Whether You Need It or Not - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, April, 2000 by Eric Grevstad, Cristina Gair

Besides running a Web site that sells products derived from emu oil, the Pounders have been fulltime ranchers since 1993, raising--what else--emus. "Computers are even relevant in the farming business, but we added the scanner so we could quickly supplement information to our Webmaster," Margaret explains.

The budget-conscious Pounders have a Compaq Presario desktop PC, an Epson printer, a Brother fax machine, and the scanner. "If something's under $200, we'll go out and buy it for the business; but if it's over $200, we research and crunch the numbers to see if it's worth going outside the budget," Margaret says.

Next on their wish list is a digital camera, but they've already researched the market and found that cameras currently available for $200 won't give them the image quality they need.

Green Means Go Splurging once in a while is perfectly acceptable to Jim Johansen, publisher of The Crayon House (www.thecrayonhouse.com), a Rockland County, N.Y.-based children's site offering downloadable coloring books.

"My attitude is, if there's something out there that will help produce a better product, then it's worth buying," says Johansen, whose recent purchases include a Kodak digital camera and a flatbed scanner. Both were purchased with business applications in mind, though the products are used for personal needs, too.

"We hope we're buying items on a need basis," Johansen says. "The scanner we bought was an upgrade that's much easier to use than our previous sheet-fed scanner."

The publisher's home office includes Dell and Compaq computers, and both color ink-jet and monochrome Laser printers. He predicts the next objects vying for his affection will be mobile devices. He's considering getting either a notebook PC or Palm organizer to have more immediate access to e-mail, which he says is a business mainstay: "There are no boundaries with e-mail as far as where you do business and with whom you do business."

Throwing Caution to the Wind If you haven't heard the term "early adopter," you're probably not alone. Linda Jacobsen, by contrast, considers herself a gadget freak. As president and CEO of an international global management and cross-cultural training firm, Global Vision Strategies, in St. Charles, Mo., she has to keep in touch regardless of where in the world her business takes her.

In preparation for an upcoming trip to India to lecture to an audience of 5,000, Jacobsen says she's about ready to buy a deluxe digital camera. "The price doesn't matter. What matters is the resolution."

Jacobsen's Last major purchase was a DVD-ROM drive for her desktop, justified because today's highly visual documents take up so much storage space and she needs to create and store 100- to 300-page training manuals. Her other tools include Dell and Gateway PCs, a Sharp Mobilon mininotebook, laser and color printers, a copier, a fax machine, and a scanner, as well as an Ethernet network.

According to Jacobsen, her purchases have to help her bridge cultural differences. For example, she says Third World border officials who often confiscate full-fledged laptop PCs have allowed her Mobilon through, not realizing it's a computer.