A Printer
A printer is essential if you are to produce material which is copy able, or if you wish to make good multiple copies. There are various kinds of printer, including inject and laser. If you are going to print your magazine in colour, a colour printer will also be essential.
A Scanner
A scanner is helpful, both to scan in non-text items, such as photographs or diagrams, and also to scan in text by OCR (Optical Character Reading/ Recognition software), if you need to work with material that is unavailable in electronic form. OCR software is often supplied with a scanner. Without a scanner, a good deal of re-typing may be required. Some colour printers are also available with interchangeable scanning heads, but a stand-alone scanner will give you more flexibility.
A Fax Machine
Many people still send messages by fax, and this can be a useful way of
receiving contributions from people without email. You may have a ‘standalone’ fax machine, or this facility can be run from your computer. Using plain paper in a fax machine is more expensive, but it does result in pages that can be retained for a long time, unlike the flimsy, shiny heat-sensitive paper on rolls, on which the print fades fairly rapidly.
Telephone Lines
You will need a phone for everyday contact, and it is also useful to have a separate line for your email/Internet/faxes, so you don’t put your regular phone line out of action when you are working on the other equipment. It is worth searching around for cost-effective telephone services, as there are many discounted ones on the market. Some services give you free Internet access; they use a normal modem and are an economical way of extending your communication links.
If you require faster data transfer, however, you will probably need services such as broadband and ISDN (if these are available in your area). These services are more expensive than standard telephone lines, but do really speed up your activities; for example, when sending files to your printing company (although an alternative is to send material to your printer on disk). Such services require some extra software and/or hardware on your computer before you can use them. With broadband and ISDN you can use the Internet and the telephone at the same time, saving you the cost of two separate telephone lines.
A Photocopier
You can choose between buying or renting a copier. You will need to consider service arrangements, as faults can be costly to rectify without a regular maintenance and service contract. Copiers vary considerably in the facilities they offer, from simple copying to collating, stapling and so on. Copiers tend to take up quite a bit of space, and can be noisy, and the older ones tend to emit fumes, so you need to place them carefully and ensure there is no health hazard if you are buying an old second-hand one. Most fax machines will also work as copiers, but will mostly not copy anything thicker than one sheet of paper at a time.
You can also use your computer scanner to copy items and this also has the advantage of providing you with an electronic copy for future reference; however, this is likely to be too time consuming for a large volume of copying.
You may wish to photocopy your entire magazine, rather than print copies from your computer. Whether or not you do this will depend on factors such as:
- whether you already have a printer or photocopier and, if not, what it would cost to purchase or lease one (including the cost of any service contracts), compared to the cost of using a commercial photocopying service
- how many copies you will need, and how often
- how quickly you need the copies produced
- whether you need copies collated by machine or are prepared to do this process by hand