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?"

Comments

what do you expect

[papasui]

when you can buy a printer that's cheaper than the ink cartridge costs.

Printers, feh!

[ackthpt]

Amazingly my HP Deskjunk 895Cse still works. It 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. Oh, and a big thanks to HP for renumbering the ink cartridges, that was a huge help, now I go to the store and say, "well, it was a C1823D, no I can't remember what model the printer is, I only kept track of the cartridge." Naturally there's now guide handy at the store either, so I'll probably have to look it up on-line and put the new number in my PDA while I'm thinking about it.

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.

Quality is job N

[kwerle]

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.

It's natural

[mao che minh]

Printer manufacturers are starting to migrate towards a business model of making profit from the sale of consumables (ink, drum and toner cartridges, etc) instead of making profit by selling the units themselves and service contracts. In fact, a lot of manufacturers lose money in the sale of the units themselves in hopes of making long term consumable customers.

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.

Exactly why printers suck

[sterno]

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.

Strange...

[sterno]

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.

Re:Inkjets are no good for occasional printing

[RocketScientist]

Find a used HP LaserJet 4 (or even a 3) if you don't need color. I'd avoid eBay (or any online source) unless you can find a local auction (they're damn heavy to ship). They last forever. No ink to clog up anywhere, just nice, dry toner. Cartridges are readily available, and all of the printy-bits are in the replaceable cartridge, so if the drum gets scratched you just get a new toner cartridge and it's good as new. They're fairly economical, they warm up pretty quickly and print reasonably quickly. If it needs to be cleaned out, get a toner or HEPA vacuum (don't use a normal one, the toner's too fine and it goes right through the filters and bags) and clean it out.

Use good paper. A ream of cheap paper is $3. A ream of good paper is $4. Spend the extra buck to not jam the thing up all the time.

If you can find one with a JetDirect (ethernet port) built in, that's a bonus. The JetDirect usually includes an lpd-compatible print server, so Linux likes it, and MacOS loves it. Windows even works mostly, as much as it ever does anyway.

It's far from just printers...

[KC7GR]

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).

Of course they've gotten crappier

[lewp]

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` :).

Rental

[nfotxn]

I feel like I rent my inkjet printer.

Just was thinking

[WildThing]

I was reading all the posts on this topic and seeing some saying today's printers suck - some saying they are ok....

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 -

• Ink Jets - the ink costs WAY toooo Much (Hint - they sell the printers cheap and kill ya on the ink)
• Laser Printers - toner prices are about the same as 10 years ago
• General Quality - about the same as all other consumer products today
• Hardware Cost - Most are overpriced
• Interoperability - Why do they only work well with WinBlows?!?!?!?