Apr 02 2009
A Truly Green Printer?
I came across this article today about Epson’s new GR-401 printer. This thing is like the Incredible Hulk of desktop printers for homes or small offices. Now I don’t use the Incredible Hulk analogy just because of its cool green color, but it actually does a lot of what other desktop printers cannot.
According to the article, this printer can do amazing feats like strip already printed paper of the toner and reuse both the paper and toner for new prints! Incredible!
Epson spokesman Isaac “Prince” Daley told us in a briefing that Epson’s research showed that nearly 80 percent of all printouts are recycled within 7 days of being printed. In response, Epson has developed a technology that strips the printer’s specially formulated toner particles from previously printed pages, leaving the paper clean and ready to be printed on again.
Well, I just had to find out more, so I went to Epson.com to figure out just when this was going to be available to the public. I searched the model number, but no results were found. Hmmm. I googled the model number and the original article popped up as well as this other article. [Edit 4-3-09; looks like this other website figured out the joke & deleted the original post] So I went back and did a few more google searches with different keywords, but I found no official Epson results.
OK, this must be so new that maybe it’s still a prototype, so I called the Epson support line to find out more. I spoke to a representative on their pre-sales support line and told him I was in need of more information on their GR 401 printer. He sounded confused and had no idea what I was talking about. Wow, this must be such a new product that even their customer service representatives don’t know about it. He googled it on his end and came up with the same articles I had, but still wasn’t familiar with this printer. He gave me their corporate office phone number and instructed me to call there.
The receptionist at the corporate office asked where to direct my call. I informed her I was looking to speak to someone about the Epson GR 401 printer. Again, more confusion from the other end of the phone line. She said she was going to transfer me to a product manager.
I spoke with Steve Semoss and told him my endeavor to find out more about their new GR 401 printer. Even he had no idea what I was talking about! I was starting to feel as if I was losing my mind. I told him to google it, and sure enough, he found the articles I found, but informed me this was not a product that Epson was selling or developing.
And then he said something that I hadn’t considered…this must be an April Fool’s joke. No way! Someone wouldn’t do such a thing, would they? Apparently so. This was an elaborate prank that almost duped me into doing a write-up of this incredible new piece of green printing technology. I’m glad I did a little preliminary legwork before convincing my readers to shell out $4K for a printer that doesn’t exist. Now about the other blogger that did a write up on it, maybe I should inform him of what I found?
If you’re looking for a legit Epson printer, check out the Artisan 800 below.
