If It Prints, I'll Let You Know

Did you ever stop to think about how much damage your important documents or any other photos can get from environmental factors such as dust, dirt, and grime? Your wedding photo from years ago or your college diploma is still vulnerable to the elements, and preserving them just the way they are may need more than just keeping them enclosed in a sealed box.

So, what do you do to make sure that your files stay exactly the way you remember them? While your soft copies can remain intact and untouched until the end of time, your hard copies can be preserved through the use of laminators, which function to protect any type of flat material that you choose.

But with that said, what type of laminator should you use for your material of choice? It all depends, actually. For photos, business cards, reports, and other small-sized materials, you can use a pouch laminator. This laminator type is more suited for home use, mainly because of its compact and portable nature.

When you think that you have to laminate larger materials, you would do better to buy a roll laminator. This laminator type is more suited to large-scale laminating, such as the ones found in institutions such as schools, offices, and businesses.

In a nutshell, the type of laminator best suited for your home or workplace really depends on the size of your material. Lamination film is typically used in roll laminators, and the most utilized size is at 27 inches. Pouches for pouch laminators are made especially for smaller articles, and often have a carrier to hold the pouch before the lamination process.

Although paper consumption rates have been lowering since 1999 the rate of paper used by businesses everyday remains at a staggering rate. So what can these businesses do to reduce the amount of paper they use and then have to destroy? Here are a few tips that can have you and your company reducing consumption painlessly.

• Do Away With Memos: Most people are familiar with the internet at this point and many businesses have some sort of interface that allows their employees to e-mail. Utilize this to reduce the amount of paper wasted on printing up memos and other notes on the job. E-mail is a much quicker way of communicating in any case. Rather than printing off e-mails forward them to other workers.

• Fax Smart: Think before you fax something off. There are many times you’d save paper and time if you e-mailed instead. If you must fax something it’s much better if you can use an outbound/inbound e-mail to fax service.

• Use All-in-One Printers: All-in-one printers don’t cost nearly as much as they used to, and the investment is worth it. The ink and paper you’ll save with this format will add up pretty quickly. Newer models also come with options like Wi-Fi, touch-screens and Bluetooth.

• Use Your Scanner: Scanning your documents into the computer means that they can be e-mailed or saved to a disk for easy retrieval, evading paper use after you’ve gotten the initial text document.

It can take some getting used to but trust me making these changes will be well worth the effort!

It may be an expensive add-on (it costs a hefty $2,500 for the addition to the T654 monochrome laser printer which costs about 1200-1700 on its own.) but if you’re in the market for an RFID tag printer the Lexmark RFID UHF Option could be just what you’re looking for. If your printer is equipped with the add-on it produces individual Radio Frequency Identification tags for the purpose of tracking specific items like individual files and hardware to make access and retrieval easier. It can be put directly on the items or put inside boxes and be tracked by a locator device that can read its serial number. It produces 20 RFID radio tagged pages every minute (this on media that is 5×7-8.5×14 inches in either a vertical or horizontal format).
The technical advancement could be quite helpful for those in the healthcare and manufacturing industries who must maintain large stores of important documents and products as part of their jobs (at a reduced cost compared to that of thermal printers normally used) but there are a few things to remember. Keep in mind it will replace a printer tray in your T654 and it is different than a dedicated RFID thermal printer which prints the tags exclusively and therefore could have some differences. It also means buying special paper already made up for RFID tag use (the printer assigns the tags and labels them with specific codes when it prints on the paper). It’s a major investment but it could help with filling and categorizing projects that never seem to be quite as organized as they should be.

Printbrush is a new transportable printer from London company PrintDreams and it looks like it could outdo the long-standing hit Pogo. A handheld (in fact it’s small enough to be carried in a pocket) printer that memorize co-ordinates in order to print(Random Movement Print Technology), Printbrush is manually (that is you run it over the paper as it prints) run over the paper as it deposits the printer ink of the document onto the paper. Not unlike the cloning features used by Adobe Photoshop Printbrush offers you the ability to copy a document without having to rely on a full printer and standardized printing media to use. It’s possible to use the device to copy any document that is letter sized to surfaces like notebooks and other paper mediums that wouldn’t fit through a standard printer. The manufacturer promises that the device (which is said to work silently) also allows you to go back and correct empty spaces left in error.
Retailing at roughly $200 and able to support both bluetooth and USB connections, the device prints in black using the same quality as inkjet printers at 600 dpi. Most likely to be useful for commercial uses such as printing UPC codes and other important information directly onto surfaces (that might otherwise require specialized printing or labels), the Printbrush could become quite popular in home offices as well. A handy way to simplify and mobilize the printing process Printbrush looks as if it might be quite popular if it can stand up to the expectation that internet demonstration videos seem to promise to consumers.

We just did a post on power charging on the go; talk about reliability and convenience. But then again, does it end there? Believe it or not, there is still something that is even more reliable and convenient than the ability to ensure that one has enough power for one’s electronic gadgets while on the road. Looking at it from that perspective, what, indeed, could be better than not having to charge at all?

That is exactly what LG has reportedly developed for e-book readers. LG Display of South Korea has developed a solar panel compatible for e-book readers. What this means is that there will be no need to power up those handy e-book readers, regardless of whether you are away on vacation or just curled up on the futon with your e-book.

As it is, e-book owners are already able to enjoy long-lasting battery life; it does not really take much power to use the device. But then again, having to charge it up can be an inconvenience, especially when one has forgotten to do it at the appropriate time. With the solar panel, simple exposure to 4 to 5 hours of sunlight will provide users with enough e-book power to last the entire day.

The 10-centimeter square panel has been incorporated into a Sony e-book reader to prove that it works. The working prototype will reportedly be on display at the International Meeting on Information Display in Seoul, South Korea. At a rather negligible weight of 20 grams and thickness of less than a millimeter, the addition of the panel in an e-book reader will have very minimal effect on the device’s weight.

With that already under way, it will probably not be long before we get to enjoy mobile phones and PDAs that can draw power from solar energy. Now that’s convenience!