Initial Post: Respond to each prompt below.

1. Describe one hardware component that are essential to YOU as a consumer. Provide three options (brand, style, etc.) for the component.
2. Offer two new or interesting details about hardware and software from the consumer report. Write one question that you have about technology after reading the consumer report.

Example:

1.A hardware that I find very important and that we tend to forget is a printer. Especially the all –in-one printer that we can generally see in most electronic stores. Even though the trend is to go paperless, the majority of us cannot follow it. As a student, I need to print and scan papers few times a week, therefore an all-in-one printer is very essential for me.

Brand:There are too many brands out there that produce an all-in-one printer, but the most popular ones are: Canon, HP, Brother, and Samsung. I personally go with Brother, because compared to the other brands, Brother focuses in producing printers. Canon, HP, and Samsung all produce other electronic products.

Price:I take a quick look on Brother’s Website and an all-in-one printer’s price varies from $79.99 to $599.99. Of course, students or households don’t need to buy an expensive one. The $79.99 one is more than perfect and will last long if well taking care of. Also, many retail store may sell them at a lower price.

Features:An all-in-one printer gives you not only the possibility to print, but also to scan and to fax. Most them can print on different types of paper and also recto-verso. Scanning on these machines can be made by deposing the paper on the top tray or by placing the paper in the glass flatbed inside of the printer. Faxing is not as popular as it was before because of emails, but it can be something useful depending on the situation. To fax, paper has to be placed on the top tray and a phone number has to be entered on the keypad. One important feature that many people forget about is the possibility to connect the printer to Wi-Fi. This option is a must in today’s world because it let’s use print or scan from anywhere and from any device as long as we are connected to the same Wi-Fi. For example, I can print a document from my smartphone or tablet wirelessly.

2.After reading the Consumer Report about the all-in-one printers, I learned that it used a certain type of printing and I found out that an application to let us print from our smartphone or tablet is already downloaded in our devices.

Printing type:There are different types of printing and this product uses a a printing type named “Inkjet”. Inkjet prints paper by deposing droplets of ink on the paper instead of speaking it like other printers. It was interesting to see that this method of printing is very efficient. It takes less time for the ink to dry and it uses less ink than other printing procedures.

App:Imagine that we are reading an interesting article on your tablet and that we decide we want to print it. Normally, we would send the link of the article to our email, open the link from a computer, and then print the article. With the applications Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print already installed in our iOS or Android device, we can simply click on a button and our article gets printed. We don’t need to deal with the struggle of downloading the app or go through a third party application.

Question:After reading the Consumer Report and people reviews, I realized that printers are becoming less used with time. I wonder if it will stay among us or if it will join the floppy dick and the DVD player?