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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 01/17/2007 |
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The new
generation of Color printers which print directly on dvds
and cd’s – In the
past couple years a new generation of printers have emerged, to print upon a
completely type of media rather than paper, which has been the traditional
thing printers printed on. While
shopping at local office supply stores – Costco and Office Depot
– I’ve seen both dvd’s and cd’s that are sold as
“Print On.”, differentiating them from regular dvds and cd’s that you stick labels on. This old
generation of color ink jet printers printed very good quality on regular
paper, and you could run different labels through them to make fancy cd
covers, and you could even print on special photographic paper and create
printouts as good or better than regular photographs. But they did all this
on paper. With the
explosion of the WWW people have
wanted to do non-traditional things related to music and photography, so this
new generation of color ink jet printers are designed for this new world. I recently
bought one on these new printers – an Epson
R340 Photo printer at Office Depot for $ 129. I
recalled buying the worlds first color printer way back in the 1980’s
– the Hewlett Packard Paintjet, which printed
on continuous special paper. The cost was $ 1500 and it was able to print out
early vga graphics. My new
Epson R340 printer cost less than a tenth of that original paint jet, it’s
much faster, it can print out in the highest computer graphics capability
that there is today, but it can do a couple things the older generation of printers
couldn’t do... One is
that it can print directly on the new Print-on dvd’s or cd’s, so
that you can choose any image or photograph that you’ve taken yourself,
and then print that directly on a dvd or cd, and add your own text to it. I’m
printing on DVD’s as I write this show, and it seems to print a dvd in
about 3 minutes. There’s
a special tray that you use to insert a dvd or cd with, and then the software
that come with the printer lets you select the image you want to print on
it. There’s always a hole
inserted in the middle of your picture, so you might have to rearrange your
graphics and text somewhat to accommodate for that. The image quality is
excellent and certainly makes your dvd/cd’s look professional. The 2nd
thing this printer can do is print photos you take with your digital camera.
Ok, my old HP 840C that I just replaced with my new Epson R340 could do that
too – but here’s the difference. I can
connect my digital camera directly to this printer and choose and print
pictures without any computer – the camera comes with software that
talks to your digital camera, looks at the pictures you’re taken inside
it, and then lets you select the pictures you want to print, and how to print
them. How cool is that ? I’m
sure there will be times that I will want to edit my pictures on my computer before printing
them out, but this feature can saves me a lot of time. There are
also print devices solely for printing dvds, or for
printing directly from cameras, but they don’t have the versatility of
being to print on regular paper as well. And I
could have bought a lesser Epson – the model R220
which can print the cds and dvds
but doesn’t have the digital camera printing capability, but the price
difference was only about $ 30 so I went with the R340, on the advice of my
friends at Accurate Data
Service and also on the opinion of KPBX general manger Dick Kunkle who has one of those earlier Epson printers. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2007 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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