Printer Makers' Ploys

Ellen Spertus writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article on printer makers' ploys, such as lying about print speeds and selling printers with crippled cartridges. I'm sure that slashdot readers could identify more deceptions. Are there any printers that actually live up to the manufacturers' claims, ideally with Linux support?"

Comments

Linux

[tmark]

What the fsck does Linux support have to do with whether or not printer manufacturers are screwing their users ?

You get what you pay for.

[silverhalide]

Hate to be a whiner here, but you get what you pay for. If you pay $200 for a printer, you're not getting a 24ppm anything, period. My personal experience has been the higher end printers are more loyal to their specs. I've worked for a company that owns several laserjet 5siMxs (HP's workhorse from a few years ago), and those things nailed 24ppm on the dot after the first page was out on most jobs. The newer 8000 had a faster processor which got the first page out quicker. Point being, if you want a fast printer, pony up the money and pay for it. Otherwise, be content with your slower inkjet and/or laser. The best deal by far are the old Laserjet 5L and 6Ls on ebay for around 50-100 bucks that reliably churn out 3-5 pages a minute. With recycled cartridges, they are by far the most economical printing solution (under 3 cents a page), and their prints look just as good as the new printers. Save your money, buy used printers.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[jedrek]

My family has owned about half a dozen HP LaserJets (we've had 2 printers outside of the LJs) and we actually purchased 2 5Ls, remembering the excellent experience we had with the IIIP and II. Those 2 5Ls went through 10-15 repairs and they STILL sucked. Finally sold them off.

The IIIP we own, on the other hand, is 10 years old and has been repaired once, for $20.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

Does reporter ignorance really equal "ploys"?

[Snowgen]

So, I read the article, the bulk of which was that the reporter's 17 ppm printer had a throughput of significantly less than that when printing a trio of single pages.

No kidding. The problem here isn't that the printer manufacturers are trying to pull a fast one on the consumer. The problem here was that the consumer in question was ignorant about what the rating meant.

I bought my first laser printer back in the 1980's. Back then it was only computer geeks buying these toys, and we all knew that when a printer was rated at 6 ppm, that meant that the printer engine itself was rated at 6 ppm. The engine speed didn't account for the time the printer's processor took to render the PS or PCL code into a laser raster. We all knew that in order to get 6 ppm you would have to set the printer to print 6 (or 12 or whatever) copies of the same page. That way the printer's CPU only had to parse the PS/PCL file once and just start spewing forth paper.

Back then, when most home use dot-matrix printers were printing at about 100 cps (roughly 1.1 ppm if my math is right), this seemed like a fair and equitable way to rate laser printers.

So it's not that the printer manufacturers are trying evil ploys to up their PPM ratings. It's simply that times have changed, and that consumers no longer bother to educate themselves before making a purchase.

At least that's how I see it. It's a free Internet--you can disagree if you want.

Re:Does reporter ignorance really equal "ploys"?

[chill]

Since it's a free Internet -- I'll disagree.

Printer manufacturers print the PPM in big, bold letters on the box. They use it as a main selling point, same as with DPI. Yes, there are several cavaets that the buyer must be aware of. However, it is deceptive marketing.

Same goes for tape drive manufacturers who quote 2:1 compression figures in 2" high letters; monitor manufacturers who make the "viewable" size much smaller than the regular size.

Well, the monitor people are getting better. A couple years ago you couldn't find "viewable size" anywhere on the box. And LCDs are "true" size -- not that inch-behind-the-bezel size.

Yes, it is up to the buyer to educate themselves. However, printer manufacturers are very much like car dealers in that they SHOUT the one number, while whisper all the "gotchas". Deceptive.

Re:Does reporter ignorance really equal "ploys"?

[Jester99]

Frankly, that's crap.

Let's say that you need a letter hand-delivered to somebody 10 miles away. And there are no roads to drive on. You gotta get a guy to run there with the letter.

If I come up to you and say "Hey, I can run 20 miles an hour, let me deliver the letter for you," you would say "that's great! You're hired."

What I neglected to tell you was that I can only run twenty miles per hour for about 15 seconds. And that's if I'm running down a steep hill. For the 10 mile jog to the delivery point, I can really only average maybe 2 miles per hour.

Was it up to you to know what I meant when I said I could hit 20 mph? I wasn't lying, I was just not telling you what you wanted to know.

If I'm buying a printer and I see the words "20 pages per minute" on the box, I expect to queue up 80 pages of documents in Word, come back four minutes later, and see the 80th page spitting out. If it can't do that, then they're not living up to their claim.

Re:Linux support

[tswinzig]

Manufacturers who provide Linux support are enabling their users. In my modest life experience, those people and organizations that are more generous in enabling others are also more likely (not a perfect correlation, but a significant one) to be honest and straightforward in other ways. Openness tends to generalize across dimensions.

Give me a break!

Or perhaps they're just shrewd businessmen, and would like to sell as many printers as possible by opening it up to more platforms?

Re:Perfectly Accurate

[*xpenguin*]

Why not make a "page" size Arial/Times New Roman. Size 12 font. Double spaced, full page.

Because then the numbers will be less, and that's not good.