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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?"
Lexmark and HP LJ's have good linux support and come with good toner. I'm refering to the laser jets printers.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
What the fsck does Linux support have to do with whether or not printer manufacturers are screwing their users ?
I finally managed to get my cheap-ass USB Lexmark Z33 to work with Linux. This would have been simpler had CUPS not been running, as the Lexmark provided Linux drivers are for LPD only... it wasn't the simplest thing ever. The Lexmark GUI tool looks good though.
However, the printer is ass. The sheet feeder puts a dent in the paper at the bottom, and the paper goes in at an angle, and it only works one sheet at a time.
Never again will I listen to the wife when it comes to buying a printer. I wanted a black and white laser with a network connector. She was like "but that is expensive when you could get this one"...
HP 2200
Full duplex. Fast. Ethernet ready.
mmm...
basically they teach you not to lie but they teach you lies and hype about the product. its amazing how three companies cna do 9 independant studies and arrive at 27 different results.
________________________________________________
Alot of the HP printers, both inkjet and lazer, have very good support from HP themselves. Since Ghostscript came out with a plugin interface for printer drivers (instead of patch and recompile), installing the drivers is eazy no matter what LPD/LPRng/CUPS/etc you use.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Xerox Phaser 850 color laser printers live up to all the claims, have the best linux support on the planet (Postscript printer... out of the box) and you wont get robbed blind on the ink prices....
:-) but is the best thing cince sliced bread IF.... your users have 1/3rd of a brain... all of them have had ZERO trouble except for one receptionist who has done $1500.00 worth of damage to one printer in 2 seperate instances... and has caused another $400.00 in damage to it recently...
granted... the printer is $3500.00USD Appx (I have 4 of them... 2 DX's and 2 N's so I got a good deal
First she violently rips a jammed paper out of it... leaving a nice 3"X3" chunk stuck deep inside instead of using the obvious levers for releasing a jammed piece of paper.. then she loads the paper tray with inkjet lables that decided to adhere to the printing drum...after she ran the same label sheet through 5 times trying to get them looking just right and removing a few of the labels..
oh and finally she broke the high capacity paper drawer by "using her foot" to remove the paper guide.... because it wouldnt come off easily (you have to lift a tab first that is labelled in several languages..
so if you are stupid.... dont get a Phaser 850 printer... or if you have stupid workers in your office...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You often have to read the fine print (if you can find it). The industry loves to do things like qoute printing costs based on 15% color coverage, which is less than one embeded pie chart. They will also almost never quote time to first page, because heat up times or nozzel cleaning cycles would put most people off. Another common trick is to quote print speed for 150dpi economy printing then quote the great high end resolution that takes 9 minutes per page.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Both Epson and HP are really pretty Linux friendly. They release info to the community, and I think Epson has actually written some Linux printer drivers, and released them open source. I chose an Epson printer after learning they are also very good about supporting their scanners with Linux.
I've purchased several printers and scanners from both HP and Epson over the years, and never felt like I was cheated or what have you. They've all worked under Linux without a hitch.
However, if you want absolute Linux compatibility, spring for a postscript printer. They will always work without a hitch, but are a tad spendy.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
I have two printers... A dinosaur of a HP DeskJet 672 for color, one that I can easily get cheap 3rd party carts and refills for, and an Okidata OL4W LED/laser printer. I got the Oki used, and I now use it for virtually ALL my printing (which isn't all that much, actually). It also gives me the advantage of being able to print anything that I have that needs it (ie, resume) in sharp, professional type.
Toner for the Oki is cheap, and I've not replaced it even once. Both print fine from Linux.
The HP Deskjet is slowly dying, which is to be expected given it's age (6 years). Given what I've read about HP's tricks with their low end deskjets (and their firing of Bruce Perens) I would have another one only if GIVEN to me...
I am in the market for a new color printer... Which manufacturer sticks it to you LESS than the others? I'm considering Epson, Lexmark, and Canon (I owned Canon prior to the HP, and was less than impressed with the durability of their printers).
Corporatism != Free Market
Most modern printers are terrible - they don't
support PostScript, they have no internal memory,
they hold a miniscule amount of paper, and they
get jammed often. My family's Lexmark inkjet is
case in point - it holds about 30 sheets, has no
memory, and only uses Lexmark's "jnl" format.
Laser printers are somewhat better, but I've no
expreience with them.
Me? I use an Apple Imagewriter II. Sure, it
doesn't support PS, but that's what ghostscript
is for (does a nice job, too). Never jams, has
unlimited paper supply (the paper is stored
externally), almost never gets jammed, and even
has 2KB memory in it, upgradable to 32KB! Most
printers die after a few years, but this one's
twelve years old and running strong!
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.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It's probably improved a bit, but a few years ago Lexmark had *NO* Linux support.
I don't know about speed, but quality-wise when printing photos, Epson is one of the best AND has *excellent* Linux support. (Not from the vendor, but Epsons always seem to get the coolest new driver improvements under Linux.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
I tell you what, my Cannon 750 prints damn fast, but the amount of time it takes to get the very first page out is outrageous!!! (I'm talking about a simple plain old page of ascii text, no graphics, no special fonts.)
A full minute!!
I'd bloody well like to see some statistics on that. I rarely print big long documents, but I often print the odd page or two. The *effective* print speed ends up being 1-3 ppm, even though once it gets going it can do 11ppm.
WTF is the printer doing? I don't remember the old BJC 200's taking that long to get started.
"Bagged", in the instance used in the parent post to which you replied, means "got rid of". The troll meant "since they got rid of Bruce Perens". You didn't catch the altered meaning, so now you know.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I picked up a 2200dse (duplexing, USB/parallel but no network) for just over $700. It has built-in PostScript which makes setup under UNIX-like OSes easy and eliminates the need for ghostscript which I've used over the last eight years. HP had a deal where you buy an additional toner cartridge at the same time and get 16 MB of RAM free. I sprang for it. I also picked up a 610n JetDirect 10/100 card off of eBay reasonably cheap. It's quite nice to have it on my network at home with minimal setup hassles.
Great quality printing at a not-too-unreasonable price. My previous printer (HP LJ 4L, which I paid $700 for back in, oh, late 1993/early 1994) ran without a single problem around 15K-20K sheets---hopefully this will last as long or longer.
Contrary to popular comment here on /., the HPDJ 960c does NOT do what I expect it to do on the Linux platform w/CUPS.
Sure it works, and for B&W it works fine. But when I try to print color photos (on photo paper) it just blows. I have to print over the network to it from a Windows machine.
According to HP this printer will print 15ppm draft B&W and 12ppm draft color. Unfortunatly I have absolutely *no* use for draft mode so what good do these numbers do me? Marketing ploys and mind games. I am thinking for the work I do (B&W mostly) that it is around 5 - 7ppm all text.
I like the printer in that it is about $200 retail, it has both USB and LPTx, and it is relatively quiet compared to my previous printer.
Problems are that it is slow, it runs out of ink WAY too fucking fast (I mean w/my DJ 400c I used 2 B&W cartridges, and 1 color cartridge in 5 years), w/this printer, 2 B&W's and 1 color since December 25th. Note: I printed TONS more shit in 5 years than I have since Dec. 25th.
CUPS makes printing on the Linux machine ok. It's nothing special but it works. I still have to print from Windows if I want color photos to look right. It's slow and it sucks ink.
If you are using it for B&W text mostly, it's affordable, good quality printing (600x600 dpi black, 2400x1200 dpi photo color), and it has an LPTx port for Linux.
YMMV.
About two years ago, I bought a Brother HL-1270N. Around $450, but probably cheaper today (and still competitive as a reasonably high-end home and small-office printer).
It does 12ppm, connects directly to 100bt ethernet (so I don't need a slave PC as a print server), and of course it works just fine with Linux (supports PCL6 and PS2).
Black-and-white laser, but *very* good quality (1200x600... At 25-up, I can still read a 10pt font, though I need a magnifying glass to do so) and a high throughput make it thge single best printer I have ever used (not just owned, used... at my previous job, we had a variety of serious high-end HP lasers, y'know, the $15k type) and they all SUCKED in comparison).
Not as cheap as a chinsy little $80 color inkjet, but, 99.9% of the time I care more about printing speed and quality than having color on my printouts. And when I do, I visit Kinkos (If I actually need a color document, you can bet I won't accept the crappy quality of those $80 inkjets).
Incidentally, for quite a lot less (around $150) you can get the HL-1240. It has very similar stats (my parents have one of these, and it impressed me enough to get the 1270N for myself), except no ethernet and half the memory. If you don't mind needing a PC to act as a print server for it, this makes a GREAT deal on an amazing printer.
They'd roll off the production line with half a tank of petrol, but if you ever wanted to fill them up again you'd need to buy a new HP-approved carburettor.
Inkjet printers are one of the worst IT scams in the business. Ink should be a commodity, like fuel. We shouldn't have to be locked in to the tyranny of overpriced printer cartridges with built in heads and the like.
Along with almost every printer's ppm benchmark I've seen, manufacturers also include the time to first page. Printers consume a lot of power (my HP 4P laserjet sends my lights flickering every time it prints), so it rests in a power saving mode. When it gets a print job, it takes it a little while for it to heat up enought to burn the toner on the paper. This warm up time can often take 30 seconds or more. If the author wanted to give meaningful statistics on a printer's ppm, he would've started timing after the first page was printed, or include the initial warm up time.
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HP doesn't make the paper, they just buy it from another manufacturer and put their name on the label. A lot of companies do this. And no, HP printers can not tell if it is HP paper.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
As much as I detest Microsoft, I've reached the conclusion that the GPL is a greater long-term threat.
And printers, specificly a troublesome one made by Xerox, is why RMS developed the GPL.
Most people don't know about paper quality. HP inkjet paper has a higher density and brightness than the standard paper you run through your laser printer. It is designed to hold the ink better.
The trick here is that they want you to buy HP printer supplies, but reality is Hammermill and Weyerhauser have perfectly good inkjet paper that is just as bright and dense.
So whenever is says HP quality paper, think "bright and dense". That's all it takes.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The next biggest problem is probably spooling, sending their printouts to the wrong print queue, or a disabled or just slow queue.
Unix definatly has some challenges, for example the lack of a universal driver standard, but these are configuration issues, not user issues.
You may, indeed, "get what you pay for", but that isn't why everyone is so ticked off. The point of this whole thread is about how printer companies practically lie to potential customers about their machines' specs.
A low price may warrant selling junk, but it doesn't (shouldn't?) permit deceptive marketing practices.
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.
If the heads clog up on an HP or Lexmark, you buy new cartridges. If the heads clog up on a Canon, you buy new heads. If the heads clog up on an Epson, you end up sending the printer away for service. How convenient of them to do that.
(At home, I currently use a Lexmark Optra Color 40 and a Brother HL-630. The inkjet supports PostScript, while the laser printer supports PCL 3. I've used both with Linux with no problems...use Ghostscript with the Brother printer, send stuff straight to the Lexmark. Lexmark supplies are a little on the high side, but the HL-630 is one of the cheapest-to-operate printers on the planet...the drum and toner are separate, so a new 3000-page toner cartridge only costs about $30. I've not even bothered checking the refill price.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
When you get a printer just get a PostScript 3 compatable printer. As long as you pipe the the postscript right out to the printer you will never have to worry.
:)
You made have to tweak the PPD file some, but thats half the fun
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I'll say! Those vendors really know how to sell a piece of shiznet. I have an HP 845c that prints every single copy upside-down. In order to right them again I have to use the company photocopier.
Anybody have a patch for the CUPS driver that can fix this?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
The speeds listed by the manufacturers are 100% accurate. It's just that those are the page-per-minute ratings for blank sheets of paper being pushed through the printer. It doesn't include any actual printing.
Care to elaborate?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
HP does not make paper. They do however spec paper, and have the cheapest paper mill THAT MEETS SPEC make it. All other manufactures do the same. So the trick isn't just trying with HP paper, it is trying with all brands of paper, on all settings to see what works. Epson might have a slightly different spec for their paper that you happen to prefer in your printer.
Note that the right paper is critical for ink jet printers, while lasers can deal with a large range of papers. However the right paper and quality is often different. There is quality of how the paper handles ink, and quality of the paper itself (watermarks).
What you want to print makes a big difference too. When printing photos that you want to display, use the expensive photo paper in a ink jet, it will look great. Plain text on the same paper won't look enough better to justify the cost. Plain text that matters will look enough better on a laser that you should seriously consider spending extra cash. If you print text often you will save money by buying a laser, since you not only get better text, but it is also cheaper to print with a laser.
In short experiment, not just with the setting, but also with the paper. I doupt that it prints worse when you select normal paper, so much as it puts a different amount of ink on the page. It probably prints better on normal paper in normal mode than hp mode, while on hp paper it prints better in hp mode. With some other brand name paper you will have to compare.
When I bought this printer (new) over 5 years ago, I didn't know it came with a toner cartridge so I bought an extra one -- I still have the extra one in the box as the first toner cartridge is still working great. Buy a laser printer!
...sucks. It is a total scam.
Oddly, I bought a second to replace the first because I had invested in a large quantity of ink cartridges during a sale. It turned out to be cheaper to buy a second Canon and use up the ink rather than shift to a new printer. Once this ink is gone, though, I'll never buy another Canon.
I own an HP LaserJet 1200 Personal printer, and it is by far the best home printer I have ever purchased. It's very fast for a personal model, 15 PPM, with the first page always printed within 10 seconds of the print command. Size-scalable paper trays, which are great for envelope printing, and it supports an addon module for scanning & copying. Even the price isn't too bad, Pricewatch.com has it for less than $400.00 US.
And if you're wondering what OS it works under, well, you're in luck. It is fully PostScript compatible, and works under Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I've used it under all 3 with perfect results. HP gets a big thumb up from me with this printer.
I'll have to try something similar at home.
"Up to twelve inches long, depending on usage."
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
I just bought a Samsung ML-1450 laser printer. They advertise linux support, and so far, I haven't found anything in what they advertise to be a lie. Of course, I haven't used up the toner yet, so who knows if it's only half full like some of the inkjet manufacturers have been doing. But I have to say that so far it's lived up to its specs, and you can't beat the price. I paid $230 for it.
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....because by adding Linux support you obviously show that you are compassionate, like puppies, can sit still during a chick-flick marathon, are in touch with your inner female and are just an overall good person.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I got a Lexmark X73 multifunction printer/scanner/copier from my wife as a Christmas gift last year. The "X" series of multifunction printers (X63, X73, and X83) don't have ANY Linux support whatsoever. Much of their output is driven through (Windows) software. I e-mailed them asking about PCL support, postscript, or raw ouput support I couold use for Linux. I also offered to work on a driver for it if they sent me specs. What I got was the e-mail equivalent of a form letter telling me that the X73 had no support for any platform except Windows, and that the interface to it was proprietary (ie, locked up tighter than a drum).
After hooking it up to my wife's Windows PC, I also found I couldn't write to it from any other box on a network, even another Windows box, as the driver for it won't install or run correctly unless it finds the printer hanging off a USB port on the box you're installing or printing from.
I stayed with my battle-scarred HP Deskjet 400, which happily prints from Windows or Linux, and across the network via Samba, etc. Meanwhile, my wife loves the X73...although it does cost us a fortune in cartridges...
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Same here. Although it didn't work "straight out of the box", all I had to do was download the latest version of CUPS, and it worked. *boom*
And, since the printer has both a USB port and a paralell port, I was able to hook up both my linux and windoze/linux box to it. (I just won't try to print to it from both machines at the same time.)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
If you care about print speed, then you are using the print enough that it will never enter power saving mode anyway. I print a few pagers a month. I don't even turn my printer on most weeks. When I do it takes a minute to warm up, but I don't care. freeBSD has a preety good print spooler and is willing to wait for the printer. Sure it would be NICE hit print within a few second hold the printout, but in practice you don't need it instantly.
Ignoring paper costs, the HP can deliver an image at about .7 cents/sheet as compared to 1.2 for the Lexmark. Though .5 cents doesn't sound like a lot, it adds up when you're cranking 20K copies each week.
Print speeds are as advertised, I get 17 ppm from the 4050's and 24 ppm from the 4100. I looked at some very high end printers because I didn't want to wait forever while the paper churns through. The 40 ppm, and better, printers came in above $10,000. So instead, I bought 3 HP's and wrote a little bit of code that spreads the load out over the 3 machines. Saved $7,000 and had fun while I was at it.
Unfortunately, there has been a downside. All of this ran on Windows 98 with not too many problems. I had to write a prompt into my code to remind me to disable power saving sleep mode whilst printing and it helped if I rebooted before firing off the printer job. I was fairly happy with the setup but thought I could do better if I migrated to Win 2000. (Stuck in Windows for other reasons.) At any rate, Win 2000, Excel, and HP do not seem to get along. One of those three pieces seems to drop a bit every so often and away goes a print job. Away, as in, I've got to watch the printout carefully to catch random imaging problems. I don't know if it's Microsoft trying to coerce me to upgrade from Excel 97, which didn't help, or HP not fully testing Windows 2000 with the 4050's. Right now, you don't want to be around me when I struggle with the mess the problem engenders. Ain't a pretty sight. Fortunately, the bug has migrated from Heisenbug status to reproducible so it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
The only way they can tell is if you tell the printer in the printer driver. My old 694 C does print out different intensities of ink depending on the type of paper chosen. (Most notably, between Inkjet Transparency Paper and Glossy Photo Paper). But that has nothing to do with the manufacturer.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
"I still wouldn't use an HP printer. Who wants to give them $25 for every cartridge? That is where they make their money."
True... The main reason I've hung on to the old 672 is because I can find refills and 3rd party carts for it at Wal-Mart for $20 or less. And I average one per year.
I know if I got a newer HP this would be FAR more expensive...
Corporatism != Free Market
I've been burned by Epson in the past with regards to their 5700i Laser printer and not updating the Mac driver for OS X.
After that I resolved to only use PostScript laser printers and my current one is a Brother HL-1650 with an internal printer server installed (with Ethernet jack)
It is black and white but, lies up to Brother's claims very well.
My advice is that if you are buying an inject you are buying lot of ink all the time (have yet to replace the toner cartridge in the HL-1650 and I've had it since last March)
Me, I hate inkjets.
Now, if you print to Linux using it it should work even though you will need a PPD (it is PostScript Level 3) to use the Duplex unit without using the printer control panel or the web admin tools.
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?
"And like that
a) Deskjet/Laserjet are HP-specific brands for their inkjet and laser printers.
..."?
b) Um, did you read the subject of my comment? "Lexmark inkjets
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I noticed this when I bought a printer. I had heard rumours of this and only when I asked the salesman directly did he tell me about it. Turns out the only brand (of HP, Epson, Lexmark?, and Canon) that gives you a full cartridge is Canon.
I also looked at the refill kits. Epson and HP had expensive refill kits and you bought new print heads with them when you bought an official refill. Canon not only had every color in a seperate tank (greta for me because I use a lot of highlight color, it won't drain all tanks equally) but you could buy official refills of just the tanks, changing the print head only when it needs it. And the Canon refills were a third the price of those for other printers. (I'm guessing because of the ease, and because there's no monitor chip you need to replace or reset.)
So, not to sound like a Canon advert, but I bought an S750 and have been very happy with it. Especially because I've bought something that I know isn't going to get more expensive when I try to maintain it. The funny thing is that I'm too lazy to refill my own, but just having the option is enough. That way is official supplies ever got real expensive I'd have an out.
A generic "me-too" - admittedly I'm not currently running linux (I'll try the latest Mandrake when I've got more HDD space to spare), but it's a very nice printer and the WinXP drivers are just fine.
/.ers should hit dabs.com where it's available for £100 including VAT (it's on their front page). Replacement toner carts look to be about £40 for it (also from Dabs), which for estimated 2500 sheets (at the usual 5% coverage I think) isn't too extortionate.
UK
"We're looking for people who are bright enough to use Windows, yet dense enough to use Windows. Everybody got that?"
I will NEVER buy a lexmark, after helping 3 too many friends attempt to get theirs working and having them die shortly after.
If you were going to have them clean the heads in the bath tub you should have 1) told them NOT to get in the tub first, and 2) make sure the printer was unplugged first!
It's funny. Laugh.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Lets ignore linux support for just a momment. I think it's commonly agreed that printer manufacturers are out to extract every last cent from consumers any way they can.
What about the magazines that "Review" these printers? I mean it's pretty obvious that magazines like PC World, Home Computer Luser and all the other magazines that target clueless users, are basically just glorified advertising catalogs. But try researching a new printer.
I recently tried to find some reviews on photo printers and found that whatever reviews available are highly biased, largely unscientific, based on old models and generally useless. This article links to some other reivews which are horribly old:
Canon S820D February 2002
Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX July 2001
Epson Stylus Photo 2000P February 2002
HP PhotoSmart 1315 November 2001
Kodak Personal Picture Maker 200 by Lexmark January 2001
If you can make your way through those articles you'll see that there is no common baseline for comparison. A fault in one printer may be talked about extensively, but in another printer it's mentioned casually. The Canon 820D has been recently replaced with the 830D (about 1-2 weeks ago) and there is no mention of it. Compared to the offerings out there the units reviewed are few.
I wish more "reputable" hardware review sites would take the time to review printers. I still haven't been able to decide between the Canon 830D, the Epson 960 stylus photo and the Epson 2200 stylus photo mainly because I don't have enough information.
As it is now it seems like printer reviews are conspicuously absent or out of date. It's almost as if the printer manufacturers are supressing reviews so that people will "gamble" on printers due to their low price and how good those "specs" on the box are.
Anyone happen to know anything about the Canon 830D, Epson Stylus Photo 960 and the Epson Stylus Photo 2200?
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Oh, and it actually does about 10ppm after it has warmed up, and because of the memory in it, never slows down from this. Fantastic thing.
First, have ou read the article? Of the three printers he comments only one (incidentaly the best one) is a laser printer. The two ink-jets wild claims do not have the PS/PCL excuse.
But this is not even the main point. Their consumers are not specialists anymore. They are selling to the average consumer who has absolutely no obligation of interpreting what they mean to say.
If a manufacturer printed "Average number of matches: 50" on the side of its matchboxes and consistently delivered boxes with 10 matches (and now and then send out a big box with 2000 matches to make the "average") it would go to jail real fast. There is no excuse for using unreal or confusing specs as a selling point. The continuing use of such data to sell printers is just bad faith.
I run a $80 HP 610CL on my Linux print server. Here's how I figure it...
... Bought from Wal-Mart ... Bought from Wal-Mart or CompUSA ... Bought at a computer show
The printer cost = ~$80
Blank Cartridge = ~25 (Black) or ~$35 (color)
Universal Ink Jet Refill Kit = $20 (Black/Color) (3 refills)
or
Custom Ink Jet Refill Kit = ~$30 (Both Black & Color) (~30 refills each)
Now, you could buy a $200 printer, but I doubt you would be as likely to do your own refills.
Cartridges can only be refilled up to 3 times. (don't buy "recycled cartridges") So, you are saving roughly $30 for every 3 refills...If you are using the Custom Kit, it's more like $60 per 3 refills...
And figuring for $30, you are paying back the cost of the printer in cartridges after only 3 cartridges.
Here's the other thing...printer technology is always getting better...the printer you buy today at $80 is probably going to be replaced by another with more features (higher resolution, faster, etc) 6 months from now.
With an $80 printer, you can really throw it away when it breaks. With the $200 printer, you feel like you have to fix it.
I've had good success with epson printers in linux. I had an epson stylus photo 1200 (6 color), which I gave to my sister, a photographer. Currently, my wife and I have a 980 (4-color). With CUPS and gimp-print, my printing looks beautiful. There is a utility (epsutil?) that I use to get ink levels, reset the printer, etc. I NEVER use epson inks or paper. There are plenty of aftermarket solutions for paper. For ink, I use a continuous flow system and bulk inks from MIS Supply It's never clogged or dripped, and when I screwed it up by causing a siphon, MIS sent me a new cf cartridge and a set of regular cartridges to use in the meantime.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Actually, a good place to look is a thrift shop... you can often plug them in and run the test sequence to see if all is well.
I purchased a Brother HL-645M (very dirty output) for $2.50 at a rummage sale, a nice NEC Silentwriter 95 for $10 at a thrift shop, and an Okidata OL-400e (with really bad feed problems) for $15... together tiding me over until I could get a new Samsung 1210 on sale for USD 100 after rebate.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I picked up a Lexmark Z65N at Costco last week for $169.99 which seemed quite good considering the 21ppm and 2400x1200dpi ratings. Plus it has a built in ethernet port. I knew it claimed support for Windows and OSX only but I figured it would likely work somewhat under Linux with another driver.
As it turns out it's a mixed bag of good and bad. The Windows driver doesn't work with sharing since it wants to speak directly to the printer and fails if it can't. This means Linux is _not_ supported in any way and Lexmark tech support says they have no indication that Linux will ever be supported. Luckily I have access to enough printers and Windows PCs (and Win4Lin) that I can live with this. It does also mean, however, that I can't queue jobs and share drivers, etc.on the Win2K server. In addition the installer on the supplied CD won't run off a network share. I downloaded the latest driver from the Lexmark website to get around that but still I'm left with fairly poor text quality and much slower than 21ppm. Photo quality is good but not much better than the HP970cxi (1200x1200dpi) that it was supposed to replace. On the up side, the printer was cheap. The cartridges are a little cheaper than the HP ones (I don't know anything about mileage yet, though) and it does have an ethernet port. For me it works just well enough in the areas that I care about to be worth keeping. It's not the incredible deal that I thought it was but it's not too bad. I just wish Lexmark would tell you the limitations of the printer. I think Lexmark was smart in many respects because the trade offs that they made cause this printer to work well for many people. However, for some it won't work at all. They just need to be a little more forthcoming with the details.
Our family has been using the same printer for over 30 years now. We have been very happy with their quality of work, and same-day service is provided for many smaller jobs. From business cards to wedding invitations to funeral programs, nothing beats a local, family-owned printer service.
True, cost is slightly higher that the Kinko's shop near the mall, but they know me by name and will deliver items to my job if needed.
My printer is retiring in December. He says his children don't have the skillset needed to operate or manage the business. If they cannot find a buyer, he will close shop and liquidate all assets.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PRINTER ! ! !
My S750 is great. Guess you can't make blanket statements about an entire manufacturer based on one person's experieces.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Thanks for writing about your recent experiences with HP! I'd have to say I had similar suspicions about their products over the last few years - and this was even before talks of the merger began.
Traditionally, I always recommended HP for anyone buying a laser printer, and almost always for a networked inkjet. (I never thought their inkjets matched Epson's ability to print near-photo quality images - but Epson's print drivers can really bog down a network print server.)
Nowdays, I have to really re-think that.
A while back, I had problems with a Deskjet 1600C that died - and was met with endless frustration getting it repaired. (Despite this being originally a $1400+ business-class inkjet with optional paper tray, HP acted like it was disposable - and couldn't understand why we wanted to fix it instead of just buying a newer model.) HP refused to sell the repair parts needed, and insisted that we ship it in for repair.
In another case, we bought several HP Laserjet 6L printers, all of which developed problems jamming when feeding paper. After over a year of putting up with this problem, HP *finally* acknowledged it as a design defect and offered to ship customers a "repair kit". When I got the "repair kit", it turns out it was simply a piece of cardboard with a double-sided block of sticky foam on the end. You were supposed to use the cardboard to shove the sticky foam down inside the printer, so it would stick to a part beneath the vertically stacked pieces of paper. That way, it was again able to "grab" sheets without trying to suck in too many at once and jam up.
Granted, this work-around did cure our problem - but it's obviously not going to be a permanent fix. HP screwed up and used a rubber material that got hard over time and lost its "tacky" characteristic needed to grab paper. They should have supplied a substitute part for the defective one - not a stick-on-top band-aid fix.
Not too long ago, monitors were sold in this fashion where the screen size was marketed as being a 17" monitor but in reality you got 15" of "view-able" area.
We all know what a class-action did; we ended-up with a refund and a label on the monitor box (and advertisement) explicitly telling us the true view-able size.
I think printer manufactures are not too far behind.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Your example is better than mine, although I believe that under very restrict and controlled situations those printers may even reach their claimed speed.
In Court the manufacturer will probably say that those speeds were acchieved in a clean room with a special cartridge filled with a non-consumer grade ink (with a density far bellow or far above the practical and profitable) printing on special, handmade paper found only in a Russian village.
I purchased a Z53 a while back because it printed fairly quickly and is one of those printers that embeds the printhead in each ink cartridge. I had an Epson before that which died of a plugged head and had eternal warm-up times which I was not eager to re-experience. The Lexmark starts up very quickly and has reasonable Linux support-- there's a binary RPM they provide which handles printhead cleaning, alignment, etc, and works quite well. The only beef I have is it doesn't support the USB port on the printer. There is also an open-source driver available that seemed to work well.
Printer cartridges are predictably expensive, but I haven't purchased one yet as a cheap refill kit works perfectly. If you must buy an inkjet it's not bad, and it's either that or an HP (which doesn't have very good support for the latest printers), since I refuse to buy another inkjet that has a non-replaceable head.
We bought an HL-1050 about 3 years ago.
The print quality is top notch. It does 10ppm iirc and just never seems to need toner.
Inkjets are good and well for photo prints but not what you need when u have a 50 page paper due in the next morning.
Just about every network printer now supports LPR, which is a lousy protocol but is the defacto Unix "standard." What more do you want -- CUPS support?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
HP paper is made by Burlington.
Casual Games/Downloads
Something like four years ago, I bought a Panasonic KX-P6300. It was, then, a no-brainer: 6ppm, 600dpi, low desk space requirements, and it was about the cheapest laser around. It got rave reviews, and was A-listed, Highly Recommended, Best Buy or whatever in just about every PC magazine there was.
And the really impressive thing is that, four years and probably 10,000 sheets later, it's still doing that same 6ppm and 600dpi it always claimed to, pretty much every time. I had one minor problem with a bit of toner stuck somewhere awkward that left marks on paper as it passed through until I found it and cleared it, and that's been it.
It's a truly excellent piece of equipment, which I'd still rate above many "personal lasers" today. I think they actually still make them, or at least did until recently...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It does 10ppm iirc and just never seems to need toner.
Ah, forgot to mention the toner.
Amazingly enough, both mine and my parents' HL-12xx printers still have their original toner cartridges. They also both have the light flashing to let the user know they need toner, but a year after it started saying so (6 months for mine), it still prints nice dark pages (I print a lot of images off teraserver and similar sites, full page coverage of >50% mean density).
So, while their toner detection method may need work, the actual toner use seems very efficient indeed.
Oh, and since someone else mentioned it, I will as well - I don't work for Brother in any way whatsoever, just a happy customer.
But you don't want to do the upgrade yourself. This job requires near-total disassembly of the feed mechanism.
There's a very funny video and parts kit available for this problem. It's a half-hour of unedited camcorder video of someone tearing down a LaserJet 5L and replacing the feed rollers. This includes the part where he drops one of the retaining clips on the floor, looks for it, can't find it, and gets another one from a parts drawer. It's almost worth the $29.95 just to see the video.
Several of the ink refil companies provide software to reset this chip into thinking the cartridge is new. Check out google and the links below.
http://www.itosn.com/ilrs/introduc.htm
http://www.inkrefill.ca/
Cheers,
Syn Ack.
About the C70, does it live up to it's speed claims?
I'm considering buying a 10 - 20 ppm laser, but the C70 claims similar speeds, and I'm interested to know if it can acutally deliver...
also, how's the black ink capacity?
Advanced users are users too!
First, the drums wear out FAR too fast for a high-capacity drum (10k pages? Pffft... I've seen single use drums that can do more).
:-) Not that I'd turn in any work printed from it though (UGH).
Two, they have a forced drum change counter.
Three, their drums are AMAZINGLY overpriced ($200 US for a drum for a printer they sold for $150 US? STUFF THAT).
Fourth, resetting the drums is a PITA. You have a cut up a home-made transparent reset sheet. Even then, all that gets you is crappy output anyways, since the drum really is worn out at that point.
When you buy a Brother, you're buying a 10k page investment.
Of course, as a tech I shouldn't hate them that much. I'm already enjoying a free, working perfectly, needed a drum reset page printer right now.
But I do like the 9-pin dot-matrix emulation, though. Heh...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I've got a SIO2PC cable, I should see if I can set it up as my PC's printer...
It can probably feed pages with a single pixel on them at 6ppm. But I wouldn't bet my life on it, the love of high margins is the root of all kinds of evil. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I bought an HP LaserJet 1200 and I love it. It doesn't have true licensed-from-Adobe PostScript, but it has something completely compatible, and I am perfectly content. Great quality, fast speed, convenient paper tray. And I do double-sided printing by manually feeding pages through a second time, and it works with no trouble.
Here is a tip if you buy one of these. It comes with 8 MB of RAM, but it is expandable; you can insert one memory module of up to 64 MB of RAM. HP sells these modules, but they are overpriced.
I went to Crucial.com and found that they sell a 64 MB module compatible with the LaserJet 1200 for under $25 so I bought one. My 1200 is maxed-out with 72 MB of RAM. For that price, why wouldn't you!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I found most all inexpensive printers were all Winprinters. They were too cheap to provide a controller. Since they are not in the printer business but in the ink business, they don't want to spend much on the razor. I think many printer manufactures get support from MS with strings attached to entice them to produce WIN only printers. MS provides the software support so the manufacture can save a bundle on hardware costs. Of course MS is not going to help the manufacture provide cross platform driver support. They are only targeting the largest protion of the market.
That is why my main printer is a networked HP Laserjet III (off a hardware printserver with linux support).
The Windows box drives the photo printer. It didn't take long to figure the diffrence in operating costs.
The truth shall set you free!
Forget the kits. Look for bulk supplies instead. I've been happy with bulk supplies. Instead of 2 or 4 oz. bottles, get the pints. Search the web for instructions for dealing with the chips, tools needed, and other supplies. Black ink at $30/pint goes a lot further than a $20 kit with a 2 oz bottle.
For color photo printing on my HP 950, this has been a big moneysaver. I run the cartridge till it burns out.
The truth shall set you free!
I got this, with the Postscript ROM, for $500. It prints from anything on my mixed network (Mac, Win, Linux) via 10/100 Ethernet, and unlike most cheap printers takes a whole ream at a time. When I was doing my shopping I found out that HP charges way too much for Ethernet and most low-end lasers have paper trays that are far too small. It actually runs about 11-12 ppm on our typical workload. HP used to be the world leaders in low and mid range printers, but it looks like companies like Samsung are preparing to eat their lunch. Too much time spent calculating executive benefits after mergers?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I guess all this discussion could be shortened a lot if anyone cared to check http://www.linuxprinting.org
l
The have a list of recommended printers (based on price, print quality with linux and manufacturer conduct) here:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/suggested.htm
Go on and read it, it will make your decision a lot easier.
P.S: Avoid HP LJ1100, we had two of them and after three months they stopped working. The repair kit HP sent us did not fix the problem.
That was my last HP, I am currently using a Kyocera mita Ecosys FS-1010, which works flawlessly under SuSE-7.3/8.0 with cups and gives very nice print results.
Moritz
I have to cast a vote for Epson. Not because thier printers are the best on the market... In fact they aren't any better or any worse than any I've tested. But the service is #1.
... My wife declares we need a scanner for all of here pics of my son. I say ok can I get a printer to.. She agrees. I go out finding an Office Max that was closing it's doors and buy both a scanner and an Epson 777 on sale. Dummy me forgot to check to see if Linux had the drivers. (ooops)
... so he wrote me personally) but for now the 710 drivers would work. Poof I'm up and running and sure enough the next version of cups drivers update had the 777.
November 2001
No drivers for the 777 in my then current Linux install. Send Epson an E-mail... Next day I get a response. They tell me that the next version of Cups will have the drivers (One the the employee's was a Linux user
May 2002 I changed the ink because it was out.. and now my printer won't recognize the new cartridges.... Call customer support... I'm under warranty. The tech has me perform a few checks to try and get it to reset... (all the tests were actually relavant too, none of this... is your printer faceing your computer or the wall BS.) No luck. The tech then tells me that my printer is dead but they have a problem.... since the no longer make my model, he can send me a new one, but it will have to be the next model up... at no charge. Well shoot me and call be a target. I'm not going to complain.. 3 days later my printer arrives via UPS with everything enclosed to send the old one back to Epson at no charge. I get a new printer. AND they even replaced the cartidges I bought since they weren't compatible with the new printer. All at no charge. Am I happy with Epson... you better believe it... Oh and guess who got the contract for my companies new printers...!
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.