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.

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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 ]