The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: Greg on June 04, 2014, 02:41:18 PM
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I do residential design/build and most of my designs are 11"x17". I used to make hardcopy by hand (pencil on velum) and now do a lot of the work in the form of a 3D model using Sketchup on my mac. Where before I could just make copies of the drawings for clients, the options are more limited now since my local mercantile got a different copier and the closest FedEx/Kinko's is about 8 miles / 17 mins. away.
I went there yesterday and had a not-so great printing experience. The machine locked up and they had to get a key to retrieve my cc, reboot the machine, and the printing was also very slow, so I was late to my presentation. So I'm suddenly thinking of buying a 11x17 printer.
I found an HP Officejet 7610 for about $150, or just under 10 times what I would spend making prints at the store. It also can scan/copy/fax etc. and has wireless capability.
So to me the math says buy one. I know the ink is spendy, but even so it seems to make sense. Does it?
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Do you need color? If you'll be printing a lot of pages a monochrome laser printer gives you big bang for the buck over the long haul.
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Technically I don't need color, but it would be nice for certain kinds of presentations. The laser printers I found in this output size had at least another zero attached.
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I found one online and ordered it, it was $144 delivered. Two days ago I spent $20 on two set of drawings, so this could "pay for itself" in one or two projects.