When the doorbell rings, it means I either have to deal with a door-to-door salesperson (lucky I don’t speak the language), or I get to receive a delivery. Mari and I ordered me a new printer at a Taniyama Musen shop on Saturday, but we’d traveled by bicycle and couldn’t carry it home. Today, the doorbell rang — pin-pon — and it was the delivery man with my new Epson PM-G700 (a mid- to low-end model) 6-ink printer. The paper I ordered along with it was carefully packaged in a paper bag and bubble-wrap. All this for free!
The Epson PM-G700 is a Japan-only model, so I can’t read the manual and wasn’t really sure what was going on when I installed the software. Luckily, having owned or set-up a half-dozen or so inkjets in my lifetime, I’ve done this sort of thing before. The included apps’ interfaces do not have English localization, but they are also pretty unnecessary anyway, and the printer driver options come up in English, so I don’t have to learn to read Kanji yet.
I had hoped that, this being Japan, I’d end up with technology 5-years ahead of the U.S. models, but apart from the case and documentation (and a slightly higher price-tag) everything seems basically the same. From the looks of things, this model might be roughly equivalent to the U.S.’s Photo R200.