Bought one yesterday for HK$2,088 from an OA shop in Central. James then told me about Jumbo in MKCC selling them for HK$1,880. Oh well, I’ll have to use mine harder for it to worth the HK$200 difference then.
Make no mistake, this is not a very solid machine. It comes with a 3 year warranty (1st year on-site, 2rd and 3rd year carry in), but I don’t expect it to last. There is nothing that says “QUALITY!” on this piece of equipment. Having said this, it works well. The cheap and cheerful DVD players from China a few years back might be a reasonable analogue: they were ugly, dirt cheap, but they play anything that resembles a CD, and last at least a couple of years. The quality stuff were 2-3X the cost, so there really was no complain.
Printing is average. The manual and online literature imply that unless you specify greyscale printing, this gem will mix the colour inks to form black, using up 3X the amount of ink (and probably making the paper all wrinkle in the process). I have no idea whether decent photo printers are like this (I suspect not). The black ink is not as dark as I would like.
Scanning to memory cards (tried SD and CF) works well. You can choose between TIFF, JPEG and PDF, PDF being the most useful to me. Let’s get the few small complaints out of the way first:-
- The ADF works, but is not too solid, as paper alignment isn’t as good as the cheap-ish Epson at the office (but then the Epson is bigger and makes a lot more noise).
- There are about 2-3 millimeters at the top and bottom of the page where the scanner doesn’t see. Documents normally have margins, so this is probably okay.
- The PDF files generated are of Letter size instead of A4. This means that printing the scanned documents may involve scaling. I might test it with some graph paper someday.
- Network scanning is a supported feature on Windows, but doesn’t work on the Mac. Not that it matters for me.
Nonetheless, scan to memory card is a killer feature. Just let it do its job without holding up a host computer is a major breakthu in scanner usability.
There is no handset, but this gem has a speakerphone, so is usable as a telephone. It is also an answering machine, but I don’t think the voice messages can be downloaded to computers.
Network setup was easy enough: specify IP address and netmask from the printer and that’s it. I needed to disable the firewall on my X40 running WinXP to print and monitor the printer, but this is a problem w/ WinXP and the firewall, not with the device itself.
Oh yeah I missed the days when printer drivers came on a single floppy disk. Tens of megabytes of software had to be installed on both the Mac and the WinXP computer. There was no easy way to “just add” the printer driver and forego all the other crap. The crap in this case are however not as overwhelming as the crap from our previous HP All-in-One.
I have not yet tested USB connection. One design glitch is that both the USB and network ports are deep inside, only accessible after lifting the top of the printer. There is a trench that routes the network cable to the back of the printer and out, but that is a good 6-8 inches of extra cable in there.
I am happy with it so far.