Gold watch for a printer

You must know what I mean. Your home isn't the most spacious, and the room you do a lot of work in is one of the smaller rooms in the house. It seems chock-a-block with bookshelves and bits of equipment, and suddenly you want less in that room. Just to clear some space, and make it a slightly better place to work in. What can go?

I felt like this. And I knew at once what could go: my Epson Stylus Photo 1400 printer. It was a big beast and took up a lot of space, especially with its trays opened out for some actual printing:

I bought it in 2007, and so it was now thirteen years old. Ancient tech; but still usable - or at least it would be, if I'd fired it up enough.

In the last ten years it's had less and less to do. After 2009 I never printed any of my own photos. I did stuff on request for my Auntie Peg, and for my cleaner Theresa, but by the end of 2017 even that had stopped. The only other thing I used it for - and in truth this was 90% of all its use - were formal typed letters that needed to be put in an envelope, stamped and posted. And those had become very infrequent, because more and more one just emailed. It was the expected thing.

The printer had therefore suffered from under-use, getting gummed-up. It would struggle to feed the sheets of paper properly; its ink cartridges would declare themselves dry before their proper lifespan; its printing head needed constant cleaning; and when apparently ready to print, the results were poor, with some lines of print coming out very faintly. A printed letter should impress with its perfection. Well, it wouldn't give me anything approaching that.

And once I bought my vintage Parker 51 fountain pen a year ago, it crossed my mind that I could now produce a nicer-looking letter with my own handwriting, with the advantage that it would look very personal. The postage-cost would of course be the same. And I suspected that a handwritten business letter had to be given 'special treatment' at the receiving end, possibly securing extra attention. The output of my elderly printer, with some lines hard to read because they were so ill-printed, was unlikely to get much attention at all.

Changing inkjet cartridges more often might help, of course; but that was so wasteful if they were still half-full. And the particular inkjet cartridges needed for this printer were expensive - typically £16 each online. I didn't always have to buy all six of them at once, but at this point in 2020 I'd need a complete set of six different colours, black included. So £96 altogether. Ouch. Why, I could buy a half-decent printer for that - one for only printing letters of course, but in fact this is the only kind of printer I could possibly justify nowadays. (I'm not keen to spend the money, though)

Well, it was time for an overdue retirement. The gold watch moment.

But I'd never loved my printer. So all I did, without the slightest sentiment whatever, was to unplug the thing and carry it into my garage for later disposal at the council tip. (A pain to the last, it was heavy, as well as big)

Immediately that corner of my study looked thankful. Ultimately I'd want to put more book-shelving there; but in the meantime I set about moving the pine cupboard the printer had stood on, and rearranging various other items. I could now get the most-used file folders off the floor and up to a convenient height, so that I didn't need to stoop.

So the corner isn't any emptier, but my floor-space has certainly grown, and the whole room now seems more spacious. 

I'm keeping my Epson V700 Photo scanner, bought with the printer, and therefore also of 2007 vintage. It has a lot of work to do yet. I have several thousand prints and transparencies to sort through and digitise. This will take me years. But the scanner remains in perfect working order, and is happy to co-operate with my modern laptop, using a generic driver. I should think it will be fine even with my next laptop, coming up in 2022. It would be nice to finish all the digitising by 2025, but who knows. This is the scanner:

Not nearly so many moving parts as the printer, and not so affected by periods of idleness. It should soldier on for years to come. But if it dies, then my scanning must come to an abrupt halt, apart from whatever can be done with the phone, using an app like PhotoScan.

I can see a day coming when all I'll be using will be a phone and a laptop. By 2027 certainly.

I wonder if I'll have cleared out my garage by then?