Since my old printer died a few months ago I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement. I ummed and ahhed for quite some time trying to work out what I wanted from a new device – eventually I decided that I wanted

• a colour printer
• integrated scanner
• ideally wireless printing & scanning
• cheap (<£100)

I’d almost given up on finding all these features in one device for the right price, then on Friday I spotted the HP Photosmart C4585 for £75 on the pc world website & decided it looked just the job.

Set up

Setting up the printer was surprisingly easy. Once the power was connected the printer displays easy to follow instructions for installing the ink cartridges on it’s screen.

Next I popped the set up DVD into my MacBook & followed the instructions. I was half expecting to experience pain trying to set the printer up with the Mac, but actually it was a doddle there’s a wizard that guides you through the whole process. Eventually it asks you to connect the the printer using the supplied USB cable; it asks you if you want to connect to a wireless network, if you answer yes the set up program displays the name of the network your computer is attached to and prompts to enter the network key and er, that’s it. Easy.

Note: When adding the printer under Print & Fax on your Mac OS X be sure to choose “HP Jetdirect – Socket” from the protocol drop down or you’ll get network device not ready errors when you try to print.

I thought it was a nice touch that HP provide a Mac OS desktop widget that shows you the printers ink levels.

Now that the printer was on the network it was very simple to set it up on the wife’s Windows XP rig. Again there’s a wizard to walk you through the set up, this time I told the software I wanted to install a network printer – it did a quick scan & found the printer. very, very easy.

Printing

If you buy a printer it’s a good idea to buy paper unless you’re sure you already have some. I wasn’t able to test the printing straight away. But when I did get to the shop and printed a documents I was very pleased with the text printing. I’ve also tried printing one photo (on photo paper) so far, I have to say I’m extremely impressed with the quality.

Scanning

Before setting up the printer / scanner I wasn’t entirely sure if the scanning function was goting to be available over Wifi, I was extremely pleased to find that it does. No more plugging in USB leads for me! The scan results seem very good, so far I’ve used it to upload embarrassing photos of my Sisters to Facebook.

Conclusion

I’ve only had this bit of kit for a couple of days, but at the moment I’d be more than happy to recommend it to anyone based on my limited experience.

This year, they’re doing it again, it should make for an interesting comparison.

It only takes a few minutes to complete, why not pop along and add your details to the mix?

Just as I was coming to terms with not going to @media d.construct 2007 was announced. This years event is all about designing the user experience which is right up my street. They have some great speakers lined up so I really hope I can go.

It has the added advantages of being in Brighton which is just 12 miles from my house (much closer than London) and a it has a bargain ticket price of £85 + vat! The boss has gotta let me go.

Earlier this week Molly announced that she’s signed on with the Internet Explorer team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues.

I think this is excellent news, anything that sees MS developing with standards in mind and gets us closer a more interoberable web has got to be a good thing. As part of her work with Microsoft Molly has started a new blog “The Daily Molly“. I hope that it lives up to it’s name. Molly doesn’t post nearly as often as I’d like her to on Molly.com, so knowing that there’s another place to tap into her knowledge is a good thing.

Molly’s announcement follows hot on the heels of news that Chris Wilson, Platform Architect of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft (and ex-Group Program Manager) is going to be the initial chair of the W3C’s new HTML Working Group. In some circles this new has been greeted with dismay. For the life of me I cannont understand why this should be. Microsoft may have been extremely slow to adopt W3C standards in the past, indeed the gap between IE6 & IE7 was far too long; however they are now working hard to comply with standards, Chris has shown that he personally is commited to the cause and I beleive that under his stewardhip the W3C WG will do the right thing for developers and end users.