools like Photoshop or Illustrator.

With an expected retail price of about $279, if you only print the occasional disc you might be better off with an inkjet printer that includes this functionality. But if quality and speed are important, you’re not going to find a dedicated disc printer like this any cheaper.

[ DYMO DiscPainter ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While a truly ‘paperless office’ is still many years away, it seems a completely wireless one is almost within our reach. As long as you ignore the need for power cords, you can pretty much eliminate all the other wires through the use of cell phones, bluetooth and of course wifi.

The latest devices to at least cut one of their cords are printers. Thanks again to wifi, those annoying and limiting parallel port, USB and network cables are a thing of the past. While I have seen wifi printers in stores before, Lexmark seems to be the first manufacturer to be really gung-ho about the idea, and have released an entire line of affordable wifi printers with no extra hardware or adapters needed.

I had a chance to look at the Lexmark X4550 All-In-One printer which is one of the company’s first wireless models. You can read my impressions and full review after the jump, or just look at the pictures if you feel you’ve already done enough reading for the day, I’ll understand.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

Not content with just letting users view their photos on a printer’s LCD screen, HP has upped the ante on their Photosmart A826 model by including a 7-inch touch screen. It’s not only the largest display you’ll find on a consumer printer, but it also allows you to perform many photo editing tasks that usually require access to a PC and specialized software.

You can add captions to a photo either by writing directly on the screen with a stylus (included) or your finger (not included) or by typing them in on a touch screen keyboard. You can also doodle on a photo, adding mustaches, knocked-out teeth and eye patches which is always comedy gold. For those photos that didn’t turn out as perfect as you’d like you can even use the stylus to remove red eye, adjust the contrast and other basic corrections.

At $249.99 it’s probably not the type of printer you’re going to replace in 6 months, but if you like to skip the PC step when it comes to printing your photos this seems like a good solution.

[ HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While Lexmark has never really taken any ‘best in class’ awards when it comes to printers their hardware is relatively cheap which is what a lot of people look for. So it’s no surprise that the company is one of the first to provide a truly affordable model with built-in wifi for wirelessly sharing the printer among multiple computers.

The Z1420 uses 802.11g which should make it compatible with the average home wireless network but it also has a USB connection for hooking directly to a wifi-less computer when needed. It can print up to 24 ppm in black and 18 ppm in color but when printing at the max resolution of 4800×1200 on glossy paper don’t expect it to be quite as fast. And from what I can tell it also uses a single color cartridge which kind of sucks since the whole thing needs to be replaced when one of the colors runs out.

But if you need a cheap wireless printer you probably can’t beat the Z1420’s $79.99 price tag.

[ Lexmark Z1420 ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If the whole RFID concept has you a bit concerned this isn’t going to alleviate your fears. Brother has just released a new printer that will pretty much allow anyone to make laminated ‘TAG type’ ID cards complete with an embedded RFID chip.

I can only assume the chips are already embedded in the blank tags to start with but the printer can also be used to program each one with the person’s identification info. Having these available as an easy-to-use all-in-one unit will probably make a lot of office managers happy but if you’re an employee who finds yourself having to wear one of these all day you might want to cut down on those 2-hour lunches.

[ Brother RL-700s ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]