Preparing to Battle the Devil
One of my favourite tweets (X’s? I’m not sure what the new lingo is) of all time is probably this one:
Our home has been rather happily printer free for the last several years. On the odd occasion we’ve had to print anything, if it was only a page or two, our works didn’t mind, and if it was longer there was always the local library.
But it turns out when it comes to looking to move house, let alone build a new one, that you’re in for a fair bit of paperwork. We’ve had 70+ page build contracts, a separate one for the land itself, lawyers, banks- everyone involved with this process has seemingly reverted to the stone age and requires printed, hand-signed, rescanned and sent documentation.
So here we are, with a new printer in the house.
It has been sitting rather ominously in its box in the hallway for the better part of last week, growing in stature in our minds for the pain to come, only a little less rapidly than the resignation to the fact we would have to print, sign and otherwise deal with the next batch of paperwork fairly imminently.
Well…
Today, at last, I got it out and prepared to go to war with the printer.
Only… Things didn’t quite work out that way.
We spent a little more on the printer than we perhaps would’ve liked, and with at least a cursory amount of research, landed on the Epsom EcoTank 4850.
The main driver of the extra expense in this one is the ability to print 2-sided, and an auto-feeder capability for scanning documents also capable of 2-sided scans. (I did *not* want to be hand-feeding single pages into a flatbed to scan, let alone when flipping said sheets may also be required.)
I’ve never worked with the ‘tank’ style printer before, and I was prepared for a great deal of mess.
Fortunately, that also wasn’t part of the battle. The bottles and their feeding mechanism into the printer are quite smart. They slot into position on the tank you’re filling and then just drain to the appropriate level in the tank. There is no piercing of the bottle lid or force required in inserting them. Just when not in use, the cap that goes over the bottle seals the bottle tip closed, although it appeared to not really spill even when inverted if not over the filling mechanism anyway.
Magic, probably. Also maybe physics and intelligent design, but let’s go with magic.
Because the rest of the setup process was equally smooth.
The suggested way to configure the printer is from an app on your smartphone (although you don’t have to do this). It connected via Bluetooth immediately and without complaint.
Just pause there for a moment. Bluetooth is the second most frustrating consumer tech behind printers, I reckon. But it worked.
Then from there you can setup the printer’s Wi-Fi connection and that also… Just worked.
The test pages all printed fine, the alignment process was a breeze and just nothing presented the battle I expected it to.
Software for the PC after doing all that, also fine.
The only issue I’m having, I don’t really blame the printer for. It’s quite far from the router where it’s setup with my PC at the moment, so the WiFi signal is a little finicky and the firmware update fails.
But given it prints wirelessly, there’s no real reason it has to stay here — so might set it up more centrally in the lounge and just let it do it’s thing there.
This was posted during Blaugust 2023, the annual blogging event hosted by Belghast. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year-round!
