Category: computing

When much of the world went into lockdown companies and schools sent employees and students home to work and study.

That triggered a surge in sales of laptops, large screen monitors, headphones and printers.

The first three items on that shopping list will make you more productive.

Laptops mean you can work on the kitchen table and clear the space away when it is time for dinner.

You need a desk and elbow room for a large screen monitor, but being able to work with side-by-side windows will help you do more in less time.

Headphones or ear buds let you take part in video conferences and other audio communications even if your home workspace is noisy.

You may not be able to avoid a printer

Printers are more of a security blanket that a serious aid to productivity. Yet for many people they are not optional.

Even if you don’t feel the urge to squirt ink onto dead trees in order to express yourself, others will insist on printed documents.

There is another way printers are not like other home office technology: They need feeding with ink cartridges.

And there is something very wrong with the way that market works.

One recent twist is modern home office printers can stop you printing if you don’t pay protection money.

Sorry, did I say “protection money”, I meant to say “pay over the odds for ultra expensive branded ink cartridges when there are perfectly adequate third-party options”.

It’s for your own good… yeah right

For years printer makers have warned users about the dangers of using third-party ink cartridges.

Campaigns had less to do with user education than with maintaining high profit margins.

When you buy the official ink from your printers’ manufacturer you can expect to pay two or three times as much as the cost of third-party ink.

It isn’t cheap.

Ink cartridges work out at around NZ$5000 per litre.

While that might be a dozen or so cents per printed page, if you print lots of pages it adds up fast.

Corrosive ink

A common scare campaign that started 20 years ago claims that third-party ink will ruin your printer’s print heads.

The implication was that third-party inks contain sulphuric acid or worse.

At one point a major printer company claimed that its print heads would be unusable after two cycles of third-party ink¹.

My testing has showed the claim wasn’t true. Even after five cycles the printer works fine.

Cheaper option

Even if the claim was true, at the time of the campaign, a consumer would be financially better off buying a new printer, using the included starter cartridges, buying two cycles of third-party ink then throwing the printer away and starting again.

Life could not be less sustainable.

That’s because in the crazy world of ink cartridge economics, printer makers used to lose money selling the hardware.

They knew they’d make it all up later on the ink cartridge sales. It’s the famous ‘razor blade’ business model.

The subsidy

Printers were subsidised to the point where a new printer cost less than a set of cartridges.

It was at around this time printer makers stopped putting full-size starter cartridge packs in their consumer printer models.

Until then, a savvy consumer could come out ahead by buying a new printer every time the ink ran out.

It meant waiting for a retail promotion to buy the hardware at a discount, but if you timed it right you’d be better off. There were always retail promotions although it might mean shifting to another printer brand.

This wasn’t good for landfills or the planet, but, hey, economics.

These day printer makers charge more up front.

They say this will save you money in the long run.

Well… in the long run we’re all dead.

And anyway, they haven’t dropped the price of subsequent refills.

Third-party ink pitfalls

Another, let’s be generous and say, “user education” programme, from the industry tells us you get inferior results using third-party inks.

This can be true if you use an inkjet to print photographs. The best results need the official manufacturer ink cartridges and, if you think it worth the cost and effort, special expensive printer paper.

My own testing shows that is true for Canon and Epson printers. I haven’t tested HP but I suspect I’d find the same.

It’s a fair enough claim.

But if you restrict colour ink use to highlighting text, drawing graphs, Venn diagrams and pie-charts, then accurate colour fidelity is an indulgence.

In other words, none of the printer maker arguments stand up to sensible scrutiny.

In the 1980s I worked on a magazine feature about the paperless office of the future. We interviewed people who said it was close. Any day now.

We never got there.

Today the printer remains essential.

While there may be less paper in our lives than there was, we are a long way from zero paper.

The alluring myth of the paperless office

Paper is hard to eliminate.

Make that impossible to eliminate.

This week I had to return a review product. The courier firm handling the return sent a complex six page PDF document to print.

Two pages had to be handed to the courier. Four had to be attached to the box.

It was not optional. And no, the courier firm could not drop off or bring the paperwork to me.

The paperwork is worse if the box has to go overseas. It can include a battery warning page that must be printed in red ink.

Regular

In my life courier paperwork happens at least every other week.

Another regular occurrence is when companies demand a printed legal agreement with a handwritten signature before, say, sending out a review laptop or employing my services.

Apple will accept an emailed “I accept your terms” for review products. One or two enlightened companies do the same.

The majority insist on a paper document.

It’s possible to fake this. I could scan my signature and overlay using what looks like blue ballpoint pen ink, then send through the mocked up document. I once suggested this to a PR company who reacted in horror as if I were planning a bank heist. They told me it would be a crime. I’m certain that is not the case.

Events

Then there are the printed tickets for events. There are no events at the moment. When we come out of lockdown they will return. You can’t show the QR code on your phone, only a paper ticket will do.

Again, this is not optional.

In other words you have to have a printer. Or at least access to a printer. In non-lockdown times that could mean a trip to the local library or a large stationary shop with print stations.

There’s no getting out of this. But this is not the worst thing about printers. We’ll get to that in the next post.

At the Guardian Haroon Siddique writes Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81. 

Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.

His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices.

Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64.”

My first brush with Sinclair was as an A-level student in the UK. Before he made computers, Sinclair designed a low-cost programmable calculator.

It fascinated me and, thanks to a well-paid part-time job, I managed to buy one. From memory it could only handle a few programmable steps, but it was enough to make complex calculations.

My second job after university was working as a reporter for Practical Computing magazine. I started in January 1980 and became familiar with the original Sinclair ZX80 computer.

Later that year I went to the launch of the ZX81 and met Sinclair for the first time. Over the next few years he became a familiar face.

That modest, clunky ZX81 computer changed everything. Before 1981 was out, the publishing company I worked for started Your Computer magazine which focused on small, low-cost home computers. For the first few issues I was staff reporter on both titles.

The next two years were a wild roller coaster ride. An entire industry emerged and I was in the centre of it.

For me, Sinclair’s most important product was the ZX Spectrum. It was flawed in many ways, but it could do enough to spawn a generation of entrepreneurs and get thousands of young people into computing. I still have one in my attic.

By the time the later Sinclair QL appeared, low-cost computers with decent keyboards and storage were pushing out the minimal, low-cost options Sinclair specialised in

By now Sinclair was Sir Clive. My last brush with his business was the ill-fated C5 battery powered vehicle. It failed and Sinclair faded from sight, later the remnants of his computer business were picked up by Amstrad.

My main memories of Sinclair were his enthusiasm and his ambitions to build devices that anyone, regardless of budget, could afford.