Benjamin Franklin gave us some theories about electrostatics. You know, his whole kite experiment and everything. 300 years later, we still look to his theories to explain a lot of the unknowns about this area. One man, physicist Lawrence Schein, looked to Franklin’s theories to help explain some things about how laser printing works. Schein has started a company called Aetas Systems in order to develop new and better technology for color laser printers.

The reason Ben’s theories on electrostatics relate to laser printers is because electrostatic adhesion is used in laser printing. Basically, the toner and the paper are charged in order to make the toner stick to the paper. Once it sticks, it is then fused permanently to the paper. The the amount of adhesion (basically ’stickiness’) during this process between the paper and the toner is a lot higher than it should be. This isn’t a big deal for monochrome printing, but it ends up being a problem with color printing because it leads to inefficiency. Color printers have to use four different kinds of belts (one for each color) and this adds to the complexity and cost. Schein is hoping to reduce the adhesion in the process and thus make color laser printers with only one belt.

Cheaper Color Printing by Harnessing Ben Franklin’s Electrostatic Forces [Newswise]

PC Mag recently reviewed the Brother MFC-5460cn and they weren’t overly impressed by it. It’s a relatively new printer that’s only been on the market for a couple of months, and so far it doesn’t seem like it has made much of an impact. Typically, Brother printers are never really top sellers just because of the amount of competition and their lack of availability. If you go into a store, you will usually find two or three Brother printers (at most) while you will probably find 10 different HP printers.

The MFC-5460cn is rated by Brother at up to 30 ppm for black and 25 ppm for color. It has a print resolution up to 6000 x 1200 dpi, which is pretty decent for an all-in-one machine, and it also has a 35-page automatic document feeder. It has built-in networking for scanning and sending faxes and also for shared printing. It uses a four-ink system with the Brother LC-51 ink cartridges. Finally, it has a 33.6Kbps modem. When the heck are fax modems ever going to reach 56Kbps? It’s been about 10 years since 33.6 was considered a good modem speed, yet even the newest fax-capable printers these days average their blazing speed 33.6 modems. What am I missing here?
Anyways, the main reason that PC Mag didn’t like this printer was its lack of speed. Their test showed that the MFC-5460cn was basically the same speed as its predecessor and much slower than the Lexmark X7350. Yikes…slower than a Lexmark? Not good. The other con was that the setup was confusing and it took a long time - something that people may or may not care about. The 5460cn is more geared towards a small office than just a casual user and you probably need to use it for business to appreciate all its features. It’s not going to blow you away with print quality or speed, so you have to like it for other reasons. Brother all-in-one printers are usually pretty solid (if unspectacular) and it looks like this one is no different.

Buy this printer

Merry Christmas from this guy:

A last-minute friendly gift reminder: don’t forget to buy USB cables.

By now, everyone should know that printers don’t come with USB cables. But, it is still one of the number one complaints people have when setting up a printer, so obviously there are still some people out there that expect their printers to come with these cables. It’s not unfair or foolish to think that, since for a long time printer manufacturers were very happy to give us free parallel cables, which were more expensive than today’s USB cables. But, that’s just not the way it is.

Also, don’t ever buy the cable that the salesman recommends to you. They will always always try to sell you an expensive gold-tipped cable and tell you that you “need it.” No, you don’t. You need any USB cable, and the fact that one is coated with solid gold does not make any difference. Find the cheapest USB cable available - it will work fine. The markup on cables is huge for places like Staples and CompUSA and it gets worse and worse depending on how expensive the cables are. They might get a basic cable for $5 wholesale and a fancy one for $8, but they will charge $20 for the basic one and $50 for the fancy one.

Since we mention a lot of deals at Amazon, here’s a tool that can help you keep track of prices there: refundplease.com

If you purchase something from Amazon (or other online retailers) and the price drops within 30 days, they will credit you the difference. Of course, no one (hopefully) has the time or the desire to keep checking back on Amazon to see if the price has dropped on something. Refundplease.com makes it easy because they will notify when the price changes. In a broader sense, this can just be used to monitor the price on something you are waiting to buy, rather than something you already bought. Why buy something and then go through the hassle of getting $3.83 back from Amazon when you can wait for the price to drop before you buy it?

Amazon Price Watch is another site that basically does the same thing.

Buy.com has the Photosmart 8250 on sale for $59 after rebate and $39 if you use Google Checkout. Google is giving merchants big breaks to use Checkout so they are passing that along to customers. Using Checkout is a bit of a pain if you don’t already have a Google email account, but it will just take you a few extra seconds and it’s probably worth the $20. There is no shipping and in most states there won’t be any tax.

The Photosmart 8250 is the still billed by HP as the “world’s fastest photo printer” even though there is probably something out there that is faster. To date, I haven’t heard any other printer company make that claim for one of their models, so I guess HP can keep saying what they want.

HP rates the 8250 at 32 ppm for black and 31 ppm for color. HP claims that it can print a 4 x 6 photo in as little as 14 seconds. The Photosmart 8250 can produce prints up to 8.5 by 24 inches so that probably makes this the least-expensive wide format printer on the market. It has all the usual connectivity options, two-sided printing, a special 4 x 6 photo paper tray for dedicated prints and a 2.5″ LCD. It is also a wide-format printer which can print up to 8.5 x 24.

If you need Photosmart 8250 cartridges, then you can check out our site.

I’m pretty sure that this has been around a while, but I have seen a few more articles about it lately so I thought I would mention it. A company called Presto Services has teamed up with HP and developed a printer that receives and prints emails for people who don’t have computers. Someone sends you an email through Presto, they get it and then they send it to your printer. The printer is basically just a regular HP inkjet, although it also designed to print pictures that people email to you.

As you can guess from the concept (and the pictures on Presto’s site) this is aimed at older people who either don’t have a computer or who don’t have the knowledge/patience to regular receive email. A big part of it is the fact that you can email photos, so conceivably a grandparent can keep up with the family goings-on without having to check email. But, won’t 1000 spam emails about V1@gr a and m0rt ga ges get printed out every day? No, kids, they won’t. You have to be on approved sender list in order to email someone with one of these.

Well for starters it’s an automatic document feeder? But what exactly is it? A lot of times when I’m writing about a printer for a review or for a deal, I mention that it’s good that the printer has an ADF. An ADF is a tray that you load up with papers and put into your printer for scanning or copying. This allows you to scan/copy multiple pages without having to do them one at a time. Obviously this will save you a lot of time because you aren’t having to lift up the lid on your printer in order to keep doing each individual page. This feature used to be somewhat rare on standard multifunction machines and then for a while they used to hold a small amount of sheets. These days high-capacity ADFs are becoming more common.

Since I can’t resist anything negative about Best Buy, here is an article about how classify their customers (the original article is in the Wall Street Journal, but you have to have one of their super-expensive subscriptions to read it). Basically, Best Buy is testing a new strategy in some of their stores where they group customers into personality types, which allows them to ultimately ignore a certain segement (the “Devils”). The groups are:

Angels - buy new stuff not on sale, presumably with five-year warranties and $100 cables
Devils - use rebates, Best Buy’s price matching and other tricks while buying loss-leaders
Barrys - high-income men who like action movies
Jills - busy moms who can probably be talked into anything
Buzzes - early adopters who show off the latest gadgets

As the article mentions, it’s nothing new to label your customers and group them together, but only Best Buy wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell cheap DVDs to get people into the store, but then they don’t want people to just buy the DVDs and then leave. They want to attract people to their store with rebates but then they don’t actually want people to successfully use those rebates. Luckily Best Buy offets this segementing with their awesome customer service.

Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons [ars technica]

Is your printer saying “out of paper” when it really isn’t out of paper? Your paper sensor may be acting up, but you may be able to fix it. You can check your manual to see if it tells you what type of paper sensor you have - sometimes it is an actual button, sometimes it is an electronic reader. The sensor may have just collected some dust and you may be able to reset it by hand. Hopefully the sensor isn’t broken, because in that case you might have to order a new one.

As with any printer problem, the first thing you want to do before trying anything is to unplug your printer for a few minutes and letting it reset. This is the easiest solution and it can clear a lot of error messages that are giving you false readings. If that doesn’t work, you can then try reinstalling your printer drivers. This is a little more time-consuming, but it doesn’t cost you anything and if you call up Epson or HP support they are going to ask if you did that anyways.