Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Unsolicited advice to the Epson printer division

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I’m spending afternoon installing Mac OS X 10.5.8 on an external boot drive along with my second install of CS4 so that I can print photographs for a client. Despite liking the way my Epson printer USED to work before the Mac OS X 10.6 update, I’m now seriously considering making my next large format printer purchase this fall from HP or Canon.

Epson, if in fact you do not plan to support certain serious printers with drivers for newer versions of major operating systems used by your customers, there is a right way and a wrong way to deal with this.

RIGHT WAY:

On your web site, post a list of printers (and other products) that lists the point in time after which you will no longer provide support and updates. This should be done at least one year prior to ending support. At the end of the support period you should release one final update bringing the drivers to current levels of compatibility. With this information your customers can make decisions about how to deal with the EOL of the products. A real professional courtesy would be to contact owners of these machines using the contact data you have. If handled correctly, you would benefit from considerable good will from customers treated with this sort of respect, and many would make plans to update to newer versions of your products. This is how responsible companies handle product natural obsolescence.

WRONG WAY:

Post incorrect and non-functional instructions and drivers at your site. Post no information about your plans to provide (or not) drivers and updates. Be sure to be completely silent about your intentions. When users discover – with absolutely no warning from you – that their printers that worked yesterday do not work today because you won’t take a bit of time to update drivers… ignore them. (I’ve sent two emails to Epson through the support area of their web site… with no response.) When a customer of yours finally does connect with a real person, be sure to insultingly tell them that they shouldn’t expect support of their too-old non-professional product – that will give them a nice feeling about how your company supports its customers as they consider making future printer purchase. This is how companies who don’t care about their customers handle natural product obsolescence.

(Update: As a temporary solution to the problems that I’ve been having with Epson print drivers and Mac OS X 10.6, I have installed the older Mac OS X 10.5.8 and a copy of CS4 on an external drive. I reboot off the external drive to print…)

Commentary

More signs of fall in the High Sierra

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I returned last night from a four-day pack trip into the Lyell Canyon/Vogelsang HSC area of the Yosemite back-country, and the signs of the coming fall are numerous.

  • Perhaps most apparent is the smaller number of people in the back-country! Although I traveled some quite popular trails I saw only a small number of backpackers. Ah, post Labor Day in the Sierra – my favorite time!
  • Many of the annual plants are dying and turning shades of brown, yellow, and gold. The mule ears have almost all lost their summer green color, the leaves of plants around treeline are beginning to turn yellow and red, and almost all of the grasses have gone to seed and turned golden-brown.
  • Although there has not yet been a real early fall storm, the weather pattern is starting to show signs of approaching weather systems.
  • The leaves of a few aspen trees are beginning to change colors. I haven’t been to the “east side” since mid-August, but in Yosemite I saw a very small number of yellow aspen leaves on trees along Yosemite Creek just yesterday.
  • Even some of the lower elevation plants are changing – also yesterday, I saw red leaves of some of the dogwood trees along highway 120 just inside Yosemite.
Commentary

Photographs in the queue

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I know that some may wonder what sort of life I live that lets me (forces me to?) go online every morning, 365 days per year, and post a new daily photograph at 4:00 a.m. Pacific.

While I do post new photographs here at a rate of one per day – which does mean that I create new photographs at a fairly steady rate throughout the year – I don’t really get up at 4:00 a.m. every day to post the next one. Fortunately my web site has a queue feature – but you knew that already, right? (Sorry if I am disappointing anyone. :-)

Sometimes when things get busy I may actually find myself shooting and and then post-processing in the evening a photo that will appear on the site the next day. Yes, there have been a few occasions when I did not actually know what photograph would be posted 24 hours later! But more often I have at perhaps a week’s worth of photographs already in the queue and scheduled for automatic publication.

I’m thinking of this right now because it is a very good feeling to know that there are enough photographs in the queue right now to carry me all the way through the month of September! That’s right, while I’m out shooting the autumn aspens of eastern California nearly a month from now the photos that I posted today will be appearing here. (Between how and then you’ll see more work from the Sierra, additional photographs from San Francisco, and a series of night photography images shot at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at the end of August.)

Commentary

Update on the Epson 2200 and Snow Leopard OS 10.6 Problems

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Earlier I wrote that installing Snow Leopard on my Macs instantly turned my Epson 2200 printer into a very large paperweight. It is completely unusable for quality printing now. Over the past few days I’ve been working to try to find out what is going on, whether there is a work-around, and what Epson recommends to resolve the issue.

I can now report that…

… the printer still doesn’t work and Epson is completely silent on the whole issue.

If you have a 2200 (or any of several other popular Epson printers of similar vintage) it is my recommendation that you should not upgrade to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard until this is sorted out – or you may well lose the use of your printer.

I’ve summarized some additional information about the situation in a comment that I have added to the original post.