tin_the_fatty weblog

Our HP All-in-One (scanner, printer, photocopier) died a few days ago. The plastic print head guide strip came off. It could be relatively easy to fix, but my attempts to put the guide strip back to make it work have been unsuccessful.

The Lady virtually gave up printing w/ it when she discovered that ink for her HP All-in-One is more expensive than Chanel No. 5 by volume. This is of course silly. We don’t exactly run a printshop w/ it. In fact we print less than 10 pages per week. For good convenience and low total cost it actually served our purposes rather well.

I am undecided whether to get it repaired. It could be such a easy job that would cost me a couple of hundred dollars and 10 minutes of the technican’s time. It would however be a total pain to drag this thing all the way out to a service centre.

While I was browsing I came across Brother’s offerings of All-in-One units, most notably the DCP-110C, available from Broadways at just over HK$800, and the MFC-620CN, highly recommended by an OA shop in Central, for HK$2,088.

These babies are cheap alright. The 620CN also has a Ethernet port and supports network printing natively. What really attracted my attention was however their ability to scan to memory cards (CF/SD/MS). Scanner software generally suck badly. They also tie up the host computer when working and often crash at the most inconvenient times. Now these Brother babies turn the scanner into an appliance. Okay sneaky net isn’t the most advanced IT technology, and you won’t get to fine tune your scans if you use this feature, but for scanning documents for emailing or archiving, if these babies work as advertised then they are far more usable than anything else on the market costing upto 10x as much (as a reference the scanner module for the Ricoh photocopier to turn it into a network scanner is over HK$20K itself).