How many times have you needed to hit Print on your computer and you’ve realized that you’re just not connected to a printer?

Physically connecting your computer to the printer of course will mean picking your computer up, making your way to wherever the printer is, or wherever a computer is that is connected to the printer through Ethernet cable.

Why on earth should anyone have to put up with this, when it’s cheap buying and setting up a wireless printer?

Printers are just getting smarter everyday. A wireless printer – one that is able to connect to computers through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi – can be had for as little as $50.

You can park the printer wherever it’s convenient, plug it into the power, and you’re good to go. It’ll just show up on everybody’s computer as a network destination, and anyone can just send print jobs.

If you’re good with setting up a wireless printer, there is no reason to have to wire things up anymore.

Now, unless you have a very old printer, you never have to connect a printer directly to the computer it needs to print from.

Nearly every printer out there has a regular Ethernet port. You just need to connect the printer to a Wi-Fi router that wirelessly connects to every computer in the building, and you’d have yourself a wireless printer just like that.

But that isn’t really as convenient as a real wireless printer.

In some buildings and installations, the router is located somewhere really inconvenient, sometimes in the basement or on another floor.

To have to put the printer next to the router can make little sense in many places. Setting up a wireless printer is the only thing that would work.

Once you have it, you could get your printer and every computer in the building to connect wirelessly to one another.

In some installations, wirelessness in a printer can make even more sense. Consider a small office where there is more than one printer – perhaps one that’s an inexpensive color laser model, one that’s a monochrome laser model, a couple of inkjet models for different levels of quality and so on.

Everyone in the office would want to connect to every one of these printers at different times. A print server would be an excellent idea in this case.

Actually, make that a wireless print server. To think of the kind of wiring you would need to do in such a situation if it weren’t a wireless set up, fairly boggles the mind.

Setting up a Wireless Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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It’s forever been a kind of lesson in economics how the manufacturers price a computer printer so that they lose 30% on the sale, but make up for it by selling replacement cartridges at a 1000% markup. Printer ink prices weren’t always this expensive.

Ink prices, over the last 10 years have gone up by about four times. You could easily buy a computer printer for $30 today and the very next month, spend about $70 on buying replacement cartridges.

If you are asking yourself why printer ink has to be this expensive, it’s a rather obvious question. HP for instance, has a $30 billion imaging business; they find that the printer business gives them three times as much in profits as their computer business. And most of those profits come from price gouging with inks.

Not every computer printer manufacturer is trying the same tack to stay in business though. Kodak, a company that’s been trying hard to find a footing ever since its photographic film business evaporated, has been wondering if it can turn the printer business model that every other manufacturer has been following on its head, and ingratiate itself to the consumer.

They have been trying to price their printers to be somewhat expensive and to price their inks to be quite cheap. With their line of photo printers, they are pricing their cartridges at about a quarter of what the other makers do.

While Kodak photo printers put out pictures that are considered to be the best in the industry, their ink prices are among the lowest. In the (admittedly small) photo printer market, they’ve made quite a dent.

HP’s way of dealing with this has been to try to bribe all the major retailers into dropping any cheaper alternatives. Staples for instance, has for long had its own line of printer ink cartridges that could save you about $10.

Yet at any Staples store today, and you only get HP’s own consumables. HP has bribed Staples into dropping all third-party consumables.

But Kodak’s new system of making a profit on the computer printer sale and leaving the ink alone has kind of made a large-scale impact on the rest of the market.

HP, Canon and Lexmark have begun to sell super-cheap printers. For instance, you can buy a Lexmark printer for $40 now. It’s almost like a new printer with starter-cartridges installed is cheaper than a new cartridge now.

Still, consumers do continue to just buy printers based on what kind of features the machines have and not based on the price they will have to pay for ink. Manufacturers don’t make it any easier on their consumers either.

It can be very difficult to compare one printer with another for how much it will end up costing you in ink purchases. They package inks in different sizes and there is nowhere you can go for easy information on how many pages of print you can get with the ink that goes with any kind of printer.

For the consumer, the good news though is that they just aren’t printing that much anyway. People have easy Internet connectivity everywhere now and they don’t need to print things out as much as they used to.

Still, it’s a shame that Kodak’s policy of being honest with the consumer hasn’t really won it any points. Only the really educated customer notices what Kodak is trying to do.

Sick of Paying for Computer Printer Inks? is a post from: Computer Spot

You can find a many photo printers in the marketplace today, however the question is-are they worth the money?

There are plenty of points to consider before buying a photo printer to use at home, and before deciding what features you need.

The rise in popularity of home photo printing has resulted in a big increase in the number of models out there. There are small printers which will print only wallet sized prints, others which will do 4×6 prints, yet still others that do 8×10 or larger.

Some might take a long time to print each photo whilst others might be almost instant, though none will print as quickly as they are able to print plain text.

Some printers are designed to work directly with a camera. These printers will have software built in that can interface with the printer and may also have a small LCD viewing screen that will enable you to view the photos before you print them.

All that you need to accomplish is plug your camera in, select the photos to print and away you go and not having to work with a computer as an intermediate stage.

The reason against purchasing a home photo printer is the cost. Initially there is a small investment needed in buying the printer, but the maintenance costs are what really make these uneconomical.

The price of good photo paper that will produce prints which do not fade as time passes or with exposure to the light isn’t small.

There are cheaper papers available but they tend to not produce such good results, that may be prone to both fading over time but also streaking during printing.

Printer ink cartridges are the biggest cost, and the one that’s the most prohibitive to regular home printing. Many printers themselves are relatively cheap, but to buy a full set of color and black inks for them may cost half the price of the printer or more-some costing almost as much as the initial purchase price of the machine.

There are now some printers out there that specifically state that they offer cheaper ink for the life of the printer, and also many generic ink manufacturers.

Still others will refill cartridges for you, but the generic and the refilled cartridges tend to have poor performance compared to brand new, brand name cartridges.

These costs, along with the limitations and poorer quality prints that the printers may produce need to be taken into account together and compared to commercial solutions. There are now online photo printing companies that allow you to upload photos from your home, and they mail the prints to you.

With bulk purchases of pre-paid credits, this can make prints as little as 6c each. There unfortunately isn’t a printer in the market today that can print high quality prints for that price.

This means that it all comes down to convenience. If you want to regularly have prints instantly then a home printer is for you-otherwise, your prints become an expensive habit.

Do You Think That You Need A Photo Printer at Home ? is a post from: Computer Spot

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Did you know that the typical photo printed in a print lab only lasts around 50 years? According the Epson, photos printed with the Epson Picture Mate Photolab & Printer last much longer – 4 times longer to be exact.

I think what they mean is that photos won’t begin to fade for 200 years (4 times longer) than photos created in a print lab. I don’t know that much about printing, but I don’t believe that photos created in a print lab will fall apart the second they hit 50 years old.

I do believe that photos printed with the Epson Picture Mate Photolab & Printer last longer. It uses advanced MicroPiezo technology developed by Epson to help your photos last longer and look their best. This technology also improves the quality of the photos printed.

With the Epson Picture Mate you can print from digital camera, USB flash drive, memory card, or by bluetooth for mobile phones and other devices.

Other than the whole last 200 years thing, another cool feature of the Picture Mate is it’s large easy to see LCD screen measuring a generous 3.6 inches.

Being able to see exactly what you’re printing before you hit print is a great benefit to avoid wasting photo paper. You can also easily  navigate around using that same screen, so it should be suitable for anyone ranging from a beginner to an expert.

The printer can run as a standalone machine or with your computer. It includes software for Windows (many versions, including Windows XP and Windows Vista) and Mac OS X. Linux users could also probably find a way to run the software (maybe with WINE) or find an alternative.

It was difficult to find things about this photo printer that I didn’t like. However, it only prints 4×6 photos. If this is all that you are looking for, this printer is pretty much perfect, but if you’d like to print something larger than you may need to go for a full size all in one style printer.

The Photo Mate prints at a high quality (5760×1440 dpi). Epson guarantees that you get at least 150 photos from every cartridge, making it a little more budget friendly than one might expect.

If you don’t, they will pro-rate the price of the cartridge and refund you a fraction of the price. I don’t know anyone who has taken them up on this deal, but it seems that this will protect you from purchasing a bad cartridge and losing money.

You probably won’t end up asking for a refund if you print 148 photos, but if it’s down around 100 it would be worth your time.

Epson Picture Mate Photolab & Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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Recently, our office got a new printer, HP Officejet Pro 8500 Premier Wireless All-in-One Printer. This all-in-one printer lets you turn your office into a professional print shop.

It high-quality laser printing is one of its kind. It’s built in wireless networking lets you to print from any room of the office. You have the option to print your own marketing materials and save up to 50% of the costs.

In addition, when you buy the printer, you get three extra color print cartridges, HP Brochure paper, and marketing software.

This helps you to start printing your own brochures instantly. This printer contains the original HP Officejet Pro pigment inks which make your documents very sharp and lively.

It also saves a lot of time because of its two tray system. You can print up to 500 pages without reloading paper.

You also have the option to save paper by enabling the two-sided printing, scanning, and faxing. This will save on office costs.

This printer reduces the clutter from under your office table because of its wireless networking. This will also help in improving office productivity by sharing the printer with numerous people.

This HP Officejet Pro printer will save on your energy by burning up 50% less power. More importantly, as you are using one printer instead of many, so you will be reducing your energy consumption automatically.

The HP Officejet uses four different inks – 940 Black, 940 Cyan, 940 Magenta and 940 Yellow. You can also connect to your PC by using a USB cable. It is a wonderful office product and quite economical too.

HP Officejet Pro 8500 Premier Wireless All-in-One Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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Do you own an inkjet printer? Has the printhead ever clogged up on you, creating streaks or missing colors from your printing?

Clogs can be incredibly frustrating. Normally when you find out you have a clogged printhead, it’s because you’re right in the middle of printing something important.

It’s one of those problems that you never ask for. It just seems to throw itself in your lap without warning, and then taunts you in your efforts to fix it.

The printhead is the mechanism of your printer (or inkjet cartridge), where the ink actually comes out.

For the most part, printhead clogs can be normally be flushed out with a couple of “head cleaning” cycles. A head cleaning cycle is a built-in function of your printer. It’s a specialized routine meant to address this type of problem.

This “cleaning cycle” works by sending a strong ‘print signal’ to your printer, while at the same time drawing a small vacuum from underneath.

The combination of these two steps works in an attempt to suck out clogged ink from the printhead. From my experience, you’ll probably need to run between 3 and 5 cycles to fully clear a clog.

The location of the head cleaning cycle proceedure varies for each printer brand, so refer to your printer owner’s manual for specific instructions to find yours. Check the index first.

If you don’t have your owner’s manual anymore, you can check our your printer manufacturers website.  Most likely, they will have your printer manual online.

There are times however, when a few standard head cleaning routines don’t seem to solve the problem.  A stubborn printhead clog like this can be persistant enough to make you want to rip out your hair.

For times like these, you’ll need to pull out the big guns!

For stubborn inkjet printhead clogs, there are various cleaners out there specifically for this purpose.  These cleaners are formulated to disolve dried or “gummy” ink which may have accumulated from infrequent printer use, or even just a general build-up over time.

I personally brought an old printer “back from the dead” using a product called ‘Clog Buster’.  It was a printer I had purchased off of eBay which apparently hadn’t been used in awhile.  I spent a few hours trying to revive the printer, and ‘Clog Buster’ was the only thing that worked when nothing else did.

The only downside with using a cleaning product like this however, is that you usually don’t have it in your immediate possession when the clog hits.

Unless you have some already on hand, you’ll have to wait for it to be shipped to you.  In the meantime, your printing project will have to remain on pause until it arrives.

(But maybe I can help…)

The good news is that you MAY be able to solve the problem using some basic household products.  In fact, Windex glass cleaner can actually work well for dissolving dried ink.  What’s the secret ingredient?

Ammonia

Tough printhead clogs can usually be brought into submission by soaking the printhead in a solution of 50/50% ammonia and distilled water.

A important word of warning…  Ammonia is potent and powerful stuff.  When working with ammonia, always make sure you’ve got adequate ventilation, and avoid mixing it with other chemicals.  Very important.

So, if your printhead is located on the inkjet cartridge itself, you’ll want to soak the printhead in the 50/50 solution for an hour or two.

If the printhead unit is located inside your inkjet printer itself, then you’ll first need to remove the inkjet cartridges.

After those are removed, put some of the solution into the top of the printhead (directly into the nozzle holes) and let it sit a few hours.

Go ahead and put a little more into the printhead resting seat.  (This is the rubber rectangle part that seals off the printhead unit while the carriage is in it’s resting position.)

If this initial soaking doesn’t work, then repeat another time using 100% ammonia for up to one hour.  Afterward, make sure to rinse completely with distilled water.

If the clog doesn’t immediately clear, go ahead and let the printer sit overnight and try it again the next day.  Sometimes the clog will breakdown slowly and release later as the ammonia takes it’s toll.

Finally, for those of you wondering about the effectiveness of using alcohol to unclog cartridges and printhead — here’s a quick note…

Alcohol won’t work as well as ammonia, but may work better than a few cleaning cycles.  The downside is that alcohol may actually dry out the plastics and metals in the printhead.

This could actually increase the chances of clogging later on down the road.  So try to avoid alcohol if possible.

How To Clear A Stubborn Inkjet Printer Clog is a post from: Computer Spot

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If you aren’t into all of the new digital ways to share photos, you can always print them out.

Or, even if you have all of these cool digital photo sharing gadgets, you can’t really scrapbook a digital keychain.

The Canon Pixma Mini 320 Photo Printer is the perfect solution for your digital woes.

The first thing that I noticed about the printer is the sleek design. It looks like it could be made by Apple, because it has that sleek, shiny, white look happening.

It includes a viewing screen for viewing photos, which is a must. I have a printer without this, so we either have to create an SD card with only the photos that we want to print, and then print them all or guess what number corresponds to what photo. It’s not a fun game.

We frequently end up with a bunch of photos that we don’t want. Paper and ink are both very expensive, so seeing what you print beforehand is a good thing.

The Canon Pixma Mini 320 Photo Printer is the perfect for traveling or going to scrapbook parties. It is quite small, so you can bring it just about anywhere.

If you’re at a party, you can have the photos printed and handed out before the party is over. On vacation? This little gizmo will follow you there too. It includes a revolutionary feature – a handle! You can carry it just about anywhere.

Print from digital cameras, memory cards, or cell phones. With an optional bluetooth adapter, you can print high quality photos from just about anything in a matter of seconds.

It claims that it prints at a ’9600 x 2400 dpi’, but for this feature to be fully utilized, the print has to be connected to a computer.

Canon Pixma mini320 Compact Photo Inkjet Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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Canon’s new addition to their line of printers is Canon Selphy CP760 Printer. It is an upgrade over the inkjet printers and is a dye sublimation photo printer.

It was created keeping in mind its target audience which are mainly families and children as it is very easy to operate and prints excellent quality photos quickly.

The most important feature of this printer is that you don’t need a computer to print. You can easily do so with memory card, USB drive, a digital camera enabled with PictBridge or via a Bluetooth interface.

Canon has added value to the printer by appealing to the instant gratification need of the customers and hence this printer is very famous with family people and people love to carry it around with them.

CP760 is much smaller than the regular printer, just 3.3 inches tall and 7.9 inches wide, and hence it doesn’t support printing on regular sheets of paper.

It uses a 4-by-6 inch paper instead. When you purchase the printer you will receive some trial sheets of 4-by-6 paper along with a wired power adapter and a paper cassette.

You have the option to preview the pictures before actually printing them through a 2.5 inch TFT display on the top of the unit.

In addition, there are nine rubber buttons adjacent to the screen which helps you navigate the menu.

There are also some auto-editing options available such as Red-eye Elimination, Portrait Image Optimize, and Scene Select.

The CP760 uses a dye sublimation ink technology as opposed to the regular ink technology which is supposed to protect the pictures for as long as 100 years.

The dye sublimation process ensures that the paper makes four passes through the machine, the first three lay down the base colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow and the last pass overcoats the image with a thin layer to prevent any discoloration and extend the durability.

All in all, Canon Selphy CP760 is an excellent product for an amateur photographer and a home user.

Canon Selphy CP760 Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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Printer is a peripheral used to produce or print hard copy of documents (text or illustrations) stored in an electronic form or soft copy to paper or transparencies.

It is one of the most essential computer peripherals because it helps users to have a hard copy of any documents they want to have.

A printer is connected to a computer through a printer cable (LPT1) or USB cable.  There are also network computers that have built in network interfaces to enable printing services for network users.

Modern network printers have the all-in-one capability to scan, print, convert to .PDF documents, photocopy, fax and email documents to users connected on the network.

These kinds of printers are used in medium to enterprises businesses.  There are also all-in-one printers that can be used in home and small business networks.

Some of the commonly used printers are the following:

• Dot-matrix printer – this kind of printer creates characters by striking pins against an ink ribbon.  Each pin creates a dot, and combination of dots form characters and illustrations.
• Ink-jet printer – it uses ink to print texts and illustrations.  It produces high quality text and graphics.  This kind of printer is usually used in home and offices.
• Laser printer – this kind of printer produces very high quality text and graphics.  Its technology is similar to copy machines.  It can be used also in home, offices, and photo printing business.

Brief Introduction of Computer Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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A typical computer should have a printer on hand. There are all sorts of computer printer characteristics to look into first.

The type of printer that is used is one of the characteristics to consider. This includes the printing quality and the speed of the printing. Multiple services, including scanning and faxing, can take place from a printer too.

Here is a look into these computer printer characteristics.

• The type of the printer
  • The dot matrix printer is still used in some places

  This is where pixels are printed to form a single image. However, more advanced technologies are being used. For instance, the toner based printer uses static electricity to move the toner into the paper for printing and then heat is applied to keep it on the paper.

  • The inkjet printer is the most common printer on the market today

  This is where small bits of ink are printed onto a piece of paper. Each bit of ink will be attached via a small electric charge.

  • Laser printers are becoming popular too

  These can work with toner in that the LEDs in the printer can get the toner to stick to the paper. Inkless printers are currently in development as well.

  Dye crystals are used to be heated into the area between the two layers of the paper. This is a process in development though, as the print has been known to fade quickly in trial tests.

• Printing Quality

The quality that a printer will be capable of handling will be measured by its dpi, or dots per inch.

The dpi readout will be based on the ability of the printer to be able to print high quality images. For instance, a typical printer on the market will have a dpi readout of 600×600.

This means that there will be 600 dots per inch on both the vertical and horizontal parts of the page. 4800×1200 is becoming a standard on some of the higher end printers these days, and some will even go as high as 9600×2400 in quality.

• Printing Speed

The number of pages per minute that it will be able to print measures the speed. This speed will be different based on whether or not black and white pages or color pages are going to be printed.

Some printers can handle up to thirty black and white pages in a minute and eight color pages in a minute, for instance.

• Multiple features on a printer

Some printers are able to handle scanning or fax technologies. Some will also be able to copy pages right from the printer without a connection to anything. CD and DVD label printing is also featured on some of these newer printers.

Those are the computer printer characteristics to think about when buying a new printer. The type of printer, its quality output and the speed of the printer are all important. Additional services may be considered too.

By using these considerations, it will be easier to find a printer that is right for one’s specific needs.

What Computer Printer Characteristics Should Be Considered is a post from: Computer Spot

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