Printing and Tweeting – A Good Combination!
Nov 8 2008

I never thought I’d be that excited about a printer, but here I am writing about one.  The main reason it’s so exciting to write about this one is because I got it free!  That’s like getting $350 (including ink) of stuff you can really use! 

I bet you are wondering why I got it free. Well it’s because I (@aruni) and Barbara Jones are both on twitter.  Barbara runs a company called One2One Network – The Women’s Word of Mouth Marketing Network and she discovered me on twitter and began following me a while back. 

OK, it’s not just because I’m on twitter, but part of getting lucky is being somewhere where people are looking for people like you.  So she probably thought since I write reasonably well in English and my blog is read by many entrepreneurially minded women, men, moms, and dads, that my experience with the printer might provide an interesting perspective. 

When she first asked me if I’d like an Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer, I tweeted back something like “heck yeah!” I then told my husband and he being the one that manages our home IT set-up as well as being our resident rocket scientist, was immediately skeptical.  First he grumbled “Well, what’s wrong with our current HP Photosmart 3210 All-in-One” that we’ve had for a few years.  The only response I could meekly muster was that the scanning feature didn’t work well.  He then asked if it was network ready (not just wireless…it had to be able to be plugged into with an Ethernet connection).  He also said it had to be Mac compatible.  Of course Barbara cheerfully tweeted it met all of those requirements.  She was probably wondering why I was looking a gift horse in the mouth or at minimum what kind of man I was married to. 

When it arrived and he opened the box, he took one look at the design and features and cracked a half smile (a rare occurrence when it comes to technical items – unless it’s a new Mac, Blackberry, or other Apple product) and said “You did good.”  I nodded knowingly thinking to myself ‘don’t I always!‘ 🙂  

He set it up and the last few weeks we’ve been using it for a variety of things from printing work related stuff, to kid’s birthday cards, maps, to scanning documents.  I have to say I’m impressed and here are the top 5 reasons why: 

  1. My husband was impressed making it easier to get it installed and tested!
  2. It has a document feeder just like a copier.  This is such a *HUGE* feature for scanning or copying multiple pages.  I no longer have to put one page down, open the lid, put another page down, etc.  I just set the pages I want to scan or copy on the top and press a few buttons.  It also scans to .pdf which I love!
  3. It’s Mac compatible (see also item #1 above)
  4. It’s WiFi and Ethernet ready (see also item #1 above) [Interesting side note: the Wi-Fi Alliance is headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator, which is where I work during the day]
  5. The design is very cool, modern, and sleek and fits perfectly on top of my little file cabinet.  It has a touch screen front interface for one touch copy and scanning.   

The only issue I’ve had with it is printing pages with heavy color and that’s probably because we use newspaper cheap paper.  A few months ago (for some cheap wad/had a coupon unknown reason) I bought a case of Office Depot premium multipurpose paper and it’s pretty thin.  I think I just began printing on it using the HP and now with the deep colors in the Epson, the pages sometimes come out feeling wet.  I changed the setting to draft but then it kind of dulls the color.  I guess I’ll have to suffer through some wet pages until I finish this case of cheap paper! 

So, although inertia (and the economy) might have prevented me from replacing our HP printer, I can honestly say that the ability to scan multiple pages easily would have swung me over to the Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer side of the camp quite some time ago. 

So thank you Epson, Barbara, and oh yeah twitter!

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