So my inkjet is really an ink hog when printing music. Not even sure I can print 20 pages without running it out of ink. The jam group I went to has 2 music pdfs. One has about 275 pages. The other has about 150 pages. What do you all use to print music? I looked online and going to a UPS store would probably run me 50-60 dollars. I can buy a monochrome laserjet for about 100 that should print 1000's of pages on one toner cartridge. Thoughts?
I’ve been using one of this laser things for a few months, it’s great. Before that I used an ink hog. A couple times I took large projects to OfficeMax - your research is correct, it’s too costly.
I'd look into getting a different printer. I have two canon's, One is a Pixma Pro 100 Photo printer and will print images up to 13"X19" It consumes (by my standards) a lot of ink to print text. Still I can print much more than 20 pages without consuming all go my Black ink. The other printer is a Canon MX922 AIO. I can scan and copy as well as print with it. It will easily do hundreds of pages without taxing the ink supply. I would suggest not printing except what you need. If you have 275 pages of PDFs, How many of those are songs you want to learn and are all 275 pages tabbed for mandolin? I have Guitar Pro7 as my music app. It will import GuitarPro TABs as well as TEFs and other sheet music formats. Or you can build your own from creating bars and notes I can reformat the page to make it more compact (saves Paper, gets one song on only one page). Generally, I don't work from PDFs I can find TABs online for 'most any song I want to play with a Mandolin. I can create a mandolin track from any guitar TAB.
I long ago moved to a tablet for songsheet storage. More portable, more organized. I was tired of carrying around books and binders and spending a ton on ink. I have a couple thousand songs in my library that can easily be accessed (no wi-fI req. to read),edited, transposed, etc. I use OnSong app on my iPad, but there are other good ones apple and android. Just a thought.
I have never been really happy with the inkjet printers I have used. Some were 'good enough', but I still prefer using a laser printer. I got a new, inexpensive, b/w Brother printer/scanner a few months ago and am very happy with it. Sometimes I miss the color capability, though. Still running on the toner cartridge that came with the printer, so all I can say about cartridge life is that I have run about 5 reams through the printer so far. ps: wife has used no-name refilled toner cartridges for years without problems. much cheaper than the 'genuine official' kind.
clee01 -- Standard notation who need tabbed for mandolin :D. And any song could be called by a person during the jam so kind of need access to all of them. Bunnyf -- Yea but a tablet big enough (12") is kinda pricey compared to cheap laser print. But my laptop is a dell all in one (screen folds to make it tablet-ish) so I am going to try it. What I don't know how to do is index these mammoth pdf file so I can easily get to a song.
I second Henry's vote for a Brother printer. Mine doesn't fax, scan, make photocopies, or print in color. It prints B&W, two-sided if you want, and does it clearly and quickly. If I haven't used it for two months, not a problem. No drama, no paper jams. I mainly print music, and it's perfect for that. Under a hundred bucks if you catch a sale.
I see folks at some jams who put their laptop on a secure music stand and it works well for them. I'm not super tech saavy but I think there are free apps that are file splitters, if you just have several huge files that each have a ton of songs in it you can separate them out. Then I'd put them into an app like onsong where they can be pulled up instantly from a main alphabetized menu or you can search by title, artist, genre, theme or make sets. Very handy.
I'd advise, before spending money on a laser printer, first do some extended test handling of laser-printed pages to make sure you're not allergic to the toner. "Toner" being the small powdered-plastic particles that get fused by heat onto the paper, to produce the printed page. I personally don't have any problems with handling laser-printed pages, but one of my relatives does, and it took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I would print cards & letters on my nice new big HP color laser printer, send them to her, she'd read them and ooh-and-ahh over the pictures. She's elderly and likes the tactile feedback of running her hands across things such as cards and letters. Then after a while she began telling me in phone conversations that her hands and wrists were itching like mad and she didn't know why. We thought maybe it was newsprint from her newspapers, you know that's getting on the skin because the black newsprint ink made her hands look grubby after rummaging through the entire paper. But she'd been subscribed to the same newspaper for years and they had not changed anything in the printing process, no new printing equipment or supplies, they hadn't yet outsourced their publications to another printer, etc (she was friends with the editor and thus had access to some insider info). This went on for well over a year and was getting worse and worse. Her doctor was consistently useless as usual, he just tried to prescribe anti-itch cream instead of trying to figure out what caused it. Typical. Then one day I read something about how a small percentage of people are actually allergic to laser toner. Ah. Light bulb moment. As an experiment, without telling her what I was doing, I started printing her cards & letters on an inkjet printer (the usual liquid ink) rather than the laser printer with its dry powdered toner. I didn't say one word to her about it, I didn't want to prejudice the test results. To a non-techie like her with blurry eyesight and half-numb hands, the printed results were identical. The paper had a similar texture as well. (Someone like me would have noticed the difference between inkjet vs laser printing just by the way the light reflects off the printed areas, laser often a little 'shiny', but you have to be looking for it and most people don't notice.) She didn't notice anything different about the new inkjet cards/letters I sent. After secretly making the switch, I waited to see if she had anything new to report during our phone conversations. Sure enough, after a few weeks of *not* handling the laser-printed cards, she told me the itching had mysteriously stopped. (The older printed items I'd sent previously, she'd already pinned up in permanent locations on her walls or put into scrapbooks. Thus, not handling them anymore.) That discovery kinda bummed me out because I much preferred designing stuff for use on the laser printer, not only was it cheaper per-page cost, but I could get higher saturation in the colors without wrinkling the page like inkjet ink sometimes does. But, I wasn't going to knowingly continue contributing to someone's health problem, so I adapted to using stupid high-priced inkjets again. (Adaptation eventually evolved into printing in only light-colored pastels, to make my ink last longer.) Now, a few years down the road, we don't do much print communication of any sort, her eyesight isn't conducive to that, mostly phone calls nowadays. Anyway... I don't know how common laser-printer toner allergy is, probably not very. (There are other concerns too.) For sheet music, you'd be flipping through pages a lot, more handling exposure. I second the notion to go to a tablet for your sheet music. Probably cheaper in the long run anyway, if you can find a suitable tablet on sale. I have an older Android tablet and I use MobileSheets Pro, love it. All the tunes neatly organized for quick access. Holds thousands & thousands of tunes. It's like having a couple hundred giant 3-ring binders (or however many, I didn't calculate it), condensed down to one tablet that fits in my purse's back zippered partition. The important thing is to have high screen resolution, if you can. IMO, screen resolution is much more important than inches/mm measurements. My tablet's screen is only 10.1" (about 25 cm) diagonal, old Lenovo "TAB 2 A10" I bought on steep discount, updated as necessary to keep it current, but the resolution is 1920x1200, so even though it's small, the display is super sharp (not blurry). So I can make my music small enough to fit stuff on the page and still sharp enough I can read it ok. Sorry this is so long! Not sure how to condense my writing without leaving out maybe-important stuff.
I too format 99% of my music to one page, keep the margins small and the font as large as possible and find that I can see quite well on an old ipad2. If the big ones get cheaper, it couldn't hurt to be larger but it's quite readable as is, even with my old eyes.
Get into the office before everyone else!
