New Gear: Epson EcoTank ET-2850 Inkjet Printer/Scanner
Computer printers suck. Every last one. Maybe some suck just a little less.
Over the years, we’ve had a litany of printers in our household. We started with an Epson 870 color inkjet. It was photo printer bought specifically for a project. We wanted to scan a bunch of old family photos, to create a booklet for each of Stella’s brothers and sisters.
It was a nice idea. But it took a vast amount of time. And consumed a monstrous amount of fancy paper and ink, in tiny little, high-priced cartridges. In the end, we might have been better off to have a local pharmacy output the images to real photo paper. It would have cost about the same, and the photos would have lasted longer.
That was over 20 years ago. In many regards, nothing has changed. In a recent podcast, Cory Doctorow reminds us that inkjet inks are the single most expensive fluid in existence.
Be that as it may, Stella was tired of the Canon color inkjet/scanner that she had been using for several years. It was always out of one-kind-of-ink-or-another. The ink cartridges were so tiny. So late last year we acquired an Epson EcoTank ET-2850.
This was supposedly a big advance, since it has a series of built-in reservoirs for the inks. It holds quite a lot of ink compared to the cartridge-based designs. The inks come in more substantial quantities.
It’s Shaq-approved, too. “Just fill and chill!” That’s funny.
Stella seems to be happy with it. It’s Wi-Fi only, but I don’t really care. I’ll basically never use it. My needs are wholly met by a little Samsung SL-M2020 B&W laser printer.
However, this Epson has a common design fault that I’ve noted here several times before. It has an onerously bright, blue status light around the power button. I meant, it’s offensively…and pointlessly bright. Most especially in a dark room.
Cue: Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the light.”
If I should fall asleep on the couch, upon waking, with the room otherwise dark, that blue light sears its way into my corneas. This is simply idiotic industrial design. Driven by an “ooh, shiny” sensibility rather than any practical considerations.
Epson should follow the example set by Ubiquiti, and make the status light something that can be disabled or dimmed via software.
But I have a solution. There’s little/no chance that anyone would need to print anything overnight. So, I treat it like a Christmas tree. It’s powered by way of a smart, switched outlet. In Home Assistant that outlet is set to automatically turn off at 11pm, and turn back on at 6am. Problem solved.
This strategy is very much like that which drew me into Home Assistant in the first place. I needed wanted a way to control power on some powered speakers based upon the state of the associated media player.
To date, I’ve used the simple, switched outlets here and there. Even a couple that have current monitoring. There are places where I might want to deploy a few of them. Perhaps I should try one of these Kasa outlet strips that includes 3, individually addressable switched outlets? They appear to be quite a bargain. And the right-angle plug is handy behind a cabinet.
So the TL;DR is that a Smart Plug can overcome a dumb design.