Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Fun & Not Fun

Fun first --

Made a bunch of little sketch books with Rives Lightweight trimmings and some reject gocco cards. Here they are, along with the big black sketch book I first made the other day, and the coil binder.



I also printed a cover for the gocco sample booklets that I'm making. I used a printout from the new laser printer (HP 3050) to flash the screen...which leads us to the Not Fun part. I struggled with setting up the printer most of the afternoon. Problems --

1) Seems like half of the features are available only on Windows and not on the Mac. Grrrrh.

2) And I think that it's postscript emulation and not native is causing me some grief. Texts seem to get rasterized; there maybe other problems too.

3) There's a bit of smudging on the bottom sides of everything; probably because it doesn't heat up quite as hot (as compared to our older printer). This doesn't seem to have caused any trouble for making the gocco screen through.

4) I can't seem to scan to file (which it's supposed to be able to); it just automatically creates an email attachement instead. I bet this is part of complaint #1 above. And I don't seem to have any control over the file type, it just creates a pdf file.

5) I can't seem to control the dot screen setting in photoshop anymore. Regardless of what I set the lines per inch to, everything comes out the same! Now this is big trouble, and maybe related to complaint #2 above. Not sure yet.

6) Various dumb mistakes in the manual -- like saying the document needs to face up when it really needs to face down. Even the icon on the control panel is incorrect. Yes, I tried it both ways, and it needs to be face down to scan and to copy. And like buttons listed in the manual are not always called the same things in the actual software. Very sloppy product management.

On the positive side, it's way faster than our 12 years old HP Laserjet 4M Plus. And the copy feature works just fine.

We have 2 weeks to return the printer, according the Office Depot, as long as we have all original packaging. This seems kind of surprising, given that we'd be using the toner cartridge and they really have no control over how much anyone would use it. Not sure if I'll keep it or not, that will probably depend on whether we figure out complaint #5 or not. But then again, our options might be pretty limited, unless I want to spend a ton of money, which I don't really want to do.

3 comments:

Michael5000 said...

Oooh... the little notebooks look way cool.

One of my little workplace joys is that I am one of only a few people at the office that have mastered the intellectual challenge of the comb binder. It doesn't matter how dull or pointless the paperwork; it's very satisfying to make it into a comb-bound packet!

Condolences on your dodgy machine. Sounds like a return-er to me!

Anonymous said...

I love your little gocco-reject notebooks! I may have to get one of them coil binder thingys myself.

gl. said...

oo, those books are looking great! i hope the joy in the binder is offsetting the frustration of the all-in-one copier. :(