Software Journal

Being on the road every other week is a tremendous practice for keeping your travel bag ready.  During the last 5 weeks, I have traveled some miles, some countries, and every single time left about 20 minutes to pack.  That is fine, only if, you don’t need to print something right before your pickup taxi arrives at the door! If you do need to print something (say boarding pass), then suddenly you get into the loop of printing, running to the basement to pickup your printout to realize that your printer may be out of toner (or ink!).  [What is the difference between toner and ink, you may ask, and then I might be forced to point out that toner is a powder, whereas ink is liquid, and while both are sold in cartridges, toner is usually more expensive than ink, blah, blah, blah.] Before you know it, the toner for your printer has somehow gotten the same priority in your travel planning as packing the toothbrush, chewing gum, the passport and the boring something to read while all electronics equipment must be switched off.

Anyhoo, if you do use toners, then one of the best brand names for toners is of course the Brother toner.  [Brother brand, or Buraza Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha, incidentally dates back to 1908 and made a name for itself using its multi-function printers!]

Rather than being penny wise and pound foolish, I find it much better to stick to high quality cartridges. For example, if you are using other HP products, you might as well bite the bullet and get original HP ink cartridges from some supplier of genuine HP products like the hp 564xl wherein you can buy black, cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges.

And yes, while there is no guarantee that the blue color that you see is the same as the blue color that I see but if you buy good printer and good cartridges, at least the blue color that you see today will likely look similar to you next time you order the same cartridge. And while I don’t have answer to the perrenial question of theory of colors, at least I can point out that cyan, yellow and magenta are used as 3 primary colors in printing instead of red, green and blue based on subtractive coloring instead of additive coloring. In simple terms, cyan, yellow and magenta dyes and inks absorb some wavelengths allowing others to be reflected and giving the object the “subtracted” color starting from white light. If all three dyes – cyan, magenta and yellow are mixed, then all wavelengths get absorbed, leading to black color, which stands for K in the CMYK color system.