So tonight I decide to make some photo Christmas cards with my shiny new HP Photosmart printer. First, I look in the HP Photosmart Premier software that comes with the printer, with all sorts of templates for homemade stuff like greeting cards, calendars, flyers and brochures. I download all the template updates, and begin looking for the Christmas themes. Hmmm, under Seasons it has Spring, Summer, Fall & Winter, but even the Winter themes are not terribly Christmasy. So I go over to the HP website, to discover the reason there are no Christmas templates; they sell photo Christmas card kits for 15 for twenty cards and envelopes! So I have a perfectly good printer and photo paper which I bought from HP, but they have to wring another 15 clams out of me just because Christmas cards are popular this time of year? I bought the @#%&! printer to do stuff like this myself to avoid paying someone else.
I have Kodak EasyShare software as well, and they do the same thing; loads of generic “greeting card” templates which no one ever uses, but not a single Christmas card.
Bah! Humbug! They should both be boiled in their own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts!
Not to be suggestion solutions in the pit or anything, but I’d send a snail mail to an HP bigwig in the printer dept. Might not get anything by this year, but I’ve found reasonable, straighforward, to-the-point mail to really get results.
Just point out they’re being tightwad scrooges at the giving time of year. (And besides, you’ll need to pay 20$ for the extra ink you’ll use. :D)
Far be it from me to defray your anger, but I should point out that most large corporations, especially multinational corporations making products to sell in many different markets with differing cultures, avoid including any religious themes in any of their free software for reasons that may not be obvious at first, but become obvious when you think for a few minutes about the possible impact of say, including christian themed holiday stuff for delivery in Qatar.
Yes, I decided to say it all in one sentence just to be contrary.
Sure, and ultimately, that’s what I did. But not everyone has Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and my artisitic talents are not much to brag on. I spent some time locating Christmas clip art and creating suitable messages in colored Christmasy fonts. The result is passable, but I know there are easier ways for the artistically challenged to make a Christmas card.
HP are a company that, on their lower-end colour inkjet printers, give you no option to print pages with colour in them to black-and-white, which people frequently want to do (to save on expensive colour ink). When you phone their support line to query the absence of this utterly basic option, they tell you you “should have read the box” and that you should buy a more expensive printer. They are also a company whose driver software is so uniformly shitty that even the Windows default drivers offer reliability and performance far in advance of anything the “specialised” drivers can manage (such as, in the case of my benighted laserjet 1100, the ability to print fonts in sizes greater than 32pt).
With that in mind, and given that making Christmas cards is possibly the most common use for these devices (and certainly the most common greetings card use), I have absolutely no problem believing that this has nothing to do with political correctness and market-dictated non-denominationalism (feel the syllable count rise, baby), and everything to do with utterly shameless mercantilism and extortion.
Damn, I hate HP and their printers.
I am, however, horrified at the idea of making Christmas cards in November. Dude, seriously. Send 'em in January like normal folk.
I fucking despise HP for this and it’s not just a “feature” of their lower end models, either. At work, I use a large format HP plotter capable of prints 36" wide that cost us $3000 brand new.
The large majority of our prints are structural and architectural plans which require little or no colour yet it still insists on using the colour inks even on black and white printouts. There’s no option to set the use of dithering for greyscale so, instead, it mixes a number of colours to make “grey” which varies tonally if you’re starting to run out of a colour. And once a cartridge is empty, the plotter shuts down and refuses to finish the plot, even if the lack of, say, light magenta won’t have any visible effect on your plot. You’re essentially dead in the water until you replace the cartridge.
I’ve called and written to complain but I got absolutely nowhere, not even an off-the-record suggestion of a workaround. The cartridges for this thing cost a small fortune and I really resent the unnecessary added expense. I’ve sworn never to give another dime to that company.
You say that as if amoral greed-driven commercialism somehow precludes market-necessitated agnosticism. The gormandizing greenback gluttons who made this package decided against including a crappy token template as a fig leaf nod to propriety. My thesaurus-fu is unstoppable!
HP has three optional template sets that are down-loadable, free from the HP website. If they feared offending non-Christians, why not include the Christmas templates as an optional download, along with the Hanukkah and Diwali templates?