Printers Manuals

Pitney Bowes IM 4511

I had never heard of Pitney Bowes until I came to work here. The name reminds me of construction equipment or forklift trucks, rather than office equipment. The Pitney Bowes IM-4511 sat on our floor and was networked to our workgroup, so it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it.

It is actually a pretty good multifunction. I thought I had seen them all, from the noisy, messy clunkers in the seventies, to the massive machines that used to make the floor vibrate in the eighties, getting smaller and more useful through the nineties, and now, in the new century we have this. A very useful and capable piece of office equipment.

It can fax, copy, print and scan all from one decent sized unit. It does them all in black and white. But we aren’t designers, so don’t need color. It isn’t massive, it doesn’t smoke, or make the floor vibrate. In fact it doesn’t make that much noise either. It just sits in the corner doing its thing day after day.

The controls are simple enough that even an old man like me can cope with them. There is a simple control panel near the top with a little gray LCD screen. All the buttons are spaced enough apart that chubby fingers won’t order 999 copies instead of 99, and they are logically grouped and well labeled.

I think it copies somewhere around the 12 pages per minute mark. Copying is about the same. Printing or copying text gives us clear black lettering where all the edges are smooth and no extra bits of ink poking out. Scanning is much the same, it gives us a black, gray and white image of anything we put in there, including color photographs or images.

The fax is about as easy as they come. Everything is set up as a speed dial and we tend to schedule all our faxes to be sent at once so the memory must be good for at least 100 pages. It doesn’t take it long to send them all either, maybe a couple of seconds for each page, something like that.

Overall, the Pitney Bowes IM-4511 is a good device to work with. It doesn’t trouble me as long as I don’t trouble it. It prints, copies and scans well. Faxes are handled quickly and quietly and you can’t even hear the dial tone. I think it will probably still be here doing it’s thing long after I’ve gone.