Salon.com > Seamus Bellamy

Great space heaters for your buck

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Maybe your home's heating system just isn’t cutting it, and wearing your coat indoors for the next six months is just stupid. If you rent your home, or can’t afford to install new insulation or upgrade your central heating system, then the best way to stay warm short of piling on extra layers of clothing is to buy a space heater.

If you're looking for an inexpensive portable heater to help keep your home warm this winter, Delonghi's $80 TRH0715T Safeheat 1500W portable oil-filled radiator is the way to go. After 20 hours of research and hands-on testing of 11 different space heaters, it was the offered the best combination of price, energy efficiency and features that I could find. But, if you've got money to burn, Dyson's $400 AM04 Hot fan-forced ceramic heater is a great option too. It's packed with features, safer than anything else I tested and heated up my test space so much faster than everything else I pitted against it. But before we talk about what you should buy, there's a few other things we need to talk about.

Best touchscreen winter gloves

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 15:59:00 +0000

For as little as $16, a pair of GliderGloves Urban gloves will let you tap and swipe your smartphone in the cold.

Anyone who owns a smartphone knows what a pain in the ass it is to have to tug off your gloves in the dead of winter just to make a phone call or respond to a text message. In order for a capacitative touchscreen—the touchscreen technology used in the majority of touch-capable phones, tablets and computers today—to register that it’s being asked to do something, you have to poke it with something that conducts electricity like a finger or a stylus.

(A capacitative touchscreen panel is typically made from glass, which acts as an insulating agent, and a conductive material like indium tin oxide, or ITO. A current is run through the panel. When you touch the panel with another electrically conductive object like your finger, the electrical current being run through the panel is disrupted, which translates into on screen action.)

A great color printer you can afford

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

If you don’t care about printing photos but still need a color printer, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter is a good choice. For as little as $107, you’ll get a color inkjet printer with a lower per-page cost and faster print speed than many other color laser printers.

While searching for a great color inkjet printer, my goal was to figure out which brand and technology offered the most value for people looking to print a report for school, a PowerPoint presentation for work, or some colored letterhead. These are all jobs that can be done using a color photo printer without entailing the higher costs of a photo printer, color laser printer or color LED printer (although I gave all technologies a fair shake in my 11-hour search). I also figured out that cheapo printers end up costing you a lot more in ink fairly quickly.

As it turns out, I was able to track down a reasonably priced inkjet printer that offers a lower per-page cost than many other color laser printers and has a print speed that leaves just about every color inkjet printer out there eating its dust: the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter.

Priced as low as $107 on Amazon, the Pro 8100 is an inkjet printer designed for use in a medium-sized office environment, but it's compact enough to use in a dorm room or your home office. Replacement ink cartridges for the Pro 8100 can be purchased in a value pack for as little as $50-$70 pop. From that, you’ll get a page yield of 700 color pages. At their most expensive, the cartridges still manage a per-page cost of roughly 2.6 cents for every black-and-white page you print and 2.9 cents for a color page. That’s well below the average 20-cents-per-page cost that you’ll get when using most photo-quality inkjet printers to print a color page. It beats the average 6-cents-per-page color printing cost of many mono laser/LED printers, too.

In addition to printing as inexpensively as many laser printers, it’s just as fast as one, too. According to Hewlett Packard, the Pro 8100 can print laser-quality black-and-white pages at a rate of 20 pages per minute. Color? 16 pages per minute. At those speeds, you’ll get black-and-white pages printed at a resolution of 1200 x 600 dpi, and color at 1200 x 1200. What does this mean? Not much. Manufacturers all have different ways of measuring the number of dots per square-inch that their printers are capable of producing. All you need to know is that everything you print is going to look sharp as hell. Oh, and if you're a Linux user, according to one Amazon shopper, the Pro 8100 will work with your hardware without having to hunt the backwaters of the Internet to track down any drivers.

In addition to being crazy cheap and crazy fast, the Pro 8100 has a 250-sheet input tray, features USB 2.0/wired ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, a full color LED display and auto duplexing. Thanks to HP's ePrint technology, you can even send jobs to the Pro 8100 via email from any Web-connected computer, tablet or smartphone.

PC Magazine gave the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter an Editor’s Choice award, citing the printer’s speed, “reasonably high-quality output," auto duplexing and cheap per-page cost as reasons for the win. PC World’s Melissa Riofrio and Jon L. Jacobi liked it, too: “Fast and competent, the Officejet Pro 8100 is a more economical choice than a color laser printer.”

When Consumer Reports (subscription required) reviewed it, they pitted the Pro 8100 against 25 other color inkjet and color laser printers. It was given a 65 out of 100 — only five points below their highest-ranked single-function inkjet printer and color laser printer, both of which cost $50 and $100 more, respectively. I'd love to be able to provide you with some more editorial reviews, but I wasn't able to find any.

Of course, the 8100 has a few drawbacks. Macworld, which is owned by the same company as PC World, published Jacobi and Riofrio's review, too, but added a warning for Apple computer owners that they'd do well to let OS X install the printer's drivers for them, as HP's Mac installation software was faulty. Just about everyone who reviewed it said that it wasn’t the greatest device for printing pictures; the Pro 8100 tends to produce over-saturated images. But like I said at the top of this piece, I’m not talking about a photo printer here. This is a piece of gear designed for occasional color printing. If you’re in the market for a photo printer, we’ll have a fresh recommendation for one ready to go in the near future.

I mentioned earlier that I looked at a lot of printers from a lot of different companies before deciding on the HP Pro 8100. There are alternatives to what HP's cooked up here, but they can't provide the same amount of value as my pick.

Dell doesn't make a single-purpose color printer other than its $200 1250c Color LED Laser-Class Printer, which although occasionally on sale, typically costs close to $100 more than the HP 8100. Canon's PIXMA iP4920 is priced similarly to the 8100, but it's marketed as a photo printer, and its per page printing cost is significantly higher: 4.7 cents per black-and-white page and an eye-watering 13 cents per page for full-color pages. Epson doesn't do cheap printers. Its lowest priced mono-function inkjet printer is the $200 WorkForce WF-7010, and it only comes equipped with USB 2.0 or Ethernet connectivity.

Samsung? They're only making hardcore office hardware. One of Samsung's CLP-315 color laser printers sells for $430, so it's not a contender here. The same goes for Brother. Their HL-3045CN is the lowest-priced color printer they offer, and it costs close to $150 more than the HP 8100. Kodak? They've had a reputation for producing some of the cheapest inkjet cartridges for a number of years now, but they're bleeding money. They haven't thrown in the towel yet, but man, it's got to be close. (I'll be sticking with hardware made by companies with survival plans that don't include winning patent lawsuits.)

HP has other options than the 8100. The 8100's the least expensive mono-function color inkjet printer they make, but for $100 more, you could step up to the OfficeJet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One Printer. For $200 more, you'll get a modestly sized color printer, scanner/copier with the same connectivity options as the HP 8100. But if you were after a multifunction printer, you'd be looking at our recommendation for a multifunction printer, right? Moving on.

There are a lot of low-priced inkjet printers out there, as well. It might be tempting to buy one and save $50 or $60. But their per-page printing cost is high enough to negate the savings you get from buying one. That's about the same number of color prints as many color inkjet replacement cartridges can provide. Take the HP 1000–J110A. It's the cheapest well-reviewed inkjet printer I could find that was reviewed by people that actually own the hardware. It costs a mere $24 at Walmart – that's less than a night at the movies! But its per-page printing cost can't match the HP 8100. Look: A high-capacity black ink cartridge for this thing costs $28 and yields about 440 pages. A replacement color cartridge costs $30 and will give you 330 pages. That means that you'll get a per-page cost of 6 cents per page for black-and-white printing and 9 cents per page for color printing. While we're only talking cents per page, the HP 1000–J110A's printing costs are steep.

Basically, once you're past your third ream of paper, you've spent more on the junk printer than you would have on our pick. Three reams!

And you'd be outclassing the $24 special in the areas of per-page printing costs, connectivity options, print speeds and features. Cheap printers aren't looking so cheap now, right?

So, if you’re looking for a color inkjet printer that’s reasonably priced and fast and cheap to use, forgo cheap printers, forget about high-priced color laser or LED printers, and pick up the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter. For most people, it's the way to go.

A great all-around backpack

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Starting at around $100, the Kelty Impact 30 backpack offers comfort, durability and lots of clever storage. It's big enough for a weekend trip outdoors but isn't too big that you couldn't use it day to day in the city to haul stuff around.

If you’re a seasoned hunter, rock climber, survivalist or ultralight camper, move along: There’s are a ton of personal stowage and cargo cartage solutions out there that will be way better suited to your specialized needs than what I’ll be talking about here. If you're looking for a commute optimized bag designed primarily to hold a laptop, or something designer, this is not it.

This is a bag for light adventure that will still work well in an every day setting.Trust me: I had to wade through them for close to 14 hours online in order to find the Impact 30. This bag is a high quality backpack that'll work for them in most situations.

Now that we’ve got that sorted out, let’s talk basic backpacks.

Great air conditioners

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

If you’ve got a small- to medium-sized room you want to keep cool this summer, you should buy an LG LW8011ER 8,000 BTU Air Conditioner. Priced at $259, it offers a great combination of features, a five-year warranty and enough power to easily cool a 225- to 350-square-foot space with some people in it.

If you’ve got a medium- to large-sized space you want to drive the temperature down in, you should think about stepping up to a 12,000 BTU unit like the LG LW1212ER 12,000 BTU Air Conditioner. It’ll keep a space up to 550 square feet cool for $319.

Why am I recommending two different air conditioners to you? Well, air conditioning is a complicated technology. What I found over 15 hours of research is that what works for one room or house may not be a good solution for another. If a fan just isn't cutting it for you, here's what you'll need to know in order to stay cool this summer.

What’s the best headlamp?

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:46:00 +0000

I'd get the Black Diamond Spot headlamp. For as little at $33, it’s a lamp that’ll provide all the illumination most people will ever need out in the field, or for emergencies and chores around the house.

(Note: If you need a hardcore expedition headlamp, I'd recommend you check out Gearjunkie.com)

There are few portable lighting sources more practical than a headlamp. Turn your head and the light turns with you, illuminating whatever you look at. That you wear it on your head also means your hands are kept free for more important things like setting up a tent in the dark, grilling a late night snack in your backyard without waking up your neighbours or changing a tire at the side of a poorly lit road. Off your head, you can hold and use it like you would a regular flashlight or use the headband to lash it to something and hold it in place. The headlamp is the modern flashlight.