I’ve spent the evening looking up the best prices and reviews for some of the office machines that I’ll be needing for PFE. As always, anything you guys can throw into the fire is welcome.
- Standalone fax machine: Sharp UXP400H £79.78 inc VAT
- Cordless phone with answering machine: BT Synergy 2150 £79.99 inc VAT
- Mono laser printer: HP LaserJet 1150 £215.78 inc VAT
- Mulitfunction colour printer/scanner/copier: HP PSC2110 £129.95 inc VAT
My comments: the PSC2210 would be nicer, as it includes a memory card reader for quick printing of digital photos, but I can’t justify the extra expense. The LaserJet 1150 gets good reviews, and HP laser printers are fairly rugged in my experience (still using a 4Plus that is ten years old, reliably churning out reams of paper on a daily basis). The BT Synergy has all the features I’m looking for – remote access digital answering machine, plus digital cordless phone so I can sit outside with the laptop in the summer (there has to be some advantage to having a rural office location!). The UXP400H seems to be the pick of a (very large) bunch of similarly featured and priced machines.
So this evening hasn’t been entirely productive – but four hours trawling the web has allowed me to gain good product knowledge and find solutions that will cost me £160 less than I had budgeted. Add that to the savings I’ve made this week on my budgets for telecommunications, insurance and the laptop, and PFE already needs to borrow less money that I had feared (and yes, I’ve already had to spend some of it on accountant’s fees, and some is allocated to legal expenses, but I’m still showing a gain).
Now I’m looking at digital cameras, those in the 3MP class. I’m keen on the Kodak DX4330 as that is closest to the DX3900 that I use at the nursery. But the Fuji FinePix S304 looks good too. Have to admit that the price tag and 10x zoom (plants often need close-ups) on the Kodak do incline me towards that. Anyone got any knowledge/experience they can share?