An ad for printers     016

These days education seems to be expensive with many parents paying out thousands of dollars per year. There can be school fees, excursions, uniforms, sport, computers, not to mention providing a seven-day taxi service for children. Parents spend this money because they want to provide the best possible educational opportunity for their children.

Inexplicably however there seems to be one thing that parents won’t spend money on and that is the cost of providing and maintaining some sort of decent printer. Parents do not see this as being necessary. And when there is a printer, somehow it has always run out of ink or toner. I believe parents are making a major mistake here.

While it is true that information can be processed on the computer screen, notes accessed, and assignments written, it is far more difficult. This is because the human brain can read and handle written text more easily when it is printed. It’s more relaxing on the eye, and the act of touching the material, and writing notes by hand, all make the critical cognitive connections easier and more effective.

When authors, for example, wish to submit their scripts to publishers the vast majority of publishers insist on having the material printed out, and on only one side of the page. These people are experts at handling written information and they choose to do it the easy, fast and effective way, and that is to use hard copy. Later on there will be a role for the computer of course but at the really important stage, hard copy wins. There is also evidence that university students who do not use their laptops to take lecture notes but instead use pen and paper actually remember and learn more. For more information on the use of computers see on this website at Parents/The big bad screen.

So what type of printer does your child need?  I’ll make just a few points. Colour is very expensive and almost never necessary. If colour has to be printed then the file can usually be printed at school or perhaps at places like Officeworks. So it is a black-and-white printer then.

The printer you choose needs reliability, speed and RAM capacity. A laser printer should be purchased as the printed copies are cheaper, and the text can be highlighted. Text that is printed using ink usually smudges and that doesn’t help students.

I am a fan of HP printers. My old HP printer, model ‘2015’ printed more than 100,000 sheets of paper over many years before it died. This level of output is sufficient for the needs of a whole family, and a small business as well. I have now purchased a new HP printer, the ‘Laser Jet Pro 400m’. The print quality is extremely sharp, actually close to real commercial quality. The speed is roughly 34 pages per minute and it has 128 Mb of RAM which allows rapid printing out from the Internet. This is something which senior high school students need to do.

Oh, you want to know the price?  Well the printer cost about $300, and I’m expecting it to perform perfectly for a very long time. My average cost per page printed is about six cents which includes a paper cost of about one cent. So parents should not buy a printer which can do double sided printing because the paper costs almost nothing and yet a double sided printer will be considerably more expensive. And most importantly, students should never print double sided anyway because this makes it far more difficult to read and process the information.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services