I answered another Craigslist ad this morning, for a piece of hardware we’ve been dreaming about for years: a tabloid-sized color laser printer. Now, some of you may recall an earlier post where I’d bartered some services for just such a beast, and you’re thinking, doesn’t he have one of these already? What an idiot. Well, we do have one of these, but it’s not as good as the one I just bought.

This one is a Color LaserJet 8550DN, which is the top-of-the-line circa 2001 or so. What makes it better than the Xerox we’ve got is duplex printing, IP-based networking (as opposed to AppleTalk only), and three extra pickup trays for various sized media. It even came with its own stand. The consumables are about the same price, and this unit actually prints out an estimate of remaining consumable life. We could conceivably retire our B/W printer and use this one by itself.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it out of the car.