Adding a New Weapon to the Arsenal
Yesterday, my printer died. They often do and this one I’ve had since my junior year of college. Considering it’s been 4 years since I got it, it’s lasted quite a while. I’ve found that, like a poorly cared for PC, a printer under heavy working conditions lasts about 2 years. Knowing that, I’ll take 4 years anytime.
So that left me with a question. Do I go out and buy a comparable printer for $40–60 that will be good. Or do I spend extra cash to buy a high-quality large format printer? I decided to go for the latter, dropping $300 on an Epson Stylus Photo 1400… and looking at the prints it’s putting out on tabloid sized paper, I know that $300 has been the right choice.
Few More Shots of my Epson :) [click to embiggen]
This brings up an interesting concept: cheap vs expensive technology. With printers, phones, headsets, mice, etc coming down in price year after year, is it really nessesary to go for something high-end when it comes to tech? Can you skimp on price and do just as good? I don’t think so.
For years I’ve bought cheaper goods at what I thought was the sweet spot of price and tech. Often, those goods lives can be measured in months, not years like intended. When you skimp on price, you skimp on quality. I’ll put out some real life examples that I’ve experienced over the years.
The Dell Computer
Back in my sophomore year of college, the $40 office Dell my dad scavenged from his office building was just not cutting it. I was getting into Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 11 at the time and that thing chugged along with 128MB of ram and a crappy on-board video-card. So, I looked into buying a Dell. I settled on the medium top of the line Dimension computer.
Within two years I had memory errors, a sound card that never worked with anything besides the cheapest of speakers, and constant Windows XP errors (thanks mostly by my reckless internet use at the time; I’ve wised up since then, mostly thanks to that Dell). I tried to upgrade my RAM, but the standard slot RAM I bought from Corsair would not work in my Dell motherboard, which only used a certain type of sticks… only available from Dell and twice as expensive. Without much money after college, I had to deal with this finicky machine until I made enough freelance scratch to buy a new computer.
This time I settled on an Alienware Area-51, at the time the top of the line model. It’s been just about 3 years and an Operating system upgrade and this PC has been running as good as I bought it. I’ll upgrade my RAM soon (which is standard) as well as my video card and expect this PC to run for another two years.
Bluetooth Headset
When I first got a smartphone (Blackberry 8300), I needed a headset to talk into because of NJ’s restrictions on holding a cell while driving. I bought a $25 dollar Jabra (great brand, actually). It was uncomfortable, hard to turn on, and stopped syncing 4 months in. The next one I bought was the $90 model which was comfy, loud, and easy to use while driving and works like a charm.
iPod Shuffle
Bought the $70 dollar model in college. After about a year it had constant errors and worked like shit with iTunes; itself an annoying and bloated program to use on a PC. When I finally needed more than 1GB of music space, I bought a refurbished Zune 30GB off that Woot! was featuring that morning. Since then, that PMP has worked amazingly well. On top of that the Zune software may be one of the best pieces of music software I’ve yet encountered, being simple to use and absolutely gorgeous in polish. Apple should be ashamed of themselves for iTunes.
There are plenty more examples besides the above I’ve cherry picked. My newest Epson scanner was expensive at the time (it’s 4 years old) and works amazingly well to this day. My Logitech MX revolution mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever used, to the point I’m considering bringing it to work with me. My Logitech gaming keyboard is programmable awesomeness. My Nikon D40… my Razorfish USB headset… Lightroom 2 software… the list goes on, and on.
It’s Nothing Personal
But it’s not just your out of work life that this applies to. At work this idea also makes sense. I’ve worked at plenty of places that try to skimp and save on non-essentials… computers, printers, tools, paper, ect. What I’ve found that, in the end, the time that you spend on fixing issues with shitty products ends up eating the money you’ve saved on their cost.
My internship (going to withhold where) was a good example of this. We had shitty programs and a shitty Mac to work on. It took me three times the amount of time I needed to do simple things like print and create PDFs of work.
Alternatively, when I worked at Mack Trucks, the workstation I was given was a monster of a PC. 4GB of RAM, suped up video card and the newest Adobe Creative suite. The newer large format printer (a 48″ wide beast) was pushed to it’s limits and performed amazingly, which it should have being $3000 and up. I got more work done in a summer there than I had anywhere but my current job.
By skimping out on price, you might be saving yourself money. But you won’t on time, especially when that brand new piece of equipment begins the end of it’s life cycle a year after you’ve bought it.