 Creative Intelligence @ Your Service |
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Creative Intelligence @ Your Service |
Site Map +1 214 234 9283 | Send Email |
Two stories of technology and its impact on business. The first is a tale of “love gone wrong,” or problems with the PayPal payment service. The second tale has a happy ending as we report about our new color laser network printer.
Heard of PayPal? Of course you have. It is the number one credit card processor for Internet transactions. Owned by eBay, it processes well over 90% of all eBay auction payments.
PayPal pioneered an industry: it was the first service that enabled people to move money across banks via the Internet for free. PayPal made money on these transfers, sometimes known as ACH transactions, by “floating” the funds: incoming funds are pulled from a bank account four days before they are available for use in PayPal. Likewise outgoing funds are removed from PayPal immediately, but are not deposited in a bank account for four days.
At one time, PayPal claimed it was a payment service, not a bank, and thus exempt from federal and state banking regulation. Which brings us to PayPal's dark side: sometimes they take money away from people without cause or notice. And they may not give that money back.
We were well aware of PayPal's arrogance towards some of its customers and took measures to avoid this particular outcome. We are not out any real money, but the following story is true:
On September 13, we moved $275 from PayPal to our bank. On October 14, without cause or notice, PayPal reversed this transfer—on their end, at least. Initially a PayPal customer service representative said via email there was no reason why the transfer was reversed. After a series of additional emails, another representative claimed the transaction was fraudulent and said we should contact the source.
The source said that yes, he had reported a fraudulent transaction to PayPal. But it was on a different transaction, not ours. We relayed this information to PayPal. Their response? Lock out the account. We cannot use this account to send or receive funds with PayPal any longer.
Again, we didn't lose any money. We sent a Fair Credit Reporting Act dispute to PayPal via postal mail. Their response is due any day now and perhaps this will be resolved. And our experience is unfortunately typical of too many PayPal customers.
We would never use PayPal, except it's the monopoly payment service on the world's monopoly Internet auction site. Some of our suppliers only accept PayPal payments. And many of us are in the same situation: we don't have a choice but to use PayPal. So what to do? Here are some guidelines for using PayPal when forced:
Establish at least two PayPal accounts: one for buying and one for selling. PayPal has a history of locking accounts they believe have fraudulently received funds. But they generally do not lock out accounts that are the source of funds.
Transfer money out immediately upon receipt: this bit of advice has been floating on the Internet for years and it saved our hide. PayPal cannot just arbitrarily take money out of your bank account. But they can out of theirs.
Never register a debit card: Although Regulation Z protects debit card holders, you are out the money until the error is discovered.
Use unique email addresses: this is a bit paranoid, but it wouldn't hurt to establish a unique email address for use with exactly one PayPal account.
(What? You're surprised that a story involving hardware would have a happy ending?)
Our Brother Multi-Function Center has seen better days. Black and white still works. But color leaves something to be desired. We figure the print head failed: changing ink and running cleaning cycles didn't fix the problem. But we love the ability to FAX and scan from any computer on the network: Linux, Mac, or Windows.
We looked at other brands. But no one else has the network features for as little money. So we figured just buy another one. What's $100 among friends? Except we saw an ad on Fry's web site one day: a refurbished Konica-Minolta 2430DL color laser printer with built-in networking for less then $200 delivered. And unlike some printers, it also supports Linux, Mac, and Windows (we need that around here).
That price includes “starter” toner cartridges capable of printing 1,500 pages in black and white or color. In ink cartridges, that's about $150 : a full set is $50 for most printers, and those are good for maybe 500 pages. So we figured why not?
The printer arrived a few weeks ago and we've been having a blast. We think that for most businesses, prices have dropped enough that purchasing a color laser now makes a lot of sense. But first, here are the bad things about this particular printer, most of which apply to all brands of color lasers:
It's big. About the size of an HP LaserJet 4 monochrome laser of ten years ago. Maybe two inches higher and two inches deeper.
It's noisy when printing. Wow.
It smells when printing. Lots of ozone coming off the fuser.
It pulls a lot of power when printing. 11 amps worth. That's about what a microwave pulls, maybe a bit less.
Notice the common phrase, “when printing”? When idle, the printer pulls very little power and has average noise. When in sleep mode, it's silent.
Now some good things. Compared to an ink jet printer:
Printing is fast. First page about a minute after coming out of sleep mode. Five pages per minute after that. Black and white only? Three times faster!
Colors are solid. No smearing or smudging.
Output is good to very good. Plain paper output is better then on an ink jet. But ink jet output on photo quality paper is better.
What about cost? Color lasers have five components that need periodic replacement: toner cartridges, $430 (ouch) for a set of four that yield over 4,000 pages, and a transfer belt, $150 for 12,000 color copies. It works out, with tax and shipping, to about twelve cents a page for color and three cents for black and white.
What about ink jet color printing costs? That depends on the manufacturer. We computed that our Brother costs about the same as this Konica-Minolta. But Dell and Lexmark owners are paying about eighteen cents a page for full-color output.
Our recommendation? If your business needs daily printing, seriously consider a color laser. Only printing a few times a week? Perhaps an ink jet still makes sense.
What about a black-and-white laser and a color ink jet, which we also recommend? Color lasers print in black and white just as efficiently as monochrome lasers. But with prices dropping quickly, eventually this option won't make economic sense.
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