Our HP printer "puked". I didn't originate the descriptive word "puked". Grasshopper No.5 used the word when the computer she was using at Eau Claire just shut down. Nada! Nothing! Dead! She said it "puked".
Our old Hewlett Packard printer was purchased 5-6 years ago from Sam's Club. We paid $140. We wanted photo printing capabilities so we paid a little more at the time. I think we got our money's worth. But the real cost (as you know) lies in the ink cartridges. Black cartridges are about $18 and color units are $25. Then there are special cartridges with more intense color capabilities for high quality prints. Another $30 per unit. I don't even want to think about the total cost of printing over the years including cartridges, special paper and software upgrades.
You can't really afford to take a broken printer to a technician for repair. A new black printer can be purchased for under $50.
So merrily we went to Best Buy and looked at the new printers. The cheapest were black printers. A color printer costs a little more. If you want color and scanning, the price increases. The big incremental jump up in price comes with "photo" capability. A printer with photo features along with internet wave transmitting and receiving was the most expensive. Amazingly, the unit with everything was priced at $189. How could they offer this futuristic "do everything" machine so cheap? The answer of course is that you will pay for the printer again and again and again with all the cartridges you will buy.
So we bought a new HP photo capable printer. It does everything except brew coffee in the morning. Then we bought a special cord to connect the printer to our computer and an additional cartridge for high quality color reproduction. The extras pushed the total cash outlay to over $200. And now we are destined to purchase a never ending stream of ink cartridges forever or until the new printer "pukes".
The lesson Grasshoppers is that you never know when an unplanned expense is going to hit. In this case it was a printer. Who knows what is next? My mother always said bad things happen in 3's.
I have to admit the new printer is kind of cute! It blinks lots of lights at me.
Love,
Dad
Cute? Blinks lights at you? Your sounding like Margaret. Cute.