It happens every time I attend a conference. You drop your business card into various pots for drawings, and about six weeks later the sales calls start pouring in. I’ve already gotten several follow-ups from contacts made at NECC back in June, and the calls had not looked like they were going to diminish anytime soon.
So, today I get the first call – someone trying to sell me toner that’s somehow much better but less expensive than the stuff we usually buy. He was another one of those high-pressure sales people that want to get you to commit to something over the phone immediately. I ended the conversation as quickly as I could. Right on the heels of that call, I got another from someone identifying himself as the sales rep from Okidata. I gave him a cool, non-committal greeting, hoping to end this call as soon as the previous one. However, his news was different. I had won the grand prize for their drawing back in June.
My prize package was delivered yesterday by the salesman himself. First there was an array of goods – nice black leather sports bag, polo shirt, canvas bag, hat, ink pen, and golf balls – all with the Oki logo on them. Nice stuff, but I’m not sure I want to go parading around with a bright red logo everywhere. I didn’t mind that the main prize had an Oki logo on it – an Okidata C6000 color laser printer.
I got the thing home, unboxed it and set it up. It’s huge, and dominates my little home office. This is more of an office workhorse printer, and not something you would typically find in a home. Since it has a print server built in, I attached it to our home network, installed drivers, and fired it up.
This thing is fast, printing at nearly 20 ppm in color. I tried several of my photos, and the output was sharp, with vivid colors. I did some side-by-side comparisons with my Epson i9900 printer. While the Oki’s output was very crisp, I prefered the Epson’s softer tones for photographs. I’m sure the fact that I was using photo paper in the Epson and plain paper in the Oki had something to do with it.
So now I’m equipped to the gills for printing. The HP Laserjet 1200 that had been my main printer seemed large when we first got it. Now it seems much smaller in comparison with the color laser. It will move over to Laura’s computer, and I’ll somehow find a way to hide the big Oki in my office.