Printer for Westercon

[kevin_standlee]

Tonopah is sufficiently far away from big cities that we will need to be pretty self-sufficient. That includes needing our own medium-duty printer and copier. There's no FedEx Office down the street where we can go do copying on the fly. While some areas will be bringing their own gear, Registration needs a printer, and we'll have various copying needs. After taking stock of our printing and copying needs pre- and at-con, I decided to buy a larger-capacity machine that we strictly might not need for some of the smaller functions.

Annoyingly, due to supply chain issues, none of the retail stores in Reno that we tried (Staples, Best Buy) had the kind of printer we needed available for purchase. Some had printers on display, but they were only non-working display models. We were facing a situation where if we wanted to buy retail, we could either get something that was too light-duty and small or was much too commercial and expensive (>$1000). However, thanks to looking over the display models, we got an idea about what would work and did some hunting online. Staples offered (online only for delivery to home, not via a retail store) a machine that worked. The site said that if we ordered by Wednesday, it would be at our house by Friday. That seemed optimistic, but we decided to bite the bullet.



To my great surprise, the printer arrived on Thursday, a day earlier than promised. As I did not pay for overnight air freight, I can only assume that it was actually warehoused in the Reno/Sparks area. I know from my Day Jobbe that the greater Reno/Sparks area (including Fernley) is an important distribution node. That's why Amazon has a warehouse in Reno (it used to be in Fernley, but the landlord priced them out of the building), for example.

Here's the printer: an HP OfficeJet 7740 Wide Format printer. That means it can copy/scan/print documents up to ledger/A3 size. It's an inkjet printer, not laser, which means we'd better get at least two extra sets of high-capacity ink to go with it, because there's no office supply store in Tonopah if they run out, and a 400-mile round trip to buy supplies is not something I want to face.



I normally do not have things shipped directly to my house, but I made an exception in this case, partially because the Astro is still in the shop and also because shipping things to the PO Box (via the street address, which is allowed by this office) often means a one-day delay before it's available for pickup. In this case, I'm very happy to have had it sent to the house, because it weighs 26 kg! We will save the packaging so that we can repack it for transport to Tonopah in late June. Moving it around will be a hassle, but it's doable.



Lisa and I unboxed the printer (it's a two-person job due to the weight of the thing), she set up the hardware, and I set up the software. We only have 8 1/2 x 11 paper here at the moment, and not a lot of it, but once I get the minivan back, we'll be making a trip to Staples to buy cases of paper and extra ink cartridges. We had a bit of a challenge learning some of the features. For example, while it will do full-duplex (double-sided) printing, doing so means you can't print within about 3/4 inch of the top edge of the paper due to that being where it pulls the paper back into the printer for the second side of the sheet. it prints very close to the edges when not duplexing, so we can work around that. Also, there does not appear to be a manual paper feed, which will be a bit of a hassle at times, but again, we'll cope.

We've identified a lot of pre-convention printing needs where commercial printing is more expensive than printing it ourselves. If we were a larger convention, it might be more worthwhile, but with our small size (under 400 members, probably), we'll trade time for money and do more things ourselves.

Comments

[radar]

That's a nice printer! We had the previous generation of that model at my last workplace.

[auntie_m]

I love the HP OfficeJet Pro series. I've only owned up to legal size paper size, but having 11 x 17 will be very useful. And yes, they do well with that heavier paper that makes nice covers and signs.
I will have my folding wagon at Tonopah if that will help.

[figmo]

Bring more ink and paper than you think you'll need. Inkjets eat ink.

[kevin_standlee]

I know.

[garyomaha]

"Computer Kibble" :) :) :)

[kevin_standlee]

I wondered whether anyone would notice that. It's the box of miscellaneous computer cables and accessories that we've accumulated and that we take with us to some conventions with traveling with sufficient space to do so. It always seems that we end up needing something from this box.

[garyomaha]

Perfect name for it. I was chuckling because we're dog people -- actually, I pretty much guessed the use for the box.

[scott_sanford]

That looks very much like the one OryCon uses for the daily 'zine (the exact model of which I'd have to look up), though that one is black & white only. It's worked well for us. If consumption is similar you can probably get by with only one spare ink set but it's better to be safe than sorry - more often than not I run an entire OryCon or GameStorm without having to replace the ink and they're much larger conventions. It's probably nicer to just accept that you'll have spare ink for the next five or ten years.

For those who haven't seen it, the full duplex mode is amusing to watch; the machine prints one side as usual, extending most of the paper, and then slurps it back in for another go.