Still More Shiny New Electronics

I just got a new printer! And about damned time, too. I was starting to get really fed up with the old one. It was an Epson Stylus 740, which I bought a couple of years ago when I first got this computer, and I guess I'm not going to complain about it too hard because for quite a while it really was adequate for what I wanted to do with it. (Mostly just printing text. Often quite a lot of text.) But it was starting to have some major problems. Even immediately after replacing the cartridge, the text would be blurred and broken, to the point where it was getting hard to read. Cleaning the heads a few times would sometimes help a little, but not for long. And, frankly, it was never much good with printing pictures. They'd always come out with faint horizontal lines through them.

So, I replaced the poor old thing with a shiny new HP Deskjet 5150, which I believe cost me just about exactly the same amount of money. I've just now got it set up and running, and I'm already feeling very, very glad I made the replacement. This thing prints nice, crisp text and pictures (much better than the old Epson ever did). It's quiet, it's relatively fast, and it's got a big old "job cancel" button on the front, which is very handy for me because I constantly keep hitting "print" and then suddenly realizing that, no, I wasn't quite ready to print that out yet and I just need to change one more thing. The only drawback seems to be that if you don't remember to extend the output tray before you print, it shoots your pages across the room. Which is kind of entertaining, actually, although I imagine the novelty value of that probably wears off pretty quickly.

Anyway, yeah, I am currently feeling very happy with my personal electronics purchases, and I just thought I'd share.