I thought the research suggested otherwise…?
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Been there… (Not with a pregnant lady’s sonogram, though. Oh dear…)
After-school job at a small copy shop/printer’s, finding out that thermal paper is aptly named. Or that not any old plastic slide that is good enough for an overhead projector is good enough for a Xerox machine. Or that old-school typesetters have extremely literate and colourful curse words for people who drop a tray of lead types in the workshop.
“Cold” laminating doesn’t really work either. The glue or the solvents in the glue tend to mess up the thermal paper.
These days, I scan whatever I want to keep - I do a bit of scrapbooking, mostly stuff from holiday trips. Pictures and postcards are nice, but ticket stubs and receipts somehow round it off for me.
seems like a classic, from wikipedias Thermal printing entry:
In many hospitals in the United Kingdom, many common ultrasound devices output the results of the scan onto thermal paper. This can cause problems if the parents wish to preserve the image by laminating it, as the heat of most laminators will darken the entire page
Yup. The whole bit of paper turns into an uniformly black rectangle.
Bolder man than me might seize the opportunity to tell people who wanted their baby’s sonogram laminated something along the lines of this being a sign that their sprog is the spawn of Satan or something like that.
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Colour me intrigued.
(1) versatile, (2) portable and (3) never needs a refill.
That’s three things isn’t it?
There’s an error as regards placing and an inconsistency as to whether the author is using what is presumably supposed to be an m-dash or a comma to separate “most importantly” but either would have been fine in my view.
versatile, portable and—most importantly—never needs a refill on ink or toner.
versatile, portable and, most importantly, never needs a refill on ink or toner.
When a Gillette razor and a receipt printer love each other very much…
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Can I buy generic thermal roll? Or do I need to buy a paper roll specific to this printer direct from the manufacturer?
‘it is versatile" ✓(ding!)
"It is portable’ ✓(ding!)
“It is never needs a refill” X (bzzzt!)
We need two conjunctions, the one we have, to join the clauses (“it is and it needs”) and the one we’re missing, to join the predicate objects of “is” (“versatile and portable”).
Alternatively, we could replace “portable” with “is portable” and have three clauses sharing a single conjunction: “a mini-printer that is versatile, is portable, and — most importantly — never needs a refill on ink or toner.”
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Sorry, still not getting that.
You’re saying that in your view “… is versatile, portable and never needs a refill” is grammatically wrong?
Because you would require “… is versatile and portable and never needs a refill”?
It seems like a perfectly reasonable sentence to me. Dragging my memory for the correct technique plus a bit of searching on’t interweb suggests the word “asyndeton”.
For those who may think this is all off topic, fair enough but it’s far more interesting to me than another thermal paper printer. 
Yes. That sentence is the composition of “It is versatile, portable” and “It never needs a refill”. I’m saying that the first of those is grammatically wrong; it lacks a conjunction to join the two predicate adjectives, “versatile” and “portable”. And the conjunction that joins the two sentences can’t do both jobs. And it is two different jobs, because there are two lists, a list of verbs and a list of the first verb’s predicates.
As I mentioned, it surprises me how few people hear this, even when hearing it is part of their job description. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I spend my days talking to computers, which never say, with a chuckle, “I knew what you meant!”. I have a kind of super-power (or is it a super-vulnerability?!) confined, I suppose, to programmers and editors. And some, but far from all, writers.
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Fair enough.
As I say, I think it’s a prefectly reasonable rhetorical device to omit the conjunction you insist upon.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Well, it is the role of a writer to twist the language to say what she wants it to and the role of an editor to suggest why it might not be a good idea after all.
In the 70s, my Mom worked at Los Alamos National Labs. She brought home a suitcase terminal which printed using thermal paper. We would hold it next to a lightbulb and watch it slowly fade to black.
it’s no Gameboy Printer
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