2001-04-12 - 11:59 p.m.

New Toy

Today, to my total astonishment, I got myself a new toy. It arrived downstairs at the store this afternoon. What was so surprising was that I only ordered it a few days ago and it's already here!

It's a new printer/scanner/copier and it's sitting right next to me on the desk here in the Hamster Palace. Since it's much bigger than my old printer, that means that Winky the Hamster is living back in the Library. Oh well.

The thing is, I didn't NEED a new printer. What I really needed was a new copier. However since I bought my last copier, technology has advanced to an amazing degree. Copies aren't even made the same way any more. There used to be all this stuff about drums and static electricity, but now documents are scanned in and then laser printed out.

Comics went through a big boom period in the early 1990s, so feeling flush I bought myself a copy machine. I bought it in 1993 I think and it cost $1,400. That sounds like a lot of money, but it was cheap for the copying power I got. Basically you judged your copier by how many pages it produced a minute. I was willing to settle for 8 pages a minute because I couldn't afford 12.

I hate to say it but I started having problems very soon after I bought the copier. The main problem: it had problems feeding paper out of its paper tray. It jammed a lot and as time went on the problem got worse. First it wouldn't feed paper over a certain weight. Then it got so you couldn't make multiple copies no matter how light the paper was. Finally it got to the point where you had to feed the pages in one at a time to have it make copies at all. The paper feeder was around the back, so it felt like I was shoving sheets of paper up the copier's ass to make it produce.

I usually make about 150 copies of my store's newsletter, double sided. So that meant I had to stick 300 pieces of paper into the back of the copier for every print run. Since it did about 6.5 pages a minute, it would take me very nearly an hour just to make all the copies. It was an annoying, tedious job.

With the machine getting worse and worse, the inevitable finally happened about six weeks ago: it stopped being making copies at all. I knew this would happen, and I resolved when it did I would buy a new copier if I had the money.

Since I was last in the market for a copier a lot has changed. For one thing, copiers are MUCH cheaper. This new one does 12 pages a minute and it costs about a THIRD as much as the old copier. Furthermore, it is a printer, a fax machine and a scanner as well. I've been wanting a scanner for a while. Who knows what trouble I could get into now?

Now I can scan in the pictures that I use in my newsletters instead of clumsy cutting and pasting. This sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun.

And now, credit where credit is due. Lily is the one that did the research and she's the one who found the right machine at the right price. I had no idea that prices could vary so widely - the same machine was almost twice as much at another site.

I had a service contract with my old copier, because a repairman had to come out when something was wrong. Now, if something goes seriously wrong with it in a few years, I'll probably buy a new one again. It's become disposable technology.

*blissful sigh* I just printed out one of the chess diagrams that I use in my newspaper columns and the reproduction was so much cleaner than with my ink-jet printer.

Now if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to go play with my new toy.