Gatermann and I spent the afternoon building a train table. I started building one about a month ago but got too busy to finish it. Today was the day I’d set aside to get some work done on it.
The economics of color inkjets vs. color lasers
Deciding between a color inkjet versus a color laser is tough for me. So I decided to sit down and do the math, and the results were exactly the opposite of what I expected.
The least expensive color laser printer on the market is the Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W. It’s $650 with a $200 rebate. It should also be noted it’s a Windows-only printer, which I don’t like since I frequently run Linux, and I might like to run Gimp and Sodipodi on Linux and print to my color printer. So for Linux use (and faster printing on the Windows side), I’d have to step up to the Magicolor 2300DL, which is $100 extra. The Minoltas have excellent resolution for their class (1200×1200, as opposed to 600×600 in most competing printers) and the toner gives a waxy, photograph-like shine.
While it’s surprisingly easy to find a color inkjet for less than $40, the least-expensive color inkjet I would be willing to consider is the Epson Stylus C64, because it’s the least expensive inkjet I know of that has separate cartridges for all four colors. And, while slow, it offers excellent resolution (5760×1440 dpi). But the slightly higher-priced Epson Stylus C84 gets better reviews (and I’ve seen the C84). I’ll base the comparison on the C64, but since the two printers use the same cartridges and I’m projecting total costs over a long period of time, the price difference between the C64 and C84 is negligible.
The reviews of the Minolta that I’ve seen complain about the cost of the consumables. While the cartridges are expensive ($150 per pop), this criticism doesn’t take into account the cost per page. While the cost of inkjet cartridges is easier to swallow, inkjets are notorious for their high cost per page. So the right question to ask is which printer is cheaper over the long term?
A set of Minolta cartridges will cost $384. A set of cartridges will yield approximately 4,500 pages. Divide 384 by 4,500, and you come up with a cost of 8.53 cents per page, not counting the paper.
Epson cartridges cost $12.34 each, and you need four of them. They yield approximately 400 pages per cartridge. Multiply 12.34 by 4, then divide by 400, and you come up with a cost of 12.34 cents per page, not counting the paper.
The Minolta 2300DL costs $550, while the Epson C64 costs $57. So the price difference is $493. A page printed by the Minolta costs 3.81 cents less than a page printed by the Epson. So divide 493 by 0.0381, and you’ll have to print 12,389 pages for the Minolta to come up cheaper.
If you can live with Windows-only printing, the 2300W comes out ahead after 10,315 pages.
There’s an additional cost with the Minolta, however: The drum unit needs to be replaced every so often. The worst-case scenario, if you do a lot of single-page prints, is 10,000 pages. That’s $150, which means another 3,900 pages you’ll need to print in order to come out ahead.
I guarantee the Epson will break down faster than the Minolta, but seeing as the Epson costs $8 more than a set of its ink cartridges (and includes a set of cartridges), I’m willing to call that a wash, especially in light of the Minolta’s higher power consumption and heat generation while printing. How much the Minolta will increase your electric bill is an unknown, as is the number of times the Epson will need to be replaced. (But most people I know who have had a computer for five years and print a lot have gone through 2-3 inkjet printers.)
Seeing as I go through 3-4 reams of paper a year, tops, it would take the Minolta five years to pay for itself. And that brings up another problem. Have you ever tried to buy supplies for a five-year-old laser printer? In five years, I’m much more likely to have to pay full retail for the supplies ($125 for the cartridges, and $170 for the drum unit), if I can find them at all. Chalk up another 4,000 pages due to probable increased costs.
If you primarily print photos, the economics change slightly. These numbers are based on 5% coverage. Photos tend to cause printers to guzzle ink five times as quickly as they would printing things like web pages, so if your primary intent is to print photos, divide those page counts by four or five. That brings me closer to my range, but not quite close enough.
So I’ve reached a surprising conclusion for myself: For color printing, I’m better off with an Epson inkjet.
I do expect the cost of color lasers to continue to drop, but what that tells me is that when the Epson breaks or after a couple of years, I should re-evaluate. But until color lasers drop below the $350 mark or my printer usage increases dramatically, a color laser just doesn’t make sense for me.
Reports on the death of film are [you know the rest]
Giddy Slashdotters are proclaiming the death of film since Kodak has announced it’s not going to sell film cameras anymore, at least not in the United States and Europe.
It proves to me that whoever wrote that story summary knows little or nothing about serious photography.
For many years, Kodak was a big name in serious photography. But come the 1960s, you started seeing serious cameras from a lot of other manufacturers. For the duration of my lifetime, Kodak cameras were pretty much relegated to the casual point-and-shoot arena.
But meanwhile, Kodak remained one of the largest producers of film. It remains so today. Go into any store and look for film, and the two brands you’re most likely to find are Kodak and Fuji.
Serious photographers have only recently begun to prefer digital. Some serious photographers still prefer the look of film. Pictures shot on film have a different look from digital shots, and they probably always will. Neither type of camera’s view on reality is necessarily more correct, but they’re certainly different, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.
Casual photographers like digital point-and-shoots because they can take hundreds of pictures and only print out (and thus only pay for) the good ones. And there’s the perception among certain laypeople that digital is always better. CDs sound better than cassettes, so digital pictures will look better than film, right? That’s what the girl I was dating a year ago thought, and I never convinced her otherwise.
The money is in disposable cameras, film, and digitals. There’s just not much money to be made in the traditional point-and-shoots–too many companies are making them, and the margins are too thin. So Kodak is concentrating on the areas where it can make money. And Kodak can make a lot of money selling $150 digital cameras to people year over year (people will want to upgrade so they can make bigger prints, after all), or disposable cameras to people who forget to pack a camera, or film to people buying razor-thin-margin cameras made by someone else.
Once you can buy a $40 digital camera with resolution comparable to film, you’ll be able to declare film dead. But you can’t do that yet, and you won’t be able to for a few more years.
But I’m sure you already knew all of this, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this. But I feel better now.
Myths about the 1904 World’s Fair
The 1904 World’s Fair was the stuff of legends, especially in St. Louis. St. Louis has a bit of an inferiority complex, so the 1904 World’s Fair gives it a rare point of pride. But there are a number of myths surrounding the 1904 World’s Fair. Let’s look at three of them: the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger.
According to legend, the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger as we know it today were all invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. But in all three cases, there are earlier examples in history, though one can make a case that the 1904 World’s Fair helped popularize all three.
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Linkfest Saturday
I don’t do this very often, but just for today I’m going to be a true weblog, posting little more than links and my own comments about them. It’s mostly so I can find this stuff again, but hopefully someone else finds it useful too.
I hope someday I’ll understand this model railroad electronics page
Rob Paisley has a page of model railroad circuitry, including, most interestingly to me, a driver for stepper motors. You’d use stuff like this if you wanted to have people moving around inside your buildings, or if you wanted other moving parts on your layout.
I used to build electronic circuits, when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. It’s been so long now that I don’t even remember what all of the symbols mean. It’s almost sad.
But the good news for me is that I’ll be able to build all kinds of cool stuff once I figure it out. I’ve got lots of old 5.25-inch floppy drives in my basement, with stepper motors ripe for harvesting. A stash of 5.25-inch floppy drives with amber LEDs would be a railroad scratchbuilder’s dream, wouldn’t it?
Making two-part plaster molds
One of the station platforms from Dad’s old Lionel set only has one of its three supports. I could possibly track down new ones, or fashion new ones out of wood or some other material, but the easiest thing to do would be to just cast two new ones, using the first one as the original.
This guide to two-part plaster molds is written with action figure parts in mind, but the same principle applies for any solid three-dimensional object.
Keep in mind it’s illegal to do any of this stuff except for your own personal use, unless, of course, you’re casting copies of something you made yourself.
Linux kernel 2.6.0 is in Debian Unstable
Fresh on the heels of the Linux Kernel 2.6.1 release, Kernel 2.6.0 made it into Debian Sid (unstable). I haven’t tried it yet, as I messed things up on my main Linux box when I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version of 2.6.
I really ought to put a Linux partition on my Athlon system and upgrade it to Debian Unstable with a 2.6 kernel.
For those of you who currently have a working Debian box, it might be apt-get upgrade time. See why I like Debian? You can upgrade to all the latest stuff with, at worst, two commands: apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, or apt-get update and apt-get distupgrade. No chasing down RPMs and dependencies, no waiting around for stuff to compile and wondering if it’ll work on your system. It lets you be cutting edge, yet conservative.
Slimming down the bird: A 2.6 kernel for PCs with 4-8 megs
In case you haven’t read about it elsewhere, a new branch of the Linux kernel called -tiny was quietly released last month. Its main intent is for embedded systems, but I can see all sorts of uses for it. The smaller the kernel, the faster it loads off a floppy, so it’d be great for boot disks. Likewise for diskless machines that boot off the network.
Some people claim that compiling the kernel with the -Os parameter, as this branch permits, causes faster operation than compilations with the normal -O2. The theory is that the system spends more time in user space than in kernel space, and therefore, the kernel will almost never be in system cache, and therefore, the smaller it is, the faster it will operate. I’m sure someone who knows some specifics of how CPUs and caches work could validate or refute this. Even Steve DeLassus, who has both an electrical engineering and a computer science degree from one of the best universities in the world for that kind of thing, admits that sometimes these specifics get over his head. So if Steve doesn’t always know, then how am I supposed to know?
But the argument sounds good on paper.
With this kernel slimmed down as much as possible (no networking), it can boot in 2 megs. With networking, it can boot in 2.5 megs. With a comfortable set of features, it runs in 4-8 megs, which a mainline kernel doesn’t always do anymore.
Obviously, this is a perfect companion for projects like asmutils and uClibc/Busybox/Tinylogin.
Vintage signs and lighting for your toy train layout
I couldn’t have possibly found this site too soon: http://www.gatewaynmra.org/download.htm.
Besides photographs of six vintage building signs, there are also numerous other photographs for download that might be useful, and also some articles with really good tips.
Emphasis is more on serious modeling in HO or N scale than in toy-train O or S gauge, but in the case of the photographs, all that means is you have to print them bigger in order to use them. And the tips for assembling and improving models from kits hold regardless of type.
I also found this tutorial on lighting your railroad buildings with Christmas lights. Seeing as most places have them on sale for 50, 60, or 75 percent off while they last this time of year, the timing’s pretty good.
One guy in rec.models.railroad suggested using yellow LEDs to light your buildings, but seeing as a strand of Christmas lights is dirt cheap and I don’t have anything to cannibalize yellow LEDs from, I may go the Christmas light route first.