apped.design

by David South Jr

Our Canon MP500 ink-jet printer was not getting the job done. Sure, it worked okay if you printed from the Mac Mini the printer was connected to. But sharing the printer, through the Mini, over the network was a failure. The problem always happened if one of the kids turned off the printer. After it was turned on, it would not accept jobs from networked computers.

I moved the Canon to an Airport Extreme which handles printing from the network directly through a USB interface on the wireless router. No good. It just didn’t work. The Canon must not notify the host computer that it’s working and ready. Once the printer is shut off, even for a moment, the link would be broken and I’d have to restart the whole setup to print even a single sheet.

We needed a better solution and found it at Sam’s Club—the HP 6150 All-In-One.

The 6150 is a fax machine, scanner, printer, and copier. More importantly, it has two network interfaces. It can be plugged directly into the network router or connect using the 802.11b/g wireless network card built into the printer. This is a big deal for a printer that cost only $250. In the past a networked printer cost at least a $1000 and it didn’t work wirelessly.

Setting up the printer was very easy. We unpacked it (HP uses a lot of tape) and put it in the office upstairs—away from the network router. The instructions easily show how to power up the printer, find the wireless network settings, and enter the wireless network password. Once this is finished, the printer is ready.

Because the 6150 does not support Postscript printing, I had to install the HP printer software onto the MacBook, Powerbook, and Mac Mini. It’s not a big deal because with the printing software comes the scanning software as well.

That was it. The printer works every time. We can turn the printer off when we are not using it. We can even send something to print, then walk over to the printer, turn it on, and it prints.

More than that. It’s an excellent scanner. The scanning software works over the network, too. When you start HP Scan on the computer it automatically finds the printer and shows you a preview scan. Or you can scan multiple pages from the automatic document feeder on the printer. Multi-page scanning makes it easy to scan a set of documents and then email them to anyone. It’s cheaper than using the fax and higher quality.

I often scan documents, archive them on my computer, and throw out the originals.

Apparently HP has upgraded the printer to the 6180. I don’t know if there is anything the 6180 can do better than the 6150. They have the same basic specifications on the HP website. I found the HP 6180 online for about $255. If you can find the 6150, it’s terrific and not worth worrying about the minor differences.

There is another HP printer that has the same basic features—minus the wireless networking. The HP 6310 has is a fax, copier, scanner and printer. It has a wired network card. It sells for $180 at Sam’s Club.

But. Ink costs a lot of money. Per gallon, ink cartridges are the most expensive liquid on the planet. Manufacturers often sell printers close to free so they can make up the money on the cartridges. It’s like the old Gillette plan to give away the razor and sell the blades.

The irony is that if you buy a more expensive printer, the ink cartridges hold more ink and the overall cost per page goes down. The black ink cartridges are different for the 6310 and the 6150/80. They both cost about the same. But the 6100 series cartridge prints twice as many pages. A cost analysis using their numbers reveals that the 6310 will cost about 5 cents per page for black only while the 6150/80 is only 2.5 cents per page. The savings on the black cartridge alone will make up the difference in price.

The 6310 uses a single tri-color ink cartridge for color printing. The 6100 series uses 5 separate color cartridges. The 5 colors make for outstanding color prints. And, ironically, the cost per page is nearly identical to the 6310.

There are now two HP printers I recommend to people. For home computing I recommend the HP 6180 or the HP 6150. For an office I recommend the HP 2840 networked color laser printer.