Overview
For several months, I have been looking to deal with a printer “situation” at my home office. You see, I am the trusty IT manager at my house and must cater to not just my own needs but the demanding requirements of my plugged-in and paper-centric wife Lisa. Oh, and one other thing. I’m a Mac guy and Lisa does PCs only. So interoperability is a key requirement for any solution I come up with.
What I’ve Got
I own an Epson Stylus RX500 multifunction inkjet that I use for printing draft copies of documents and printing photos. The RX500 includes a flatbed scanner, 8-in-1 memory card reader, photo printer and can make color copies without requiring connection to a computer.
The RX500 is a pretty capable unit, but lacks a number of features that have been driving me crazy over the past year.
First, it lacks a built-in network adapter, so it must be connected to a host computer to support access over the network. I’m not always around, and we only use laptops in our house, so that does not quite work out for Lisa. She has to make a trip from the living room to the office, plug the printer in to her laptop, stand around waiting for the print job to spool and then finally she can walk away.
I had been using eFax’ free inbound fax service for a number of years but could not justify the cost of a monthly subscription required to send faxes. The RX500, though blessed with a pretty keypad one would think might be able to “dial” a destination fax machine unfortunately can’t send faxes. I don’t use fax all that much, and frankly don’t understand why people continue to use it, but in some cases I just don’t have a choice, so I have resorted to paying $1.50 per page at my local Kinko’s office to fax. The price of faxing this way really isn’t the problem, it is the inconvenience of having to go out of my way to do it, and the fact that my personal documents are leaving my house and being handled by someone and/or some piece of machinery at Kinko’s.
So, you say, can’t you just use the faxing capability of your computer’s operating system? Both Windows and Mac OS X come with built-in fax software. Well, sure, I can do that, but a couple of problems that don’t make this as simple as you think. First, 90% of the times I need to fax something is because the document I am faxing requires initialing each page and supplying signatures. The other 10% of the time the document I am sending is not actually on my computer…it only exists in hardcopy. Well, why don’t you just scan them you say!
As much as faxing is a pain in the butt, the real annoyance has been not having a real scanner. The RX500 has no facility for handling multi-page documents – each page that gets scanned has to be placed on the glass and after this insanely tedious manual process you have to use software to put the pages together into a single document.
The best of times, the worst of times
I recently picked up my first laser printer – an affordable HP Color LaserJet 2600n for high-quality output and its ability to provide services over a network.
The 2600n does a really good job printing envelopes and high-quality color documents, but it is awful at printing on cardstock or textured papers and above all else is one of the most annoying printers I have ever seen when it is not doing anything. Yes, the sound it makes when printing is actually OK, but every 10 minutes, the printer recalibrates itself. While recalibration for optimum performance is understandably necessary, the 100-decibel blips and beeps it makes when it is doing is absolutely not acceptable and has caused headaches over here. So this thing remains OFF at all times unless it needs to be used.
What next?
What I have really coveted is a networkable multi-function printer with an automatic document feeder (or ADF) so I can fax multiple pages without a host computer OR scan multiple pages and generate a multi-page PDF in one shot.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap had piqued my interest at one point. It is a frighteningly fast multi-page dual-sided scanner with a 30-sheet ADF and comes with a license of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard Edition so you can scan directly to PDF. A recent version of the ScanSnap is optimized for the Mac and includes the Mac version of Acrobat. I think it is a fantastic device, but there are some problems. I don’t want yet another device I have to create room for in my office. That’s yet another USB port, yet another external power supply and yet another piece of software I need to install. Another limitation is it has no networking capability, so Lisa won’t be able to use it without bugging me to help do her dirty work. And finally, Acrobat 7.0? Acrobat 7 is not a universal application so it runs slower than it should on Intel-based macs, Acrobat 8 has been out for six months and Fujitsu’s version of 7 is nonupgradable. It’s also relatively expensive at $400.
I had been eyeing the recent generation of all-in-ones from Epson and HP and saw some reasonably positive reviews for the HP C6180, which seemed to have all of the features I was looking for at a good price, with one exception which I will point out later. Some bonus capabilities included the ability to work wirelessly and the ability to do remote scanning. I had been down on HP for some time but their printers were always pretty decent and HP was generally good when it came to supporting Macs. The 6180 was generally visually pleasing and compact in form, unlike some of HPs battleship gray OfficeJet monsters. I dove in on a deal from Amazon – $219 with free shipping and no tax.
Setting it Up
HP’s packaging for this unit was fairly efficient – mostly recyclable cardboard and paper. The less styro the better and it was a pleasant surprise to not have to deal with that.
Turning on the printer for the first time resulted in about minute worth of twisting and shouting before settling down.
The six smallish ink cartridges were very easy to open and install. Each slot is designed to accept a specific color cartridge, so you can’t possibly screw it up by mixing up the colors. Ink initialization uses 1 sheet of paper and takes about 5 minutes to generate. I liked having my expectations managed, and the display of a countdown timer on the units built-in color LCD display was satisfying. It was a moderately noisy process, but as a whole a much better experience than I had with the Epson RX500.
Networking
I have a wireless access point in my office protected with WPA and was hoping it would. It was easy to enter an alphanumeric WPA-PSK key…just “text” the key using the keypad and it works like a cell phone. Truthfully, I didn’t really need it to be wireless, so for now it is simply freeing up an extra network port on the router for a future device.
HP All-in-One Software
HP is notorious for bloated software installs on its consumer devices. HP PCs typically come preinstalled with loads of less-than-useful software and a gallery of desktop icons.
Hey, at least HP is consistent. The included software wants 200+ MB of space, and when installed places a nice little collection of icons on the dock. I wonder how much of this is due to the universal binary thing on the Mac platform. I’m a Quicksilver guy so no need for distractions…I would have appreciated an option to skip messing with my dock. On the other hand, no system restart was required – hooray! HP installs a few applications into the standard Applications folder.
There are some redeeming capabilities of the software…a colleague of mine purchased a C5180 (basically the same printer without the ADF or wireless networking) and I was instantly able to connect and print to his printer over the network without having to install additional drivers. You can configure the 6180 using one of these applications, or you can connect to the built-in web server via a browser and do it that way. The interface is ugly but it does the job. The LaserJet 2600n has a similar service.
Operation
As with most inkjets, and unlike typical lasers, the C6180 can shake itself quite a bit while printing so be sure to place it on a stable surface. There has to be *some* effect on print quality if the printer is gyrating too much. Placing it on a rolling file cabinet will probably not make you happy.
The fax feature worked flawlessly. One nice surprise…I was in the middle of sending a fax and wanted to stop as I was missing a page. I accidentally hit the Power button instead of the Cancel button…oops! On restart, the 6180 printed out a report indicating there was a power failure and the fax was not sent. Probably a good thing to have if you schedule a fax a few hours in advance and power is interrupted. By the way, did I mention you could schedule a fax to be sent at a later time? 
Print quality was decent for an inkjet, though I have seen better. Draft mode is frighteningly quick though a bit noisy. I did not have an opportunity to test photo printing but I have seen output from my friend’s 5180 and it looks pretty good.
The thing even prints graph paper
Yeah, this was a fantastic idea…the printer has enough internal memory to store preprinted forms such as lined paper and graph paper. I suppose you could place your own “predesigned forms” on a memory card and use the printer to print them as if they were photos. Leave the card in and you have access to them in an instant.
Close…ah, but no cigar
The only major feature I am missing from this setup is one-pass dual-sided scanning. I was able to work around this limitation by scanning the stack of pages twice (top side first, than bottom side) and leveraging software tools like PDFLab. I was also able to modify a neat Python script that uses Tiger’s Core Graphics APIs to manipulate PDFs to order the pages correctly. I’ll post the code when I get a moment.
A complete bust was HP’s “WebScan” feature that allows you to scan via the web. This is a fantastic idea, but it gets a 0 of 10 for implementation, as in, how did this software make it out the door? WebScan does not work with the ADF at all, and in its current state you can only generate a preview – the scan function just would not work in Firefox or Safari, no matter what I tried. So, HP, make this feature work, make the user interface work better, and by the way, make it generate a PDF too just like your desktop software. This way Lisa can place her hotel bills in the feeder and download the scanned multi-page document to her laptop when she needs to prepare her expense reports.
Final thoughts
Not a bad printer for the price. Hopefully a future Photosmart printer will include a dual-sided scanner feature with a working WebScan feature at the <$200 price point.
