Thoughts 03 Apr 2008 09:36 am
New printer
I purchased a new color printer yesterday, it’s an HP D7460. The little HP 1020 I had been using would only print in B&W. —-Either the cartridges are plugged/dried out, or it hates Vista.
This printer’s best feature is that it has a built in 802.11g card.
The network connection to my secured wireless router was a snap. The printer has a touch screen that allows you to choose which network you want to connect to, and an alpha-numeric feature for entering the encryption key.
(When you create an encryption key always keep a copy in plain text, encrypted or hidden, for installations like this.)
When setting up the software in Vista I let the cd autorun and accepted the defaults, but it didn’t install properly. I had to uninstall and then reinstall by exploring the cd, right clicking the setup.exe and choosing run as administrator.
Between Vista’s continually asking for permission to do something and my added security, running installation software gets to be a pita.
Now that it’s running I have discovered that regardless what HP says about ppm. This printer is slow, the quality and colors are good, but less that perfect.
Having said this. I would still recommend it. The price was only $149 at Office Depot and I’m sure it could be found a few dollars cheaper online.
The speed, quality and color are well within tolerance for an amateur like myself. After all, this is a home unit, not something you would be using for the brochure to promote your next gallery showing.
The only other thing you need is patients. The initial printer alignment takes nearly 5 minutes.
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All in all, things are going smoothly in my transition to Vista, but then again I’m being very careful about the products I use.
While there remains no way to use this machine in the mixed software and hardware of my work environment. At home, using it for Paintshop X2 and Photoshop it runs fine… So far.
As a side note:
If you have a Samsung monitor, Adobe will say that the monitor profile is corrupted. It’s not. It’s just Adobe and Samsung refusing to play nice together.
I switched to the Adobe RGB profile and everything seems to be fine.