Printer Recommendations

Yesterday, we replaced our much maligned printer. When we bought it, I liked it and I thought it was cool - it looked like a spaceship and I thought it was cute. I thought its problems with paper-feeding were just one of its quirks. Time went on, and the paper feed issues got to be damn annoying. When you would tell it to print, it would make a noise, and you could see the paper in the tray wiggle a little bit, but after rolling its rollers for a little while, the orange light would come on saying check the paper. So, you press the button, because clearly there is paper in the tray. Sometimes I would shove the paper in to make sure it hit the sensor and the rollers could grab it. Problem was, they would grab ten sheets and print on the first milimeter of each. ARGH! The only way to get it to print nicely on a piece of paper was to lay in wait, and when the rollers started trying to grab a piece, jam it in there. Then everything was fine. Come to think of it, every HP printer I have ever owned has had paper feed problems. This piece of junk was an HP PSC 1510 All-in-one. As a scanner, it worked very well. The copy function, when you actually could get it to feed the paper, was also quite good.

Anyway, yesterday we replaced it with a Canon PIXMA MP600, which is another all-in-one thingy. It has had zero paper feed problems, after printing both of our tax returns twice (once for the IRS and once for us). It also did envelopes for our taxes without a hitch, and I was able to get it to print on one of the test sheets for our invitations (an odd size -- 4.5 x 7.5) inside of 15 minutes. So, I am quite pleased.

The only problem is the form factor. It is probably half again as big as the HP in each dimension, and sufficiently tall so that it won't fit on the shelf where the HP has been living. I put it on my great-grandmother's desk in the office, where it fits nicely. But I missed having the desk, when I went to try to get all the tax return crap into the right envelopes and write all the checks and sign everything. We have two desks in the office: my great-grandmother's desk (hereafter the wooden desk), and this industrial looking thing that Mike got in college. For a while we had my computer on the wooden desk, but we have a tall office chair, and my legs would get squished and it wasn't a good setup for sitting there for hours, playing games, which is pretty much all I use my desktop for. The industrial desk is a good computer desk because it is tall, and it doesn't impede the electrical cords. However, it is not a good writing desk. As I was trying to address envelopes and sign stuff, it was squeaking and wiggling back and forth. I think the printer might not get to live on the wooden desk, since I sometimes do use it for writing. I guess it can live on the floor, against the wall. It is big enough that we are not going to mistakenly step on it.

So anyway, if anyone wants a pretty good scanner that can sometimes print stuff if you want it bad enough, let me know!