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Old HP DeskJet/ScanJet Power Supplies Failing?
[null] asks: "Has anyone experienced problems with HP DeskJet printers (mostly 600 series) or ScanJet 4100C due to the power supply going bad? I've just got back from a friend whose scanner is currently toast as the power supply decided to put out something other than the 30VDC/400mA/14W it is spec'd for. I'm extremely suspicious because I have a DeskJet 660Cse with the same power supply brick that was working fine up until a month ago when it would go from printing fine to printing several sheets of garbage out of any given print job. I checked it with my tester and saw it giving out 37.5VDC (25% over spec). This link from HP PartSurfer lists the HP products using this power supply and has a picture. This power supply usually featuers a model number of C2175A molded on it. My friend's supply was listed as made by Lucent and mine is by NMB, causing me to wonder if the design itself is possibly defective. Google is not being very helpful in finding people with similar problems, and we are talking about pretty old hardware here that people would probably throw out rather than bother trying to order parts for. HP also has recalls on power supplies for DeskJet 800/900 series and some PhotoSmart 1x00 series printers. How about it, anyone else had problems?"
Almost any power supply, unless very well regulated will show a voltage higher than its rated voltage if you test it with no load. That's not likely to be the problem.
There's a few problems with this article.
The Deskjet 600 series has been around for something along the line of 8 years (I had a 660Cse with my state-of-the-art 486). If the problem is just beginning to happen now, I'd recon that the printer will already be failing due to other reasons (the 600 series has a blotting sponge, and a few other parts which are designed to fail after a few years). Finally, after 1997(?), the 600 series was demoted HP's super-cheap product line - simply put, they were horrible printers to begin with. If you want a quality printer, you're going to have to spend more than $50.
In addition, all of the Deskjet 800/900 series took power from standard two or three prong AC plugs, NOT DC transformers. The recall was due to a manufacturing defect in the plug, not the circuitry.
Finally, I'd also like to note that the power bricks for all the 600 series were interchangable, but HP changed to a significantly different design for the 700 series, and eliminated them entirely with the 800/900 series. Working in an institutino which owns 150+ Deskjet 600s, I can report that I've seen a bunch of the power bricks to fail, but the printers typically fail of other reasons long before that (very fuzzy output, excesive noise, bad paper feeders, and other mechanical failures). They typically break within 2 years of purchase for mechanical reasons.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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