Slashdot Mirror
Are Printers What They Used To Be?
Fifster asks: "Has anyone noticed any trends in terms of printer quality nowadays? Perhaps it's just me being nostalgic, but I used to have an old HP Deskjet 500 maybe...ten years ago, and it worked for years. Sure, it wasn't colour, and it was noisy and somewhat slow, but it never died. After I decided to retire it and buy a fancy new colour printer with features I don't really need, I've gone through about a printer a year. I finally decided to get a Brother HL-1440 laser printer to avoid the cost of cartridges after my last HP died after I replaced an expensive cartridge. Has anyone else noticed this trend of poorer and poorer quality printers, at least in terms of life expectancy?"
when you can buy a printer that's cheaper than the ink cartridge costs.
I bought a Lexmark for $40 at Walmart, and it's a peice of crap. To make it worse the drivers for Linux don't work with CUPS(thus not Mandrake 9.1)
printers suck
The real question would be, what's a decent quality printer these days?
Stashed in my closet is an Alps ALQ-224e, one mighty printer. You don't find them made like that anymore. It's got to weigh 30 lbs, but it could whip off draft copy fast, and best of all on fan-fold paper. Ever try to debug with your code scattered across several sheets of laser printer paper? Ugh! I'll probably keep this beast as long as it runs. I've still got two ribbons for it and they're still for sale (apparently these things were more popular outside the US, as in Europe) and ribbons are still for sale for it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I personally prefer dot-matrix printers, where you can print banners. w00t FP
I've been going through about one a year as well. I don't buy cartridges anymore, just printers.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
It COULD be that the cost of the printers you're buying has something to do with their useful life.
I had a conversation about toasters a little while ago that went the same way. Ya know - your parents toaster that they got when they were married still works, but you go through one every year or two?
Try spending 5x the money on a good toaster and see how long it lasts you.
You're citing the Deskjet as a quality printer? I had the Deskjet 500, the Deskjet 500c and some other variant of the Deskjet and they all sucked. (Don't ask me why I kept buying them). They cost in the neighborhood of $500, were loud ... slow ... and EVERY single one of them deteriorated to the point where they were useless.
The happiest day in the life of those printers was when I sent 2 of them down the garbage chute and listened for the crash at the bottom. Deskjet, a quality device? I think not.
I can buy a somewhat useable printer at the grocery store for $30. At that price I could see using it once or twice in a pinch and tossing it.
Still going strong, bought it new in mid '87...Sure, it's only 300 dpi and is slower than today's printers, but it's built like a brick outhouse.
Now that you have a Brother you'll be buying a new printer more often than you did printer cartridges.
It is no secret that HP has been building some of their printers in ways so they don't last as long, and they are also making a KILLING on ink.
Personally, I bought a Canon BJC-8200, which has six colors (Black, Dark Cyan, Dark Magenta, Yellow, Light Cyan, and Light Magenta) and uses individually replacable ink tanks. It has proven to be quite reliable and the ink is cheap. The additional colors make for much better photo prints.
Personally, I don't plan on buying another HP printer ever. (Or lexmark for that matter, with the recent DMCA nonsense).
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Sure. They pretty much give the printers away
nowadays with rebates and price. Its the ink
that they make money on. My old cannon is still
a better printer. And it had better ink cartridges, larger, cost effective, as well.
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pope is the antichrist. catholic
pedophile priest scandal:
http://home.fuse.net/gospel
I paid $700 for my HP DeskJet 550C. Now I can by 8 color printers for that price with far higher print quality. The last time my printer ran out of ink, I gave it to a friend, went out and bought a newer model, and didn't think anything about it.
I'm not complaining.
My HP 722c has been going strong for ~4 years now. So long as I can keep finding new ink for it, I can't see getting rid of it.
I do like the gadget factor of the newer models that can print photos right off of a memory stick, though.
New printers? What are those?
I'm still using the HP LaserJet Series II I got around 10 years ago.
I never buy HP printers again. The way they increased the prices for the cartdridges is not normal anymore.
Before we got the Euro the normal black cartridges where around 42 German Marks (21 Euro) and now they are around 41 Euros (82 German Marks) the prices doubled. If you want a serious printer then buy the cheapest you can get and where the cartridges are cheap as well. For the normal letter printer that most of us are, a cheap printer will do it all the time.
OK, that didn't work. But inkjet printers do just suck.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I don't think the author of this Slashdot story factored in that the price of printers has gone down steadily over the years.
"Derp de derp."
Anyway, the reason the printers get cheaper is because they want people to go buy new ones more often. And it works, therefore they make money.
I don't think this sudden trend of poor quality printers is down to manufacturing, it is proberbly because they are made to have short life-spans so that you need to go out and buy a new printer
Sell the handles (cheap HP/Epson/Cannon/etc printers) for cheap, and the blades (Cartridges) for way more then they are worth.
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
I've never owned a printer and I never plan on owning one. On the very rare occasions when I HAVE to print something (Usually once a year at tax time) I take the file to work and print it there.
I've never understood the need to print stuff out. It's hard to grep a dead tree.
But amazingly, the printer and printer supply business is going like gangbusters. Who'da thunk it???
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
If you'd cut down on all those extra u's you're putting in color and favorite, maybe your printer will last longer.
Smeghead every day of the week.
This is a corollary to Moore's Law.
Moore's Law: Every year, the density of transistors on an IC will double (i.e. smaller, faster, smarter parts).
Corollary: Every year, companies will do more manufacturing in Korea and similar countries (i.e. cheaper parts, but parts that break down quicker)
Lee Iacocca made a fortune when he decided that cars should be disposable. No wonder that consumer electronics do the same.
This trend is most evident in the market shift away from workgroup laser printers to high speed ink based printers that last far longer then laser units and don't have multiple parts that wear down (such as fusers and transfer drums). Ink printers have a purge unit, a print head, and an interpreter board. It is cheaper to avoid the costs of onsite service contracts and instead just ship out refurbished units. Both the consumaer and the manufacturer (and even the distributors) win. This is blatant when it comes to the "home office". Ever cheaper bubblejets are available while the cost of ink remains the same. It is more practical to buy a new set of $45 ink tanks then it is to replace the printer - ink that costs Canon, HP or Epson $5 to manufacture.
why they use dot-matrix printers on Futurama!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I honestly haven't had an HP printer that has worked reliably in the past 8 years. My current HP Deskjet 694c prints a full page maybe 1 out of 4 tries before jamming. My best failure was the HP Deskjet 560c. When it failed, it would still print, but anything I sent, text, graphics, it didn't matter - was printed out as a single line of smiley faces (the printable version character 1, IIRC). Very annoying.
Even at work, the printers rack up almost as much downtime as they do uptime.
On the other hand, my mother's Imagewriter she got for her Apple IIe 15+ years ago, and my old Epson RX-80 from about 20 years ago still work perfectly today. Of course, finding ribbons for them is pretty rough...
I use a canon S300 printer. The quality is great, but the thing goes through print cartridges once a month or so. Granted, I'm a college student who prints lots of papers and also LONG code listings for classes, but still, my old HP lasted 3-4 months before a new cartridge was necessary. Oh well, at least the cartridges for my Canon are only $6 when you buy them online.
~a
It's not a bug, it's a feature
Fortune magazine about 2 issues ago has a lengthy article describing what it took to create the newest generation of printers, a massive exercise in cost reduction.. its pretty interesting.
They are no longer designed to support an engineer's weight like the old ones.. i still have my Deskjet 540 and it hasn't hiccupped once yet.
Everything is a cheap piece of crap compared to Back In The Day. Of course, everything costs about 10% of what it used to, maybe about 5% if you consider inflation.
Hard drives, scanners, printers, keyboards, all crap. Strangely enough, now that I think of it, there seems to be an exception: monitors. Back in the days when you could use a HP scanner to pound a LaserJet under a house (without damaging either one) to support a sagging foundation, monitors were really expensive, and it seemed like I had to replace them often. It's been a long time since I had to replace a monitor for any reason other than "I want to."
</nostalgia>
Some bright spark[1] decided that once a person buys a printer, they are commited to it, so will have to buy the print cartridges for it. So if we make the cartridges expensive, we can still maintain our profit margins, and have continous profits rather than once off for each customer.
Now enter the business side of things. Our business customers don't want to keep buying the latest bubblejet/inkjet/crapjet every 3 months, so they produce a seperate business line of machines. Mostly these are laser based, however, there are some top-of-the-line inkjet systems that are mostly used in the printing industry (eg signs/cars/etc).
So you either buy a business quality printer, preferably laser based, and you pay good money for it. Or you do what some of my customers do:
They buy a new printer when the old print cartridge runs out. However, they are being thwarted by the print manufactores who are now selling print cartridges half full on new printers, so they buy a new cartridge with the printer (usually at a discount, since they can wrangle one with the printer), and run it till it runs dry, and pick up the next latest and greatest model.
Ok, so thats a bit extreme, but I do have one customer doing that.
Basically, printers are becoming a consumable product.
[1] Reminds me of the quote: May a bright spark grow into a flaming idiot.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
but this is a trend in any consumer electronic device. Relatives of mine are still running IBM PS/1's, while others have gone through 4 computer systems in 5 years.
The same can be applied to almost anything-cameras, cars, etc
The best printer ever, hands down. Fast (10-12 pgs/min), reliable, and compatible - with everything. I never had a problem with them. Perfect for the office environment but perhaps a bit too bulky at home.
Unfortunately they are no longer being made but many can be found on eBay. Yay HP!
- Ben
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Funnily enough, HP felt their printers were _too_ robust and needed to be flimsier.
5 3- 2,00.html
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/imt/0,15704,4194
Of course printers are getting worse in quality! Why do you think StrongBad still uses a Dot Matrix?
It's annoying when I try to show off the wonders of Linux on a friend's computer, only to find out that the printer they've got is a nice heavy paperweight outside of the Windows world.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
It's not just printers, though they are have been cheapened a lot. Computers in general have gotten cheaper. Computers used to be built like tanks with metal, and were held together with screws. Now they are made with cheap plastic and snap-together cases. Keyboards used to last for years, now you are lucky to get a year of use out of one before breaks. Even simple little things like case fans. It's rare to find an old 286 with a dead fan in the power supply, but newer systems the fan seems to croak after 1-2 years.
About the only thing that I have seen any real improvement on is mice. Getting rid of the moving parts really helped, though the buttons tend to fail on optical mice after a while. Never had that happen on a ball mouse, but then again maybe I never used one long enough for the buttons to break.
printers are given away with most computers. They tend to be pretty crummy, but people use them, because why would they want to buy a printer when they've already got one? Then they buy ink cartridges or try to refill them.
For most users who need to print things off occasionally, these cheapy-dogs are all they need...and someone with more serious printing needs knows what sort of equipment can meet those needs and shops accordingly. The trend, though, is cheapness and ubiquity, which leads to more cheap and short-lived printers on the market, as opposed to bastions of power and reliability.
Skal! AMS
Best way to go about it? Buy the cheapest USB deskjet money can buy, that comes with a cartridge. Seriously. Like $30 with rebate or something.
Why? Don't cartridges normally cost around $30? Why yes, yes they do. When the cheap printer breaks, junk it, and get another el cheapo. It may last a few cartridges if your lucky, but if it doesn't last more than one, its not a total loss.
In the meantime... I have an HP LaserJet that I bought 2 years ago that's gone through about 25,000 pages without so much of a hiccup. And I've replaced the toner only about 4 times. They're not cheap, but they're very reliable, and the drums last too.
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HP makes great laser printers.
THe problem is not the manufactors but the technology. They all blow. I do not know of 1 inkjet that is reliable. Not one!
Epson is bad, cannon is worse, hp is ok, and lexmark makes medicore ones.
Since I upgarded to laser for the same price as a high end inkjet my problems went away. No streaking, paper jams, unexplained errors. Ok in a year I did have a single paper jam when I feed it dusty paper.
In an inkjet, dusty paper would cause the ink to streak and the printer heads to clog. With a laser printer it just james on ocasion. The text is always clear and it always works.
Inkjet vs laser is like modem vs cable modem/dsl. Its not the speed but the reliability of it always on and working.
http://saveie6.com/
A friend came across a rather interesting dilemma when he had to replace his ink cartridge - we both went to the local computer store and found out that the price of a new replacement cartridge was slightly less than a totally new printer. This new printer also included a new cartridge - he opted for the new printer since it was USB and his old one was parallel.
So as other posters have indicated - printers are becoming more and more disposable (it looks as if a lot of other pc components are becoming this way as well)
i.e Mouse not scrolling properly because there is so much filth and dirt on the ball contacts? Don't bother cleaning it - get a new one!
There is also the availability of ink cartridge refill kits which although void warranty - seem to be a cheaper alternative to buying a new one.
That's just my opinion. All those cheap printers on the market (specilally inkjet printers) have hidden costs and they don't last long. I don't currently have a printer but when time comes to buy one, I'll probably buy an low-end to mid-end HP laserjet with native postscript support (I don't intend to print color, so B&W is fine).
The last (come to think of it, the only) printer I bought was a LaserWriter II NTX from a junk sale at the university I worked at; I paid $50 for it about ten years ago. (Hm, come to think of it, I might have spent a few bucks on the ImageWriter II as well.) I had to get a repair kit to fix a problem with sticking paper feeders on the NTX, but it's been running like a top otherwise. Someone gave me a color inkjet printer for free because it had a Mac-only interface once; I spent the money for new ink carts, and they were dried up, plugged up, and uselesss inside of a month because I didn't use it often enough. Waste of money.
The laser printer works with all my machines at home: my G3, my iMac, my iBook, and my Newton, all over a LAN using an SE/30 as a print server. As soon as the toner cartridge I ordered tonight comes in, it'll be back up and running full time again.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I am only in college so I haven't seen that many printers come and go. Although, the first computer my family bought (in 1995) came with an HP Deskjet 400 that still runs pretty well today. Many of my classmates have Canon Bubblejets that have operated consistently and cheaply (8-10 dollars per cartridge) for three years. In the office where I work the five year old bubblejet is the most dependable of all the printers, even next to the laser printer.
I am sure these kinds of things vary and the bubblejet isn't the first choice if you need super quality or high volume, but it works well for the occasional color spreadsheet with charts.
That is just my experience, and since I am no expert on printers (that takes a special breed), that is all I have.
Yes, printers are mostly throw away these days. Also, notice that most (all?) printer manufactures have at any given time two dozen current models each which uses a different cartridge! And the printer you bought yesterday is now obsolete and the new models are just different and do not provide any descernable enhancements. It seems to me that it would alot easier to support a several printer models instead of several dozen. I think HP is the winner in this category.
In addition, I wish somebody would come up with a standardized cost-per-page printer metric, much like you find on kitchen appliances for energy consumption.
Way-back I used to use dot-matrix printers. They were great because they just kept chugging along, spewing out reems of ugly dotty print and making lots of noise.
When the ribbons started running out you could even give them a squirt of WD40 to help the ink on the outer margins wick its way back into the printing area -- and they'd print like (near) new again for a few more weeks.
The cost of a new ribbon (which lasted several boxes of paper -- about 5,000 pages of program listings) was around 5% of the printer price so they were very cheap to run.
Then came the laser printers.
Much higher quality, much faster but a little harder on the pocket.
These days however, inkjets rule. Every computer store you go into has row upon row of these evil devices -- each with their little laminated samples of photo-quality printing attached.
When they're new, these printers do a great job. They're quiet, the quality is superb and they're pretty fast -- considering the previous two statements.
However -- thanks to big high resolution screens and better development tools I find that I seldom need to print program a listing and virtually all of my correspondence is done by email -- without a drop of ink being used.
This means that I might not fire up my inkjet printer for weeks or even months at a time.
But when I do -- the bloody thing is almost always suffering from clogged nozzles -- requiring (at best) a cleaning cycle (which wastes $$$ worth of ink) or, in the case of an Epson, the total junking of the printer.
So what's the answer for low-volume, very intermittent printer user?
The cost of a laser is hard to amortize over a hundred or so pages a year, inkjets hardly last a single cartridge of ink before clogging up, and dot-matrix printers are not only rare as hen's teeth but they're still noisy, slow and produce ugly print.
Anyone got any ideas.
I have an old HP Laser Series II that is more then ten years old and still working almost perfectly. (For reference it was first used on an IBM 8086) The only work that I ever have to do to it is replace the toner cardridge and clean it out once in a while. The only problems it has ever given me was when I used cheap generic cartridges that leaked toner (took a lot of cleaning to bring it back to life). Though the printer cost a fortune when I bought it, it print documents nearly as good as any new laser printer and its pretty fast. The only real downside is if you want to print graphics, it just doens't have enough memory to handle that, but for everything else its great. This printer has actually outlived 4 computers, and is currently attached to its 5th.
Compare this to any of the newer printers I have bought recently. All of the DeskJets and lower end laserjets seem to die for various reasons. The most common being the rubber rollers drying out. What I can't figure out, is why these old rollers on my LaserJet Series II have survived while these don't. Even the higher end printers like the 8100 series seem to have considerably more problems with jams and such (granted the 8100 has a much more complicated paper path then my old printer).
Still, for me it was certainly worth paying the extra money once and having a quality pritner that lasted, rather then going through 5 cheaper ones that would break and cause agrivation.
Sadly, I work in a retail environment, so I have a little insight into this area.
Printers, nowadays, are made to last about 2 months longer than the manufacturer's warranty period. Why? Because it gives meaning to the retail store's warranty. If you buy a machine with no extended warranty, and it breaks 2 months after the manufacturer's warranty is over, what do you do? You can't return it, it's been more than 30 days since purchase. You can't call the manufacturer, because their warranty is over, and they owe you nothing. Next time you buy a machine, though, you will (most likely) get that extended warranty for an additional $30.
But aside from that, here is a list of home use printer manufacturers to stay away from:
1) Lexmark
In terms of machine life span, expect no more than one year from Lexmark. And even then, they are riddled with problems such as drawing the paper in crooked. Also, companies such as Dell and Compaq bulk purchase Lexmark printers and rebrand them, so stay away from them as well.
Epson is much better than Lexmark, however their newer printers are very picky about what paper and ink you use. In fact, if you use the name brand epson ink but not epson paper, chances are that the ink will run or absorb wrong and your print will look all sorts of bad. When you use all of their propriety stuff, it looks great, but you pay more for that great look. Much more.
HP makes high quality printers. The prints look great, they are fast, and they have all sorts of features like digital camera card readers and little color LCD screens that let you see what picture you are about to print out. With these toys comes a much higher price tag. Also, their ink system for their home line of printers sucks. The machines put much more ink on the paper than is needed and the cartridges cost quite a bit to replace. HP overall is a good brand to go with, but not for long-term usage. If you buy an HP, buy the warranty. Trust me, you will use it.
Canon is by far the best manufacturer in terms of home use machines right now. Their S series has machines that fit almost everybodys' needs, including the s750 which is great for small offices that need speed but not photo quality, and the s820 that prints beautiful photos but isn't the fastest. Canon is also the only company that is making inexpensive cartridges for their machines and using them as a standard for the entire model line. They are even cheaper if you get the generic brand, and have a much lower failure rate due to their simplicity.
Brother's laser machines are great and last a long time (if they work right out of the box, but that's another issue), but never, ever get one of their inkjet machines. Low print quality, leaky cartridges, over-charging for replacement ink, etc. Laser machines are great, inkjets suck.
Lastly, Sharp makes a copier that can be used as a laser printer. It's main use is a copier, but can be hooked up through the USB port to act as a color scanner and laser printer. It gets good quality and is pretty quick, but toner is a bit costly in these machines to use as a daily printer, so I wouldn't recommend it.
I believe that covers them all, so let's hear the flaming from Lexmark fanboys. If there are any real questions or requests for elaborations, I will reply to those.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
at the risk of being one of those people who says "things aren't what they used to be" i will say that this aren't the way that they used to be.
my atari 800 still works well today, and have 5 1/4 inch floppy disks for it that are still usable. typical 3 1/2 inch floppies today might have bad sectors out of the box, and almost always have bad sectors by the time they are a few month old.
also, i have a few times replace replaced broken manyX cdrom drives on newer machines with old 2X or 4X cdrom drives that never have had any problems. these drives are about 8 years old and still run with no problem. and these cdrom drives were certainly cheap drives when they were bought.
i have done similar things with monitors and network cards.
as far as printers are concerned, an old HP4 laserjet from ebay is a better bet than a new random deskjet - wheels might need to be replaced every once in a while, but i know of many or these that work well with no problem.
of course, it may just be that these old things that are still around are around because they worked, and we have forgotton about those things that no longed worked. tried and true is better than untried and new.
I have a laserjet 2 1/2. Was a laserjet 2 with over 100k pages on it, ripped the laserjet 2 controller board out not so long ago to replace it with a laserjet 3 board. The thing is built like a tank, and everything but the controller boards is available OEM (at that point HP was still using generic engines).
Nowadays with everything specialized to the manufacturer, and almost no metal in the printers, yeah, they're crap. Buy an old LJ though, cost you about $50, and you'll never need a another printer for a decade. Plus you'll pay $30 for 2000 pages worth of toner.
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
Your HP was rock-solid, your Brother sucked. What is changing?
Yes, old HP printers are practically invincible workhorses, and new HP printers are proof that HP has become an ink company.
My parents happen to own a Brother HL-1440 and they think it's terrific. I think the printer was bought back in 1998. Still running fine after I binged on it for printing out numerous essays and applications. I think the printer's quality is what you can expect for a sub-$500 piece of electronic gadgetry. I work--no frills--but for the price, it's Okay.
I also have a coder friend that also has a Brother laster printer and I don't think I've ever heard him complain about it ever. Maybe you're expecting too much?
Buy the $89 printer that has been out for 2 years. then go spend $50 on the costco ink cartriges. For $140, you'll have a good printer, and 3 years of ink (yes... if that isn't 3 years, then get a laser printer for all your docs). After that, throw it out.
Perhaps it's just me being nostalgic, but I used to have an old HP Deskjet 500 maybe...
Nah, you're mistaken. A Deskjet isn't old enough for nostalgia.
Not even a dot matrix is.
No, it's not nostalgia until you've reached daisy wheel.
The coolest voice ever.
We had a Panasonic Laser Parner (model number forgotten) with our first Pentium, a long time ago. (it still had a card slot for font expansion) The thing doesn't exactly make me wish for the 'good ol' days'. The drum developed a defect that left vertical absences of toner on the whole sheet, plus the paper cartridge stuch out of the printer and was held on by 2 flimsy plastic tabs. Broke 3 times in a week, then we gave up and just held it in place.
So, there was nothing special about 6 years ago. Printer manufacturers haven't gotten lazy. They just recognized their target market: people want cheap printers, not high-quality expensive printers. They are especially not concerned with speed, for the most part. As long as it looks good when printing out your 3 page English paper, people won't complain. The Dell Guy doesn't need PostScript support, like he doesn't need 15 ppm color. He also doesn't need so spend more than $75. It's just another concequence of computing for the masses.
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
We are replacing our netwrok printers with networked photocopiers, the outright cost is a heap more but in the long run its much much cheaper..
Gives me a chance to consolidate all those "extra" things like scanners and small deskjets..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Printers have definitely gotten shoddier over the years. From iron tanks in the 80's to flimsy plastic toys today. But then on the other hand, for an affordable price, they print beautiful 600dpi photorealistic prints of you and your loved ones on the beach.
Seems to be the case for a lot of things: we've sacrificed quality and long life for cheap, convenient throw-away garbage.
It simply seems to be the cost/profit question is always answered by "reduce QA staff and product quality, increase glitz and marketing."
It doesn't seem all depressing, however. If you go out and spend $5,000 on a printer today, you'll find that the product you get is fairly rugged and dependable. You just need to shell out the extra $4,200 for that long life.
fifth sigma, inc.
The quality of "free printing at work" is never to be rivaled by anything coming out of HP, Lexmark, or Brother.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I have this relic of a printer, a dot matrix LQ-1500 from the early 80's that still prints great, and probably will another 20 years. heh.
CSE stands for Crappy Sheets of Expensive. They didn't even put the effort into ending the phrase properly with a noun.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
America What a country!
Activity can create the wonderful illusion of productivity! ---Me
I see the occasional busted deskjet cross my path, and while they're not typically worth repairing, I have found one easy fix that's saved a handful of printers from the trashbin.
Sometimes a deskjet will just start freaking out while printing -- skipping lines, not printing to the edge of the page, weird stuff like that.
There is a clear plastic ribbon that runs horizontally from one side of the machine to the other. It is usually just above and behind the metal bar that the cartridge assembly is carried on. Look closely, and you'll notice that there are finely pitched vertical lines printed on this ribbon. As the printheads move across the paper, a sensor counts the number of lines and as a result the printer can determine where on the paper the printhead is.
Very often, this ribbon will be soiled by inks, dust, etc... Take a soft lint-free cloth, wet it lightly with isopropyl alcohol, pinch the ribbon between cloth-lined fingers, and wipe across the entire length of the ribbon. You might be surprised at the amount of crap that you pick up.
Anyway, someone out there might find this useful...
And when I was a child, I used to WALK TO SCHOOL... IN THE SNOW... UPHILL... BOTH WAYS!
Are we getting older now? (please say it isn't so!)
ive got a IIP plus and hte only problem is the letter tray has a serious jamming problem that stems from static...when the weather gets more humid it should print better but even so, when it feels like grabbing paper, it goes like a champ
Bottles.
So fed up with Inkjet printers, esp. colour printers. I remember everytime I ever printed in colour. It was the first day the printer came home, printed a photo. Thats it.
Laser all the way. One year later still works like the day I bought it (knock, knock)
I've got a 15-year old Tandy DMP300 that still prints great (If you just want text)
I had an HP 712C that I bought so long ago I can't remember... still cranking away.
I bought an HP 932C in 8/2001... it died 1/2002, 16 months.
Replaced with an HP 960C in 2/2002... died 12/2002... 11 months.
Replaced with an HP PhotoSmart 7150... died in 3 days...
Now I'm back with my old faithful 712C and Lexmark Optra S 1250N that haven't stopped working since I bought them.
That's exactly why printers, and many other electronic devices, increasingly, suck. When you went to Walmart, did you do a thorough comparison of the quality of these devices? Did you get test pages, check the durability of the construction, and ask the opinions of other people who owned them? Of course not, if you had that $40 printer would still be on the shelf at WalMart.
The problem is that today, most people are comparing devices based on price and nothing else. So, if a manufacturer can undercut its competitors prices by reducing the quality a few notches they'll do it every time. Until consumers, in general, prioritize things like quality and customer service over price, you can expect devices to continue to suck.
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I bought a HP 855C for $500 back in the day. That thing was pretty good. Finally a roller fell out and I could not figure out how to get it apart to get it back in so now the paper feed crooked. The kids use it now. I replaced it with a HP 842C for $150 and I love this printer. I don't print much but it is working great, yes it is cheaper built but it was 1/4th the cost and it actually prints faster and higher res.
I had a Canon BJC-6000 before the 855C and it sucked. I will only buy HPs if only for the way the paper loads.
...the Apple LaserWriter II series.
I can't find an exact release date on them after a few minutes of Googling, but they are all well over 10 years old and plenty of my clients still have a few of them around. They aren't the fastest printers, but they are built like tanks and the toner carts are fairly generic and still rather widely available.
I wanted something a little better, so in 1994 I bought a ~$1400 LaserWriter Select 360, IMHO one of the best printers Apple ever made. 600DPI, 10PPM, 16MB maximum RAM, and even an internal fax card option. My Select 360 will be 10 in February, and it shows no sign of its age.
The newer printers I work on just feel cheap and insubstantial to me, especially the inkjets. And if this DMCA crap they're pulling to keep third parties from making toner/ink carts continues, I will keep my older printer for as long as I possibly can, with the help of fixyourownprinter.com, if necessary.
~Philly
I bought a sub-$100 HP printer that works fine for the occasional job, but I do remember spending about $500 for a similar printer 5 years ago. I imagine if I spent the same dollars today I would have a very nice printer indeed.
Components are getting cheaper, not necessarily better. Spend some money; get a better product. Unless it's the difference between Tommy Hilfiger and J.Crew, you usually get what you pay for. Imagine that.
-Dean
I like my Raven 2400 Colour, it prints txt just like a ink jet (but a little slower and more loud) And for pictures there readable. Not the best but it does the job. And it's probably cheaper per page. Since the ink is dirt cheap
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
For me a low end printer costs ~ $100 and is for printing:
drafts
shopping lists
non archived items
On the other hand a mid level printer is about $2-3000. (In days back a apple laserwriter ][, currently a HP4050 w/ duplexer, 64M). They never want to die. I replaced the laserwriter because of its size. ouch.
So toner costs were high, it would last months printing 1000s of pages. Much better than ink. I use printers like that for printing:
PDF manuals (both sides of the page)
archival material
in the past final assigments, now proposals
etc...
Color is a different story, I think inkjet color has come a long way, but it still requires good paper.
just my 10 bits ;)
This could explain why the LCD prices have not fallen sharply despite increased demand. Most monitor manufacturers made CRT monitors that last, making it difficult to convince anyone to replace theirs and contributing to a stagnant stock.
Personally, I hope that the rise of the LCD vs the CRT does not mirror the rise of inkjet vs laserprinter. Cheaper, crappier, guaranteed to need replacing just after 1 year warranty runs out.
I have the above printer, got it back in 1995. It's still going nicely. I will definately go for a laser once it does die.
I do a great deal of work that requires a printer. I got tired of spending money on ink and new printers, so I will get a good draft, burn it to CD and then drive two minutes to Kinkos where I make a nice color print out for $1.00. That will server as my first proof. If I am going to do any flyers for my band I do the same. They can run me off black and white straight from a CD at .10 a pop. In the long run that became cheaper than replacing cartridges, especially since it happens at least once a week.
They are cheap because they figured you geeks wanted bells and whistles, not quality.
Why would anyone ever use more than one?
Is the HP LaserJet IID I snagged when my office upgraded...along with 3 extra toner cartriges (enough to print for years on...) Over a decade old, 2 paper sizes, 300 dpi, auto-duplexing, the works ('cept for color)...it even works fine with my mandrake laptop Of course, then, it does weigh 70 lbs...
Ceci n'est pas un post.
My HP LaserJet 6L has always been touchy, but now it is grabbing up to 10 or more sheets of paper with each feed (yes I follow the "remove paper before reloading" mandate). It prints fine, but I just throw away too much paper due to printer jams. I ended up buying a new one last week (on the way!), the same Brother printer the poster purchased.
Watch for my LaserJet on eBay any day now!
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've noticed that trend to, I chucked two inkjets recently in the past year, after my LJ 5 started jamming alot. I also have some 1 GB SCSI drives from circa 92 that are still going strong even though in the past 2 years I've had a 10 GB laptop drive crash, a 10 GB Quantum Fireball, and a 60GB Maxtor crash on me. And I hear noises coming from my 30GB IBM now, every morning it still works I am amazed.
I went from a dot matrix printer to a Panasonic laser about 12 years ago. I paid $850 for it but it worked flawlessly for five years. Since then I have averaged an inkjet printer a year. The worst being a Cannon that only worked reliably through the first set of cartridges. The thing I find most annoying is none of the inkjets have black only with a nice big cartridge. I print far more black than I do color. The color inkjets all shut down after you run out of color. I literally once was trying to print up an invoice so I could get paid. I had ironically planned to buy new ink cartridges with part of the money. I lucked out because I had saved an old cartridge that was 99% empty. My next printer is going to be a laser.
I'm still using an Brother HL-8, mechanically the same as the HP Laserjet. This is a 1984 model. It is in it's last days, as some of the feed rollers need replacing. It's slow but it still works.
printer things like hp/cannon inkjets have become throw away consumables.
Companies, sell them cheap & make money off the cartridges. After all, where's the money to be made in a printer that lasts 5-6 years & uses standard carbon or ink???
I still think the higher end corporate network printers are a bit more robust. but then your still stuck with buy proprietary cartridge refills.
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
"On the other hand a mid level printer is about $2-3000. "
Nah, that'd be a high level printer. Mid-level would be in the $200-$300 range. My Brother 1440 laser printer was $300 a year ago, I expect it to last at least 2-3 years. Plus it does all the stuff I wanna right now.
For under $100 I could get it at either 32 or 64 meg of RAM, I'm not sure how high it can go but Crucial.com has the RAM for it pretty cheap.
"Derp de derp."
I still use an hp deskjet 500. actually had it since i had a pc running win3.1 way back in the day. i get cheap knockoff cartridges, like $15/each. compusa has them. using under linux now... having soem problems with printing pdf files. other than that, works great. and yeah, i think it's immortal, i've banged it around, several dorms/apartments, competitions, etc. i love it.
While what you are saying about decreasing prices being offset by the cost of consumables. If your $40 printer dies quickly then you aren't going to spend enough on consumables to offset the printer company's costs in the original printer. Seems like it would be in their interest to make cheap printers, but yet ones that would last forever so that people would keep buying more ink for them.
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The best inkjet ever made was the 500c, photo output sucked but otherwise rocks, my dad's small business still has two that work a decade later. One of the best photo printers ever made was the origional Tektroniks phaser, likewise I know people that still have working units. Best laser printer would have to be either the Laserjet3, or Laserjet 4M, both are workhorses that refuse to die (I had a Laserjet 3 that I worked on, 500K pages, only reason I was working on it was that the single plastic gear had plastic rotted from age, everything else was metal =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The quality of printers has gone down lately accross the board. After messing with inkjet after inkjet and longing for my old Epson ESP/5000 dot matrix, I ran accross a Lexmark Optra S laser printer at a local computer show for $150.
It was the best printer investment that I ever made. 15ppm at 600x600 dpi with network card, built-in web server for printer status, telnet to enter PJL commands, an ftp server that you can ftp postscript files directly to (it understand ps natively) and even a built-in lpd daemon that talks to UNIX lpd -- all built-in to the printer!
They sell pretty cheap on ebay. Forget the poor quality inkjets, pick up a used laser that is a few years old with all the bells and whistles. Unless you want color, I pretty much guarantee that you won't be disappointed!
The price of computers has dropped almost as dramatically as the price of printers, yet I expect to get at least 5 years out of a computer (before it becomes physically unusable, not before it becomes obsolete or has to have a single part replaced) and I haven't ever been disappointed. Printers, on the other hand...I haven't seen a new printer last more than a year without becoming irreparable since the '80s... I think there's something more sinister going on here...
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I'll take this Ask Slashdot as a call for nostalgic stories of beloved old printers. Back in my idealistic days, I used to run a network of 30 devices, server, shared internet connections with a capital and maintainance budget of $3000 dollars a year for a wee non-profit. This was possible since we didn't run Windows and bought all equipment when it was 3+ years obsolete. We relied on sturdy, underappreciated hardware. We had a fleet of HP 4L's and 5L's. When they started eating 5 pages at once, some guy in Williamstown could fix the rollers for $75 ($3 parts - but I never dared do it myself - its apparently pretty easy to destroy some stuff in there). I wouldn't be suprised to see that they are still running.
But if you want quality, I'd say find a HP720 or 722 , (the best personal color printer ever made IMHO), and a brother laser. (I really like brother lasers. The toner is about 30 bucks, same as a color cartrage, lasts very long, and the whole thing is small and reliable.)
I do security
For me, it's been a bitter-sweet progression over the years.
The first "real" printer I ever bought was an Epson FX-286 wide carriage dot matrix printer, 17 or 18 years ago. The print quality is typical crappy dot matrix, but the printer still works (although I haven't re-inked the ribbon now for several years), and it never missed a dot.
The next printer was an Epson EPL-7000 laser printer, purchased probably around 14 years ago when I needed better graphics capabilities and letter quality printing. The print quality of course was much better (300 dpi), and this printer also still works well and has never had any problems, although it tends to curl paper even more than most laser printers. The toner cartriges are very espensive in comparison to other small lasers, but they also last very long.
Then things started changing. I began buying inkjet printers for their color capability. I first bought an HP Deskjet 855C. This printer worked for about four or five years until it stopped printing properly in color. I still use it as a backup monochrome printer.
Still wanting color, I replaced the HP with an Epson Stylus Color 1520 wide format inkjet printer. By this time the print quality was quite good - 720x1440 and it did a pretty decent job printing photos even though it's only a four color printer. This printer still works; however, I have had constant paper feed problems with it, and the head nozzels clog occasionally if it goes more than three or four weeks without being used. Presumably this is due to the fine geometry print heads.
Wanting better photo quality, I recently purchased an Epson Stylus Photo 1280 about a year ago. This printer still works of course and seems to have fewer paper feed problmes than the 1520, but the head clogging problem is worse. At least a few nozzels clog almost every time that the printer goes unused for more than two weeks. The photographic output quality, however, is exceptional (although perhaps not quite as good as can be had today).
Clearly, the higher volumes and lower prices have brought about a reduction in quality and longevity of printers, but what do you expect - you get what you pay for. The flip side is that the quality of the output, particularly for photographs, is better than it has ever been, and you are paying much less for most newer printers, so they don't owe you much when they die after only a few years.
Yep, another LaserJet Series II still going strong here too. 300dpi is still more than good enough for the average document. It's pretty big and doesn't really fit well under or on my computer desk, but other than that it's a great printer. I'm at least the 3rd owner, my boss bought it, then I believe gave it to one of his kids during college, and they brought it back and now I have it.
I've never been eager to buy an inkjet as long as the cartridges are so expensive. I'd gladly pay twice as much for the printer if I could get the cartridges for a reasonable price.
The first printer I had was an HP Deskjet. It was loud, slow, print quality was poor, and it died after a year or so. The next one was an Epson, and it was also slow and loud, but it lasted about 3 years. Just recently I got a Canon. It's fast, and it's too quiet, because I can't even tell if it's working or not, since it's virtually silent. I've only had it a few months, so I can't compare life, but it was way cheaper than any other printer I ever had, print quality is as good as you could ask for, and it does the whole seperate ink cartridges for each color thing. I've been happier and happier with each successive printer I've had.
If anyone here is looking into a new inkjet printer, this is what I have and I would highly recommend it.
At home we got a HP Laserjet 4 about Thanksgiving 1992 for I think $1100(don't quote me) Still works and works very nice. Page count to over 35,000 last I checked (about a year ago). Works fine. One point looking at it we had it doing 1000/pages a month (only like 3 months after my mom started doing lots of Ebay stuff).
Yearbook in High school, they got a HP LaserJet 1100(I think it was Spring 1999), worked fine until the pickup roller thing started sucking multiple pages at once. After we got the fix for that it worked just fine. On deadlines that would do a few hundred sheets in the two weeks or so leading up to it. So not super high load, but it held up.
Right now I got a HP LaserJet 1200 on my machine at college, have only printed 1797 pages so far, has postscript support and can do 1200 dpi, as well as using standard (I think) 100 pin SODIMMs to expand the memory. Got this thing in August 2002 for IIRC $400 and max volume/month accord to HP is about 10,000 pages. (yeah, like I'm really pushing it, although I am printing out the PDF files of my CS121 text out on it. Up to chapter 11 and 538 pages (2x sided so really 269 sheets of paper). Haven't been able to run it through a good hard endurance test, but so far it seems to do fine.
Inkjets may be nice for color inexpensively (compared to a color laser I mean), but for black and white gimmie my laser printer.
As for quality? Got a freeby color inkjet (about $200 I think) when we got a computer in 1996. Between the $35 for color ink (and the fact it is either black or the color in there) and it went so slow I have used it I think 3 times.
So agreeing with other people, you get what you pay for.
I used to have an Epson. Luckily, I bought it through a warehouse chain..Costco. I have since moved coasts and new store. One year later, two changes of ink trying to "deep clean" the cartridge (25% of the ink each time you try).
I called Epson help desk, and the help desk said I was screwed...for the low, low price of what you originally payed 10 months ago, you can have a new one. I trumped by stating that I would return it to the warehouse store. Quote, "Well, good on you, I would not give you a dime for that piece of crap and neither will Epson."
So, I ran as fast as I could, grabbed the no question return policy, and bought a HP. Quality, great. Ink lasted about six months. I am actually pleased...but I will never buy another Epson.
First, you get what you pay for. This cannot be said enough and tehcnology is not immune to this simple law of economics. I use an Epson Photo Stylus 2200. I bought this printer after my Epson 1520 died. I was able to print a high quality book of my design work and sent around 10 of the 18 to design firms around Boston. Every single person I sent the book to commented on the high quality of the print. Personally I was amazed by the excellent color consistency from screen to print. I give Adobe InDesign most of the credit here. My point is I paid ~$700 for this printer and it's already paid for itself. In a very dead market I was able to land a new design job. Had I bought a cheap printer the reaults would have not been as good. Cartridges are ~$10 a piece but I can replace any of the 7 tanks individually so I'm not throwing away ink.
I currently own an epson 1270 & and epson 2200
Both are excellent and get constant use and i've had no problems.. they weren't cheap when they came out either.
you get what you pay for...
Was looking to buy a printer recently. Checked out fine print on HP ink cartridges. Seems the chip in them will make them stop working at a specific date even if ink remains. When are they putting the chip in the printer to make it nonfunctional at a specific date? They'll probably call it a "lifetime" warrenty - Hey it's only got a two month lifespan - it lived a full life.
One contributing factor in the "old days" was of course IBM, and VAX and XEROX did not sell printers per say, they actually sold maintinence contracts. thus making expendable products was not part of the philiosophy. As we enetered the more modern model of "commodity printers", The goal of a printer manufacturer is to make a printer that will with predictable certainty outlast its warrantee and be able to handle some abuse in shipping and use. With immature/unsophisticated manufacturing this meant expensive printers to achieve sufficient reliabilty on average. as they did more research at design and manufacturer the printers became simpler and cheaper to build so that they would last just long enough. In the consumer market price selection dominates other attributes like reliability so there you go. a race to the bottom. on the other hand printers are much cheaper than they used to be.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
> Printer manufacturers realized -maybe 10 years ago- the same thing that game manufacturers realized more recently; that far greater proffits await those who seek out continuous revenue streams.
That may be true, but it still doesn't explain the drop in quality of printers. I can't buy your cartridges if my printer doesn't work, and if I have a bad experience I am likely to take my cartridge business to various competitors until I find one that sucks the least.
> As I recall, some would-be cartridge vendors have sued printer manufactuters claimin that this practice is anti-competitive.
It's Lexmark, who manufactures Dell's rebranded printers as well.
You don't *have* to buy a new printer.
I got hooked on laser printers when I dragged home a Brother HL-645M from a rummage sale. It smeared about a pound of toner on the sheet, but man did the TeX output look good!
Since I didn't want to go out right away and buy a new laser at USD 150-200 or more, esp. when I had a yukky old HP 612C sitting on the desk, I went for used printers. Tried about four of them, altogher spending about USD 45 (coinidentially, almost the same price as a new cartridge for the HP 612C) You'd be amazed what you can get. I've seen plenty of the vaunted HP II and III series at thrift shops (although many lack paper trays, and I'd bet plenty also do a "50 Service" or similar if I had bothered to check them out), and once a very nice NEC PostScript laser (excellent output-- only problem was a very loud feed mechanism and a high operating cost) for $10.
I ended up going for a Samsung 1210 because I wanted a warranty, and have been satisfied, but if you want a tank, just because you can't get a new tank doesn't mean you can't get a tank.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I've had it for 3 years, and no problems. Well, one problem once, with Office 2k on a laptop, but I blame microsoft for that! ;)
Infact, I'm even using the wrong drivers (for the 850, actually) for it on some of my machines (network printer) and it works fine.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The best inkjet I had was the Canon BJC-4200. It had seperate ink tanks, so you could replace the blank tank for ~$7.00 and not have to replace the print head every time (though you could if you wanted to). It also had seperate black and color tanks, so if you didn't print color that often, and the color tank dried up, you weren't completely SOL - you could just buy a new color tank.
Linux support was great - it accepted plain ASCII input (ie: you could cat a text file to lp0), and once RedHat 4.2 came out, there were built-in ghostscript drivers to print PS. I never had a problem with it in 5 years - I only got rid of it when it physically broke (mainly because it got stepped on). The closest replacement I ever found was a BJC-2100, but it still didn't beat my 4200 for reliability. Recently, Canon's history of working with the free software community has sucked, but regardless the 4200 was the best printer ever.
However, I too gave up on inkjets and bought a LaserJet 1200, and I haven't looked back. I still have my BJC-2100 for when I need to print in color, which is rare. But HP's office/home-office printers have always been great and reliable, and if you can afford them, and don't care about color, there's no better laser printer. Just so long as you don't get the shitty "home" printers, like the 1000, which are basically big honking paperweights. But any of their entry-level printers that speaks postscript is a good deal.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
If you want quality you have to pay for it. It was at least a couple hundred bucks for a good ink jet 5 years ago, and they lasted a while. Even before that 10 years ago a DeskJet would last for 5 years , easy. As computers have become more popular the prices of devices have dropped and quality has tanked as the result.
Now, if you really want a good printer, then don't buy the $40 ink jet from Walmart, so you can buy $30 cartridges and have a printer last for a year. Go and buy a "business/commercial" inkjet. Sure they are $250-$350 but they actually are built better and the cartridges are cheaper.
This is its not just printers, Its just about everything. Companies put out junk products for two reasons.
:) )
1: People will buy it cause its cheaper
&
2: Causes people to buy a new more one often which keep a revinue stream flowing.
What is not mentioned much is that in this junk food comsumer market we create far more waste then is necessary by constantly having to replace crap products that these companies put out.
This lack of quality flows into about everything I see on the market. A good example is board games. I picked up a couple for my kids lately and the quality is CRAP. These are games that I also had as a kid and I distinctly remember them being better quality. Specifically they were Trouble, Hungry Hungry Hippo, and Guess Who. (Yes, my kids are still to young to get them playing Risk or Axis and Allies with daddy
I Wrote meself a Win2K driver for the Imagewriter dot matix spooled through a RS232 interface from my modded XBOX to my Apple ][+. Works like a champ for the text pr0n. talk about quality ascii pr0n... :)
btw, see http://linuxisforbitches.com. *BSD will not die especially with a US DOD grant for 2+ mil for open bsd dev. too many dummies trying to make Linux secure IMHO (and fuckyou stallman - you should be a politician since your opinion means shit).
A real OS is OS/400 or S/390. I've worked with both that past 8 years. rockfuckinsolid. Linux is for the little league since the platform has *yet* to be proven on big iron.
btw, don't say that it has been proven on IBM big iron HW, it's been almost a year since it was supported so we'll see... I piss on LEEENOOKS just for fun and hope to continue doing so.
Like a director is going to trust SW from a bunch of opensource fags... truth hurts.
Get a reason to be taken seriously and *maybe* someone will listen...
If you don't print out very many documents, and you have a car, simply send your documents electronically to Kinko's! They've got nicer printers than the average Joe can afford, plus it's convenient to send stuff over the web (or email, if your Kinko's guy likes you).
I have a Laserjet II and there is a little sticker at the back that says it was built in november 1992. I bought it used, but I know that before I got it, it was heavily used in a office.. on the secratarie's desk. Sure, its not color.. and its not very fast.. But it prints very very well, and the ink is very cheap.. So I highly recommend old laser printers... old HPs.. (Laserjet 2-3-4) or old "professional grade" laser printers. some of them are very big.. but they are very solid.. and you can get cheap ink
I bought a Samsung ML1430 for $180 after rebate. On the toner shipped in box I'm at 3000+ pages. Toners are about $50-60 for this printer. On my crappy old Lexmark I was buying a $30 cartridge every 900 pages.
If you don't need color, go with laser.
sig
EVERYthing I've seen in the last decade or so in the electronics field, with the rare exception of some very high-end (and expensive, if bought new) test equipment, has been suffering from a progressive degradation in quality of design and physical build. Here's just a few examples:
1A2 Key Telephone Systems: Rugged as all get-out. Granted, they need one 25-pair cable per phone, but they just Kept On Going, and they had a nice balance of features perfect for small and medium-size businesses. My own has lasted over 25 years, and in all that time I've replaced maybe a couple of fuses and one bridge diode.
Their fate: All 1A2 equipment recalled by AT&T was destroyed by crusher and recycled. I guess it was TOO reliable to the point where it competed effectively with newer and cheaper crap. They're still made by ITT/Comdial, but their heyday passed with the death of the 'ever-better engineering' philosophy propagated by the original Bell System.
Tektronix: Used to be THE name in oscilloscopes, RF spectrum analyzers, and other gear. In the year 1998, they stopped including schematics and servicing info in their instrument manuals (and they used to have some of the best documentation in the business!) In 2000, they completely discontinued their entire analog 'scope line. Now, in 2K3, they're selling cheap crap that's made overseas and final-assembled in the U.S., and they couldn't care less about supporting older (and still very useful!) gear if it's over five years old.
Hewlett-Packard: Don't go there with me. They spun their entire test equipment division off into something called "Agilent." They used to have a most (older) IBM-ish attitude towards their gear, in that you could get manuals and parts for test gear up to at least ten years beyond its last production date. Not any more! Not with Crazy Foolerina at the top of the ladder. Now, what was once one of Silicon Valley's proudest achievements lies in ruins, fragmented into a company that doesn't seem to know what it wants to make, or what companies it wants to merge with next.
I could go on, but it's too depressing. Suffice to say that true "innovation," in my eyes, means taking the best lessons and techniques from older (and PROVEN!) technology, combining it with the best ideas from the new stuff, and watching what happens. It also, to my eyes, means finding better ways to build stuff that will LAST!
Does anyone have any real idea of how much of the planet's raw materials and resources have been wasted on "throwaway" technology that'll be polluting landfills for generations to come? No? I didn't think so. I doubt anyone really does know for sure (or care, to judge by today's corporate "ethics" -- or lack thereof).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Lexmark printers seem to have longer warranties than most. I bought one for a friend over a year ago, and no problems. It was dirt cheap and had something stupid like a 5 year warranty!
You probably just need to replace the pickup wheels. You can occasionally find the real HP service kits on ebay, or there are a couple of companies that make aftermarket ones quite cheaply. Try fixyourownprinter.com.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I love the brother 1200 and 1400 series, you can buy a replacement toner for them for about $45 if you look hard. They're fast, reliable, and print very well. We have about 10 or so of them on campus that I maintain and I have yet to have a problem with them. R-
Hard loop..... huh?
Dynamic Designs
I think about printers differently than most Slashdot'ers do, apparently. In my spare time, I do a lot of digital and film photography, and use Photoshop to manipulate the images, and create them from scratch.
What I care about is the print, be it a proof or final image.
I shopped around for a very good quality inkjet that is reasonably economical to operate--however the value curve leans definitly towards quality.
I ended up buying an HP PSC 750 for about $175. It uses a multicolor (about $30) and a black cart (about $15).
Now, when I run prints, I have a good idea of what the per image cost is, and just keep it in mind. I don't worry that an extra proof will run the cost of an extra print--in the end its my work, and I just want it to look just so.
Many seem to worry about keeping the per print cost to an absolute minimum, but that just seems bass-ackward to me. I guess if you're doing thousands of prints that makes sense, but most home or even home-office users don't fall into that catagory.
When I'm reading a how-to, or some other form of documentation, I generally download it to my laptop and read it there, if I need to be able to take it with me. I don't waste a ream of paper.
Anyways, I know I'm not necessarily like most people. Just thought some would like to hear a different take on the subject.
-buf
PS. Some will undoubtably jump to the question of the permenance of most inkjet prints. For something that matters--like end product for a client, or show...I use a medium-to-high end service shop. There's plenty available online and the prices these days are fairly economical.
My first printer: $400 (HP LaserJet IIp+, ahhh..)
:).
Current printer: $30
I don't care how far technology has come, you can't cut the price of the average consumer printer that much without flushing quality down the crapper.
I haven't owned a printer since the old HP died my first year of college. I can't find one that I like as much that isn't huge and costs $1200. I don't really need a printer anyway. Paper is so passe`
Game... blouses.
I bought a Brother HL-1050. It worked great (quiet, fast, clean output), when it worked.
About a month after the 1-year warrantee ran out, the drum unit failed. It cost over $100 to replace, and the printer itself was only $290. A year after that, I turned it on to discover a weird pattern of blinking status lights. Looking at the manual, this indicated some kind of super-fatal breakage. "Replace entire mechanism, minus plastic shell" or some such nonsense. I haven't gotten around to that, and probably never will, because it'll undoubtedly cost more time and convenience than buying a new printer.
In the more than one year I've been printerless, it turns out that there've only been a couple times when it would have been nice to have one; never was it absolutely necessary. So I think I'll stick it out without a printer for awhile.
Yeah, my school has a no-cost policy -- you can print out up to 100 pages per day at no cost. For the last 2 years they've been threatening to start charging, but they never will because the Dean of Libraries has said that printing is a service that must be kept free in the same way that computers are free to use. A very nice guy :)
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I have an HP LaserJet that is 5 years old and still going strong. For color printers, I've had a Lexmark, a Cannon, and two HP printers (one of which I'm currently using, the others have worn out). Supposing I had bought all HP printers, they would have made a lot more money of off all of those color printers I bought than that old laser printer which still works wonderfully today. I've noticed the same thing with computers. I have an old IBM Aptiva -- about 7 years old -- that, although slow, is still going strong today. I haven't even had to replace the CMOS battery in it! I had one Compaq that burned its motherboard out within two years, and a Gateway laptop that shuts off if you so much as tap it while its running a CPU-intensive program (luckily, although Gateway computers aren't really good, their tech support is great and they're happy to take it in and replace whatever is necessary). The real problem is that computer geeks don't make up the majority of computer and peripheral consumers. There are far more 'Average Joes' and businesses out there than there are computer geeks. 'Average Joes' don't know enough about technology to make an educated computer or printer choice -- they buy what's cheapest or what (and I quote) 'has the most Gigahertz.' Same thing with businesses -- in an effort to cut costs, purchasing managers may choose to buy a cheaper printer or computer and let someone else deal with the maintenance issues. It looks good on them to cut costs, and most likely no one will think to blame them when the printer or computer breaks down a year later.
Star Micronics NX-1000 - $100 in 1988 and still going strong....
I used to work for HP, and I know that in terms of revenue, they are not a printer company - They are an ink company.
;-)
They suck you in with dirt-cheap printer prices, then stab you in the back with the replacement cost of ink.
I believe some vendors deliberately include only partially filled ink cartridges with new printers so that you HAVE to go buy an expensive refill shortly there after.
Oh well... guess it beats using a typewriter
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I am using a OKI laser printer, works fine, heavy duty for one year so far. I am not sure what to expect tomorrow...
off of ebay for about two years ago. The thing is a tank. It cost a bit more than 100 bucks with shipping. It came with a postscript module, JetDirect card, a toner cartridge (that I have yet to replace) and 6MB of RAM. It does everything I need, the output is sharp and doesn't smear. I still have my Epson 640c for color stuff, but I rarely use it. I have put about 3 reams of paper so I figure I have gotten my money back in ink cartridges I didn't have to buy. On top of that it's a LOT quieter than the Epson.
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
My first inject a cannon 200 is on its third owner. A family frinds kid in college.
My friend has had a epson color inkjet printer for 5 years. It still prints photos well.
By junk, deal with it. By quality, ehoy it.
I've got an older Laserjet. I bought it because they run forever, and when they do break down they're easily serviced.
I got my start in the computer business working in a small computer shop. One of the things we did was repair Laserjets. This was in the days of the LJ II, III, and 4. Those old IIs and IIIs would come in broken with 100,000 pages on them, we'd replace a part (often the fuser), and they'd go back out again - total repair cost usually a hundred bucks or so. The HP service manuals for those things were the bomb!
When it came time to get something more stout than my Epson 750 inkjet for my home office, I picked up a LJ 4M on eBay for $200. It had something like 10,000 pages on it, and came with the JetDirect card and PostScript. About a month after I got it, it started throwing a service error. I ended up ordering a fuser bulb and replaced it in about half an hour. One year and about 4000 pages later, it's still going strong. The 3-year-old Epson inkjet is on its last legs after less than a thousand pages.
The only thing I wish I had done is gotten a 4+ because they have a low-power sleep mode. I have to remember to shut off my 4 or else it sucks up a bunch of power.
in fact I'd go so far as to say this applies to virtually everything that is manufactured, from printers to stereos to cars and kitchen appliances... it's economies of scale dictating the corner-cutting, cost-saving, "it's good enough" approach to material goods. anecdotally, my sailboat's 16-hp yanmar diesel engine was built in 1979, and it is sturdier and more reliable than you'd believe. I've trusted my life to it, and it's probably got another 20 years of good service. also my parents' moritz stereo receiver component is about 30 years old, and works as well as it did when they got it. compare that to the lightweight plastic garbage w a 2-year shelf life selling in stores today.
/$0.02
I wonder if this shift towards more temporary purchases is fueled in part by the speed with which computers become obsolete. as consumers expect to replace a computer at *least* every 3 years, perhaps they/we become less averse to sacrificing quality for new features?
whatever the reason, I wish it were easier to find things built to last....
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
I've come 10+ year old Apple Laser Writers that had over 100,000 (100K) pages output (in an office environment).
:)
I was wondering this same thing just the other day. I have a NEC Silentwriter 95, circa 1992-3 here in my home office, with 14,000+ pages on it and it's still going and looking like new. It's fairly big in size compared to the printers that came out a few years after it, which I attribute to being engineered to a different set of specifications.
There are two reasons for it's remaining useful to me:
#1) Postscript. (Level 2 to be exact)
Postscript is the closest thing printers have to a universal language. Platform and OS agnostic not to mention resolution independent. I used it 10 years ago with my DOS based word processor (Lotus Manuscript) and use it today with various versions of Windows, and Mac OS9 and OSX.
#2) Network Print Server/Printer Port Adapter.
I bought this little device made by Hawking Electronics for about $70 that connects to the printer's parallel port and plugs into my LAN. It runs print server software that understands IPP, Appletalk, Novell and a few others, and allows me to make the printer available to every computer in the house (7 at the moment), greatly increasing the value/usefulness of the printer.
I've stashed away a few spare NEC hi-output toner cartridges that I found on closeout, and hope to heck that the electronics hold up - so I should be good with this "antique" printer for another 5 to 10 years. 20 years on a single laser printer sounds about right to me.
300 DPI may not be hi-res anymore, and 8 PPM mac isn't the fastest, but it's still good enough for almost everything I print.
-Mp
I have LaserJet IIs and IIIs still running at work. Their firmware is dated around 1990. Meanwhile, my fastest growing pile of printers are all relatively new ones.
I had the opportunity to confront an HP rep about my pile. He suggested I buy their workgroup-type printers (which are twice as expensive as their personal lasers). I went off on him about why should I give him even more money to get a decent printer. He really didn't have an answer.
From a CD? Have you checked out Their website lately? You don't even need to run out to kinkos until you're ready to pick up your prints, or even let kinkos fedex them to a recipient for you. Screw printers, You're way better off using the local kinkos.
Oh and hey, if you're like me and there isn't a local kinkos, you can Still use copymax
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
What does higher and higher frequency do?
More data, obviously, but whats the effect on transmition?
Followup question: what does it take to make vegitation not absorb radio signals? Do only lower frequencies have this property? Or is it some harmonic? What?
Myren
We just purchased one of these for the house and I'm very happy with it so far. It has individual ink cartridges, with ink that is water resistant and apparently lightfast for 70 years on regular paper. It prints at 5760x1440dpi; just beautiful. It's plugged directly into our AirPort with USB; printing wirelessly is completely effortless (and a fun, although wasteful, way to send messages downstairs to tell my roommates to turn the tv the hell down). I honestly can't speak about the long-term good or bad about the printer unfortunately, as I bought it a couple of weeks ago. CompUSA for $140. Ink cartriges were FULL, not half-full like most cartriges that come with printers. Overall, I'm very happy.
You can easily end up spending more on high quality paper than you do the printer + ink. Something ain't right here...
sheesh, i can still work a pen and paper.
I've never found much use for a printer.
BUT, i do have an old dot matrix (epson) and a daisywheel printer when i want to print documents.
color printers are nice i guess if you have to print up flyers for flea markets, garage band events, or microsoft get-togethers. oh, BTW, it's sure nice
to go into dos and do "yourdoc.txt > lprint"
instead of mouse clicking on a bunch of icons and getting bluescreens or out of ink, can't find printer, wrong format, etc. etc. etc. - infinity.
Anyone use those cartridge refill kits? Does it affect the print quality in any way? Does it end up saving you money?
I have an hp deskjet 842c that has held up about 3 years now, no complaints, other than everyone elses - the ink runs out quickly and is expensive to replace.
fyi - In the same time period i have gone through 3 HP pcs (wet climate) and now steer clear of hp completely.
what are you doing to make paper dusty? do you store your computer table in the attic? It's called built-in-obsolence, and HP is everybit, if not moreso, as guilty as the other manufacturers. there are great inkjets out there, but not by HP.
sorry we can't all go out and buy laser printers.
That's great that that prices keep coming down, regardless of quality. But the real problem here is the fact that it has gotten to the point where we feel more comfortable throwing away a 30 pound printer that has seen a 1,000 page workload to buy a new one. All of these printers go somewhere (read landfill), not that many people would care sitting snuggly in their mansions printing off the latest slashdot article so they don't have to stare at their $1000 monitor to read it, cause that would be hard on the eyes. We still have our HP LaserJet II (I know, along with half the readers on here) and likewise it continues to print to this day, not to mention that it was one of the first printers I can remember seeing under the driver list on Linux. Not to mention our HP 4Si (Duplex :-) ) and our HP2100 that print with great quality. Most people just need to realize that eventually all of this wastefullness is going to catch up with us, so just shell out the extra $100 and buy a printer that will last more than a year. Believe it or not it'll save you and the rest of us in the long run.
Quite possibly the worst printer I have ever had the displeasure of working on was the HP4500/4550 series color LaserJets. It's a tumbler design, each color has it's own section of a big drum that rotates to put the toner on the paper. This rotating drum get so dirty with extra toner that it either collects on the bottom or it cross-contaminates the other colors. It also takes over 5 minutes just to warm up/calibrate/initialize, which really annoys the hell out of you when you have to keep power-cycling the printer.
The final straw was a few of the printers started failing at the same time, just spitting out blank paper until the tray ran dry. Turns out it was a bad batch of image transfer belts which of course you can't find any information about on HP's support site.
Bah...
-AlPhAbEt
I got an HP LaserJet 1100 for college at it's lasted 4 years *without* needing a replacement toner cartrigde.
I did start having a problem of multiple sheets feeding, but HP provided a FREE repair kit (which I ordered via their website). Now the printer works like new again!
As far as Linux compatibility, visit here for ratings of the vendors and Linux printing troubleshooting.
I have a laserjet IIP that's been chugging away for over 12 years now. Those are great little printers! I have no intention of replacing it until it falls to pieces.
As for a color printer, my current color printer is a Canon BJC240L inkjet. It's ok, but just ok. The best feature of it is that you can refill the ink cartridges. I have no plans on EVER buying a printer where you can't refill the ink/toner yourself. I refuse to play that game.
Gaachh, kids these days, and their newfangled "printers"...
Why don't they grow a brain and have the cartidge part number match the printer model number?
Einstein was cool and you know I'm right.
Don't contest this with me.
A second source confirms this.
I'd have to agree that consumer electronics quality has been declining for several years. Perhaps it is an attempt by the companies to generate revenue. For example, if people bought things that lasted twenty years, so there would be no market. It could also be a move towards cheaper production methods. One thing is for certain: These cheap products are killing the small repair businesses. For most products, it is much cheaper to buy a new one than to repair it. I have personally gone to a laser printer and love it. I've yet to replace the toner, and I print notes for lectures as well as essays/reports/labs. I think that printer quality is just a tangible example of what I mentioned above.
I just signed off on some class action forms I got in regards to my HP Laserjet 1100. The stupid thig kept grabbing multiple sheets of paper and jamming. Apparently HP knew that this was happing to them, but it was happening after the warranty period expired. They are sending me a free repair kit, and a rebate for ink. For people who no longer have the machine, they get a larger rebate for ink. I still have the printer, but I had ended up buying a HP PSC 950, which is scanner, copier, fax, printer. It works great, and with Mac OS X (actually the Laserjet 1100 does now too with Gimp Print). Looks like I'll have a laser for large volumes of text printing (useful when in law school), and the PSC for color and all it's other goodies.
My favorite feature on the PSC is the built in card reader with proof sheet printing. Put in a memory card, hit proof sheet, and you get a sheet of thumbnails. Fill in the bubbles under the pictures you want (ala scantron), bubbles at the end of the page for what type of paper, number of copies, etc, then scan the proof sheet and it prints everything out for you. It is a thing of beauty.
You folks saying, "I had an HP 850C back in the day" are confused. That was "a few years ago", not "back in the day".
Back in the day, there were things like chain printers, and I recall them sucking. They were loud, expensive, and prone to all sorts of various problems.
I think it's quite good now; you have a choice between dirt cheap printers that wear out in a year or two of normal use, or moderately more expensive printers that will last a decade.
I have a LaserJet 4, firmware dated 1992. It had about 75k pages printed when I got it for free. It's 600dpi and running strong.
The LaserWriter Pro 630 is still my favorite Apple printer. 600 dpi, 8ppm, it came with PostScript level 2, PCL 4+, on board ethernet, 8-32mb ram, and all kinds of Apple fonts. It had a grayscale shading system that was advanced for its time (1993?). Trademark apple quality all the way. They are still going for $200+ now on ebay if you can find them.
My HP Deskjet 810C has worked well now for 5 years, ever since my POS apple stylewriter II died. It doesn't have the prettiest output, but it was cheap and the ink lasts a long time.
For 90% of printing needs out there, unless you're doing photographs, go ahead and buy a personal laser such as the venerable Laserjet 6L. These little buggers can be had for about $40-50 offa eBay. Install a free separation pad kit, buy a $40 cartridge, and you're set for 1500+ pages. Not to mention that no inkjet can hold a candle to laser text quality. I've been in college for three years, and haven't once needed a color printer for anything.
I was going to buy a HP laser printer but I bought a Brother HL-1850 instead. It works great with both Windows and Linux (They even have native Linux drivers available for download!) it's fast, It supports both PostScript and PCL, It has a duplexer built in, the toner cartridges are high capacity and relativly inexpensive, and the printer itself only cost about $500 (And I've seen it for less since...) I have absolutly no regrets about buying this printer. The construction even seems to be at least as good as the current offerings from HP and others...
On the other hand, where I work we still have dozens of HP LaserJet 4 series printers in production. The post-LJ4 series printers on the other hand seem to have only a fraction of the longevity of the LJ3/LJ4 printers! (We only have a few LJ5s left that I know about...)
This thread has me remembering the injet printer I ran back in the imaging lab at the school I attended. This was back about 93 or 94. Way before you could run out to Best Buy and pick up a spiffy home printer.
We got a grant to purchase and operate an IRIS inkjet. The printer cost about $70,000, and the postscript "rip" computer that sat in front (a big and powerful 486DX--the fastest PC on campus initially) was another $20K (the software was the main cost, mind you.)
There was a separate ink cart. for each color--these ran about $120 each.
The printer loaded 11x17 paper by clipping onto one end from the tray, then wrapping it around a spinning drum. The printhead then travelled across the width of the paper and sprayed the ink on the paper as it spun around the drum. Very entertaining engineering, indeed.
The chargeback for each 11x17 print was about $90.
Now, the print quality was AMAZING for the time--photo quality et. all, but still had standard inkjet problems of being non-waterproof and faded under prolonged UV exposure.
Today, I have an HP 750 PSC that cost be about $170, uses two carts (color $30, black $15) and produces a quality equal to the IRIS. And we complain about the cost.
I'd blow my mind if someone told me that about a decade ago!
-buf
I'm using a 12 year old HP LaserJet 4 that's gone through about a dozen cartridges and still works like a champ, much nicer than the (yeah, faster) Lexmark pieces of crap we've got at work now. The LaserJet 4 was $1000 in 1990 or 1991. I know that in another 10 years it's going to break down and I'm just going to be heartbroken too because by then everything will be a horrifying "cheapo printer! built-in cartridge!! No replacement parts ever!!! completely disposal!!!!" and nobody will understand why I'm so upset that my 20-year-old one-color printer isn't around any more. I get a new computer every couple of years, but they're just fashion. Printers are real hardware, like a car or a camera.
"waiting 20 seconds to post"(slashdot's intel386 :-)
server cluster no doubt).
sheesh, i can still work a pen and paper.
I've never found much use for a printer.
BUT, i do have an old dot matrix (epson) and a daisywheel printer when i want to print documents.
color printers are nice i guess if you have to print up flyers for flea markets, garage band events, or microsoft get-togethers. oh, BTW, it's sure nice
to go into dos and do "yourdoc.txt > lprint"
instead of mouse clicking on a bunch of icons and getting bluescreens or out of ink, can't find printer, wrong format, etc. etc. etc.errors to infinity.and it's easy to redo those ribbon cartridges, ebay has them real cheap plus you can wind your own with typewriter ribbon.
oh, and ascii pr0n looks best on a dot matrix, for those in the know.
he got a 5050 or something and it didn't lasat 1 print job.. it was a dud ;-) rotflol.. seriously.. they are sending him a new one after actually making him do some test.. scary part was that one of the tests he had to be online and they tried to reset the printer remotely... true story folks.. big brother may know what you are printing
Only 'flamers' flame!
I have an old OkiData 400e laser printer from my 486 that sort of works fine (it started printing pages completely smeared with black for a while and then fixed itself somehow) but I barely use it. The problem is that it went obsolete. I haven't tried it in linux but it's been compatible with everything I've tried it with so far. It has hp compatibility mode for DOS programs so that probably means something.
The printer's page buffer is too small to do a lot of stuff. If all you're printing out is text then it works fine but if you try printing out a full page image at 300 dpi (the max setting) it doesn't work. It doesn't even print out some graphics heavy pages done in word. I would upgrade but instead I just don't use a printer.
The printer is a solid piece of work though, really heavy and well built with an lcd display that actually gives useful information, although it jams more than it used to. If you want a printer that lasts, buy a laser, they seem to be built better because of their price and the life span of the toner. Get one you can barely lift and doesn't creek when you twist it and you'll be good until your requirements deem otherwise.
It seems like it's hard these days to get your hands on a decent printer that doesn't need a new set of $50 ink cartriges every 300 pages or constantly clog, steak or jam. Added bonus if it has PostScript and expension capabilities without costing an arm and a leg. The new dispoable inkjets and GDI winprinters may occupy the best shelf space in the local office supply store, but there's still decent printers out there if you look around enough. You can bet I was a happy camper when I found a name brand 16ppm PostScript laser printer for under $200 at a local office supply store.
This week, the national office supply chain OfficeMax was advertising the HP LaserJet 1200SE for $199.99. Bad news, it was sold out. But good news is that another national retailer, Staples, has plenty in stock and will match the OfficeMax price if you bring a copy of OfficeMax's advertisement. In my area, it appeared in the Sunday Lowell Sun and the Sunday Boston Globe. Check your area newspaper for the advertisement. I'm sure there's other national office supply chains which can match the OfficeMax price on this printer. According to HP, regular price is $399.
The printer is 15ppm at 1600x1600dpi with PostScript and 16MB of RAM. (The non-SE model has only 8mb of RAM. On both models there is a quasi-standard looking RAM expansion slot which can accommodate another 64MB of memory). Connectivity is via your choice of a bi-directional parallel port with standard centronics connector and a USB "B" connector. Printer works flawlessly with CUPS over the parallel port.
Reports indicate it works fine over USB too. See linuxprinting.org for more information.
The printer includes one C7115A toner/drum cartridge, which yields around 2500 pages. I found new prefilled cartridges for $60. Loose refill toner is $13. I found ferrous toner (for MICR printing on checks and so on) for $35.
The big profit stream eventually backfired as hundreds of companies have rushed into the printer cartridge refill and refurbish market.
Printer cartridges is one of the few markets that do well on the net. The cartidges are small and easy to ship. The field is information rich...that is, you buy according to the label..not the look of the cartridge. Why do you think you get 10 spams a day from people selling ink?
I've noticed the printer manufacturers have finally started to come down in price on the cartridges to match refillers.
Smart printer shoppers look at the cost of printing and not the cost of the printer. Personally, I would avoid Lexmark because of the chip. I also look for those brands that have the most ink per cartridge.
Speaking of Brother laser printers, does anyone know if the Brother HL-1850 laser printer is any good?
Thanks.
I work for a computer recycling busines, and new inkjet printers are immidiatly dismantled (often with great prejudice and furious use of air-gun). Older laser printers I will generally test, and dot-matrix Okidata printers I covet and hold dear to my heart on thier own personal pallet.
(If your looking for me I am the one with the "All Equipment must be DESTROYED" sign above my desk.)
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
(That said, Consumer Reports doesn't pay much attention to lasers, probably because most home users want to print color pictures. The only others they reviewed were the HP 1000 and 1200se, which both also got excellent marks.)
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
After my lovely little Oki laser died after 7 years of faithful service, I needed a new machine. I also found that current offerings were kind of cheezy.
I found a refurb reseller who was offering some Lexmark Optra S units. The reseller sucks, so I won't mention them here, but the printer I got was a great deal.
For about $300, I got a unit with less than 20,000 pages, three paper trays, a duplex unit, and a network card. It can do 18 pages per minute at 1200 DPI, and its rated for over 20k pages per month. It was hardly used. They even threw in a toner cart.
Best of all, it uses big old carts that are a breeze to refill, so my toner costs are about $40 for 17k pages. Not too bad. I use www.tonerrefillkits.com, no affiliation, and their stuff works as advertised. Web site is down right now, so they could be out of biz, hope not.
So, don't try and buy a new printer. Find a creampuff that came off lease, and enjoy it for the next 10 years or so. Some of those older models were made like tanks, and well designed ones at that. I'm glad that some corporate wonk felt the need to upgrade to the "latest".
Has anyone else noticed this trend of poorer and poorer quality printers, at least in terms of life expectancy?
/printers/anything
was an Epson RX80-FT. It was built like a tank, and ran like one, too. It worked without failure - no problems - for over ten years! And was still cranking out dot-matrix documents when I finally sold it.
Today's inkjets are junk, like throw-away phone cards. But nice lasers can be had for less than $400.
My 2
This is a sample sig. Press F1 to personalize.
We had a Canon LBP8-III which we used for years, I could be wrong but it might even have been getting on for a decade. It was likewise slow but it worked relentlesly up until the day it died only once needing the heat roller replaced because it got damaged. After that printer we seem to have got through several in the subsequent years.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
In my office the just did a new "Print2000" deployment. They removed all of the old printers from the office (no one is allowed to have a printer in their cube now) and replaced everything with high end Lexmark Printers. Of the 6 printers closest to my cube, 2 have already broken down and are unusable. This is pathetic; I know what brand I won't buy.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
I know Lexmark is currently using the DMCA to bludgeon their competition with regard to this.
Also, if I might make a recommendation, Canon seems to be the least obnoxious with the ink issues - their printers are a little more expensive, but the quality is a good bit higher, including a lower consumables cost. This even applies to their ~$150 printers. But that's just me.
Also, I think HP's entry level printers, even at a constant price point, have turned to crap. I've noticed a lot of DOA printers among my friends and family (I, like most of you, am the local "computer guy," so I have a decent sample size ;)), much more than they used to. Seems like they really are determined to quit doing what they did well and turn into Compaq.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I sell printers at one of the largest office store chains in Canada.
Let me tell you a little story. A medical company discovers a drug that you take once and boosts your immune system to hundreds of times its normal level. As a result, much fewer people get sick, which everyone views as a wonderful thing. But suddenly, we don't need as many doctors. Hospitals close down. And, since nobody needs nearly as many drugs, the medical company that developed the drug is out of a job -- there's only 1/10th of the market left.
Of course, that's not what happens. Nobody tries to -prevent-. It's all about -repairing-. Someone gets sick, they go to the doctor, they get drugs. The doctors, hospitals, and drug companies all prosper.
Same goes for printers. The failure rates among the printers we sell (ranging from $50 inkjets to $3000 lasers) is frighteningly high. And I can tell you right now that when a printer dies, it doesn't go to get fixed. It gets replaced.
If you bought one printer that lasted your entire life, everyone would just have to buy one printer and the printer company would go out of business. My HP 600 is still alive and kicking. Five bucks says your HP 3420 isn't going to see next year. They smartened up. They made them disposable.
I've owned my Okidata 810e/PS for more than 8 years now, and it's still making beautiful b/w laser prints. The toner continues to be readily available, and it's fast enough for my daily use. Just awesome.
I think I got lucky -- I bought the printer at a time when printers were no longer being manufactured like tanks, but wasn't being price-squeezed to be built like throw-away floppies. (Around the mid-90's.)
This seems to happen with lots of technology products -- the first ones are overbuilt and clunky, and then there's a "sweet spot" period, and then it turns into mass-market goo.
I worked ato Future Shop (in Canada) for around two years while in University and probably sold around 5 to 10 printers a week. It was in a smallish town and I worked hard to make a good impression and develop clients, not just customers. As such, I VERY quickly stopped selling Lexmark, and only reluctantly sold any printer that cost less than $300. Not because I made more on the high end stuff, but because I would hear about it if I sold crap (AND I made more money on the high end stuff). HP's low end, Canon's low end, Epson's low end all suck. Suck suck suck. Drop $300 on a printer, and they were actually pretty decent.
Finally, the time came when my girlfriend's aging Apple Imagewriter died and I needed a new printer (for my PC). What did I get? An Okipage 6W, an LED printer - one step down from laser but it IS a toner based system (instead of ink) and I love it.
I've been counting the number of 500 page paper bundles I've fed into it (to see if the pages per toner cartridge numbers I would quote people were bullshit or not) and so far with two toner replacements I've printed around 8000 pages. Runs fine, print quality is great (black and white only) and the toner cartridge isn't even that expensive.
Moral of the story - skimp on the price now and you'll get crap. By an ink based system... well, read the rest of the posts for the various rants about how expensive, quality degradation, disposable they are. Go with a toner based system (laser or LED) and spend a little more. 8000 on an HP would have already cost me around $400-600 more than I've spent on my Oki including toner.
I've been using monitors regularly for 25 years now, and in my experience they last about 3 years and need replacement. I've switched to LCD now, we'll see how long they last.
I think that over the years we've noticed a steady decrease in the reliability of many consumer products, particularly electronics.
That being said, while some of it is probably corporate cheapness, and another part possibly deliberate shortening of lifespan of products, a lot of this could probably be attributed to miniturization and the increased of technology. Nowadays we're cramming more stuff into less space. Printers are being replaced with MFC's, or with models intended to pump out more, more, and more performance. With an increase in immediate output, I think we can see a decrease in overall lifespan.
Perhaps in asking that our products perform better now, we are limiting how long we can expect them to perform into the future (and this doesn't count ink refills, etc).
Planned Obsolescence... The manufacturers don't want to make something that will last for 10 years when they make make something that will last for 3 and force you to buy a new one. Just my .02
almost all computing equipment nowadays are built to lower standards than in the past - i guess you could say the older stuff was in a sense overengineered. Maybe it doesn't make sense to build a PC that will last ten years when the components in it will be obsolete in 2. But personally I like the older, better built stuff. I have circa-1989 Mac IIcis that still work. I have IBM original-pentium-era PCs that still serve me well, running less intensive tasks, but working nonetheless. Quite frankly a lot of the "horsepower" of current machines is unnecessary.
But from the point of view of the vendor, they've just screwed themselves if theyve given you a machine that will last much longer than the warranty period - they've just almost certainly guaranteed they won't be seeing any more money from you for "X" years, *unless* they "luck out" and you're the kind of person to go around making sure everybody you know also gets one. But then they also dont have control over their whole user experience either - if the OS dies, will the general consumer think to blame the OS maker, or will they go look for another brand (possibly only to find out it wasnt the hardware, but then hey its too late for vendor A, no?)
look at the whole industry - hard disk warranties are shortening, motherboards are dying because of cheap capacitors - its a downward spiral into the toilet bowl, for product quality and longetivity. Its much cheaper for the vendors to replace parts (or refuse to replace parts) than to Build Things Right the first time round.
I've got an HP LaserJet 4L from about 1996 or so.
I've changed the toner once in over 6 years of school.
Text quality is fantastic. Resumes and reports printed with toner on laser printers look more professional than ones printed with ink.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I just got an Epson LQ-570e on eBay for 40 bucks (including shipping). It ain't color, but it prints shipping labels just fine. And since my 5-year-old LQ-570e is still cranking out packing lists, and my 15-year-old MX-81 is still cranking out invoices, and they all take the same cheap re-inkable ribbon cartridges, I'm not looking for a super-duper color printer that will die next month. I do have a Cannon BJC-620 that's alive and well after 6 years in light-duty home use. The new printers are mostly junk from what I can tell. Sometimes it pays to not "upgrade."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I pulled an HP Laserjet 4P out of the office trashbin about 8 years ago. It is still going strong, and I've only gone through about 3 or four toner cartridges. That thing is built like a tank. It has been around the world, both directions, and has been banged up pretty good. I can remember exactly one paper jam for the entire time I've had it, and the print quality is pretty good. It is slow as hell, but I'm pretty patient. It prints about 2-4 pages per minute.
:-)
As far as I can tell, the 5P line, and the Deskjets they started making about that time is where everything went to hell.
I was thinking about getting a newer printer to do color stuff, but from the sounds of the discussion, I think I'll keep it around...
I used to work for lexmark. If you'r buying a lexmark printer, its probably because it's cheap, in which case, when it comes time to get new carts, don't bother, just buy a new printer, and allot of the time if you buy the next step up for $10, it comes with both a color and black and cart. Inkjet printer's are incredibly simple devices, they should be easy to build like tanks that last half a life time. But then if they did the printer companies would be much smaller, because less people would buy them. They only have a one year warranty for a reason. Also if your going to refill your carts. Give it a try and if you are having problems just, get a new/non-refilled cart. Sure the companie's over charging you with new carts. but in order to do that they're not making crap on the printer themselves. And if you buy a printer (read: not an all in one printer, that's a whole other ball game) for less than $150 than, it's probably a piece of shit. And you should expect high cart prices and problems. Oh, one other thing. any time you buy a piece of hardware for Linux, you should do a little research to make sure it's going to work first.
Sure, it's like a lotta things...when the product becomes a commodity, quality often goes down. Obvious computer analogies are floppy disk/drives (these always seem to have problems these days, if anyone cares), Modems (generally suck, and are very often WinModems (shudder)), cheap scanners, etc.
I miss my ST-506
Home Depot.
My hammer and chisel haven't failed me yet. Unfortunately, finding production-quality stone tablets has been getting harder and harder over the last, um, 2000 years or so.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
This really isn't anything new or unique to printers, computers or anything else. It's called Planned Obsolescence .
What you say about the LaserJets is true. About 3 months ago, I was adding paper to the try of my LJ4. As I pulled out the tray, several black plastic peices fell out. I was worried for a while, but that mofo is still printing as well as the day it was new.
Hell, I'll probably retire before these LJ4s...
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
And for a home printer it gets used heavily. We go through a couple cases of paper a year to print things for our daughter's school. Not one problem ever, ZERO maintenance, and we use only reconditioned cartridges. Best piece of hardware I ever bought.
I intend to research on epinions.com and on fixyourownprinter.com. I appreciate any insight.
ObPrinterStory
I like the nostalgia happening here. Amen to the Apple printers. I worked with the gentlemen who were lead engineers for Apple's printing and imaging technologies until the return of Jobs, which smote them summarily and mightily. Bob Ogrey had one of each Apple printer ever made, in his garage and knew them each as if they had their own personality :) Wicked talented industrial designers. Bob was present on the famous tech support call where some dude called Apple tech support to ask how to remove his cat's tail from the Laserwriter. Everyone was drunk by the time that call ended. I believe that story was covered by Steven Levy either in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution or in Insanely Great: The Life and Times of the Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. Here is a similar true story.
Have you ever had a brother product? Think not!
My Xerox Docuprint M750 Works good. It uses seperate containers for the ink, so it can be replaced with out changing the heads, and has an open ink standard so 3rd party ink can be "official". And it woks great, if not better in *nix useing the pcl3+ driver for gs. Its fast but picky about paper. Use the wrong lb value (aka cheap paper) it has a tendancy to jam (a Xerox that jams, never seen that before). It was an attempt by Xerox to get into the PC market but realy never took off. It is an ashame tho. The best quality, and fastest, ink jet I have ever seen.
Printers definately seem flimsier to me now than they did 10 year ago. I've had the "pleasure" of owning a couple of HP deskjets that would clog up and smear if not used every few weeks, but my old reliable is an HP Laserjet 4L. 4 pages a minute, black and white, but I just replaced the toner cartridge for the first time sine 1995. ($75) Considering this was a $400 printer I think it's been far more economical than the inkjet alternative.
My experiences:
Citizen Swift A3 printer, dot-matrix: still working (10-15years old)
Citizen Swift 9 Pin: still working
3x Citizen Swift Colour 24pin: 1 broken rest still working (8-10 years old?)
HP Bubblejet: too expensive to repair after 2 years
Unisys Laser: works but unreliable/tempermental
Citizen C60: jammed 1 month, ink cartridges have to be hacked to be economical
I only converted to InkJet due to noise anyway. I still prefer dotmatrix when possible! It's crazy.
If you can keep them going buy old printers, good refillable InkJets seem to be like gold dust here (south uk) and there's still even a market for ribbon cartridges too after more than a decade!
It just comes across as massive price fixing to me, even if it's not I'm still not happy with what is available for the money these days.
A blog I run for the wealth
The overall quailty of much of today's electronics has declined because consumer prices have remained very low. The quality of printers/electronics made 15 - 20 years ago cost quite a bit more than they do today, thus it goes to reason that they last longer. When comparing the things made of plastic and things made of steel, things made of steel will last longer.
I've been going through about one a year as well. I don't buy cartridges anymore, just printers.
Quite a few of the posts mention the logic of a $50 printer with a $25 mail in rebate being cheaper than a $35 ink cartridge. So buy a new printer not a cartridge, right?
Wrong. That $50 printer comes with a "sample" cartridge. What that means is you get a cartridge that's deliberately only 25% or whatever full.
It's enough to make you think you're getting a deal, buy the printer, install the drivers, print maybe 100 pages and then go to the store and buy politely buy a series of $15 cartridges for $35.
Or, even better, you come up with a cunning plan to get a $35 cartridge in a discounted, now $25 printer. Only you get a $10 plastic print unit and a quarter full cartridge that's only worth $3.50. Plus, with luck, you'll forget to mail in that rebate and you paid $50 for a $13.50 product as opposed to $35 for a $15 one.
Don't feel bad. Some idiots buy a Lexmark Z22 and get a color sample cartridge. Now it uses all three inks to print murky brown when you just want black and runs out after 40 pages of wasted ink. I know. I did. Once.
My company has started buying used HP LJ4s online instead of repairing their fleet of crappy newer HPs. A maintenance kit for a $500 laserjet costs $180 +labor, whereas a used LJ4 costs about $30-$50 on ebay. This is almost the same price as an ink refill for a lousy deskjet!
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
I have noticed. But only from Hewlett Packard. My Kyocera has been running non stop for 3 years now.
As with everything costs go down, so does build quality. Its starting to get to the point where I can now buy a new lexmark printer for the cost of two new cartriages from my local supermarket. Low end Lexmark £60. New cartridge £30. Its almost just worth buying a new printer when the cartridge urn out. Before long I wouldn't be surprised to see printers where you can replace the ink
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Ok, we thought, it is still under warranty, no big deal... No such luck. The print head was "designed to wear out" and as such was a "disposable/renewable part," just like the printer cartridge. The company said we had to buy our own new one... which coincidentally cost more than the entire printer did in the first place. Grrr!
We now have an HP, they seem to be much better quality, and last much longer.
My Laserwriter has lasted for about 11 years, with a good internal dust cleaning circa 1999. It's a great (big) printer that's fairly loud, but interfaces with almost everything, so I'm happy with it. It's still my primary printer. Match it up with some HP Bright White paper, and it's perfect.
Michael C. Hollinger
Well I'm still stuck with this damn stone tablet and chizel... not very pretty and it's slow as hell!... but archival quality is awesome ;D
Interesting...how accurate do you feel it is?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
If you're a SOHO user printing in color, having to replace the printer once a year really is not a big deal when you consider the cost of ink cartreges.
My younger brother went through 2 Epson printers (each seemed to last about a year... the first kept clogging and the 2nd died of an electronic failure) before finally switching to a HP 600 series printer about a year and a half ago - it's still working.
My HP 932C is over two years old and still works like the day I unpacked it - although I have already spent more in damned ink then the cost of the printer. The printer it replaced, a 660cse, is also still working, at my brother's girlfriend's house. On of my friends has had an 800 series HP printer for several years now and his father has a 500 series printer - all still working. While this is just anecdotal evidence, the HP printers seemed to just keep chugging along long after they've burned up their value in ink.
If you think about it, since HP makes their money off the ink - it's in their BEST INTERESTS to make printers that last. It seems the game lately isn't to make the printers break earlier, but to make the ink cartreges run out faster... If you look at my discontinued printer, the 932c, and then look at the printer HP's web site recommends as a replacement, you'll notice the new recommended printer holds almost HALF AS MUCH INK!
If you do a lot of printing, you're getting screwed using ink jets no matter what the reliability of your printer. If you need color, get a closeout printer (pricewatch and google are your friends) that is easy to use refill kits on and refill yourself. If you can live without color, laser is the only way to go.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
But I also remember that my original HP (lasted 1992 to 1998 I think) was well over $400. Our newest Canon i850 looks nicer, is a whole lot faster, has much better print quality, and costs $150. If it lasts even half as long as the HP did, and we buy another one, it'll still be cheaper overall.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I picked up a HP Deskjet Portable (also called a "110", I think) with my first 486. Mini little thing with a straight-through paper path and a power supply that rivals a brick for size and portability.
Some years later, I picked up an Epson Colour something-or-other. I can't remember what it was, because mere weeks into it's lifespan, it'd begun attracting dust and crap like a magnet. I swear the damn thing was magnetic - what eventually broke it was the adjustable wrench that somehow found itself in the works.
Nothing's better for a printer's mechanism than an adjustable spanner.
The HP was (is!) built like a Masonry Water Closet. I swear you could (can!) crack rocks with it. The Epson would break if you looked at it funny.
Postscript is that, ten or so years on (and four after the Epson) the HP is still plugging away, and hasn't dropped an iota of quality in that time - although it has a few issues with Windows XP.
Carts are getting harder and harder to find, though.
We're all gonna die!
I feel like I rent my inkjet printer.
_nfotxn
Ahh, remembered to log in this time. Anyway.
So far it's perfect, but then, I just bought it a couple weeks ago, and haven't even gone through one set of ink carts yet. I work at a store that sells them, though, and even the ones there (which print a lot of sample pages, and have gone through numerous carts) still seem to be aligning properly.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
I've had a Laserjet 6L since around 1998, and haven't had so much as a hiccup with it. As far as I'm concerned, it's a fine printer for home use.
I agree that even the 4L model was a workhorse. Okay, so it isn't fast. The tray isn't one of the old "standard" trays that stuck out and took a full ream of paper, and doesn't hold as much paper as it could, and it is REALLY slow when graphics are printed.
It works. And works. And works....for 10 years or so. I just recently ran low on toner, and was able to easily purchase two more cartridges. They were pricey, but I expect to get YEARS of service from the cartridges. I get weeks or months of service from the stupid inkjet cartridges, and the price for them adds up quickly.
I can't talk about the quality of modern lasers. I haven't had to purchase one. Mine prints out text that looks crisper on cheap paper than most new inkjets print out on expensive, somewhat specialty paper - the stuff just shy of the photographic paper nonsense. (I mainly print text. Sometimes maps. Hardly ever do I print a picture, so I've never felt the lack of color.)
If I put a photo on my computer, I generally don't want to print it out again. I don't like boxes of anonymous photos from god knows when. It's generally very easy for me to label a directory and know exactly the date/location of the photos therein, whereas with photos I end up with envelopes I have to crack open and shuffle through quite a few pictures before I can really pin down time and place.
From pricing out the cost of ink and paper, I believe most people would be better served with a cheap 35mm camera and 1-hour photo. If they want their images on the computer too, buy a scanner.
The only people an inkjet really benefits, in my mind, are those who, on a more or less regular basis, actually print out color things - newsletters, collages for people, whatever. But it would need to be a regular practice of printing things that really would suffer for not being in color, and not just making their text red or blue to "stand out."
Also, on inkjets, maybe the space of the e is filled in, or the bar over the l is a little bigger than it should be. That never happens with my 4L, despite no maintenance, never being dusted, and very little padding during moves over 10 years of use. (I think it's 10 years. My parents got it when I was in high-school...)
I can't think of a single inkjet I've seen that looks like it would stand anywhere close to ten years of use.
I remember 3 years ago when i finnally got around to replacing my old (1994) Epson LQ20 (or something). Anyway I replaced it with a Xerox salvaged from a soon to be rubbish tip! It prints 1ppm at 300dpi in HP LaserJet I mode but damn is it solid. I think this thing was made in the late 80's, apparantly Xerox doesnt even know they still exist! Never jam's and only occasionaly spits the dummy when you overload the memory, but heck when you print on average little more than 2 pages per month, it does just fine. :)
Back on topic, if you need quality today, well for my clients I only setup and recommend laser printers, oki / hp are good or brother for cheap and nasty, but the golden rule when you buy a printer is that the cost is 100% in the toner / ink cartridge, so you may pay $100 for that epson inkjet now, but after 2 years that $500 mid-range hp laser cost you a tenth of the epson's TCO!
I don't know. I'm still using the LaserJet IIP I bought in 1990, which still works great. I'm guessing that they don't make em like the used to though.
I submitted this story a month ago, except it wasn't asking just about printers, it was asking about all electronics devices in general. Guess what, it got rejected!
If you don't stop reading this right now you owe me $1,000. Send check or money order too...
Find a picture of a sheet of graph paper (sorry, no links, you'll have to find it on your own) and print a full 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of it. That'll give you a good idea of how accurate it is.
Sb
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Has anyone noticed that the quality of most hardware these days is very poor.
Sure, hard drives are huge and fast...but many don't last three years. I've had many motherboards, power supplies, and fans die over the past three years....way more than the 10 years before that.
Hardware manufacturers realize that people replace their hardware every three years (roughly), so why design it to last ten?
-ted
Well my good ol' HP 952C survived having the case melted by a halogen desk lamp (don't ask), yet still works as well as the day I bought it! (Well, except for the strangely-shaped reminants of the plastic case...)
I've seen a lot of bashing of Lexmark printers. Presumably much of it is accurate but there are good Lexmark printers out there. I've been using a Lexmark 4039-10R laser printer for about 8 years now. It's been terrific. Toner cartidge lasts 15,000 pages, prints 10PPM, does postscipt and the printer has been rock solid. It's built tough and though I could make a few critiques of the design none are serious problems. Just wish I could find a network interface for it...
I've used some of the Optra lasers as well with similar success at work and have nothing but good things to say about them.
I can't speak about Lexmark's newer stuff. I've never used their inkjets or low end lasers. They may be great or junk, I don't know. But some of what Lexmark makes (or did anyway) is genuinely good.
No comment necessary, thats what my friend would say when someone bought a brother. Sure these laser printers are getting worse, but brother seems (is) to be the worst of the worst. Nothing but crapola... Not to say that the lower end lexmark and hp's are anything to write a book about or any better, but you really get what you pay for, its no Optra R or LJ 4 quality. Dont know about the absoulte latest HP and Lexmark Printers, but I know around five years ago if you spent the money and went with ones with a high duty cycle (which unfortunatly I installed a HP copier/laser/fax/all in one jobbie today and there was none of this information provided -- jee wonder why!!) you were guaranteed a printer that was bulletproof... Still considering the cost per page, speed, and overall reliability laser is definatly the choice still over inkjets .. just dont plug them into your standard UPS and you'll be happy!
I think that people who buy inkjets wind up paying about as much as they would had they bought a laser printer because they have to buy ink and new printers when their cheapie inkjets break.
:)
You can buy a used, reliable, laser printer off ebay at a reasonable price and get years of service out of it. I agree with the post up two levels or so. It's the reliability that really makes it worth it. Less hassle and worrying rocks. It's one of the reasons I use Linux, after all
And odd thing happened to a friend of mine he has had a laser printer for a number of years now and after printing thousands of sheets has not had to replace the toner. The only thing that has gone is the paper tray which can only hold 1 sheet at a time cause it sucks up multiple sheets. I use to have an HP 660 which only break when my grandpa put in a cartridge backwards and destroyed the cartridges.
Checking out my form of escapism.
Wouldn't companies want to make their printers last longer because it would build customer loyalty (and hopefully result in the customer buying LOTS of cartridges from them)?
.
It's funny to note that the expensive epson 3000,5000,5500,7000,9000
printers (wide print format) don't have print cartridge chips
As for knocking down color printing costs, I'm looking into getting an automatic ink refill system. These are the ones I've encountered so far.
"IJC Bulk Feed Systems" (chip resetters and 'full' chips)
"Continuous Inking System(1)"
"Continuous Inking System(2)" (not necessarily affiliated with each other.
"Continuous Flow Systems"
(automatic chip resetter at this company)
Parts for building your own feed system for an un-supported printer.
"Continuous Charging System"
(carries continuous refill systems for Canon printers in addition to Epson models and option of buying smaller [cheaper] bottles.)
"Camel Ultra-FLO CRS(TM)"
CRS(TM) - abbreviation for the term Continuous Re-inking System(TM)"
(Carries Canon as well as Epson)
Inkjet Buying Guide(with printer recommendations, and refill companies, drivers, etc.)
"I have two Canon BJ-200 printers that have made a total of at least 150,000 copies without any problems...The gallon of black ink is about $32 including shipping."
"Other than the Canon BJ-200, all other CANON PRINTERS are off my buy list because the HIGH COST of operation."
(The author doesn't give definitive numbers nor methodology --duhhhh...he's not "testing" either)
His copy rate for ink is running at almost 1/50th of a cent ($0.00021) at a fraction of a laser printers speed I suppose --Though he is running two in parallel, and is adding a 3rd I believe; that could speed things up.
For comparison Samsung ML-1430 Laser Printer (a nice printer IMHO) runs at 1/5 of a cent per page at higher print speeds.
I don't know what your problem is with the L series. I have an HP 4L that I bought new when they first came out. I had a problem with it when it was brand new. HP fixed that and it's been fine ever since. Of course, I did pay $2000 for it, back in the stone age. It's not fast by today's standards, it doesn't print color and it won't accept paper for a second pass, to print on the back, but the print quality is perfect.
When my Deskjet 690C ran out of ink last summer I bought an Epson C60 because I thought "why not buy something that will last longer than the ink cartridges"...
Well, the ink cartridges last about half of what the HP does, approximately. And they still are insanely priced, about the same as HP ones. And mind you, Epson has got the nozzle heads built into the printer canon-style, while the HP nozzles comes with the ink cartridges, thus gets changed to fresh ones every time.
Sure the print quality is nice, but why does dust still stick to the nozzles, slobbing the ink all around when I try to print. If that isn't the case, well then the printout has white stripes all over it, dispite the fact that it spends literally ages to loudly buzz and whine, apparently some self-cleaning, before every print job.
When it works, it produces great images, especially along with photo paper, but usually it has one quirk or another.
My next will be one of these cheap samsung lasers.
Hah!
Wait until you have to buy a drum unit from Brother after about 16,000 pages - how about $200?
This is the same drum technology available in every HP 4 98a laser cartridge available for about $70.
Yup, Brother and Okidata screw you over pretty good when it comes to buying laser consumables.
When all is said and done - the print quality is rarely as good as can be found on an 8 year old HP 4!
Probably right. I don't see how you can make a quality product at what they charge for it, even if you do sell it at cost in order to ream your customers when they have to buy replacement cartridges. I remember my first HP printer. When I had a jam with labels, I was able to take it partially apart and clean off the stuck paper. With the last HP printer I had, the mere act of labels jamming caused the printer to tear itself apart. After that I went with Epson since it has a straight paper path and is less likely to pull labels off the paper as opposed to HP wrap around feed. However the HP was easier to load as I did not have to reach as far. Given the printer manufacturer's attitude about refilling/third-party cartridges and some if the new laws they had passed to protect their fat executive salaries, my next printer will be a color "laser" printer and not by an inkjet manufacturer. I saw them recently for sale for around $700. BTW - I hear that new ink-jet printers only come with partially filled cartridges to force you to buy new ones sooner and that even some of the new cartridges are not completely filled for the same reason - sort of like the 12oz "pound" coffee can.
What, are you referring to the Mustang?
'Cause if you're referring to the Chrysler K-cars, you're mistaken. There's a ton of those things still on the road. Can't say that about most other cars from that era, such as GM X-bodies, Toyotas, Hondas...
I can only hope my printers have the longevity of an '83 Aries.
JD
I had two hp printers and one canon photo printer (bought refurbished) and my free lexmark, $50 otherwise, has been the most problem free out of all of them. Ive only owned 3 computers and owned 4 printers. I hope that printers continue to get better. If I have learned anything its to not buy hp ever again.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
As for the audio equipment: I've found these no-frills manufacturers do the best stuff. NAD, Marantz, Rotel, Genelec, Magneplanar, Gradient, etc. you know, the ones which just do it without bells and whistles and flashing lightshows?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
My cousin salvaged an HP laserjet 4 plus for me from a company that abandoned it after leaving the building he works in. Replaced the toner cartridge(25$ on ebay) and it works perfectly, and by the looks of the thing, the previous owners were NOT kind to it. My epson stylus 777, however pretty it prints photos considering how little it cost, is not nearly so sturdy.
I've had my LaserJet4L for almost 10 years too. TEN YEARS! Can you imagine that such a peice of computer technology could last that long? Sure, the toner costs $60-$80 but I've only had to buy a couple of them since I've owned the printer. I still haven't had to install the other one yet.
Inkjet's are scam. I've bought a color Epson printer because I wanted to use it to print photos. I've gotten maybe 20 pictures out of ONE ink cartridge. That's $1/picture.
I'd really like to see cheaper alternatives for photo printing.
Just buy an HP Apollo Printer or Cheap Lexmark Printer, you know the ones that cost $30. When the inks all used up throw the whole thing away and buy another.
I have a Samsung ML-1430 that I'm extremely happy with... It prints ~15 ppm, and costs about $150 by PriceWatch, $185 on buy.com. It has great print quality, ships with Linux drivers (includes Cups + some PPD files and other crap on the CD) and works via over USB or Parallel. Unless you need to print color photos, I don't believe there's any good reason to get an inkjet over a printer like mine...
Why do you advise particularly against the "L" or "M" models?
Do they use a different (worse) printing engine? Do they wear out more quickly? Are they not worth their money?
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
But then, I'm unemployed now, so if it breaks down, I'll probably just do without printing for awhile. (And no, I was not fired for stealing!)
.nosig
Don't be quite so quick to slag off on Tektronix...
I recently purchased a Tektronix 321 portable oscilloscope (era 1960, still works perfectly except for some wierdness in the brightness knob), and I emailed the Tektronix customer support department to see if I could find any information about it, and they (promptly!!) faxed me all the information I could have hoped for; circuit diagrams, instructions, specs, etc. They were really polite too.
Just figured i'd add my personal experience, hopefully it's not an exception.
ìì!
Old Deskjets are, of course, pretty bulletproof. Over 10 years ago I bought a 540C. It only does 300 DPI and is nowhere near photo-quality, of course, but my father still uses that printer today.
:-)
:-)
In our office, we have a 960C that prints 1000 pages a month or so, and it's doing fine. Wether it will still be fine in two years remains to be seen
Now, I wish HP DAT drives held up this well. At the ISP where I worked for four years, we had to replace our HP DDS-3 drive once a year (internal or external didn't make any difference). We finally settled the issue by getting a couple of used Sun DLT changers at a bargain price. End of difficulties, and a whole lot faster
and that's why printers don't work as well as they used to. In the past, printers were sold at a profit. Now, printers are sold near cost, maybe even below cost, and more of the profit is made on the consumables, such as inkjet cartridges and special inkjet paper. Since the manufacturers are no longer making money off of the printers themselves, it's in their interest to minimize the production cost of the printers. Minimal production cost = mimimal quality and reliability.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I'm fortunate to live in the Seattle area, and I bought at Boeing surplus a HP LaserJet 4M Plus for $50 with toner and paper. In my experience the LaserJet 4M line is pretty much bullet proof, and with a limited amount of preventative maintenance will last a very long time.
How many people really need color? The ones that I know that do need a nice color printer, not some rickety HP revenue generator.
The Samsung personal laser printers sell for under $200. The cheapest inkjet at Best Buy is $99 and on top of it all black & white laser blows away inkjet any day of the week in regards to performance and quality. Toner which lasts a year must be mindblowing to those who know nothing else but buying ink every three weeks.
We've certainly reached the point where the PC is now a needed appliance and the printer market has been living high on the hog for too long. We're all techies here, use your status as the "neighborhood computer guy/gal" to start letting people know about the benefits of laser, especially when they call complaning about their "free" inkjets.
Perhaps the above comment is a little harsh, afterall inkjet technology definitely has its benefits, but for everyday printing its just the wrong tool for the job.
Yes, they have decreased in quality. This is just a normal part of capitalist companys in a competitive market. Please ingnore it and continue to consume our products.
Even HP's Portables in the 300 series aren't bad + they use the most common inkjet cart HP made.
The only disadvantage is they are slow and to use any of them other than the i90 Canon and the new HP 350cB you have to use GIMP if you want to run them on OS X.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
"Is it just me or do printers really suck now?"
I threw away my LC-10 printer just last month and was tempted to grab it back out of the bin! That LC-10 was made in the late 80s and one ribbon *which was self-reinkable* which lasted for probably 1000 sheets.
Now I have to rely on a 4 year old BJ-210 which doesnt like non-printable ascii anymore while I look at a 680C which broke *I think its electronic failure* within 6 months of purchase *they arent cheap*. Both of these printers need a new $30(AU)+ ink cartridge before I can get through 1000 sheets.
PRINTER TCO HAS GONE UP SO MUCH!!!
If you need 1000 copies of something forget about printing them. Its pretty lame when you send yourself a fax just to get cheap man pages or when you leave your office to hit the Kodak print shop *we ARE being screwed*!
Pixels keep you awake!
...or a LaserJet 1 - 4 that isn't an "L" or "M" model
Wouldn't want that M model... it had extra memory and Adobe PostScript. `M` models are typically the best older printers for Linux printing (PostScript whips up on PCL as a printing language)
.:diatonic:.
Seconded. The 4L sucks for graphics [can't interpolate to save it's life] but it won't die. Have one at home that's 9 years old, took it's first cartridge 8 years, and has jammed less than once per year.
It's only fault is that it's got a squeaky wheel somewhere inside [paper feeder, I think], but that's not exactly critical.
Sucks power like a mofo, though.
Indeed, I own a HP Laserjet 4 since 8 years. It was a heavy investment at first, but until now, I haven't had any problems other than paper jam's.
Mark
alt.sysadmin.recovery on printers
Janie took my gun...
Try any HP LJ 4 or 5 series
We use them at work, and do 300 to 500 sheets a day, while replacing the toner twice a year. Lots of white space, but the overall durability is unbeatable. I have an HP LJ 4 and 5 at home, no problems in several years.
For colour printing go to Epson, I have a c80, replace one colour at a time, magnificent prints, durable, and reasonable cartrige prices!. Epson colour matching is awesome, and I get better prints on plain paper than some photo printers. Paid $300, Mac & PC compatible, USB out the box.
The moral is...You get what you pay for. $99 Lexmark, garbage. $300 Epson, great. Used HP Laserjet, look around, $100.
and hides in damascus
Quality isn't so much the issue as I see it...
In other words quality is at an all time high,, it's longevity that's the problem.. I think there is some connection between complexity and problems (think Murphy's law). But there are other issues that are plain stupidity. A great example is the current line of Epson photo printers, I've owned three of their models over the last three years (yikes! one per year..) All of the printers had a common flaw, the printhead is built into the carrier for the cartridges in such a way that it's nearly impossible to get at the actual printhead, this caused the problem of having to run the "Clean Printhead" utility and waste a ton of ink (not to mention it didn't work for crap). HP however has the idea with replacing the printhead with each cartridge, although Epson's cartridges are cheaper because you never replace the printhead.
I've found a few nice tricks to keep your inkjet working right at home using stuff everyone has, I'll share...
If your printheads are clogged up a soft cotton rag with water on it will do miracles (I've also found that in really bad cases you can suck a bit of ink through the printhead, but it doesn't taste too good, although on the bright side it doesn't seem to stain your mouth as long as you rinse it out right away...)
If you're getting software communication errors check your cable first (although that is usually not the problem) and then go after the contacts on the printer with isopropal alcohol and water mixed 50/50 to clean off the spray of ink that is ever-present in an inkjet (if you doubt this take a rag and wipe the inside top of your printer or watch someone spraying paint) as it can cause bad connections with the inkjet cartridges.
Other than this, all I can say is the warranty for 20 dollars that I buy with my printers from Office Max has been the biggest blessing I have had..
I also have an 842C. Pretty reliable (though not built like a tank like the Deskjet 500 which lasted me about 5 or 6 years) and I can use it from both Linux and Windows (via Samba). The color cartridge seems to be a bit rare and pricey, but not too bad.
I'm looking for some kind of higher volume (1000pages/month) photo printer that will give me a couple of years of reliable operation. Color laser printers don't play well with glossy photo paper, and consumer ink jets eat ink like candy. Xerox phasers look nice, but probably don't support a very high resolution. Is there anything else out there in the $1000 range?
I'd be willing to bet the people who think they are 'okay' are much younger than the people who think they suck.
Obviously, there are always exceptions.
Personally - I'm 36 and have been do this crap for 25 years (yes - since I was 9). I think most of today's printers suck for multiple reasons -
We're keeping old HP printers around because they work. Sure, they're slow, the postscript support is flaky and the network stack is garbage but you can work around those. It's much more of a hassle to use the newer HPs which have jams and other mechanical failures on a regular basis. We've gone through all of the usual procedures, had them professionally serviced, etc. - they're just poorly designed.
/dev/null mode and choke on some postscript documents - and they continue to be quite slow - I've never seen anything close to the rated speed in actual usage since the processors aren't even remotely capable of keeping up with the print engine once you get past the "hello world" level. PDFs containing complex figures are measured in minutes per page even on the "workgroup" printers.
Unfortunately, there's not much connection between cost and quality - expensive workgroup laser printers seem to jam about as often as cheap deskjets. HP's firmware hasn't improved much, either - the newer printers don't hang if they get multiple simultaneous connections but they still go into
There are two new printers I rely on: a very expensive Canon ImageRunner copier which doubles as the uber-printer and a Xerox / Tektronix Phaser 8200, which is a color wax printer. Both have been rock-solid, handled all sorts of convoluted jobs and are *much* faster than the latest HPs - the ImageRunner is rated at 60 pages per minute and I've never seen much less, even with huge files containing truly vile postscript. This isn't surprising - it has an 800MHz PIII instead of the slow 300Mhz ARM/MIPS-class CPU which is all HP can afford to put in a $16,000 printer.
Price ink cartridges the same time you printer shop. When I wanted to buy a printer, I got an Epson Stylus Color 800 over it's little brother, the 600, because of ink cartridge prices. The printer is significantly faster, but the big deal was the black ink cartridge had twice the capacity for only $4 greater cost. I recouped the price of the faster printer in the first two ink cartridges, since I'd have to buy 4 for the 600 series printer. My 2 bits, at least look at replacement ink cartridges when buying a new printer, it's enlightening.
I thing everyone should take a step back. What kind of duty cycle is your printer suppose to have? I think a lot of residential consumers use their printers more than they think. Maybe a small laser would be a better choice. I have a HP LaserJet 2100 and love it. I don't miss printing in color for one minute. I know a color laser is just to expensive for most people. But why not have two printers. Toner in a laser can sit for much longer than an ink jet. Sometimes you just get what you pay for. You shouldn't have to buy a new printer THREE times in three years to drop a little cake on a good one.
While I'm posting my thoughts. Stores like Best Buy really make their money on the USB cable that is not included with the printer. $15 - $20 for a 6' USB cable. Come on.
Tell me about it. I too have fond memories of my DeskJet 500...a work horse by any measure. These days everyone seems to be making "disposable" printers...They are ultra cheap and probably sold at a loss, but they come back and rape you for the consumables. That perfectly explains why they are trying to put third party cartridge manufacturers out of business.
The only printers that I have noticed that are still built really well are the mid-range to high end HP Laserjets. The personal Laserjets have always been a bit iffy, and I would never touch one. Their Inkjets have been a mixed bag since the 600 series. The nice thing about the HP inkjets though is that their carts last quite a long time due to a large reservoir, the price is comparable to other manufacturers cartidges, and you geat a print head replacement when you put in a new cart.
In contrast, I noticed Epson, Brother, and Canon inkjet carts come with a puny amount of ink, and suck it up in no time. And if the heads get clogged bad, good luck.
-R
**********************
does any one of you noobs know that new printers come with "starter cartriges" that have less then full tank of ink (1/3 in HP's case) so buying a new printer is, in hps case, 3 times more often then buying a new printer from canon.
Lexmark cheap-printers have tanks that are 1/3 the size FULL... so no point in getting those.
epson has the BEST output quality. and they have "perminint" print heads, so no aligning ever. they are supose to last the lifetime of the printer. and since you never buy new print heads, you pay a lot less for ink (cartriges).
anyway, is it worth of buying a color laser printer? any experiences?
Last year I've bought simple printer from Lexmark. It had problems with paper holder from the beginning. Now I've bought another printer from HP but I do not expect more then a year from this. But I can remeber simple printers working like 3-5 years...
It's a cartoon from 'the worlds best computer mag', the german CT.
The one guys saying:
"Those were professionals at work. They only took the gold, the stockshares and the printer cartridges."
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Great rundown but how about MFC's?
I once berated MultiFunctionContraptions until I really needed a laser-based flatbed copier and fax with a real paper cassette. (Try faxing reciepts from a sheet fed!) I ended up with a Brother MFC-8600 for my home office and am surprisiningly happy with it. I now need one for a second office where I will be relying on it as a printer too. HP's 3330 has since come on the scene but reports indicate that its software is terrible and you cant say... fax receipts from its flatbed. (But it has PostScript emmulation which would make for a better printer.) Canon's entries don't seem to have a strong market presense and their web site isn't very helpful. That said:
Has anyone operated a number of MFC's in a high-volume environment? Do any models stand out?
Should I instead buy a copy machine, laser printer, scanner and laser-based fax machine? No, fax software is NOT an option...
Thanks,
MD
If the made printers that lasted for years. Fewer people would buy their newer products and ink. Sad, but its a fact. Ive worked in a computer store for quite some time now and i agree with you. But printer ink is our main income along with CD-R's.
get a used recent (not current) model of a laser printer from ebay. i got a hp laserjet 5 with network interface for something around $90. toner isn't cheap, but lasts, and the print quality is great.
I agree
I have an Epson 680 (777 in the US) and it's mechanical construction leaves somthing to be desired.
The new epson printers are made mostly out of plastic. The gears are soft and thus somtimes slip. The page feeder is also made out of this plastic and sometimes ends up misaligned and gets stuck causing the gears to slip.
The cartriges have chips in them to supposedly tell me how much ink is left. They do this so well that I can see the ink level dropping as the ink drys up if I leave it alone for a week or more.
It feeds 2 pages at a time sometimes more. Makes quite a racket (it's louder than my old dot-matrix).
And recently it now puts too much ink down which gets on the rollers and creates streaks on every page!
I would go for a new printer but because I sell them at Office World I can see the inferior quality they always display.
Makes to AVOID (take it from someone that sells these things):
Lexmark - Cheap printers, small carts that are as expensive as a large HP one, very plastic. Combo machines that can do photocopying have inferior print quality/speed to and equiv HP machine.
Xerox - Maybe OK but stay away from the M series. This series have bad problems with the print head getting blocked. The only way I got around this was to do a head clean almost every day. When it gets blocked, I could only unblock t by rubbing some paper across the head!
Epson - Ok at most times but see above
HP - I have had no problems with HP machines!
OKI - Who??
Brother - I've only used the laser machines but they seem ok
We bought one of these for use in the office as a shared printer. The drivers are hopeless, 100% CPU while spooling, unable to change print options from W2K and XP workstations, support is pathetic. Brother should stick to sewing machines.
Just the other day, I wrote an e-mail to my business partner saying the very same thing. If you want a long lasting, well designed printer, whose 4 cartridges last ages, try the £99 Epson C82, that I purchased recently. It is very fast, and while not designed for photos, great for business and what you would otherwise use a laser printer for. It has a straight paper path, and the minimum of switches and levers to make it go wrong. And a clever fold down paper collection tray. All of HP's printers are now poorly constructed. I owned an HP 5110 all-in-one for a month, and it was so unreliable and badly designed I had to take it back, not to mention the most pathetic paper tray design. Like many other people have already said, the expensive short lived cartridges of today's printers is a massive con and a class action lawsuit is due. Alternatively, buy an Epson C82 and vote with your wallet. And no, I don't work for Epson. I just like to sing the praises of a well designed product that works.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
"THe problem is not the manufactors but the technology. They all blow. I do not know of 1 inkjet that is reliable. Not one!"
That's proably because you couldn't afford it. I use to work for Epson. Yes we had the el cheapo printers. We also had top of the line commercial ink-jet printers as well. The technician had to be 80% mechanic[1], and 20% repair technician.
[1] Imagine a printer about the size of a small sofa with wheels.
BTW we also did lasers as well.
I paid $225. They are becoming affordable. You can buy a laserjet 1100 (one I have) for about $200 today or you can go to ebay and get a $4,000 printer for only $200-$300.
They are about as expensive as a high end inkjet today so there is no execuse unless your very poor or unemployed.
HP does not use built-in-obsolence with laser printers because consumers who need them are bussinesses who will not tolerate TCO and downtime. HP wants money and you will pay about as much through ink and printer replacements with inkjets as much as a single laserjet purchase.
http://saveie6.com/
The first printer I owned was a Canon BJC-210. It worked for years
with very few problems, I eventually sold it to get a newer printer
capable of decent photograph reproduction.
Boy what a mistake that was. I now own an Epson Stylus Color 760. The
first one I had failed after about seven months - it started coating
the first paper feed roller with black ink every time it cleaned
itself, leaving lovely thick black lines down the edge of every sheet
it printed.
I called Epson, got cut off a few times, held in queues for hours,
grilled about "have you only ever used official EPSON(tm) ink
cartridges and parts?" endlessly (which I actually had done) and
finally they agreed to take it for repair.
The repair guy arrived to collect it a day earlier than they said,
when I wasn't in, then didn't turn up again on the day he was supposed
to arrive, when I had taken the day off work just so I could hand the
printer over to him. I re-arranged, took another day off work, and
finally got him to take the printer away for repair (no replacement
left in the meantime BTW).
Then I waited, and waited, and waited. After their service deadline
came and went by more than two weeks, I called again and again, and
they eventually admitted they had lost my printer and would replace it
with a recondition unit of the same model.
The "new" one arrived about another week later, an ugly piece of shit
with a couple of nice big scratches across the top. "Sorry, we cannot
guarantee the appearance of reconditioned printers, only their correct
funtioning".
Well, it's now another seven months later, and guess what? This one
has developed exactly the same fault. Of course now the warranty
period is up, so I can either pay about three times what the printer
is worth to get it repaired, or buy another. I'm damn sure it won't be
an Epson.
3 dead HP's in 2 years. Meanwhile, the 1985 vintage Panasonic dot-matrix is still going strong. That's gor emergencies, tho - it's all metal so it's fairly heavy to move. My everyday printer now has been a Lexmark Z53. I've had it for a year now, and I'm happy with it. It's quiet, smooth, fast, and does photo quality under gimp-print.
C|N>K
A lot of people seem dead set on comparing an entry level printer of 100 buck or less to what used to be a 1k+ printer. Hp's at the grand level, still pretty sweet. And they've learned new tricks.
Don't want something that will only last a year. Here's an idea, don't buy something that's only ment to last a year. Buy something from the business line.
As an aside. From my experience with Brother equipment. They're always a pain in the ass until you learn the secret trick. Every machine they make seems to have a special lever that has to be jiggled just so, or a spot that needs to be jabbed just right. After that, they tend more towards the simply annoying.
But hey, you get what you pay for. Don't expect the rolex you bought off the guy dealing three card monte to be suitable for circumnavigating the globe either. It's just one of those things.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
You pay peanuts, you're gonna get a monkey.
YOu can buy a laser printer for $225. My HP laserjet 1100 is very reliable and was purchased for that price. The difference between reliabilty is night and day compared to an inkjet.
I disagree with you on the assertion that low end laser printers are just as crappy as the low end ink jets. This is what I thought originally but was proven wrong. The reason inkjets suck so much is because the ink is low grade and dries out on the ink heads. Or dust from paper clogs the nozzles when passing through. Also the mechanics wear down and are not designed to handle more then 5k copies.
A laser is different because the vast majority of parts are in the cartidge itself. Only the laser writer, transfer corona, feed tires, and the loading mechanism are left. The drum, toner, charge corona, developing unit, and recycling unit are in the actual cartridge.
This means the same manufactoring which takes in account that the el-cheapo gears that brake every 3k copies will be replaced whenever you change the ink!
This makes them extremely reliable. The technology also insures jams are next to zero and even dirty paper will never smudge. The ink lasts for a long time because it is already a powder and is melting into the paper. It is not a liquid that can dry out. And last the majority of customers who buy laser printers are bussiness users who will not tolerate downtime and have requirements about pages printed per month. Inkjets are made for the consumer who printers something every once in a while.
It is true what your saying with built in obscelence. I have seen it with coffee makers. My mother decided only to buy the top of the line coffee makers because of breakage. No luck. She now uses an old MR Coffee bought when I was born because it works. However laser printers are not built like this and even if a problem arises you can always replace the toner cartridge which takes care of %90 of the problems since this is where most of the mechanisms are.
http://saveie6.com/
I still use my 500c printer. Its worked flawlessly every day for almost 12 years
My good old Atari Mega STE ran for about 7 years 24/7 as a server (Minitel / BBS) . No noise (no fan), no hardware failure ever, and no unexpected system crash. I still have it to watch demos, it's still running like charm.
On the other hand, my brand new Athlon CPU was dead after less than one year of workstation usage, probably because there was not enough fans in the box.
On the Atari, and on my Akai sampler, there are old cheap Quantum 450 Mb hard drives. Used them a lot for a decade without any issue. I still use the sampler with the same hard disk, and there is still no bad block.
Nowadays, a fatal hard disk crash is ordinary. At my daily job, we have to replace about one disk every month. I can't even imagine running a server without a RAID array and daily backups.
Next episode : memory. Deffective RAM. This is something I wouldn't imagine some years back. Even non-ECC RAM used to be rock solid, I've never seen any bad SIMM chip so far.
Nowadays things are different. When I bought my Athlon, I had to go back twice to my vendor in order to change the RAM chips. I experienced random crashes, and memtest86 revealed that parts of the RAM were borked.
When it comes to printers, things are the same. My old IBM 4019E was rock solid. I bought it from a company that already used it for years. But I never had a glitch with it. But finally, when I became a daddy, I wanted a color printer to play with digital imaging. I bought a HP 690 that worked very well... but not for a long time. One year later, strange things happened, like colors that didn't work any more. Same thing on Linux and Windows, so it was a hardware problem. Now I have a 970Cxi that seems to work, but well...
It's clear that today's hardware is really flaky. You can have it solid by taking extra preventive measures (excellent cooling, no dust, AC power regulators, excellent cables, ECC RAM, RAID arrays). But this is like shit in a lovely gift box.
{{.sig}}
I know a chap at one of the insurance agencies in South Africa. They did various tests in the printer market. In the end They settled on the Minolta PageWorks 8L. It is a normal B&W printer, but the printer has the following advantages: 1: It runs on normal Copier toner. Dirt cheap. 2: It can take a stack of paper and runs reasonably fast. 3: It is super robust. 4: The printer itself is truely affordable. Unfortuanately, you then need a seperate printer for the photo's.
!
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
Samsung are doing a line of really cheap lasers I got mine for £99.99 with two free toner cartrages giving me 3000 sheet straight off. Since then Ive used it fairly consistantly to print off reports webpages articals etc it has let me down in fact I was impressed with the quality both in build and printing from such a cheap printer.
I have a HP 930c - it's a cheap colour inkjet from maybe 2 years ago. It has full auto calibration, meaning it prints some test patterns and then scans them using an optical sensor. I wouldn't call it a "camera", but it is designed so it can make sure the output is accurate. You can tell it's working because the whole inside of the printer lights up blue (the colour the sensor works with).
Works fine for me - I had assumed that all HP models would have it in by now.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I am sitting beside an IBM 5225 printer and there are 2 or 3 4214's elsewhere. They just work and keep working even after years of (ab)use by users.
In the meantime I am chucking out inkjets and laser's left right and centre even though the majority of the printer is replaced when you need to put a new ink/toner cartridge in it.
I've been try to sell a color LaserJet. I'm not even sure I could give it away. It's a stalwart machine, but yet people can only see the lower up-front cost of an inkjet printer, rather thant the long-term costs and the reliability issues. Resolution is one issue where the older printers fall short, of course, but it's like processor speed: People just don't realize they don't *need* 2400 by 2400 resolution to print colored text.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I'm considering buying a second-hand laser printer for my home office.
Personally, the better b/w quality of a laser printer is more important that the color printing available on inkjets.
Sure, a toner & drum package costs as much as a complete color inkjet, but it also lasts for 1000s of pages of crisp black text!
I use to have a job about a year ago that was very cruel and unusual punishment. My job was a computer tech that turned into printer repair, which included deskjet printers. The parts to fix a deskjet printer were more costly then it was to fix them.. but people still wanted them fixed. I finally quit the job when HP came out with a line "I think 620c" that only came with a three year warranty from HP. And as soon as one of those suckers turned three months. Logic board would die, or power supply.. it was getting crazier and crazier. I could still smell the foam packaging on these printers and they would be coming to be with defective parts and no warranty left. Anyways, I quit that job and now work for big BLUE and loving it.
------88-------- Sig? Sorry, I don't smoke.
What you say!!!
If it weren't for a Bad Printer, there would be no Free Software Movement!
Bad Printers are good for Freedom and Growth. Move 'zig' For great justice
I've got an HP 842c deskjet here at home, which has been running 3 years without any trouble whatsoever. At work I use an HP 2100M Laserjet, which also runs flawlessly.
My brother's been through 2 Lexmark, 1 Epson, and is now on a Canon inkjet in 3 years. He finally bought a 10 year old HP laserjet and hasn't had any trouble since...
Worked himself out of a job because his brushes lasted too long. He never had a repeat sale because the things lasted forever -- which was their selling point in the first place.
So no, things aren't built like they used to be. This makes no sense, save from a capitalist perspective, where money in a fat cat's pocket today justifies all the landfills and toxic waste dumps of tomorrow.
I recently purchased a combo psc 2210 that was doa, Amazon also said they never received the printer. They asked me for a tracking number and I said that their method of free return 3rd class mail, does not use tracking numbers. I guess amazon claims to offer free returns but if you want to use a tracking number, you need to pay for it. After 15 calls, one of the geniuses in customer service finally figured out that if I've bought $XXXX from amazon.com every year since it existed why would I suddenly come up with an ingenious printer scam to collect $299.
I ended up getting a 7550, it seems to work well, for now.
No joke. I interviewed with HP a few years ago and when I made a casual comment about how my old laserjet just kept going and going, the guy interviewing me started ranting about how those old printers were ruining HP's business. He said that if the engineers had done their job right those older printers would only have lasted for two product cycles. Sheesh.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
I have a Canon S830D. Edge to edge printing and you can not tell difference between it and film when printed on Canon Photo Paper Pro. I've shown prints and film for friends to compare and they can hardly believe it. Amazing printer.
Dirk
My Epson 600 (permanently clogged printhead grumble grumble) series inkjet has laid unused since I got a LJ 4M Plus. Sure it's black and white only but it's fast and Just Works. I have another one on my porch for spare parts. I'll use this printer for years to come. These printers are dead easy to work on too. Give me bin full of LJ IV parts and I can build printers out of them. It's tough as nails, has good print quality (600dpi), the cartridges last and last, prints reasonably fast, works well with Linux and is easy to service. I can live without color. If I ever do need color, I'll just pick up another inkjet and print to it maybe four times a year. Even a cheapo inkjet may last a long time with the LJ 4 doing the heavy lifting....assuming it doesn't clog up that is.
My only complaint is that KDE's print system can generate Postscript that takes this thing AGES to render. Basically, the green processing light blinks for 7 or 8 minutes then a page comes out of the engine at normal speed. This thing has 38 MB on the formatter board too! Sure, it looks pixel perfect when done but sheesh! Even newer HP lasers take a noticable amount of time printing from say Konqueror. We have an Oki 7200 in the office that prints KDE stuff fast. I guess that thing must have a fast CPU in it's Postscript interpreter. I suspect the problem is in QT. Maybe QT needs to expose some quality/speed tradeoff functionality to the end user. Moral of the story, don't print from KDE apps unless your printer can eat complicated Postscript for breakfast.
No, my printer a HP Colorjet680 or something like that, which I paid about $150 for 3 years ago, stills runs fast and clear. If you want a good printer, shell out a few extra buck for the quality.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've actually given away a couple of HPII/III's that I grabbed off the junkpile at work and fixed, mostly minor... rollers, etc. Damn reliable little printers.
;-) -- Actually I think I'll trade it up to the 4M I just grabbed).
:-P
And, lately, I just gave away an HP4... just cleaned up the output rollers (no $ spent) and it works fine, and I have two more (one works, one w/ same problem as the 1st) to go (plus, one of my own
The HPII's and III's (not the P's) we had pretty good luck with. I used a "fixed" HPIIIp I grabbed off the junkpile at work for 3 years, before I got the 4, fixed that, and gave away the IIIp. The biggest problem we've ever had at work is the damn 'recharged' toner... once maybe, the second time we get a 10% failure, and it increases every time. Personally, I wish we'd just stick with new ones.
Then again, we're moving towards a 'paperless' office, so the millions of pages a year we print is *increasing*
Nowadays cartridges outlive the printers they come with.
I bought this thing in 1993 I think. It has worked like a charm ever since, no problems.
My only big complaint is that it doesn't feed paper very well. I will admit that this sometimes annoys the hell out of me (when it prints a page on the roller b/c the stock got hung up in the "tray" and you have to feed a piece of paper thru it 4 times to absord the mess).
A month or so ago it started to squeak when form feeding... I am wondering where to shoot the dab of WD-40.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I recently got a HP Laserjet 6l for free. It had been in the back of a pickup truck for about 6 months. When I picked it up water poured out of it (and onto my shoes).
...Oh, I did have to get a free repair kit from HP fix a well known multi-feed problem but other than that it has been great.
I let it dry out and it works perfectly.
There\'s no place like ~
I have an old Okedata 380 that I picked up from my old work before it hit the trash. This is an old ribbon style printer. I had been in use for some 5 years in an office setting, and now I have gotten another 5 years out of it at home. With no sign of of trouble.
In that same time, I have purchased two new printers, a Canon BJC2000 and a HP660c, both of which have died.
I know the Okidata is slow, loud, not color, and only 600 dpi, but I also know that I can count on it to work tomorrow -- A lot more then I can say for the others
Cars were made better in the past, too. It all boils down to simple supply and demand. Make printers that last and the demand for them will die down, once everyone has one.
Today's manufacturers try to hide the shorter product life by adding new "innovations" to each model release.
Forget flash card slots, just give me a printer that'll live as long as a dot-matrix of yester-decade.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Thought that I would chime in. I have an old Xerox 4004 Inkjet that I bought back in 94-95 for about $250. Sure, it is black ink only and only about 300dpi, but it is still working perfectly without a hitch. 9 years for a printer? Pretty damn good IMHO.
Makes me laugh when all my friends HP color inkjets and Lexmarks crap out after 1-2 years.
Of course, I have no idea what the quality of the new Xerox inkjets is like.
It's all part of the plan brother, nothing new. Bought a new car lately?
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
I'm on the other side of the world, and used to run a computer / electronics store.
;) became higher dpi = better printer.
;) but it didn't matter since Epson, Canon and HP printers for the same money were just as woeful.
I remember retailing dot matrix printers for ~$250 AUD (just to give you an idea of when)
Bubble / ink jet printers were still kinda new. In those days, you had to sell a printer on things like; cost per page, how and which paper it took, who would fix it locally. Hell we even used to show people testprints!
HP500s were great in terms of robustness and compared to the 250$ dot matrix, they weren't expensive, but the trend with customers (not clients
After about 6 months of selling the, then new, Lexmark 'high dpi low cost' printers (was it a 1080? or a 1000 or something), my staff threatened to strike / do bad things to my coffee if we continued to carry them.
I said, "hey, I don't mind if you're honest, just tell them they're crap printers and the carts cost way too much". I'm not a fool, i was after all running a business, the profit on those lexmark cartridges wasn't bad, the profit on those swqeegey refillers was through the roof, and the cable was 'sold seperately'.
Never the less the staff insisted that the Lexmarks be removed from stock. People would just buy on price vs dpi, and even choose against the salespersons advice.
Within 3 years of that meeting, almost all big brand printers in that price bracket were;
a) usually sold on price vs dpi alone,
b) had a ~60$ cartridge,
c) complete and utter rubbish.
Less than week after i handed the store over to someone else, Lexmarks were back in stock
Also of note; The Star dot matrix, was still cranking out receipts on one of the POS machines with glee. It was prolly >10 years old at the time, it had done some *serious* mileage, Not to mention eating the occasional coin / watch battery someone dropped into it.
Hey, I'm using a old LQ500 they used once at my school, I don't know how old it is, but I'd guess its at least 10 Years old. I just had to buy a new [how du you call this stuff you use in pin-Printers] for 6 EUR, much cheaper that ink and I can print several 100 or even 1000 pages with it! This LQ500 is loud, but cheap!
craesh
Ya know - your parents toaster that they got when they were married still works, but you go through one every year or two?
I was in a Williams Sonoma store the other day and they had a toaster that was like $120. Hand-made in England, it was made of all these top-notch parts. But it didn't pop up the toast automatically, you had to *manually* lift it up when it was done.
I asked the salesgirl how she expected me to pay this much for a manual toaster. She said it'd outlast me and that my kids'd be able to use it. I told her that I still had a problem with the price -- a functional automatic toaster from Target is $15 and lasts me about 4 years (I eat toast about twice a week). At that rate, I'd have a cheap toaster for 25 years and still have spent less replacing them than the toaster she was trying to sell.
Needless to say I didn't buy it, but be assured, if you're looking for the toaster to end all toasters, they'll sell you one.
Read about how to get a free new separation pad here.
Or order one directly here.
Well sure printers have been made of less and less quality in the last 10 years. The same way with everything else. Cars don't run forever like they used to...what's the difference with printers? If they ran forever, you wouldn't ever buy a fancy laserjet or anything like that.
And this is why I just spent $140 on a straight razor -- I'll make back my money in 6 years and in the meantime it looks darn cool!
"this is a really good piece of cantoloupe."
The Epson large format photo stylus ink printers provide the best quality for the price. The company has a line of six and seven color printers between $700 and $4000 that are network compatible. Never had a problem with my 1200 or 7600! I've still have the hp deskjet 855C that I purchased eight years ago. It has been repaired once and doensn't have great color print quality. Non-HP inks are a lot cheaper now for this machine from Amazon.
New Lexmark Z45 dead before it reached a year.
Aye. The 4L is a tank. Mine's also around 10-11 years old, and has been through hell. If only all hardware was that well-built! They're also quite cheap to replace - lots of them available (and, by the sounds of things, still working!) through Ebay.
Next time an epson bubble jet dies on you, crack it open.
My girlfriend had a 740i and it went the way that epsons seem to go - colors progressively becoming weaker and eventually stopping completely so that repeated "cleaning cycles" did not fix the problem any longer. I took it apart and found what I expected to find - a mixture of dust and dried ink covering the print head cover area.
What was amazing, however, was the huge piece of blotter that filled the entire bottom of the printer, probably 4" x 14" and 1" thick, which was half saturated with ink! I have taken apart printers before, and have never seen anything like this. It was taking those $32 ink cartridges and pumping them into a piece of blotter!
Now, my brother has an old epson 24 pin dot matrix, and he has about the dustiest room I've ever seen and that thing still works beautifully. I am half tempted to buy one off of ebay just since I know that it has worked since 1992 and he's probably only bought about 2 ribbons for it as well!
+++ ATH0 +++
You didn't use to be able to get a laser printer for under $1000. If you pay that kind of money for a laser printer today, chances are that you will get a quality product as well. If you buy a $300 special, on the other hand, the PostScript interpreter will run on your PC and the thing will likely fall apart quickly.
Dig this: if you buy a printer and get the 2 year replacement plan (~$20 US), they'll give you free ink for that 2 years. Just show up with the slip saying you bought the replacement plan, and bam; they give you what you need. (I have heard that some stores require you turn in the old cartridges, though I have yet to have to) If you print a lot like I do, you more than pay for the cost of the printer and the replacement plan. And the way printers don't last now, in 2 years, you just start over again. If they still do this in 2 years, I'll be back there again for sure.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
I have a couple REALLY old printers... Anyone remember the Gorilla Banana, and a Commodore MPS-801. Both of those printers use the spinning platen, and dual-hammer print heads. For those who aren't familiar with that design, the print head has two flat hammers that strike a spinning platen that, from the end, looks like a gear, with teeth on it. Those ridges when struck with the hammer, intersect at just the right place to form a dot on the paper. It's really quite interesting. They're loud, and slow, and the print quality is pretty poor. The letters are made up of 5x7 dots, and there are no decending characters... Letters like g, q, p, y, all sit up a bit higher than other lowercase letters... :)
I also have some Okidata Microline printers, and a couple Star NX-1000's, and a Panasonic KXP-1180. All of them are favorites for using on Commodore computers with my Xetec Supergraphix Gold interface... that thing's got some real value, actually, they're VERY hard to find.
My Epson Stylus Color 400 still works fine, even with cheap Chinese ink. I have had that printer for several years. My Epson Stylus Photo 780 works well, too, but needs to be used more often than the 400 to keep from clogging. Ohwell, good thing I'm not paying Epson for their ink anymore.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Your situation not withstanding, my experience with Tektronix has been bitter. They bought-out Lightworks - the only feasible adversary of the AVID non-linear editing system in it's day - and basically sat on it until it died. Oh, and they released Lightworks VIP...which was a painfully under-developed product with a nice GUI.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I still have an HP 500C I've has since College. Only printer I've ever purchased. Print quality isn't that good, but anything I need in better quality I print at work. The ink of course is costly, but I don't print that much. When I do, the ink is usually dryed up, but put new ink in, and away she goes. HP still makes decent printers, about the only decent thing they make is printers and scanners, rest of their products really suck.
I can remember my Deskjet 550, from about 96, and 97. worked great... until the popcorn incident of 98... couldn't quite get it to stop streaking after that...
... now... if we didn't need to have the maintnence guy come in every 3 days to fix something, it would be worth having in the office. Thank god its on lease, or else we'd be paying just as much for the tech visits, as we did for the printer.
so, I got rid if it, and just stole time on the lab printers.
Now, at work today, we've got a few printers in the office, a HP 8850 Laser, works great. Its like a nuke sub. only needs to come up for more paper.
Then theres the Cannon color pass.
Its a $11,000 color scanner, printer, copier. I think it even does the dishes, but we havn't tried. beautiful prints come out of it.
Printer quality isn't just suffering on the low end, this $11,000 beaut proves it to me.
If you want quality and sane ink prices then stay away from home user printers. They are dirt cheap and as exptected plain dirt quality. Those printers arent anything but a necessary evil to sell inc cartridges. Why else would they have a cleaning routine that squirts inc into the cleaning pad everytime you use it even if you printed something a minute ago? Its all a big scam and the money spent on a real printer is well worth it. The TOS is probably much lower if you get a real laser and not a cheap one. Bubble jets should be avoided at all cost since frankly they stink botth at quality and in printing quality.
HTTP/1.1 400
I bought that Brother printer from Amazon for about $100 off the regular price--I paid about $150 for it, which is the lowest of the low-end laser printer costs. (The discount might be related to some slighly off-spec lots since other places sell this printer refurb'd for the same price). I'm going to have to purchase a new drum kit already because the printer doesn't seem able to do quality printing on anyone's stock without leaving a very thin film of toner over the paper. Cheap paper will also leave paper dust on the pickup rollers that scorches onto the paper for the first couple of sheets you do in a day. So that $100 I saved will be spent on a $70 drum kit and experiments with different paper brands. Still, this printer is a good deal if you don't mind the hassle, since it's part of a new generation of printers for which the drum and toner are separate consumable items. This is an excellent trend that I hope to see better printer manufacturers, like HP, take up.
Kris
Kriston
I think the quality of computer components in general has been in decline for a couple of years. CD-ROM drives and motherboards seem to be particularly bad lately. This is partly the fault of consumers. People demand high performance at a low price point, and don't seem to care much about reliability any more; computers are becoming "disposable". The computer manufacturers are simply catering to the demands of their market.
I would never buy computer hardware there (Though *USA isn't a whole lot better and appears to have driven all the mom and pop places in the area under) and only buy other things there after careful consideration of my expectations. For cooking utensels I'll usually go to the local gourmet, resturant supply or hardware store.
So if you want a printer that's well made and will last a long while, skip the $40 *mart special and drop a couple of grand on a high-resolution PostScript laser printer. You get what you pay for, after all. I used to work in a print shop and what they're doing with those laser printers used to take a 5-digit-price laser typesetter typesetting to film.
Personally I don't have much use for paper these days anyway and haven't had a printer on my system in about 4 years. Last time I needed stuff printed, it turned out that my local copy shop supported my LaTeX generated PostScript files.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have a Lexmark X83 (flatbed scanner/color inkjet) that works pretty well in OSX, but I'd really prefer a version that has a color laser instead of inkjet. Any home (under $2k) units fit the bill? IIRC there's color laser below $1k now..
...Lexmark and HP are basically exactly the same thing. Thermal-drop inkjet tech, with the printhead disposable on the cartridge. They've both taken on the low-end with gusto; recall that in the early days of Lexmark (was 1995 that long ago?), they were IBM's just-spun-off printing division, with some reputation to go with that.
Canon was the first to have the sense to move to separate tanks; Epson was the first (and only?) to bring piezoelectronic printheads to market, which basically tripled DPI overnight.
I'll agree, a clogged Epson head sucks. It'd be nice if they were (more easily) replaceable, but they're also the most expensive component of the machines by far. The trick is not to let ink/empty tanks dry out in the printer, which, of course, implies using a bit more ink.
Having spent the night (and $30 for a *no-name* cartridge) bringing a Deskjet 560C back to life, I can't say the HPs are all-that, but that goes without saying, anyway.
What's always interested me are the also-ran technologies- the Star SJ-144 used a wax transfer mechanism of some kind, and the Citizen PN48/PN50/PN60i brought something similar to the portable market- in the size of a stapler. (I really should've bought one for college.) Okidata's low-end models have gotten a bit flimsy in recent years (hint: work on the gear train for the drums, guys), but LED printing is nearly as elegant as it gets (if you're mostly concerned with text).
The biggest irony in my mind is that we're still using all this damn paper.
Nothing is the way it use to be. Take cars for example. My car is 27 years old and has over 141k miles on it. Yet it runs great, gets awesome gas mileage and I don't expect to see it stop any time soon. Where will a brand new car be in 27 years with 141k miles? Probably a junk heap. Printer manufacturers are seeing what car manufacturers saw in the 80's. If you make them wear out quicker people are more than likely going to need a new one sooner.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Why would you get something you don't need, if what you already have works?
I rarely print these days. Most documents, scans, and other accumulated stuff sits on my hard drive or archived to CDs. I have an ink jet printer, Epson 740, that I barely use, and I buy the cheap ink from inksell.com...the quality is equivalent to the actual ink for my Epson.
Regards,
javajeff
That's about the time HP's CEO changed to that woman. Ahh, after URLing, here she is. Carly Fiorina
She decided to move HP to a class-based inventory company to keep up with current competition. If you watch the history of the ScanJet line you can actually watch the trend.
I am doing this in order of release date.
Let us start from the HP IICX:
HP II CX (Disney still uses these)
HP 3 C
HP 4 C (600 Optical DPI, around $2,800)
HP 4 P (300 Optical DPI, around $890)
HP 4 S (Terrible device made with VistaScan. HP won't even own up to making it)
HP 5 P
New CEO
Based on the 5P Core but without the expensive metal casing and protecting for the scan bar:
HP 5100C (What's happening here? Printer-port only scanner that breaks down every 300 scans when the head falls off the railing, giving a horrible grinding noise?)
HP 6100C (SCSI only like almost all of the scanners above. Has a burnout problem with the power supply.)
HP 5200C (Printer-Port / USB scanner, same trouble as the 5100C but after a year of service)
First New Design, released with the same 'product line' number as above scanners.
HP 4200C (USB only. Has similar grinding problem as 5100C. Lightbar is powered off in software only and crashes Windows '98. Costs $100 less than 5200C)
Still uses 5P Design:
HP 6200C (USB / SCSI. Same grinding problem, more expensive case. Costs $100 more than 5200c and an additional $300 if you want the ADF/Negative 5in by 5in light)
New updated 4200 Core:
HP 4300C (USB Only. If Serial number shows MY95XXXXX or less, scanner was manufactured incorrectly and will usually give an ERROR 42. HP made no announcement about the known hardware problems and only would repair if the customer called in. Note that there is no TOLL-FREE option)
HP 5300C (Looks larger than the 4300C, but same hardware)
Annndd lalalala down the line.
I own five HP 4C now days, all of which I picked up at the Dallas First Saturday Sale and I cannot express how EXCELLENTLY manufactured these scanners are. I even managed to pick up three ADFs [automatic document feeder 50x sheets] with the scanners. You can still find these scanners on EBAY for $10 or under.
I understand this entry appears Off Topic, but it is just a history of the HP quality through the new CEO's ownership using the ScanJet line.
seems to be having a shorter and shorter lifespan.. i still have an 8 year old 500mb maxtor harddrive running a web server 24/7! no probelems as of yet :D
now that's quality
-judging another only defines yourself
While I completely agree about low end laserjets not being crappy, I do have to say your lucky if your 1100 doesn't jam. That model if fairly well known for having problems with jamming.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I had an HP722 and it still works fine. I have a Canon that, in the immortal words of Bart Simpson, "both sucks and blows at the same time".
Laser is the way to go. I got a Samsung-1430 which is very similar to yours. In the last year, I recouped the initial 275 dollars (buy.com + a coupon) in the savings of cartridges alone.
Unfortunately, cheap laser color is hard to come by, so I still have my crappy bubblejet.
--Joey
I have a 12-year old HP Series II laser printer that is still running. The page counter shows over a million pages printed.
"They don't make 'em like they used to"
as a load of people have already stated before, the manufacturers cut down on production cost for their printers. this is a logical second step to increase revenue. the first step was to force customers to pay periodically for expensive cartridges. now is the time to make printers themselves replaceable.
generally, it is a clever move. you can choose between long life with a professional printer and manufacturer ink, or you can try to get away cheaper with a consumer-grade printer in combination with non-original ink.
any other way won't work.
and, on a side note:
my personal experience as an employee of an epson service partner is
DO NOT USE COMPATIBLE INK CARTRIDGES IN EPSON PRINTERS!
70-80% of the epson inkjet printers we get back for servicing have clogged printheads due to the use of cheap ink. the consistency of some non-original ink is thicker than that of the original used by the manufacturer. as epson states in its FAQ, the ink is specially designed to match these printers' advanced printhead technology. and this is not a marketing trick. there is substance to this statement.
as seductive as these offers are, i would not recommend using them...
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
I understand that...I'm not comparing apples to oranges here (if you read what I originally said). I'm saying that, at a given price point, HP's quality has been declining. They used to produce reliable printers for $150, now they make defective printers for that price. One should expect the opposite in the computer industry - namely, that over time quality increases at a price point. But not with HP - their quality control has taken a nose dive. Note I'm not talking about features and such, and I'm not complaining that I can't get a top-of-the-line printer for $50. But when DOA rates start going up, that's bad. And I've even started noticing HP's with plain defective paper feeder designs, which is sad since that used to be the thing that they did the best.
And all I'm saying is it doesn't HAVE to be this way. Like I said, Canon seems to be making great printers still.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Hehe, this sounds eerily familiar. I worked at OfficeMax several years ago and unlike every other electronics department in town, we were not on comission, AND knew what we were talking about :). I remember routinely recommending computers from other places like Gateway 2000 over what we sold at our store. Of course this worked out nicely because they'd come back and buy their printers from us which was where we actually made money. We lost money on most of the computers we sold.
You'd get that same behavior in computers that you get in printers. People coming and buying Packard Bell despite alll of our warnings to the contrary. Or the best was when somebody would come in who'd bough a piece of crap from another place and then we'd give the sympathy and find them a good system.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I bought an HP Deskjet 550C the week they were released. Paid $700 for one of if not the first inkjet that carried both a color and black cartridges at the same time. I used the printer for 8 years, even thought I was salivating at all the newer printers that came out after my old printer. Finally, I succumbed to temptation and bought an HP LaserJet 1100 about 2-3 years ago and placed the old (still working) 550C into semi-retirement with a family member. After realizing that the 550C was getting used more often now that it was in retirement, I replaced it with a HP PhotoSmart P1000, fearing the 550C's immediate demise. So after 9 years of use, the old warrior was relegated to an upstairs closet. Fast forward 6 months, and my sister needs a new color printer, quickly and cheaply. I started to look at a few el' cheapo printers, then I realized that the 550C is just sitting in that attic... sure it is slow, but it is still a color printer, and you cannot get any cheaper than FREE!! So, the 550C is back in service, printing away after only relubricating the main printer arm. What is great about the 550C is that after nearly 11 years, I can still go to Wal-Mart at 3am and buy ink for this thing. That is pretty amazing, It is rare for any consumable for any product to be widely available after so long of a time.
A few years back I worked at Best Buy
We had HP rep in our store almost 40 hours a week. She was an HP employee, and basically showed off the HP printers and helped customers out. She also gave us lots of cool free stuff.
Anyway, the higher ups at Best Buy figured you shouldn't let a printer go out the door without 2-4 spare ink cartridges.
"Imagine, you're finishing a report at 1:30am, and you run out of ink! Who's open then!?"
Plus, they include greeting card and photo software WITH the printer, so you know once you get the PC home and the kids start printing like there's no tomorrow...
Has anyone looked at Alps printers?
Unfortunately they don't seem to sell them anymore, but they boasted better quality prints than laser and cheap ink (powder) refills.
Don't know if anyone else is using the same technology (Micro Dry and Dye Sublimation Printing) or whether this was a case of 'too good to be true'.
You can look at nearly every consumer electronics category and find this. The easiest is to compare the VCRs that early adoptors owned with the VCR of today. Modern VCRs have HiFi stereo, Super-Quasi playback, VCR+ Plus Gold, Commercial Skip, Commercial Advance, and cost about the same as a low end DVD player. Older models cost close to $1500, were mono and often had wired remotes. They also tend to still work for those few that didn't get bored with them in the late 80's.
Here's why. New technology costs money. Let's say it would have cost $1300 to make that VCR in 1980. Well, the sort of person that drops $1300 on a VCR doesn't want a piece of crap like you can buy a Best Buy for $79.99. They want a quality piece of kit. Besides, bad reviews can kill a new product line, while everyone expects the first models to be expensive, the question is, "do they work?" So, the answer is simple. Build it like a tank. Add $200 to the price, and build it like there's no tomorrow. It's a flagship product, so over the top is good. Dodge sells Vipers not only to sell Vipers, but also to sell Neons. The price of metal and machining hasn't changed too radically since then. Let's say today that the upgrade to that quality wouldn't have been $200, but instead $125. Also add market forces from DVD players - which are mechanically simpler than VCRs - meaning they should cost less than a VCR. Now you have a $80 VCR that has most every feature anyone would need. It would cost $125 to upgrade it to the high quality they "used to" have, so you now have a $205 VCR in an $80 market.
The same thing is happening right now in DVD players and recorders. Keep in mind that the transport hardware's task is almost identical between the player and recorder. You'll see on the same shelf at your local retailer a DVD recorder for $500 and a DVD player for $100. Compare the finish on the two models. Look at how the remote controls are made. Compare the overall feel of the two units.
I have been a hp lexmark okidata epson printer tech and each year you see the use of more and more platic part over what once was metal its ture for both leaser and ink printers
Carly Fiorina is *awful*. More stupid company-gutting decisions have never been made, yet because she's the highest-ranking woman in the tech industry, and knocking her down would look terrible from a PR standpoint, she stays.
May we never see th
The trend. My first printer was an old Dot-Matrix. Screeched like a banshee, didn't do color (At the time, color printers cost several hundred dollars) and was a bit slow. It never ran out of ink in the time I used it, and never stopped working.
Ok, so my dad went out and grabbed a Canon BJ 230. I still have it, because it will process B-size paper. Unfortunately, the carts suck.
After that, we've gone through Epson Styluses 440 (ink heads clogged), 600 (only worked half the time), 760 (have to print every week, or heads clog), and 880 (Ok, but the heads still tend to clog up). Ok, this isn't going well. So he went out and got... An Epson C62! Starting to get some wierd colors off that one.
Now I recently went out to the swap meet and picked up a Panasonic KX-P2023 for $4. It still works flawlessly. Sure, it's a tad on the slow side and I can't do higher than 360*180. But that's all most people would ever need. Plus, I can print ASCII from my 21-year old Tandy Model 100. The only problem is that I keep getting an STDIN as a print job (???)
I currently lean in favor of laserjet and DMP printers, for some reason.
Unfortunately, this trend is intentional: What incentive would anyone have to buy a new PC or new parts, if they all were made to last forever? Obviously, there would be zero incentive. That's why the PC industry purposely make components that are less and less reliable, just to keep people on buying something new every once in a while.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
If old printers survived for long amounts of time, then the vendors would be forced to keep their old ink manufacturing facilities operational. But this isn't what they want; they want to move to the new ink formulations and keep the price of ink as steady as possible, to guarantee a cash flow. This means they need to obsolete the printers to keep everyone on track to use the new ink.
On the other hand, I may be talking out my ass.
I used to have a Star NX-2420 rainbow. It was a top o' the line 24-pin dot matrix printer, I paid about 200 bucks for it in 1991. This tank lasted me through last year, and if it hadn't been for my last ink ribbon finally giving out i'd STILL be using it, but alas it's now relegated to my basement corner with all of my other discarded computer parts. So I decided to go out and buy a new color printer and being a poor college student picked up a relatively cheap lexmark. When I took it out of the box I was amazed this thing didn't even wiegh a POUND much less be as hefty as the old dot matrix. The color picture quality was actually BETTER on the dot-matrix and it seemed to print faster. Now I know this wasn't a top of the line printer that I just bought, but for the cost of ink nowadays you should get more than what you pay for. Now if you want a good printer that will last you're going to have to look at top of the line, which can run upwards of 500 bucks. I think the cost to quality ratio has SERIOUSLY slipped.
My HP DeskJet 500 still works; it is still my only printer. It was originally attached to a 386.
Sig this.
If anyone has any stories about the quality of newer Samsung Laser Printers, I'd love to hear it. I'll be in the market for on RSN.
Having just purchased a new (HP) printer in the last couple months, I can definitely say a few things about the job they've done on making sure you pay-- one way or another. Take a look at the ink cartridge capacity of those low-end HP printers; I could probably sneeze and expel more fluid ;-) The more you pay for the printer (especially the "office" inkjets), the more the ink cartridge holds. I look at it as the difference between buying a car outright for cash or getting a 36 month loan. I haven't calculated how long you'd have to use the cheap printers to equal the cost difference of a more expensive printer, but I can't imagine at $30-$40/cartridge it would take too long. Take a look at the capacities on the cartridges some time when you're at a store; it infuriates me to see a MUCH larger-capacity cartridge available for cheaper than the one I have to buy because they've designed each printer line only to take a particular cartridge!
.... is that I have a Sony CD player that I bought ca 1986, still going strong, I have a Sony TV bought ca. 1995, no problems, I have a Sony minidisk bougth in 1998, no hiccups, I have a Sony portable radio that works a week in one AAA battery, bought 4 years ago.
Geddit?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Surely your employer put a piggybank for you to pay for those printouts.
Now that you mention it, I should do that here in the office, I will start a printing business.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Hey, that's slick. Now I have something I can use my linux laptop to test printers with. Have to find time to try that out. Thanks.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I've noticed that computers while more complicated and mabie more powerfull are also lack substance, samething with Celphones, regular phones and electronics in general.
Lexmark should team up with Gilette, they could package a printer and a Mach-3 razor together, and have them both last approximately as long. Of course, I'd need to agree to the TOS for using my razor, and only use it in the approved "downward motion" manner.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Just a day ago I was thinking about how the ONLY piece of computer equipment I still have from years ago was the HP LaserJet 6P I bought in 1996/7? when I was a law student and really couldn't afford it. Everything else has been upgraded several times.
Might be OT, might not be modded up, but that's an informative post about a hardware topic I don't know much about. Thanks.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
looking at my good old HP Deskjet 500C. I still use it, it still works (even if it has hard times... i.e. some cloth fall onto the printer a few month ago, blocking the cartridge carrier so it could not move any more... but it tried so hard to get back into it's standby position... I noticed a typical "electronic overhead smell", but it took me TWO DAYS to find out what it was. The servo was running ALL THE TIME. And what to say, it still works fine!
;)
I don't think one could do that much harm to an actual printer.
Of course it was more expensive, like, 200$, but who cares. I buyed it 10 years ago!
Why should I buy a cheap printer with messy drivers and stuff, and do that every 12 months, if a could get a quality piece of technology.
Maybe I'm just nostalgic because that is (still) my first printing device I owned
I'm taking a class right now myself, and all of my professor's notes are on the web, too. To me, this means I don't HAVE to have a paper copy, because I can go to any computer lab, public access terminal on campus or at the library, or even a privately owned, Internet-connected PC (I know they're rare), and read these notes without having to kill a tree OR carry its poor, mutilated remains around with me.
I do carry a skinny little notepad (made out of butterfly wings and elephant ears), which I jot notes on in class, but I keep it short by avoiding redudancy with the web notes.
All I can say is that I work for LAUSD ( Los Angeles Unified School District ), and on my site witch I prefer not to mention, got a few hundred LexMark Optra 312L and HP LaserJet 1200. All worked ok, but the LexMarks like on que, after 3 years just started to jam, rollers did not work, and alot more stuff. So far I got about 20 printers laying around since they out of warranty and even extended warranty, and just for someone to figure out what is wrongs costs around 100 bucks, and that is on educational prices. The HP seem better but they get the ocasional software driver loss. Anyhow that is my .99 cents
it's really not incredulous that consumer products were not designed/manufactured to last for any length of time. it's called planned obsolecence, and every manufactured item has a limited lifespan; otherwise there'd be no need to design and manufacture new stuff and companies would go out of business... the lifespan of consumer computer/peripheral products tend to be very short(one to two years) due to the fact that many of those products are not repairable, versus workgroup or enterprise computer/peripheral products which are built to last on the average of three to five years(and tend to be exceptionally repairable).
i've been purchasing computers and related equipment for my employer(s) for the last 10 years, and i've had a chance to see the TCO/ROI of consumer versus enterprise printers, and hands down in terms of duty cycles and consumables, the consumer level products end up costing the company (or the individual) a lot more money over the lifespan of the printer than the workgroup/enterprise printers which literally get the work squeezed out of them over 5+ years... not to mention projects like gimp print which help new computers/users to have access to legacy equipment which is still operational (i'm using it now to fire up an old epson stylus 5000 as a printer for a group of osx users).
color laser printers are too bulky, too slow, too expensive, too costly to maintain, and consumables are very expensive. if you absolutely need color, lease a color laser copier and a fiery rip, and have the leasing company service it for you.
IMHO, it's better to spend the money up front getting a solid b/w laser printer based on a commonly deployed marking engine, like those from hp or canon... you don't get the lateset and greatest gimmicky toy features of the new printers, but you'll enjoy having that trusty old printer for years to come. personally i've got an old QMS 860 printer based on a canon bx engine, and it's still cranking away after all these years. i also found a place that will sell refurb part so i can continue to repair it years after qms stopped supporting it!
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
sorry, the link above won't work...
if you are interested go:
www.epson.com -> canada/north america -> help -> frequently asked questions
it reads:
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
I print maybe once or twice a month - in that time the printer is turned off. Turning it on and making a quick printout usually ends up in a blank sheet of paper. I usually have to force a clean cycle up to 6 or 7 times to make the page print properly.... when you add up the wasted paper, wasted ink... media costs... epson is now at the bottom of my list of printers to buy.
It is dissapointing to see a company who used to make fairly reliable hardware sell out. In my opinion they purposely make their carts. act like this - pure horse crap.
What I would love to see is a printer company that charges more for the printers... and very little for the ink. Anything else is extortion and the company doing it needs to be boycotted and slapped down big time.
7 years ago when I was in Saudi Arabia the office had two HP II's. My first thought was "what crappy old printers" -- but then it sank in. Those printers had been there since the Gulf War in a desert country whose fine sand gets into *everything* and grinds it down. I believe the only servicing those printers had ever had was replacement toner cartridges. They may or may not still be working now, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were in the same trailer and still functioning.
(My personal printer is an HP4P which I've had since 1993. Although it doesn't get the use it would in an office I do print a lot. The printer fell off its desk once which broke the paper level indicator, but minus that its doing great.)
The best home printer I've used was the HP LJ 500+ which my Dad got for $100 about 7 years ago. It is huge, heavy, and nearly impossible to carry by yourself, but it gets the plain text and simple pictures printed.
I had a fairly good Lexmark Z11, but then it started to freak out when I'd try to print, and it would refuse to acknowledge my colour cartridge that I kept refiling. It just melted down I guess.
Now I have a Lexmark Z33 which works OK so far, but the cartridges hold 1/2 the ink of the Z11's and they cost as MUCH! Sheesh! I refill the black one, but what pisses me off is that it came with 3 plugged nozzels! Cleaning it does not fix it. I'll try desperate measures like dipping the end in boiling water, after I get some more life out of it. It prints fine, but in draft mode there are noticible lines.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
out and buy the domain suckmycartidge.com
1. Find some lamer willing to do sick things with printer cartidges.
2. Photograph said process.
3. Post on the net.
4. ????
5. Profit.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
So what's the answer for low-volume, very intermittent printer user?
The cost of a laser is hard to amortize over a hundred or so pages a year, inkjets hardly last a single cartridge of ink before clogging up, and dot-matrix printers are not only rare as hen's teeth but they're still noisy, slow and produce ugly print.
The way I see it, there are just a few real options.
Dot matrix is not an option. Only use for those is for triplicate forms. Beyond that I cannot conceieve of why anyone would want one. The only reason they were ever popular is that they were cheap and the quality was good enough. (it was never actually good, just adequate)
My solution was to purchase a higher end (for the time) network quality laser printer. Cost a bundle but it also prints 15,000 pages per toner cartidge. I've owned it over 8 years and replaced the toner once. With the amount I print (in the low thousands annually) it works out to a little less than 8 cents per page and drops as my print volume increases.
The other decent option I see is to invest in a multi-function unit. Then you can scan, print, fax, and copy which makes the usefulness of the device more than simply just a low volume printer. I have one of these as well which I only print from occasionally (my laser is cheaper) but use for color and all the other features. If you get one though, get the extended service agreement. More stuff to break...
Beyond that your options are pretty much either bite the bullet on a low end printer (inkjet or laser, pick your poison or get a high quality old used laser. Kind of depends on your particular needs.
Hint: the "maintenance kit" is a new fuser and rollers. Don't be lazy and do it yourself. The newer HP fusers are DESIGNED to be user-replaceable. In fact, you shouldn't even have to replace the fuser for about 150,000 pages. Of course, the price you quoted of $500 for a laserjet sounds like a 1200 series: maybe you should stop using a small desktop printer for a heavy duty job. There are published duty cycles for HP printers and you should abide by them if you want them to last.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Because they have 2-3x the duty cycle of the personal lasers. Look it up, it's published freely. Don't gripe if your LJ 1200 breaks because you ran 20,000 pages/month through it. Your LJ II and III series printers are workgroup printers, which is why they last so long. Get a LJ4500, which is their descendant, and enjoy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I have a Brother HL-1440 and I'm constantly wishing I'd gotten the 1450 instead. It may be somewhat more expensive and the benefits may not be obvious based on a printer comparison by a consumer review site- but the extra memory, postscript, and truetype support- none of which I thought I would ever need- sure would come in handy these days. Geez, I wish I could trade my 1440 in.
In my office here, we have two HP printers. There's a HP 4lj, black and white laser, which we've had for many years now. Then there's the 4550n color laser, which is just a little over two years old.
One is called "slow but reliable". The other is now called "schizo but prints color and fast... at least when it WANTS to work". I'm highly UNimpressed with the color printer, to say the least.
The color printer has had, as part of its maintainence, four new drum kits, runs out of ink every 10,000 pages (it seems), and has had a laundry list of problems. Included on this list:
- The smallest fan in the front died, causing the whole printer OS to freeze up, flashing "PRINTER ERROR 57.3". The "factory" solution is to replace the entire front assembly, a part that costs $400, for a malfunctioning fan. We replaced it by ourselves (with some difficulty since the fan had THREE wires coming out of it and refused to work without all three connected properly) and it has worked relatively fine since.
- The transfer belt went obsolete about 30,000 pages early. And for those of you who have ever seen an HP printer spew an entire ream of paper from the tray entirely blank, that's the problem. HP gave us a free replacement of this $300 part for free since we complained enough about it (and since we're one of their biggest customers... the joys of working in a university).
- The networking on the printer is a little flaky at times, occasionally disconnecting from the network randomly. We suspect that the M$ machine is behind this again, since it's that person who always seems to "find" that error.
- The printer's internal systems got screwed up by one of the few M$ machines we have on it. For some reason, that M$ machine decided to cut us off from PS printing, which, well, is just slightly important for us.
Now, granted, the latter two points are OS related, but that's the problems we've had.
The 4lj, though, in the seven years, has had the following problems:
- The transfer roll had to be cleaned once due to a buildup of ink on it.
- One of the internal RAM chips' holders fried out about a year ago. Moved the RAM to an open slot and it's worked fine since.
Granted, I'll give them that the color process is harder to print than the black and white, so there should be some more problems. But what about that little fan that totally rendered the printer useless? You couldn't even just disconnect the fan, since that third wire was a connection checker that killed the printer if the fan "wasn't there".
The 4lj has been a workhorse for us and shows no signs of becoming obsolete for us. The 4550n may be fast and prints color, but it really is has been a pain and a complete money sink (we've put enough ink/repairs into it to have doubled its price, $3000 IIRC, in two years... the 4lj hasn't been doubled yet in 8).
If the 4550n keeps giving us trouble, we're switching brands. HP can suck our left big toe. A $3000 printer shouldn't be THIS much trouble, since our $1000 printer from 7 years ago hasn't been even close to that bad.
-Jellisky
The most dependable printer I've ever had is a Stylewriter 2500 with the ethernet adapter. After all these years, it still works fine, and cartridges are still easy and cheap to get. The biggest problem I have is that Apple didn't write an OS X driver for it, so unless I'm printing out of a classic application, I'm stuck using the Lexmark that came bundled with the iMac. What a waste.
www.printerse.cx.
I think that the quality has gone down as the industry has moved toward a "harvest" phase of the product life cycle. They don't invest and develop new printers, they just figure out how to make them cheaper, poorer and more like a commodity.
I asked my laser 1450 to print a measely 120 page document and the laser blew up. I'm still waiting without parts for two weeks now from samsung, under warranty.. The thing was a printing marvel for four months and then it falls flat on its face. The printing industry is only going to get worse.
I find used parts and acessories all the time. Cartridges can be found cheap too. The LED technology works as well, if not better than many lasers and seems more reliable. Cost per page is basically insignificant. Of course, being responsible, I'd rather not waste by printing unnecessarily, which, in my humble professional opinion, happens way to often.
i picked up a gov surplus laserjet 4p for $45 with after my $30 wonder made it 6 months and died. that printer is by far the best i have ever had. and it still works perfectly to date
In three years doing lab-rat work, I never saw one replaced. I saw two of them have repair work done (fuser or something). As part of the lab rat duties, I had to print a test page each week and send the page count to the admins. I kept waiting for the page counts to roll back over to zero.
I don't remember how big they were, but several hundred million pages is about right.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
This article looks at it from HP management's point of view.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Printers simplay ain't what they used to be. My current printer is about 13 months old and she died right on schedule. Tore her apart Monday and managed to resuscitate her for a while but I know it will be sooner rather than later that I will be making the effort again.
The only good news is that she can be fully disassembled with hardly anything, all of the plastic just clips here and there. Four screws are the only mechanical fasteners and they only really serve as locks to back up the plastic snaps.
I'm very tired of the printers "features" being blown out of porportion too. 2400x1200 sounds like much better resolution than 600 x 300 but in truth, they are the same thing. If I have a 4 color printer, each color capable of 600 x 300 dpi, then they can add all of these numbers together to come up with 2400 x 1200. Baloney, it is still 600 x 300! Fortunately, 600 x 300 is pretty darn good.
with internet, cheap cdrs, pdas, who need printers?
In our office we use LaserJet 4000 series printer and LaserJet 8100 series printers. Most of the 4000's and 4050's are above 500,000 pages. One is even over 1,000,000 pages and still plugging away. The cartridges last 15,000 pages and cost the same as the 3,000 page cartridges you get for a lot of other printers. They need a maintenance kit (rollers, etc.) every 250,000 or so (About $300 installed.)
The 8100's are more expensive, but they're just as long lasting, print a lot faster, and last 30,000 pages on a toner cartridge.
Meanwhile, the 1100 series "personal printers" are jamming right out of the box, only hold 200 sheets and cost a fortune in toner. But they're "cheap!"
I've owned several Brother lasers and recently learned my lesson. The difference between a Brother laser and an HP laser is that with the Brother, the toner and drum cartridges are separate. I noticed my Brother drums going bad about once a year but this also has to do with the work load. On the HL-1440, the drum costs $150.00 (Staples). That's quite a bang to your wallet each time a drum goes bad and you run into one of those "Do I replace the drum or buy a new printer?" type situations. With HP lasers (at least the newer ones), the toner is combined with the drum in a single cartridge. This allows perfect print quality all the time and you never have to worry about when your drum goes bad. The price of toner for the HL-1440 is $51 (Staples) and the price of a single toner/drum cartridge for my HP 1100 is only $6 more. Say you replace your toner four times each year (HEAVY usage), that would only mean an additional $24.
I bought an Epson Photo 780 when they came out because early reviews raved about the photo quality. When I found one for a hundred bucks, I grabbed it quick. The photos were amazing! I did some 8x10 borderless prints on glossy photo paper and they looked as good as anything that I've ever seen from a quality photo developer. Stunning. I printed off quite a few photos then didn't have anything else to print for a while. A couple weeks later, I fired it up and the print head was clogged.
This was never a big problem on my old DeskJet 500. I'd take the cartridge out, clean the heads, and pop it back in. If the clog was just too bad to clean, a new cartridge would do the trick since the whole nozzle assembly is part of the cartridge. No such luck with the Epson. I eventually took the print head apart and cleaned the nozzles because their pathetic "cleaning" routine didn't do a damn thing. Put it all back together and my prints were good again.
Then I let it sit for another week. Clogged nozzles. Fine. Take it apart. Clean it. Put it back together. Print.
Then I let it sit for another week. Clogged nozzles. Fine. Take it apart. Clean it. Put it back together. Print.
Then I let it sit for another week. Clogged nozzles. Fine. Take it apart. Clean it. Put it back together. Print.
Then I let it sit for another week. Clogged nozzles. Fine. Take it apart. Clean it. Put it back together. Print.
I can keep this up but you get the idea. This is what I got for spending nearly $50/set for genuine Epson ink.
Last goddamn Epson product I'll ever buy.
You may also remember how much printers cost back then. I just bought a HP 5500 for 199.00 at Circuit City. I remember paying $300+ for printers years ago. I bought several LAserJet 2200N's for what I paid for one HP Laser 10 yesrs ago.
No kidding. There were a bunch of them here... after almost exactly a year they tanked. The paper separator dies. HP knows they sucked, and offers a free "repair kit" that will give you about another year.
:)
They even had to settle a class-action lawsuit for that particular model of printer, because of that very problem.
Yeah, I got a letter to claim my piece of that pie. Boiled down to maybe a $20 coupon, and wasn't worth the trouble to file.
The update that you could get from HP for it for free fixed all of my troublemakers that I took care of. (probably 8 or 10 in total)
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
When I finally upgraded to a decent digital camera (Canon G3 FWIW), I looked into finally getting a decent color printer. After wading through the "photo quality" jargon and looking at the real cost per page, I decided to skip it all together.
Even assuming a lifetime of 5 years for the printer (which is laughable these days) once you buy photo paper, cartridges and the like, even if you print 3 4x6 prints per page, you are looking at around $1 per page minimum. And those prints will fade in a matter of weeks so you've got to pony up for the archival quality (read: expensive) inks which aren't readily available in bulk to do your own refills with.
So what to do? When I need a couple of shots printed onto 4x5, 5x7 or 8x10, I pop those photos on a compact flash card and head down to my local WalMart. for $.26 a print I get very good quality on good quality Fuji paper. If it's something I really care about and want Kodak paper, I use ofoto.com. They are a bit more expensive ($.47 per 4x6 print) and you've got to pay for shipping and wait a couple of days for them to arrive, but the quality is top notch.
Who needs a printer.My family is using a Canon LBP-4 which has lasted us since 1987 or so(same age as my little brother) with 2 toner cartrige replacements and one repair. In 16 years. That was(is still) a quality printer. It'd be nice if it had more than 256k RAM(it has trouble printing lines and non-text) and greater than 300 DPI, but it's definitely worth whatever we paid for it.
Apple LaserWriter II series: same Canon SX engine as HP LaserJet II, but with PostScript and Ethernet (IIg).
:-( These things die for any number of reasons, including "Thursday landed on 2nd of month" and "Fly came in the east window again." Not too cool...
I'm using my LaserWriter IIg with 8MB ram, PostScript and EtherTalk with Linux for years and years now. A few times I've replaced the feeder boot ($15 rubber piece, from the www.printerworks.com) but this thing produces beautiful output at reasonable speed and gets thousands of sheets per toner cartridge.
I've done 40,000+ sheets and we're still going strong. Never had a need to upgrade or replace and the PostScript+Ethernet means that Linux printing is fast and not too resource-intensive.
ON the other hand... I'm on maybe my fifth color InkJet printer.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Now they're razors. In order to cheapen them, small parts that used to be metal are thin plastic. I've stripped two drive wheels in normal use. In each case, it was cheaper to replace the printer than repair it.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I have still an old apple laser writer 4/600 at home
which works fine. It is 10 years old and a bit
slow but it still does the job.
I've owned mine for about a year now, with no troubles. Good choice.
Heck, have you looked at the 'el cheapo' printers? THe printer costs less than replacement cartridges!! The HP DeskJet 3320 printer costs $50 (MSRP, with rebates, it's sometimes free!) But getting both black and color ink cartridges will cost you almost $40!!
Printer manufacturers don't care about the quality of the printer anymore, because they make all their money on ink and toner. (Just look at IBM's lawsuit to prevent third parties from making toner cartridges.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
"The HP LaserJet printer experiences increasing multiple feeds toward the end of warranty or service life. The separation pad installer provides a one-time solution to the issue of multi-feeds and paper jams caused by the hardening of the old pad."
check out this and order the neat fix-tool.
yeah, its free.. good to see some responsability taken!
get xited
I have a HP 540 myself.. (~5-6 y/o now I think) bought 3 cartrages ( & 1 color) in that time, just kept refilling them. image quality is still great. I don't need it to make photocopies, or fax something out with it or as a standalone etc etc.. most of these new features seem useless to me and I do a fair amount of printouts.
I've actually got an old DeskJet, the first model. Works without any problems. Recently, I also sold off a pile of old HP's, models including Deskjet Plus, Deskjet 500C, 550C and such. I got about 20 of these printers all in all, all had been in office use for this whole time and they all worked. Two or three had problems feeding paper but it almost brought a tear to my eye to part with them for just a few euros each.
I'm planning to store the DeskJet somewhere safe along with my XT. One day, when I can go and buy a disposable $5 printer from the grocery store, I'll dig it up and remember why I miss the times of Turbo Pascal and Space Quest III...
** After I decided to retire it and buy a fancy new colour printer with features I don't really need, I've gone through about a printer a year. **
I mean, what caused them to die? Did they mechanically work, but not print? Did they print badly? Did they smoke and blow breakers?
If just bad quality, I noticed that my inkjet heads tend to jam up unless I print everyday. Running through the clean cycle 20 or 30 times seems to fix that.
I've seen a few posts about paying extra for Postscript on laser printers. Can you clue me in as to why this is a big deal? I found the 1450 page, and it says it emulates PostScript Level 2. Is there any difference between emulation and native support?
I came to the same conclusion a while ago when I
realized that 95% of my printing used only
black ink (not too much white ink).
After deciding to get a laser printer, I also
chose the Brother 1440 because of the speed,
large cartridges, and the ability to print
duplex (two-sided).
The duplex printing is done by printing the
even pages in reverse order,
putting the paper back in reversed,
and printing the odd pages on the backs.
It workes great and, imho, is better than
duplexing inside the printer since it
is faster.
The 1440 also can print from 300 dpi to 1200 dip,
do booklets, and, in general, does what I want.
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?
At a repair business I once worked at we had a Mansmann Tally dot matrix printer that had been dumped on us 'broken', after cleaning it and removing years worth of paper clogging it, it held up to at minimum 10 - 20 multipart forms per day for the next 10 years. It also put out about 110db of print head on metal noise, so it got a custom made wooden box shoved over it.
The Panasonic laser printer we had there was a tank, it was one of those non-cartridge, spill toner over every thing ones. Panasonic used to sell any piece you wanted for it, even pieces of assemblies, unlike some I could name. I don't know it's status now but it did great for 5 years when I left that comany. I'd alway chuckle when listening to other people complain about the cost of cartridges.
Right now I found a Panasonic KX-P1124i at a charity store for 6.99. I bought it and then bought a ribbon for 9.00. It didn't even need the ribbon. The paper for it is getting scarce, I used to get flimsy greenbar in the two sizes, wide and narrow but now all you can get is white. I could probably get greenbar but 1000 sheets of tractor fed paper for the less than the cost of 500 laser printer sheets isn't bad. And it really confuses younger computer users when you show them documents that have perf on the side.
Too many of the older laser printers no longer have any support, especially those that didn't generate 'streams of income' with cartridges and other 'made to fail' items.
Tupperware computing is not for me, to get better quaility I'm willing to, um, do resource reclaimation to acquire older hardware that I can still repair and use.
I've have noticed that the companies who made solid long lasting printers that did not jump on the tupperware bandwagon are no longer with us.
Tongue in Cheek: Does anyone have an interface for the PC that will drive one of those ancient 2 ton IBM band printers? The ones that IBM can't get companies to upgrade because, "We've had it for ages it's the best worker we have"......
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
We survey reliability regularly - we haven't seen any difference between 1 yr old and 5 yr old models in our surveys, or we'd report on it.
Similarly, Consumer Reports checked into whether more recent models are less reliable
We've got results for computer brands at http://www.choice.com.au/articles/a103391p1.htm. They're pretty unreliable overall, but age isn't a factor: results from our last survey are very similar in the rate of repair needed for models of different ages.
Unfortunately our printer info is in the pay per view section. *doh*
morf
-- Why should I question authority?!
I've recently had to replace all the CRTs in my house with LCDs. Couldn't stand the whine from the TV flyback, switched to the PC. Viewsonic short depth video quality was grainy and then it picked up a flyback whine, too. 2.5 years old and replaced with a Planar 19" LCD. Wife's ADI 19" Trinitron monitor joined all of the other ADI's I've seen people (3) buy in an early demise. 1.5 years old and replaced with a Viewsonic 17" LCD.
My brother's got an actual Sony monitor that's ~9 years old, but that's the only monitor I know of that is still in peak considition after more than 3 years.
Here's what I do...
1) Print document to PDF file.
2) Bring to work or school.
3) Print document on nice laser printer (free paper, too!).
I rarely need to print something so urgently that it can't wait until the next work/school day.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Where I work, we use very high end printing solutions. There are a few larger format sony dye-sub printers here, and they yielded really high quality results for the last 5 years. Then sony stopped supporting them and the new media for the printers makes them print like crap.
They are now just really expensive hunks of crap that won't produce high quality results for our clients.
We moved on to the Kodak "Professional" series, and we have to replace them every six months. Luckily, it is within the warranty, and every one has been replaced with Kodak footing the bill. I guess it is okay with them because we go through a pallete of media per month, so the amount we spend on media very easily eclipses the printer cost.
Unfortunately, your assumptions are not correct in all cases. Not all of the gears are replaced when you replace the toner and drum. In my case, a Xerox P8 printer which cost I think over $300 when new, required a $90 toner / cartridge replacement when the first set ran out, and then died about 6 months thereafter. It turns out an el-cheapo (your words) gear in the main body of the printer had literally disintegrated. Due to that one gear, it's just a pile of plastic and metal at the moment and I'm back to only having my DeskJet 7350 printer -- meant for color photos -- as my main printer. And oh yeah, that replaces the DeskJet 722C which began flaking out almost exactly one year after I bought it and finally got so bad I replaced it recently. Looks like the only real option is to pay $$$ for "office quality" printers. The home stuff is junk.
I still have my HP DeskJet 500. It works great!
I got an HP Deksjet 722C somewhere around 6 or 7 years a go, and it's still trucking like new.
As the cost drops, the quality will eventually suffer. Today's computers and the like are perfect examples of this rule.
-Slashdot Junky
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I have an IBM 4019/E Laser Printer.
This thing was manufactured in 1989. It gets 15,000 pages per toner cartridge (costs $100/cartridge, though.)
It's hot. It's dead slow. and it does graphics terribly. And it weighs 50 lbs.
After putting a memory board (eBay!) into it, it now has 2.5MB of RAM instead of the lowly 512KB it came with. It's expandable to 4.5MB total. Recently, the paper has started to come out in poor print quality, like the charge corona is going so not all the toner is properly placed on the page (toner where there shouldn't be, no toner where there should be.)
if it finally totally goes, I'm going to get an old-school laserjet and use that.
You have GOT it. I have dropped a Panasonic 4420 six feet directly onto concrete. Back 'round 90 or maybe earlier. And it STILL WORKS TO THIS DAY.
Panasonic printers are workhorses. Panasonic dot matrix printers are STILL the choice of businesses that print on 3-part or 4-part or 5-part paper, because you can STILL READ them.
You can find instructions on how to reset a Panasonic laser cartridge on the web so it thinks it's a new cartridge. Maintenence mode IIRC. Too bad Panasonic doesn't make inkjets. If they did, the inkjet would run you about $500, would have separate cartridges for each of the six colors available, print natively at 2400 dpi, and have HUGE paper rollers made of real rubber, like seventeen of them, instead of the crap HP makes out of plastic, and they're 3/8" in diameter.
I buy Panasonic electronics when I can and have never once had a warranty issue. I research and don't buy the crap - they do put a little of it out, but the Panasonic brand is fairly unpolluted.
I would pay any amount for a REAL Panasonic inkjet. Too bad they don't make cars. We'd see a 100 mpg SUV if they did.
I have a 660c that is about 8 years old. I cannot say that I am happy with it. It has lasted, but print quality keeps degenerating over time despite new cartridges. Streaks keep appearing despite many cleaning attempts. The black cartridges keep going bad prematurely, before empty, and it also forced me to buy a new color cartridge just to work. (The old one dried out, probably becuase I did not use color much).
I suspect we won't see cheap ink jets (in cost-per-page) until the patents expire. Until then, they will milk and bilk us.
Table-ized A.I.
Notably the LaserJet 4. Nothing fancy 600 dpi. Good selection of repair kits, toners and accessories available via ebay, etc. Cheap, efficient printing. Ink Jets suck for anyone who actually has any quantity to print.
Cheers! -- Richard
fixyourownprinter.com offers replacement rollers but they say they are for if manual feed has problems and I have the optional letter tray for the IIP+ is this the kit that I want? or would I be better off buying a container of the roller fixing liquid they sell to rejeuvinate the rollers?
Bottles.
I still use my HP deskjet 500! It's a tank. Not a single problem. I really don't consider it all that noisy either.
I'm hoping that printers will start to improve in quality once the wow factor of near photo quality prints wears off and people actually start demanding something that will last.
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...but the average new printer isn't.
The paper feed mechanism has taken down more printers then other issues... Most of the others (ink clogs, cleaning the printhead travel bar) are no problem to maintain but when the rubber rollers die you can't get replacements.
The biggest culprit is the bottom feed printers with HPs being the worst of the lot (the epson 1520 comes in second, mine still works but I have to clean dust off the rollers or it cannot grab paper in proper time...).
Of the top paper feeds that I have seen feed problems, the award goes to HP again for the 1100, so bad was the feed theyt offer a free repair kit on-line to insert a better paper thingie (it keeps the paper stack from slipping into the printer)
My favorites for printers are the HP Lasers (have them for years, they don't die). And the Epson 740 (with three interfaces - parallel, Mac Serial, & USB -, great resolution and speed it makes an excellent GP inkjet).
Dot Matrix - Currently I'm using a panasonic though I liked the Star printers too, when I did a lot of Dot Matrix buying. (Okidata was definitely a hit or miss and later Epsons DMs were problematic with plastic breakage).â
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Ah the horror, the horror... welcome to globalization.
I can't let this go by without mentioning Mark Levinson.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Does this mean it's solid and it stinks or that it solidly stinks? I just couldn't resist asking.
DouglasK Do Justly. Love Mercy. Walk humbly with your God.
which still works and would probably continue to work for several more years. It weighs 15 lbs and was clearly built to last unlike today's 5 lb all plastic printers.
I've got an old Epson Stylus Photo EX. It is a workhorse and prints great images. I intend to keep it until it dies or the cartridges are no longer available for it. I did notice that Epson has not gotten around to updating the driver for XP on this printer. Another slimey way for them to try and force purchase of a new printer I suppose.
But there are workarounds for that.
It's not just a saying, it's TRUE.
...it's all of America that went to being all about shiny plastic and marketing. People buy shite and they buy it by the ton. I've got a friend with a small biz who sells knives at SF Conventions etc., and it's always the the gaudy shiny crap that sells, not the moderately priced decent tools she carries a few of. HP and the rest are giving the public what they ask for. I had a Panasonic camcorder break the little plastic on-off switch, they wanted $275 "Flat fee" to fix it at the factory. They obviously think the public is a bunch of morons with no Hobbit-sense and too much money.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
You're welcome. Love your tag, BTW =)
Most printers designed for home use, are cheap pieces of crap. A printer is an intricate mechanical device, and mechanical devices are very expensive.
The only way that cannon can pump out printers, even at cost, for $50 each, means that they are cutting corners in materials, quality control, or both.
if you want a printer that lasts, you need to start spending more than $200 for an ink jet or more than $2000 for a laser
What? Me? Worry?
I've been computing for around 20 years now, and have bought many printers over the years. Most lasted only a couple years. One even broke down after only a week, around 50 pages printed. I won't mention the name, but it begins with LEXMARK. The store offered to replace it, but I instead chose to just get a refund. If a printer breaks down before its had a chance to shed its static from the styrofoam packaging, I don't want it. My better printers were the older HP's, I have an old laser printer, that doesn't always feed properly, but it still gives a great printout. I had an older Epson dot matrix printer that lasted 9 years before it gave out. My most reliable printer? The very first one I bought, that I still use today for the bulk of my printing. It looks like crap, the case is all yellowed, lots of cat hair inside it and in the vent holes, scratches all over the place, but it remains my workhorse. It broke down a few years ago. The print head kept skipping. The fix? A tiny dab of dry grease on the bar the print head runs on. No problems ever since. This workhorse was a Tandy DMP-130a. By far, the best money I ever spent on a printer. -- Smoov
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum, cogito.