Monday, September 03, 2007

Tools of the trade, aka toys

Spent most of the day shopping. I have been needing a digital camera to photograph art work since the previous digital camera went kaput; and our laser printer is on its last legs; plus my scanner (as much as I love this wonderful Powerlook III scanner) is so old that it will not run with the new macs, and I have to keep booting up the old PowerMac 7600 in order to run it, and now the PowerMac is having lots of problems and is probably not going to last too much longer.

This being holiday weekend, there are lots of sales going on, so I've been looking at ads and researching what to get.

The camera -- I had thought I'd get a nice compact one, but after looking around, looks like I can get the Canon Rebel body for not much more than a good compact. Since the Rebel XT uses all my EOS accessories, even the remote, I decided that was the thing to do. I found an used XTi on Amazon, in "like new" condition. I googled the seller and found his photo gallery on aol. Looks like his other camera is a $5000(!) EOS, so he probably took good care of the Rebel, I hope. So I'm getting a digital SLR after all.

The printer/copier/scanner/fax all in one -- I actually started looking because I wanted a laser copier. I'd like to have small gocco classes here at the house and needed a copier for that to work. As it turns out, the output from the Brother Inkjet that we have will make gocco screens as well, but the text is just not as crisp coming out of the inkjet as the laser. And also because the current laser printer is really old and on its last legs, AND the scanner may not be accessible easily for much longer, so it would seem that all things point to a new laser all in one. We'll probably end up buying this HP all in one.

Put together a small sketch book with a big stack of Rives Lightweight trimmings (leftover from cutting paper for the new prints) and the coil binder. I had covered 2 boards with some scrap prints, thinking that I'd use the boards to cover the sketch book. Well, the coil binder is smarter than I am! There's a inner slot that prevents anything too thick from entering. You can insert the boards, but not far enough to where the punches are. So I'll have to use the boards on some other project. In the mean time, I used some scrap black Arches Cover for the sketch book. So it looks rather plain, but I'll gussy it up eventually.

I've always saved coils from coil bound books that I no longer need, and always wondered what the heck I'd do with them. Well, I was able to use one of those coils for the sketch book today!

2 comments:

gl. said...

why does the coil binder care how thick something is? it seems a shame you can't use boards.

oh, and do you have any recommendations for a color laser printer?

fingerstothebone said...

I think the punches can't punch through when it's too thick, and also, maybe it would damage the punches? That's the only thing I can think of. I originally was going to use 2-ply boards, but didn't have scraps big enough. I bet covered 2 ply boards would fit though fine (mine were 4 ply).

I didn't look at color lasers at all, but a quick glance at the same ads shows a $299.99 Brothers color laser printer. So they've really come down in price too. My one issue with which one to buy -- so many of them are not network capable and they don't talk to macs. So be sure to check those specs if you care about those!