We have a fairly technical household – smartphone, smart lighting, AI assistants and all that. My son recently cleared his Class X exams and got into the science and technology stream. He had to suddenly deal with heavy books and deep concepts. Junior College was a challenge and the projects were tougher. He fell sick for a couple of weeks.
We got special permission from school so that he could take time off, but his assignments had to be submitted on-time and without fail. There was a helpful whatsapp group of his classmates that gave us the project and assignment descriptions and my and my wife helped him to get things done while he was resting.
It was a Monday and the whatsapp group was buzzing a lot. There were a lot of assignments and all of them had to be submitted for evaluation on Tuesday – exactly 24 hours later. The topics ranged very broadly from making a model of a periscope to explaining the age of the sun very precisely. There was also the one where a C Program resembling a finite state automaton has to be written and the output explained. Yes! These are school projects! We needed to work fast and smart.
I quickly went to a store and bought an Epson L4160. It cost me Rs 17,299 and had a lot of things that I was looking for. The first important thing for me was the fact that it was an integrated ink tank printer that had these neat little spill-proof ink bottles with useful nozzles that will ensure that the wrong colour is not inserted into the tank, the Ink bottle doesn’t need to be squeezed & the refill automatically stops once the tank is full . The cost of printing is also very impressive and is 12 paisa for black 20 paisa for colour. Which means that I get maximum value per rupee with this model. It prints pretty fast too, the speed of the new InkTank printers has increased to 15 ipm from 13.7 ipm for black and for colour it has increased to 8 ipm from 7.3 ipm. What that means is when I need to print a series of stuff, the printer just stands up and delivers at blazing fast speed.
Armed with the Epson L4160, I returned home and we split the research into three and started looking for data and material. At this point, the important thing was that work was running in parallel and we really could not afford to keep running to the printer and connecting it to our respective laptops all the time. The L4160 helped a lot there, we just added it to our home WiFi and it was sorted. All of us could easily schedule jobs to the printer from where we were and it was all done.
All along, the quality of the prints was amazingly crisp even in the economy mode and the more detailed mode was even more vivid. We all worked in a frenzy for about four hours. The print outs were handed over to my son and he collated and used the reference and created project reports and started printing out the various parts of the model too. Then one of his class mates messaged us with some pointers to key diagrams from the text books that could add value to the projects. My son didn’t have the energy or coordination needed to draw them due to his health, we just used the Epson L4160 to scan the relevant images and add them to the report effortlessly.
In all of 5 hours, we had the reports ready for submission and all sorted out. We took one look at the mountain of work we had done and it looked like we had all collectively lifted a metric ton of load and somehow scrambled to the finish line with a brilliant final report. While we all patted ourselves on the back on a day’s work done well, all of us knew that without the Epson L4160, we would have been completely at sea.
This was the day when all the depth of knowledge, presence of mind and co-ordination that we had was put to test and the stakes were high. In the end, having Epson as a partner in this with the really thoughtful features and functions that the L160 made all the difference to the final result and in a way it was a day of Epson, My Son and a Metric Ton. All this at 12 paisa per page! That took the cake for me.
One device, multiple uses, consistency and reliability. That’s the Epson L4160 in a nutshell for you. That day has now made the device a part of our family and we now fondly call it “Newt”- short for Newton. What a day!