hasn't written the "Good Things" series for a long time. A few days ago, a friend came to urge him and said he wanted to watch it. Here is another article, let’s talk about the two printers and an scanner I bought over the past year.
As a home user, it is obviously an exaggeration to have two printers and one scanner at the same time. It is obviously an exaggeration. I guess many small and micro enterprises will not be so exaggerated.
However, I have always been a person who adheres to the principle of "there are many stationery for poor students" and "can be lazy", so I never mind the purchase of equipment.
Here, let me talk about my mental journey in purchasing printers and scanners as a middle-class kindergarten parent + digital player with SOHO needs, and I also give some recommendations for now.
Ink Warehouse Printer: Epson L4168
About the Epson L4168 I bought at home, I have written in the Good Things Series before. If you are interested, you can read "Earl Good Things 12: Epson Ink Warehouse Printer".
Even after buying another laser printer more than a year later, I still feel that color inkjet printers are still the best choice for ordinary families with children, especially those with a lot of color printing needs such as kindergartens and primary schools.
Regarding the problem that inkjet printers do not need to block the nozzle for a long time, as an old user who has used L4168 for more than two years, I can also make an evaluation now: may occur, but the probability is extremely small.
My inkjet printer will never be plugged in and off. Epson's inkjet printer will perform nozzle maintenance regularly (maybe once every few days) when idle (that is, it is to automatically spray a little ink onto the waste ink pad) to avoid the problem of long-term blockage, which can greatly reduce the problem of nozzle blockage. After using it for two years, the nozzle was blocked once, and then it was washed with a deep nozzle, which quickly relieved.
However, if your inkjet printer is not plugged in normally and only plugged in when using it, it is equivalent to disabling Epson's regular nozzle maintenance, then the chance of blockage is much higher. So if you buy an inkjet printer, it is recommended to plug in permanently.
Overall, I am still satisfied with L4168, especially the double-sided printing function added compared to the 3 series, but it is too paper-saving. If you calculate the printing cost carefully, you will know that for printers like inkjet, which have extremely low single-sheet printing costs, printing paper is the most expensive component, and automatic double-sided printing can greatly save paper consumption - of course, this is not just a matter of money. For primary school children, if they need to bring a lot of printing materials to school, double-sided printing of is equivalent to halving the weight of the data, which is a huge benefit of .
Last year, Epson's product line was upgraded. The L4268 model is currently selling. It is estimated that the upgrade is not big. The current price is 1,899 yuan. I don’t know if there is a better price during Double Eleven. My L4168 was bought on 618 in 2020, and it was 1499 yuan at the time.
If I want to say that I am a little dissatisfied with L4168 (L4268 is the same), the scanning function does not contain " automatic document feeder ". If you encounter a large number of files that need to be scanned, you have to put them in one by one manually, which is very cumbersome.
I am a person who likes to electronically archive documents, but I am unwilling to do repetitive mechanical labor, so I have high requirements for "automation". This will be highlighted when talking about scanners later. If you are like me, and have more than a dozen pages of documents that need to be scanned and archived in batches, you can consider the L6278 model in Epson's commercial printer product line. The automatic document feeder is in the red box of the picture below. If you put the A4 files that need to be automatically scanned, they will automatically enter the scan one by one. With the automatic scanning function, there will naturally be a batch automatic copy function, which is much more automated. Of course, this price is 1,000 yuan. Although the printing speed is fast and it supports wired networks, it is slightly cheaper for homes.
In fact, just me, I would rather spend more money and buy a dedicated scanner, which is the Epson ES-580W we will talk about below.
paper feed scanner : Epson ES-580W
I am a person who has a hobby for document collection, so I bought a scanner more than ten years ago. Of course, at that time, it was a huge flat panel. It is roughly similar to the picture below, anyway, it takes up a lot of space on the desk.
Although this scanner also archives a lot of materials, to be honest, the usage rate is not high, and the core is troubles.
Yes, even after I bought the L4168 ink tank all-in-one machine, the built-in scanning function is also used. The trouble is mainly reflected in two points: ❶Slow, scan a piece of paper for many seconds; ❷Hard, you have to open and change the paper after scanning one piece.
So, I later studied the high-photographer. Although it was fast, it was still annoying.
Last year, my father was sick and there were a large number of papers such as examination reports and discharge summary that needed electronic archives. So after researching, I bought a paper feed scanner, Epson ES-580W.
paper feeding type, these three words correspond to the flat plate type above. The paper is no longer scanned while lying down, but walks into the paper maker. The most intuitive advantage of this is that the area of the area is greatly reduced.
paper-feeding scanner is born for the electronicization of documents, so its core advantage is " double-sided scanning ".
Yes, for a person who needs to print on both sides when buying a printer, double-sided scanning will naturally not miss it.
is actually a very intuitive requirement for me who planned to buy a scanner at that time, because a large number of inspection reports in the hospital are printed on both sides. It would be extremely painful to scan such files using a device that only supports single-sided scanning (such as the Epson L6278 ink tank all-in-one machine with automatic document feeder mentioned on both sides).
Of course, with the paper feed scanner, I became a document archive madman - the second core image is the various information about archived kids.
My child is now in the middle class of kindergarten and is beginning to be interested in drawing and writing, so from time to time I will use letters to draw red, or paint colors, or even draw something with bare hands. I will not throw away every written work of the baby. I have a folder to collect it. It will be a memory to hand it over to the baby who grew up many years later.
Although the original written copies are all collected, I will use a scanner to archive them and put them in the cloud disk to facilitate sharing with relatives and friends at any time.
For example, the picture below is the latest drawing, I named it "Fireman and Flowers of the Night".
In fact, with a scanner, all kinds of files and instructions at home can be archived electronically. The scanner now has OCR text recognition function. Scanning the generated PDF files can be retrieved (documents containing specific keywords can be retrieved in a bunch of PDFs), which is very convenient.
I heard that when I was in elementary school, parents would be asked by teachers to supervise homework and take photos to upload them from time to time, so the software " scan almighty king " became very popular.
I am a paid user of Scanning All-Round King. I used it to save a lot of files, but there is a saying that Scanning All-Round King's effect of relying on mobile phone cameras and algorithms to correct deviations is absolutely incomparable to scanners.
As a Virgo player who pursues perfectionism, he uses a scanner, which is almost shelved.
Of course, if you want to buy a scanner at the moment, I don’t recommend the one I bought. The price is 2,999 yuan, which is a bit high. Although touch screen operation is very convenient and can even be stored directly on SD card or LAN FTP from the computer, these functions are not practical for home use. The price of
paper-feeding scanner depends largely on the scanning speed. My one is 35 pieces per minute / 70 pages. It is indeed fast, but it does not mean much to home use.
speed is slightly slower, don’t touch the screen, there are still many choices for double-sided paper-feeding scanners below 2,000 yuan, so you can consider it. Moreover, domestic products like Founder are more considering the national conditions, such as invoice scanning and ID card scanning, which is very good.
Of course, it should be added that the paper feed scanner is not suitable for those three-dimensional content because it only has the option of paper feeding.
For example, the picture below is the origami tape drawing taught by my child recently in school. The red one below is raised origami, so it cannot be scanned in a paper-feeding scanner. It can only be scanned with a flatbed similar to the Epson ink bin all-in-one machine mentioned above.
laser all-in-one: Brothers 2550DW
When I talked about why I bought an inkjet printer, I mentioned my concerns about laser printers - Dust pollution during home use is a big problem, especially for families with children.
But why did I buy another laser printer later?
Two reasons: one is true love; the other is dispelling concerns.
I am a Virgo, so I am destined to be true love for laser printers.
Yes, although the interest rate of inkjet printers printing accuracy , that is, PPI, is higher than that of laser printers, but due to inkjet ink, it will faint on ordinary A4 paper, so the output effect is still inferior to that of laser printers that use solid powder. The high precision of inkjet printers must be reflected on similar photo printing papers. It is easy to use to draw photos, but it is inferior to ordinary documents. The two pictures below
are printed samples I scanned with 600DPI resolution. You can compare them and pay special attention to the corner areas of letters like N.
The first picture is Epson inkjet.
The second picture is Brother Laser.
inkjet has a inferior effect compared to laser output, and may not be sensitive to ordinary users, especially if you don’t look carefully in the distance.
But I am a Virgo, a Virgo who is even sensitive to document printing fonts, so this gap in printing quality is definitely something I will notice and think about overcoming. From this perspective, the documents printed by the laser printer are the clean and clean ones of my cup of tea.
Especially, after my concerns about contamination of laser printers were dispelled.
There is a famous saying on Zhihu: "If you talk about toxicity without dosage, you are just hooligans." I accidentally saw a video about dust pollution in household laser printers. The main air monitoring instrument was placed on the edge of the laser printer. I printed more than a dozen pictures at full speed, and found that the PM2.5 did not rise. This undoubtedly greatly alleviated my fear of laser printers. In addition, I organized a separate study last year and was not worried about contaminating the baby, so I considered buying a laser printer. After buying
, there was a Qingping Air Detector at home that could monitor PM2.5 and other quality control, so the video of which up master was repeated. For users like me who can make at most a few dozen pictures every day, PM2.5 has not changed at all.
So, compared with multiple parties, I bought a relatively cost-effective brother 2550DW laser all-in-one machine - supports automatic document machines, which can scan and copy in batches. toner cartridge is separated from powder box. Although the cost of printing a single sheet cannot be as low as that of ink bin printers, it is also considered low among laser printers. If you are willing to use domestically compatible consumables, the cost will be comparable to that of the original ink bin printer.
laser printer, in addition to clear printing, is really fast. When you want to print a dozen or twenty pages of large documents, it is really fast compared to waiting ink to spit out lines of text.
If the child at home is in junior high school or even high school, only needs to print black and white documents and no color document output needs, laser all-in-one machines like are actually quite perfect choices. The high-speed black and white printing function, the two scanning methods of tablet + automatic paper feeding are only lacking the double-sided scanning function .
Of course, there are not many professional commercial laser printers that support double-sided scanning, such as the following HP , but the price of 5299 is obviously too cost-effective.
After all, I guess there are very few people like me who have double-sided scanning needs, and even if there are, it is better to buy a paper-feeding scanner for 2,000 yuan to be cost-effective.
Although most individuals or families do not need to use two printers + one scanner like me, but you might as well choose the configuration that suits you based on your actual needs.
