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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?"
when you can buy a printer that's cheaper than the ink cartridge costs.
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
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.
Well what did you expect for $40 from Walmart?
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.
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>
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
Same here. I had several problems with my old Deskjet 500. The least trivial was a bad power cord. It developed a short early in its lifetime, and ever after would kill power at the slightest bump and required contortions to get power in the first place. Easily replaceable, but not when you're a college student on a budget using a hand-me-down printer. The second problems was more painful, and more expensive to fix (to the point where it was cheaper to buy a new printer). The paper feed mechanism wore down (it was a friction feed, like most printers are) and would misfeed paper at the most inopportune times. Ten pages into a twenty page paper, the printer would decide to feed five pieces of paper into the tray rather than one. Worse, sometimes it would skew the paper, or even stop feeding at all (your printed page ended up being jumbled into a single line -- try handing that in!).
I "fixed" this by switching to LyX (because I didn't want to learn TeX/LaTeX syntax, and because Word kept screwing up footnotes by misnumbering them or putting them on the wrong page) for use on our engineering workstations (Suns, IBMs, and HPs), and printing with my 500 page laser printer quota (free printing! You couldn't print more than 500 pages per semester, and your balance didn't roll over by semester, but it was more than sufficient and better than going to the campus-wide non-engineering labs and paying for printer use).
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.
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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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.
And it's a shame too. All that crap is piling up in garbage dumps. Instead of a junked quality printer that laster 5 years, the dump has 5 printers that each lasted a year. 5 times the wasted material.
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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> 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.
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
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
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.
Printing for me is a vital part of the proofreading process. For those who write things other than code, going through lines and lines and pages and pages is much easier with paper and a red pen than it is on the screen. as always, ymmv.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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 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.
I feel like I rent my inkjet printer.
_nfotxn
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.
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.
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'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 -