A Printer Has Invaded My Bedroom
My wife wanted one of those multifunction printers downstairs so she could scan/copy/fax/print without having to come up into the office. Unfortunately, there’s not too many places downstairs where the kids–particular Gracie–can’t reach or get to easily aside from our bedroom. Certainly no place near the computer downstairs, so the device had to be something I could network.
I had been doing some research on what kind of multifunction printer to get. I thought an affordable networked-multifunction printer would cost several hundred dollars. It turned out there were a few choices in the $200 price range.
My mother-in-law, and just about everyone else I know for that matter, has some sort of HP device. It’s likely directly connected via USB, which obviously won’t work. I could have gotten a networked HP multifunction printer at Costco–my place of choice for these things–but it was over $200 and from what I read, most of the HP units drank ink like water.
I ended up settling on the Brother MFC-665CW. For a mere $200, plus tax, I have a device that scans, copies, faxes (both standalone and as a printer from the computer), prints, has a built-in answering machine, and has both Ethernet and WiFi connectivity. It’s also Mac and PC compatible. To boot, the devices ship with full ink cartridges and, according to what I read on various sites, it doesn’t drink ink nearly as bad as the HP units.
One thing I tried to do with it today was use the PictBridge functionality to print a picture from my Nokia N80 Internet Edition. I had to tell the N80ie what settings to use–it would fail on the automatic settings–but once I did that, it printed my picture on a Letter size paper with no borders. It kind of saturated the paper since ink jet printers tend to do that when printing photos, but it did a pretty adequate job.
The new device is now sitting on my nightstand where it has easy access to both a phone line and an Ethernet jack. It takes up a lot of room on my nightstand, but it’s not like I was using my nightstand for much of anything before that anyway.
