As the Premium part of the name implies, the Epson Expression Premium XP-810 Small-in-One, offers lots of features. Some of those, like the duplex (two-sided) printing and duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF), tend to be office centric. Others, like the support for PictBridge cameras and the ability to print from memory cards, are more appropriate for home use. Having all of them in one printer makes the XP-810 a better than average choice for the dual role of home and home office printer and not a bad choice for either role by itself.
The XP-810 is two steps up in Epson's numbering system from the Epson Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One, with most of the difference showing in office-centric features like the ADF and duplexer that the Epson XP-410 lacks. However, it also shows on the home-printer side, with far better photo quality, for example, and an added tray for up to 5-by-7-inch photos. In addition to being a better home-office printer, in short, it's also a better home printer.
In addition to the ADF and duplex printing, office-centric features include faxing, Ethernet for easy connection to a wired network, and the ability to both print from and scan to memory cards and USB memory keys. Most other features are useful for both home and home office.
Basics Core multifunction printer (MFP) features in the XP-810 include printing and faxing from, as well as scanning to, a PC, even over a network, and working as a standalone fax machine and copier. Extensions to the core features include copying to and printing on printable optical discs.
Mobile printing support includes printing through the cloud, assuming you connect the printer directly to a network that's attached to the Internet, and printing from iOS and Android smartphones and tablets over Wi-Fi. And since the printer supports Wi-Fi Direct, you can print directly to it even if the printer isn't on a network.
In principle, being able to attach the printer to a network means that you could share it in a micro office, but the paper handling is a little meager for that. The 100-sheet capacity is enough for most personal use. For a shared printer, you'd likely run out often enough to make refilling the tray a minor annoyance.
One nice touch for paper handling is a single-sheet manual feed in the back that can handle letter-size paper, although the tray is hidden under a cover that makes it easy to miss. Another plus, for home use at least, is a second tray for up to 20 sheets of photo paper, so you can switch between plain paper and photos without having to change the paper in the main tray. The duplexer can also help save paper for both home and office use.
Paper handling for scanning is surprisingly capable. As you would expect, the ADF can handle legal-size paper, to supplement the letter-size flatbed. Beyond that, however, it offers an ample 30-sheet capacity, and it can duplex, by scanning one side, turning the page over, and scanning the other. Menu choices available through the 3.5-inch front-panel touch screen let you scan and fax two-sided pages as well as copy both single- and double-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies.
Setup, Speed, and Output Quality Setting up the XP-810 was standard fare. For my tests, I connected it to a wired network using its Ethernet port and ran the tests from a Windows Vista system.
Speed is not a strong point. I clocked the printer on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at a lackadaisical 3.6 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it significantly faster than the Epson XP-410, at 2.6 ppm, but a little slow for the price range. The Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J4710DW came in at 5.7 ppm, and the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J4610DW managed 5.6 ppm. Photo speed was also a little on the slow side, averaging 1 minute 20 seconds for a 4 by 6.
Output quality is more than acceptable across the board, with notably high-quality photos. Text falls at the high end of the range that includes the vast majority of inkjet MFPs. That still leaves it short of the quality I'd want for something that needs to look fully professional, like a resume, but good enough for most business and personal needs. Graphics was just a touch below par for an inkjet MFP, which makes it good enough for most business needs, including PowerPoint handouts and the like, unless you have an unusually critical eye.
Photos are a strong point. Colors in some of our test images were just a bit dark in terms of a hue-saturation-brightness model, but they were fully saturated, with the subtle gradation that gives a 3D look to rounded objects and with good enough contrast to make colors pop. Overall, the photos were a definitive step above what you'll get from most drugstore prints.
The photo quality obviously makes this printer a good choice if you're looking to print your own photos, while the low paper capacity limits it to light-duty use. Beyond that, it offers a more than acceptable level of quality across the board and a long list of features for both home and office—from duplex printing, to the duplexing ADF, to printing from cameras, and more. If you need a single MFP for the dual role of home and home-office printer, all this can make the Epson Expression Premium XP-810 Small-in-One a particularly good fit.
Microsoft has slashed another $100 off the price of its original Surface Pro, so now you can get one for $700 compared to $900 for the new Surface Pro 2.
A 40-year-old NEC account manager has been charged with mail fraud for allegedly obtaining replacement networking parts from Cisco using bogus names, the U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday.
Craig A. Stanland of Stamford, Connecticut, is accused of making hundreds of false warranty claims online to Cisco to replace supposedly defective networking parts, which cost between $500 and $8,600. He was arrested on Oct. 1, and a criminal complaint was unsealed on Monday, the DOJ said in a news release.
Stanland is believed to be an enterprise account manager for NEC, a Cisco partner, who helped NEC customers with service contracts, including obtaining new parts, according to an FBI affidavit in Stanland's court file. Most of the Cisco products that were part of the investigation were originally sold to NEC, according to the document.
"As an NEC account manager, Stanland would have had access to those covered parts' serial numbers (here, the chassis serial numbers), which are necessary in order to purchase the service contract," the affidavit reads.
Stanland allegedly made between one and 10 claims a day between three and five days a week. Cisco shipped more than 400 parts to two post office boxes in Greenwich as well as Stanland's home and his wife's business in Brooklyn, prosecutors allege.
Stanland, who is accused of running the fraud for about a year, controlled 14 service contracts for Cisco networking parts. The aliases he used included Alan Johnston of Opex Solutions, Kyle Booker of KLB Networks, Steve Jones of SHO Networks, Robert Johnson of Adaptations and Paul Smith of PS Solutions, the DOJ said.
He was expected to return defective parts to Cisco in exchange for new ones, but instead sent back off-brand third-party parts or none at all, the DOJ alleged. Cisco usually shipped the replacement parts before receiving the defective ones, according to the affidavit.
Stanland, who is free on a US$100,000 bond, could face a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted of mail fraud.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
ADVISORY: This essay contains violent and sexual content that some readers may find offensive.
Dirt for days. Around-the-clock degradation. Scandal too good to be true. Is this the latest from a publishing porn princess or prince? No: this lip-smacking low behavior is from Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars.
If someone sees me reading Suetonius, they give me credit for reading Latin, which I did in college. As a Classics minor at New York University, Washington Square College, and all of 20 years old, I longed to get credit for a Latin author whose style was not so torturous as the historian Tacitus'. Tacitus made me sweat. My boyfriend, down at University of North Carolina, was a chemistry Ph.D candidate and fluent in Latin. He suggested Suetonius.
Soon I was sweating for different reasons.
Suetonius Tranquillus, private secretary to Emperor Hadrian around 119-121 A.D., wrote down goings-on that make us look like pikers. Don't take my word for it; here's some material from Book V and Book VI.
Book V concerns the Emperor Claudius, Roman ruler from 41-54 A.D. Suetonius starts by accusing Claudius' father, Drusus, of being the product of adulterous intercourse. The author can't wait to let you know that Claudius' own mother thought him dull and his grandmother treated him with contempt. He lays it on even thicker by telling us that Claudius' sister prayed that the Roman people would be spared the misfortune of her brother as emperor.
Our author is just warming up. He accuses Claudius of drunkenness, gambling, laziness, silliness and hanging out with a low-rent crowd.
Once Claudius becomes emperor, his bad traits could flower. Then, as now, sex sells, and the reader can wallow in it. Suetonius was surprised that Claudius evidenced a wild passion for women but not a jot for men. Back then, there was no concept of heterosexual or homosexual. Sex was sex: Have at it. But Claudius denied himself the pleasure of half the human race. Well, there's no accounting for taste.
As you might suspect, Claudius was safely dead before Suetonius decided to tell all. But before he died, Claudius did his future biographer a great favor: he adopted Nero as his successor.
Now our author is truly in his element. He tells us, practically sotto voce — you can hear him whispering in your ear — that Nero was always cruel. He killed one of his freedman for not drinking as much as the poor sot was ordered. He ran over a boy, killing him, for the pleasure of it. He gouged out a knight's eye. He cheated bankers — as opposed to the now-common reverse. He even cheated the winners of the chariot races he sponsored.
Rita Mae Brown, a screenwriter and poet as well as a novelist, is the author of Rubyfruit Jungle and multiple mystery series.
Courtesy of Oxford University Press
Rita Mae Brown, a screenwriter and poet as well as a novelist, is the author of Rubyfruit Jungle and multiple mystery series.
Courtesy of Oxford University Press
That's just for starters. Nero was charged with incest with his mother and his sister. Nero wanted to be loved as an entertainer, and our author is horrified at such a common ambition. Nero even entered chariot races and won — despite falling out of the chariot.
Now come the exciting vices. Nero, who became emperor at age 17, gave banquets where harlots waited upon the guests and himself hand and foot — as well as elsewhere. He seduced freeborn boys, married women and even a Vestal Virgin, Rubria. His roving eye landed on the priestess, and his body with it.
One of his more imaginative escapades involved castrating a beautiful young man, Sporus, whom he then took to wife. Kissing his wife in public was the least of it.
Suetonius reports, without a shred of disbelief, that Nero would be released from a cage. Wearing a wild animal skin, he would savage men and women tied to posts. Doryphorus, his freedman, accompanied him on his feigned bestiality. Nero married Doryphorus, too, but this time, the Emperor wanted to be the wife. He made people listen to him being "deflowered" on his wedding night. No mention of what Sporus thought.
From distinctive sex acts, Suetonius switches to murders, political intrigue, botched matricide and then a success at wiping out the maternal unit. She was so violent herself that Suetonius doesn't pretend to be horrified.
Oh, Nero also lost Syria. Perhaps nothing is new under the sun.
Non-stop rapes, murders, castrations and sex with multitudes fill the pages. As for Nero's death, best you read that extraordinary episode yourself: I'll just note that Sporus was with him at the end.
Suetonius' underlying theme — left unstated, out of credit for his readers' intelligence — is the devastating erosion of total power to the human psyche. Few rulers have overcome the washing away of reality, and in his work Suetonius makes this hideously clear. Without restraint, honest debate and consideration for human life and economy, not only will the person in power be destroyed — finally so will the state, the civilization.
Any government, any individual, any people can forget this central lesson at any time. Chances are they will lack the imagination of the Caesars in their demise, but you can't have everything. If you're going down, at least it should be a vivid spectacle.
And what a spectacle Suetonius gives us! How delicious to wallow in constant erections — really, it does make a girl wonder. The aging Caesars accomplished all this without Viagra: we do have a lot to learn. A guilty-pleasure read from the second century? Oh, yes. We can thank Suetonius for disguising the most salacious gossip as history — still a good formula for a bestseller.
Rita Mae Brown's latest novel is The Litter of the Law.
BOSTON (Reuters) - The Massachusetts teenager who has been charged with murdering a 24-year-old math teacher at his high school used a box cutter to stab the woman, then disposed of her body and went to the movies, local media reported on Thursday.
The 14-year-old, Philip Chism, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to the charge of murdering Colleen Ritzer, whose body was discovered in the woods behind his high school in Danvers, Massachusetts, some 20 miles north of Boston.
Chism apparently used a box cutter to stab and cut Ritzer in a second-floor bathroom of the school, the Boston Globe reported, citing an unnamed law enforcement official.
After dumping Ritzer's body, Chism went on to buy a ticket for a 4:30 p.m. screening of the Woody Allen film "Blue Jasmine," a law enforcement source told the Boston Herald.
A spokeswoman for Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett declined to comment on any details of the case.
The attack marked the second killing of a U.S. teacher by a student this week, following an incident in Nevada in which a 12-year-old boy armed with a handgun shot dead a teacher and wounded two schoolmates before turning his gun on himself.
Police in Danvers began investigating the incident after neither Chism nor Ritzer returned to their homes after school on Tuesday. They had initially issued a missing child report for Chism.
When a search for Ritzer turned up blood in the bathroom at Danvers High School late Tuesday, the police began a criminal investigation. Chism was found walking along a highway a few miles from the school shortly after midnight Wednesday morning.
Prosecutors charged Chism as an adult, which allowed them to release his name and could mean that he would face a longer potential sentence in an adult prison rather than a juvenile facility if he is convicted.
Chism, who played on the Danvers High School junior varsity soccer team, had recently moved to the New England town from Tennessee.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; editing by Andrew Hay)
Well this puts a new wrinkle on things — according to a new report from Der Spiegel, the NSA has been spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone since 2002. That's long before she became chancellor, though it's unclear how deep the snooping went.
Don't forget, while you're out partying this weekend for Halloween, we're having a contest! You can win some awesome prizes, so make sure you read the entry requirements below, and send in your photos! You don't have to be in costume this year, but we need to see a phone or tablet in the picture, so don't miss that part! We have a few great entries already, but we want to see more, so make sure to get yours in!
2013 iPad buyers guide: How to choose between the iPad and other tablets, including Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus, Amazon Kindle Fire, and more!
Apple has flipped the tables - er, tablets - and not only managed to cram a 2048x1536 display into the 7.9-inch Retina iPad mini, but managed to cram a full-sized 9.7-inch display into the new iPad Air. But is either of them to right tablet for you? While everyone here at iMore certainly believes the iPad is still the best tablet for most people, most of the time, there are rare exceptions where an alternative tablet might suit your specific needs better. The iPad may have the best overall user experience, the highest quality apps and games, the widest range of services, the biggest selection of accessories, and the best customer support, but there are also things the iPad doesn't offer that other tablets do, like subsidized hardware pricing, digitizer support, Microsoft compatibility, or simply no Apple about them. How do you know which one is for you? Keep reading!
Most delightful interface and experience
Unlike others, Apple built the iPad on top of a mobile-first operating system. (Little know fact: Apple actually began work on the iPad before the iPhone.) As such, it's not crippled by the need to support legacy interface paradigms or hardware, like mice and pointers and tiny click targets. Instead it was born from multitouch, and made everything that came before feel old and unwieldy by comparison. From slide to unlock to pinch and zoom, it's now become a mainstream sensation. Over time, Apple's built on that with everything from FaceTime for incredibly easy video calls to Siri for incredibly engaging voice control. A lot of other companies throw a lot more features at the wall, hoping something sticks. Apple's focus on the best, more coherent, most usable features. iOS 7 makes it even better. They re-built the entire interface on top of a game-style physics and particle engine, so it's even more discoverable, playful, and powerful than ever before.
Apple is neck-in-neck when it comes to sheer number of items in the App Store, but they're so far ahead when it comes to the sheer number of tablet apps that's it's not even a race any more. Out of the one million apps available, nearly half of them are now optimized for the iPad. Part of that is because Apple showed developers how to make tablet apps based on the ones Apple made at launch. Part is because of the set targets Apple provided, making it easier to create pixel-perfect tablet interfaces. Part is because that, from early on, iOS developers came from the very design-centric, experience-centric Mac developer community. That set the bar very high. Likewise, some of the biggest and best gaming franchises came to the iPad early, and still come to the iPad first. While you can get a lot of name brand apps on multiple platforms now, many of the boutique apps are still iOS exclusive, including Infinity Blade, Tiny Wings, Letterpress, and more. Then there are Apple's own - now free - App Store apps, which are some of the best in mobile: Numbers, Pages, Keynote, iMovie, iPhoto, and Garageband. Other platforms are still struggling to attain tablet breadth. iOS has that, and depth.
When you get an iPad, not only do you get instant access to all of Apple's great services, like iCloud backups, and iTunes in the Cloud re-downloads, but you also get access to pretty much all of Google and Microsoft/Nokia's best services - like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, Google Drive, Google+, Hangouts, Outlook, SkyDrive, Bing, Skype, Here Maps, and even BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) via iPhone compatibility. You also get the best third party services like Dropbox, Box, Spotify, Songza, Pandora, Netflix, Amazon Kindle and video, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, and many more. Apple doesn't offer their stuff on any other tablets (iWork for iCloud on browsers being the only exception), but almost everybody offers everything on iPad.
Biggest selection of accessories
From protective to decorative cases, to keyboards and other peripherals, the choice of iPad accessories remains the best of any tablet on the market. Part of that is due to the iPads popularity. Part of that is due to Apple releasing new designs only once every couple years, and keeping designs on the shelf for 3-4 years. That means accessory makers can sell the same accessory for a lot of tablets, for a long time, which is the best thing in the world for them - and for iPad owners. Instead of worrying about making something for a wide range of tablets, they can concentrate on making a wide range of things for the iPad. No matter what kind of case you want, what capacity battery charger, what kind of stand or keyboard, what type of Bluetooth accessory, chances are you won't only find it, you'll find several different options to choose from.
Note: The full-sized iPad just got a redesign, becoming the iPad Air. It'll take accessory makers a couple of months to ramp back up, but they'll do it quickly.
If you have an Apple Retail Store near you, there's no point choosing any other tablet. Apple will not only sell you an iPad, but they'll help you set it up and show you how to use it, give you free lessons on all the main features. More importantly, if anything goes wrong, they'll fix it for you or swap it for a new tablet, usually while you wait. You can make a Genius Bar appointment, walk in with a broken iPad, and thanks to Apple customer service and iCloud, walk out half and hour later with a replacement tablet containing all of your stuff, that's essentially a clone of the one you walked in with. No one else comes close to matching Apple's level of customer service. Appallingly, no one else even tries.
Even though the iPad's user experience is unmatched, the app, accessory, and services unequaled, and the customer service the best in the business, there's still more you may need. That's where iMore comes in. We'll help you get used to your new iPad, help you figure out which are the best apps, accessories, and services for you, and help show you all the things you can do with it, like photography, music, and more. And when you're ready, we'll help you upgrade to your next tablet. Whether you keep up with us on the web, via RSS, Twitter, App.net, Facebook, Google+iMore, YouTube, or iTunes, or some other way, you'll quickly find out the iPad doesn't only come with great stuff, it comes with a great community!
Who should get the iPad?
If you want a tablet that just works, and that has all the great user experience, app and game, accessory and services, customer support and iMore community benefits, then the iPad is for you. It's not as cheap as many competitors these days, doesn't have a Wacom-style digitizer built-in, but it remains the single best tablet lineup in the world at what it does, and what it does it does very, very well.
Unless you have a very specific set of requirements or use cases that make something else a better option for you - see below - get an iPad. You'll be glad you did.
Who should get a Samsung Galaxy tablet instead?
Samsung makes a dizzying array of tablets in what seems to be every half-inch increment between 7 and googolplex. I'm not a fan of the Galaxy Tab series. They're iPad knockoffs and not very good ones. However, I am a fan of the Galaxy Note series because, awkward software aside, they include Wacom-style digitizers. That means they work with styluses as first-class citizens. Anyone looking for an amazingly portable Wacom tablet that also happens to run Android apps would be well-served to look at one of the tablet sized Samsung Galaxy Notes.
The Nexus 7 has just been refreshed with a higher density screen, making an already good tiny tablet even better. The Nexus 10 hasn't been updated yet, but should be soon. Both run Android the way Google means for it to be run.
The interface isn't quite as good as the iPad, though it's getting better every iteration, and the tablet-optimized app selection is still a crime against larger screens, but services like Google Now are unmatched on any other platform. Also, Google typically eats profit margins on their hardware (since they make money off advertising in their services), so Nexus tablets can be quite a bit cheaper than competing devices, including and especially Apple's.
If price is your most important feature, and you like stock Android, you'll likely be happy with a Nexus tablet.
Amazon is perhaps the only company other than Apple that understands humans don't want old fashioned PC desktops on their tablets. That makes the Kindle Fire line much more useful and approachable to mainstream customers. They've also recently updated both their small and full-sized line of tablets with the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX.
Like Google, Amazon subsidizes the hardware cost of their tablets, although instead of ads, they do it with content. The Kindle Fire HDX is basically the world's best front-end to the Amazon store, and the best way to buy anything digital from Amazon. The downside is, because of that model, Amazon literally can't afford to put the Kindle Fire HDX up for sale in any country where they don't have a digital store to support it.
They also run a highly modified version of Android, called Mojito, but retain access to Android apps. If you're in the U.S. (or a few other countries), you're all in on Amazon, and you want to save some money up-front, however, the Kindle Fire HDX could make you happy.
Who should get Windows Surface or RT Tablet instead?
While the iPad sits between the phone and the laptop, Microsoft's Surface, and Windows tablet strategy in general actually sits between tablets and laptops. That makes them quite different in kind. And, thanks to the RT vs. Pro strategy, a little complicated.
If you have to run Windows apps, specifically Office, then you might have to get a Surface or RT tablet, or a Windows Pro tablet. The Surface is Microsoft's own hardware, but there are other brands as well, like the Nokia 2520.
If you want slightly more than a tablet, Windows RT might appeal to you. If you want slightly less than a laptop, Windows Pro might appeal to you.
(I'd still rather a MetroOS-only tablet (or one based on Windows Phone OS), with a touch-optimized versions of Office, but that's not the world we live in. Yet!)
If you're still not sure about the iPad Air or Retina iPad mini - or even the still-on-the-market iPad 2! - jump into our iPad discussion forums and the best community in mobile will happily help you out. If you're not sure in general, head on over to your local big box or carrier show and ask to try them out, and ask a lot of questions. Then dive into Android Central, Windows Phone Central, and experts there will help you make a final, fantastic decision.