One downside of moving jobs is that I’ve had to give back all of the kit I was using that belongs to Fujitsu*. The car went back last month at the end of its lease but yesterday I returned a pile of technology to the office including mobile phone, laptop, monitor, printer.

Hang on. Printer. I’m not the only user of that particular device…

I never liked it anyway – I’ve had a succession of OfficeJet all-in-one devices since I swapped out my trusty old LaserJet for a company-supplied printer and I’ve found inkjet devices to be expensive in consumables (non-OEM cartridges gunking up; OEM cartridges running out even when they say they have ink in them) and the HP OfficeJet 4620 that I’ve used for the last couple of years was particularly unreliable from a software perspective too. So I decided to pick up a small-office laser printer instead and the Samsung SL-C410W was just £130 for a colour laser printer.

Of course some will say, if I think ink cartridges are expensive, wait until I have to buy toner and the other items that the new printer will need but we’re talking in thousands of pages here… for someone who gets through about a box of paper (2500 sheets) every 2 years or so (and half of that has been taken by the kids for drawing)!

Anyway, back to the point. The SL-C410W was available at a great price direct from Samsung (£20 cheaper than John Lewis or PC World – and Staples were way off the mark), with free next-day delivery. Setup was simple, following the supplied instructions to get connected to my Wi-Fi network (although I did install the software on a PC and use the supplied USB cable to make things easy).  There were a couple of points that it might have been useful to know though:

• Setting a static IP address needed a connection to the printer’s SyncThru web service – either using the supplied software to find the device on the network or using the DHCP logs to work out which IP address it was using and going to http://ipaddress/sws/index.html.
• Once in SyncThru, login is required to make changes – default username is admin and password is sec00000.

With the password and IP address changed and discovery services configured, our family PC (running Windows 8.1) automatically found and connected to the printer, whilst the Windows 7 PCs only needed me to walk through a wizard (printer and driver location was automatic).

That just left the issue of copying – a feature on the OfficeJet that we do use sometimes. Here, some open source software called iCopy came to the rescue.  It does exactly what it says on the tin – provides a “free photocopier” by linking a scanner and a printer – nothing that can’t be done manually but a single button was helpful for family members who use this feature.

The only slight problem was locating Windows Image Aquisition (WIA) drivers for my elderly CanoScan N650U/N656U with Canon not offering anything for Windows 7 and the Internet seemingly littered with dead links.  Luckily, Tom Heath has posted a link to the drivers and these worked a treat.

Only time will tell whether the SL-C410W was a wise buy or not – but at least my family have a means to print homework, my wife has a printer (and copier) again for her work, and I have something that should be reasonably reliable and hassle-free…

As the HP OfficeJet pile of uselessness goes back to my employer, let’s hope this replacement is better… pic.twitter.com/qW25QXVSRz

— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) May 5, 2015

* There are lots of upsides too – including that my new “laptop” will be a Surface Pro 3, and that I’ll be using modern software to help me in my work.