PRINTER OWNER PERSPECTIVE – II
Jatin Lodaya is an experienced Chartered Accountant turned visual storyteller, social media blogger, road tripper and financial literacy educator. He gave up his corporate life to follow personal passion & priorities. @jatinlodaya
Question: What made you invest in a home printer and how satisfied are you with the purchase and your advice to individuals or families who do not have a printer at home?
Jatin Lodaya: It has been 5-years since I bought my Epson L805. I use it often for documents and periodically for photographs. Since I work from home, a printer is a necessity. Apart from me, my family also uses it frequently. Mostly for travel-related documents, itineraries, tickets, boarding passes, hotel reservations etc. Apart from this, there are personal finance records of family members, such as bank and credit card statements, and investment and tax statements. I prefer to retain prints over soft copies as I believe in creating a documentation trail.
Considering the nature of my vocation – I am a financial literacy trainer and an accountant for a family-owned micro-enterprise – document printing is higher. I have to print lecture schedules, speaking notes, and group photos. Hard disks are reliable, but some form of paper trail is essential. Also, I prefer printing photographs (usually 4x6”, 5x7”) of friends and relatives and gift them whenever I meet them next. This gesture surely brings a smile on their faces. Recently I gifted my dentist a few of her images that I made during 2022 Navratri. You can imagine how happy she was.
For every friend or relative’s birthday, I send them customised e-greetings along with their personal images made by me. And if I am going to meet them, I carry prints too made on my home printer.
I have a huge inventory of albums and many memories reside in them that we periodically revisit. With digital photography, most of my images end up in my hard disk. But whenever I felt the need to get any printed, I used to get the same done from a local print shop. During a visit to a photo trade fair, I came across the Epson printer stall where I saw the portability and quality it provided and especially with the six-colour external ink tank, I was amazed. I found the price quite attractive too. Being a chartered accountant-turned-photographer, I went through a quick cost-benefit computation such as the cost of print per page/photo and placed the order at the exhibition venue itself. The convenience it gives me, especially the Wi-Fi-linked wireless printing feature (not just from a computer, but any device on the common Wi-Fi network), and above all the comfort of in-house printing is so amazing.
I keep a reasonable inventory of photo-quality inkjet media (4x6” and A4) and use it periodically. To convert an image on my hard disk to a physical form in a few minutes brings satisfaction to me. It is 5 years now and I never had any downtime with my Epson printer. The Epson Photo+ tool provides templates too which helps in enhancing creativity thereby adding value to each image while printing photos.
Smartphone images are getting locked in the memory of the phone and over a period of time, they get lost. Memories are best enjoyed when we can see them regularly. How many times are we going to browse through the phone’s memory or a hard disk? While there are shops to print photographs, owning a printer at home is more convenient especially with the cost of print being so low and the convenience. So, evaluate your usage and then decide. Look out also for the convenience factor, especially if you have children who need to take prints regularly for their academic projects or if you have to periodically print any sensitive information you inadvertently are sharing with random shop owners.
Nowadays you get multi-function printers that can also scan documents and facilitate making copies. Look at it as a cost of convenience. The benefits will surely outweigh the cost!