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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?"
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)
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.
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.
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.
misbehaves regularly and print quality is looking less impressive every time I run off copy. It's 3 years old and I've undoubtably spent as much for ink cartridges as I did to buy it originally. Yes, they do print very nice and pretty when they're new. Best not to expect that for long though, like a chinese made egg beater in my kitchen drawer the plastic cogs loosen up until it starts making strange noises and jamming
Unfortunately, the printer itself is not capable of "losing quality." The particular printer you have is basically a simple processor that moves a carriage back and forth and tells the cartridges (which are actually pens) when to shoot ink. The cost of "cartridges" (read: pens with ink resevoirs) is a little ridiculous...however, you are paying for the actual PEN itself (the unit which is responsible for laying down the ink). Next time you are in the printer aisle, look at the cost of the pens BY THEMSELVES (for the printers which need them--OfficeJet D Series, for example)...
The point of this: each time you replace your ink, you are actually getting a brand new pen as well, so the quality is exactly the same as when you bought the unit (unless they are misaligned, or need to be cleaned). This changes with newer printers which use lasers to self-align.....
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
...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
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.
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.
Then there's this: I've repaired printers for more than a decade as one of the side jobs I do. I don't do electronics, but the mechanical side is fairly simple to do.
I charge $15/hour with a cap of $75 on repairs. For most office quality printers that's not a big deal. However for most consumer/home printers with severe problems (dust accumulation, pet hair, and cigarette smoke being among the worst ones) it rapidly climbs to the cost of a new printer.
What most people don't realize, however, is that good quality older printers, especially HPs, Xerox, and Canons, are often worth keeping around and repairing if they do the job you want to do. Most newer printers, especially those under $150 or so, are simply built to last maybe a year or so. Lexmark particularly comes to mind.
So often, for most home users, it's cheaper simply to replace it (hey, what's new?
I have two printers - a HP870cSE and a Xerox laserjet. Both, I suspect, will continue to give me great service for years to come. Too bad the HP cartridges cost me more than the printer is worth. The Xerox toner cartridge has a lot of life on it yet, tho.
Just my shave and a haircut worth.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
You do realise that Sony is a mid- to low-end home electronics manufacturer, right?
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.
I agree. The 4L is a consumer printer, but mine just keeps on cranking the pages. It was when HP made every laser a robust product. I've never felt that any of the inkjets were as reliable.... I've printed many, many manuals, tax forms, what have you on it, no problem. It's slow, but so what? It STILL looks better with cheap paper than an inkjet with expensive paper - at least where plain text is concerned. (And that's 99% of what I do with it. Once in a while I print out a map. I don't print out any photos. I like them better on the computer.) I find that even modern inkjet prineters have the occasional "blob" around the letters. Maybe the whole in the e is almost filled in. Maybe the bar over the top of the l is a little too thick. Stuff like that never happens on the laser, and it's been going for 10 years or more.
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!
We have an HP OfficeJet R80, and this thing is a tank. It's absolutely huge because it scans, copies, and faxes too, but we've had no problems at all with it, and it's been put through the wringer the past few months from the parental figures making threefold copies of my late grandmother's photo albums. The ink costs an arm, a leg, and a few more extremities from anyone in your immediate area, but I see it as worth it for something that's been regularly used for the past few years. That, and even the computer illiterate people (my family =/) can work it no problem.
By the way, run far, far away if your parents get into geneology. Ugh.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
This little ribbon is called the "Encoder Strip."
It allows the printer carriage to understand where it is in the universe on that X plane it travels on.
A quick call to HP tech support will generally suggest this as a fix. Hope your in warranty!
Becareful when you clean it, ordering and replacing one can be quite difficult.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Dye-Sublimation is the way to Go for alot of printing - this one is under !K and prints a 8x10 in under 90 seconds. - Kodak Professional 8500
Really? My HP Deskjet 690c has been around for the past 6 years. I've replaced the ink cartriges a handful of times. Provided I keep it clean once a quarter or so, the output is good enough to pass for a consumer laser printer. Deskjets are nice and easy to keep clean; the printhead is on the cartidge, so its all a 5 minute job to clean everything up & declog them.
I love my HP Deskjet 690c; I hope it never dies!
The after market for ink jet printer cartridges just got smaller. Here's a link to a Register article about Lexmark, printer cartridges and the DCMA.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28811.html
There used to be a check on the price of printer cartridges in the form of competition. Now (with yet another abuse of the DCMA) it looks like Lexmark will eliminate its competitors. One can only expect the price on cartridges to go up.
What does this mean for you and me? Well, a quick check on the CompUSA web site shows that one can buy a brand new Lexmark Z45 Color Jet Printer for $86.74. On the same site the two replacement cartridges are $31.99 for black and $37.99 for color making the grand total on replacement cartridges a whopping $69.98 leaving $16.76 as the cost of the printer itself. So one can only conclude that a printer that costs this little can not be of high quality and durability. In the final analysis, those of use who buy low end ink jet printers will have to live with the fact that we are buying printer cartridges and the printers themselves are only a mechanism to utilize this expensive ink. The up side is this, when your cartridges run out you have the option of buying the next model of low end printers for very little marginal cost. Perhaps small recompense for so grand an outlay for ink.
I wonder, how much ink mass is in one of these print cartridges and how does the price by mass relate to that of silver or gold ? I am afraid to do the math and find out. Perhaps instead of buying into the precious metals market in times of economic down turn the smart investor may want to consider this market instead.
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.