The Empty Soda Can

First of all, if you haven’t read the Introduction to this post, please do so. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will help you better understand our search for the perfect printer. :-) After years and years of purchasing printer after printer—some good, some bad, some so horrible you’d prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick—we were finally happy with our Brother HL-4070CDW for printing, Epson CX5200 for flatbed scanning, and HP OfficeJet 4315 for sheet-feed scanning. We also had our worse-than-a-sharp-stick Samsung SPP-2020 for photos, but since that only worked once before being in the shop for three years and then coming back still broken , we hardly even counted that. But the one thing we still required was a functional CD printer. I hopped online and, lo and behold, Staples just happened to be running an awesome sale on the Epson Artisan 835. But did I want to risk another Epson all-in-one? Sure, my CX5200 was great, but it wasn’t a CD printer. The only CD-printing al...

When Anna and I first got married, we bought an HP printer. I don’t remember what model it was; I just remember that at the time, I wanted a nice printer that could handle 11″×17″. It cost us over $500, but we were happy—right up until we tried to print something. It was horrible . In the three months we owned it, we had no less than thirty different errors. It probably worked, about 2% of the time—no exaggeration. I remember one day, I needed to print a two-page, black-and-white text document, before I left for work. I was late, because I only gave myself 20 minutes and the printer took 32 minutes to complete it. We finally got HP to take it back, but they docked us $50 for the ink we used.  I decided it was time to find another manufacturer. Shortly after the HP debacle, we got an Epson Stylus Photo EX. It was awesome , but when we got a new computer, a few years later, its standard 8-pin serial connection was no longer standard. We upgraded to another Epson, a Stylus CX5200 al...