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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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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/
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 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...
Of course. 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. In the case of game manufacturers, sell subscriptions to online games, with monthly fees. For printer manufacturers, dump the printer hardware at cost and maintain the high margin revenue streream available through sale of replacement ink cartridges. This revenue stream is so lucrative that some manufacturers have gone so far as to include encrypted signatures encoded in their cartridges sutch that competing vendors can't produce cartridghes for their printers. As I recall, some would-be cartridge vendors have sued printer manufactuters claimin that this practice is anti-competitive. At the moment I don't recall which companies this relates to. I believe it was one of Cannon, Brother or HP, and that there was a story about it on /. a year or so ago.
--CTH
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I'm quite familiar with how they work. The issues I have are more along the remaining mechanics responsible for paperfeed, alignment, sensors (got paper?) etc.
Images used to look beautiful, now they regularly have bars, even with a new premium HP cart., due to the paper feed being less precise. I've wasted a number of envelopes, too, as it seems to be getting cranky about how it wants to handle them, i.e. how far does it advance the form before it decides it actually has been moving a form rather than trying to load it.
And slow doesn't begin to describe it. The way it appears to recalibrate every time I start a new print job appears to indicate they knew it would run into problems eventually and try to correct itself.
Then there are the messy jams. And I haven't even run mailing labels through it. :-) Anyone who has ever had to disect, clean and reassemble a printer a user has reversed mailing labels through, I appologise for recalling that memory and making you cringe.
This was ~$300 printer when I bought it. An equivilent printer off the shelf is about $124 now. Total cost of a set of carts, from a discount seller, $55-$60, YMMV.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yep, generally speaking, you still get what you pay for. That's a lesson my parents drilled into my head from the time I was a child -- you're better off spending more at the outset for a higher quality item than buying a cheaper item with earlier obsolescence.
Case in point, the Nakamichi amplifier I bought 12 years ago for $600 is still cranking along just fine, and I've gotten that many years of superior sound quality from it compared to say, a $200 Technics. My dad's is even older and is only soon to be retired because it predates too many audio-video advances.
This printer is based on the Canon SX print engine. Other very reliable printers that used this engine were the Canon LBP-811 and HP LaserJet II/IID/III/IIID.
HP does not always use Canon engines for their laser printers, and when they don't, the printer sucks. The last good printer that HP manufactured that used a Canon engine was the LaserJet 5si. Bulletproof. The new models fare much worse in terms of build quality and reliabilty.
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.
Ahh, the good old days in 4th grade, when I spent time converting rows of 7 pixels at a time (or was it 8?) of homemade pictures on small graph paper from binary to decimal numbers to send to the dot-matrix printer. egads, I was stupid too because I don't think I ever wrote any program to do the adding for me.
make world, not war
The problem is, there's no printer to spend 5x the money on. Not really. A $500 inkjet printer is either a photoprinter, in which case it's the same print engine and mechanics as the $99 inkjet, with a $20 card reader, a 2" LCD and maybe some extra paper and color matching options built into the driver (the HP 932 and several HP Photosmart printers were essentially identical, at least)... or the $500 inkjet is a low-end network printer, in which case it's the same as a $99 printer, but maybe with an ethernet port and perhaps a built in print server. In neither case is there an update to the mechanics.
$500 laser printer? Have you looked at the $300 - $500 laser printers lately. These "low-end" products have adopted the cheap manufacturing typically associated with $90 inkjets. No benefit there, either.
So how do you get a decent printer?
My rule of thumb is to either buy something that resembles a photocopier - I like HP 4000-series printers - these are printers that it's probably worth keeping up a service contract (I have a Phaser 850 at home. The service guy has been out twice since January to fix minor problems with it), or a LaserJet 1 - 4 that isn't an "L" or "M" model. Those things will take a bullet and keep printing.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I bought my Panasonic Laser Partner KX-P4450 back around 1990. Its been working great. Prints on plain old copy paper ( cheap : 99cents/ream(500 sheets) at Fry's when they put it on sale ). Toner - cheap at around $20/bottle, which is good for several reams of paper. The rest of the stuff in the printer slowly degrades, but over the last 10 years, I have only had to replace the drum, which came in at about $150.
$150!! I spent $150 for a Drum??? Yes! I know, I spent more for that drum than I could have spent for a whole new printer! I know that. But I really do like this old laser machine. Hardly ever jams. Makes nice prints. Its only drawback is that it does draw a lot of power ( keeping the fuser hot ), so I only power it up when there's printing to be done.
I spent right at $2,000 to get the printer in the first place. But then, I wanted a printer done right... not some cheap pile of stuff I can't depend on when I need it. Otherwise, I would be in the same boat a lot of people here are posting over. I bought that printer the same time I bought my brand spanking new AST-Premium 286. The printer is still with me. The AST is long since gone. ( It had proprietary innards and I could not economically maintain it, although I still have several 286 still in service.... that's how I learned my lesson in proprietary stuff... the lesson cost me about $1000, which is the price difference between the AST and what a generic machine would run me. The generics are still in service. )
Business will provide what sells. If you focus on price and are willing to accept junk, that's what you will get.
Price for me is a consideration, but I consider much more than out-the-door price when evaluating a purchase. I have been known to pay an order of magnitude, sometimes even more, if I know what I am getting is good stuff. Don't get me wrong - I will pay very little for "bragging rights"... when I pay more, there's a reason... usually things like having it extremely maintainable, using generic parts, or maybe extremely energy efficient. A car designed for easy maintainance to me is worth far more than a car designed to visually impress someone. Show me a car where I can't work on the engine, and I will show you a car that I may look at, but leave it in the showroom. Want to turn me off fast? Tell me it has all these extended engine codes, but don't share them with me. You might as well be trying to coax me to live in a gilded cage. I don't care if it is gold, it is a cage!
Business does have a tendency to provide what the customer will pay for. It's up to us to guide business on what to provide. Putting our little dollar-sign blinders on doesn't help much. There is so much more to something than the out-the-door price.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
> 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.
I would recommend using one of Epson's printers that utilizes their DuraBrite technology (The C62 and C82 use it I think?). This ink is non-water soluable and is pigment based, which should prevent feathering on most plain papers. The best part of their DuraBrite inks is that photo prints on plain paper look almost as good ad a print on photo paper, so you don't necessarily need to buy expensive paper to get good prints.
When I sold printers, one of the tricks we would do is print out a demo on one of the DuraBrites and immediately run the results under a water fountain. No running or smearing! Most customers were impressed.
The one drawback to the DuraBrite line is that I don't think they have and 5-color models, only 3-color. Depending on what you are doing, this may not be a big deal. If you're looking for stunning photos, however, and don't need what the DuraBrite offers, I would recommend the Epson Stylus Photo 825. The photos are simply amazing.
No, I'm not affiliated with Epson in any way. I used to sell printers (HP, Lex, Epson, Canon) and fell in love with their (ink jet) printers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
I don't know, but I find that laser is the way to go, it may only be black and white, and it may be expensive. But it lasts.
I have 2 Okidata OLE 410E's and a HP LaserJet 5, both excellent printers, and the catridges usually last me about a year at a time.
I still have all the original laser printers that I bought, while the other printer that I got which was a inkjet died within a year, and wasn't all that good quality wise.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
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 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.
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
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.
Do you buy the cheapest brand of monitors?
I can't remember one ever dying, and I make heavy use of mine. Generally I only get rid of them when I finally resell them cheap bundled with an old machine to someone.
I am the kind of guy who twenty years ago was reverse engineering the 'seperate sync/video' lines on discarded dumb terminal displays, wiring in a 9 pin connector and using them with Hercules graphic cards. Then Sim Earth (for DOS) came along and I had to finally have color.
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.
It accumulates on the slider bars of printers causing more frequent head-jams and can coat the paper feeder rubber making it less 'tacky'. Also, smoke can accumulate on and shorten the life of PC fans.
Both these occur over time and might not be directly attributed to the fan/paper feeder/whatever failure. Just a contributing factor.
So often, for most home users, it's cheaper simply to replace it (hey, what's new? ;-) and as noted in the parent post and elsewhere, it's often cheaper to replace a low-end printer than it is to buy new cartridges. I have to confess I don't understand the economics on this - I find it hard to believe it's cheaper for the manufacturers in the long run - but that's where the markets's going. Sad.
The economics of this is that the manufacturers don't quite dump the printers out at cost; they do make a profit (albeit a small one).
However, you don't think that's a full ink cartridge in that printer, do you? On the low-end printers, the ink cartridge is usually at least half-empty (often 3/4-empty). By buying a new printer instead of replacing the ink, you're forcing yourself to buy more often; true false economy.
Personally, I think that they should simply sell the printers without ink (and that it should be mandated). The printer manufacturers would probably love this, as it would let their revenue stream be the ink.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
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.
> 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.
Yes it does. The printer manufacturers wants you to buy a new printer every few years, even if they sell them at a loss. Why? Because when you have a new printer you have no choice but to buy your ink from the original manufacturer since there are no 3rd party cartridges yet. If you have an old printer, chances are that you can find cheaper third party cartridges.
This scheme works extremely well in order to keep the heavy users to buy your cartridges. Their printers break down quicker, thus giving them a quicker upgrade cycle, probably ahead of the 3rd party ink suppliers, making them buy only your cartridges. These are otherwise the clientel that is most inclined to put in the effort to find and buy good, cheap 3rd party cartridges.
So I guess that the most lucrative "point of failure"-setting for the printer manufacturers would be so they make the printers break down for the heavy users around the same time as the 3rd party ink cartridges gets available.
The best way to remedy this sick and wasteful situation would be for some government-, industry- or consumer-organization with a lot of clout to set a simple, patent free standard for ink cartridges and strongly encourage the use of it. If a large enough share of the user base gets behind it, the printer manufacturers are forced to accept it. The same goes for many other product groups, including wacum cleaner bags.
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 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 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.
!
The problem with this kind of reasoning, though, is that people like me exist. :) Heh, okay, let me clarify.
I bought an Epson Stylus Photo 890 recently, for a number of reasons, ranging from full-on (i.e. better print quality than Windows) Linux support (over USB, even!), printer resolution and speed, 6-color cartridge and separate black cartridge, low price ($300 list, $240-ish on pricegrabber), and a $100 rebate.
It is not Epson's newest printer. It was among their cheapest (after rebates and shopping around). It's one of the best supported inkjets in Linux land. It handles lots of media types, including cardstock and glossy paper on rolls (heh; I still want to find 8.5" wide rolls of paper ... like a hundred feet of the stuff! Imagine the obscene high-quality pornobanners! :), and prints fast.
Oh, and the aftermarket cartridges for the damned thing are five bucks a piece including shipping. Let my cats dye themselves black (or cyan, yellow, red, whatever) by stumbling upon my spare cartridges and sharpening their teeth; I'll laugh at them and consider it five bucks well spent :)
So this idea won't work with people like me. I only paid $140 for this thing after the rebate check arrived, but if it dies after only going through 25 cartridges or so, I'm still going to be pissed, and I'll switch to another brand (if I still need to print anything when/if this happens).
It seems another "best" solution to this problem doesn't involve the government at all, but people just refusing to buy the latest and greatest model because the front facade looks cute and it can bake cookies. At least wait until aftermarket cartridges are available.
Read my stuff.
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
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 +++
Testify, brother.
First job out of college involved h4x0r1ng print queueing software for a print farm of HP Laserjet IIISi printers. We killed trees all night - we bought the extra 1500-sheet "big-azz external tray" module, and the night operator had to refill them during the print jobs. Even with air conditioning and ventilation, the farm reeked of toner and ozone, and we probably filled a small pickup truck every day with unused reports on their way to the shredding company.
We conservatively estimated that these printers were doing 5000-7000 pages per night, 5 nights a week. No failures even under that kind of load, and the only maintenance we did was the preventative stuff every quarter-million-pages.
(For us, that was roughly every three months, but unless you own stock in a paper producing company, or just have a pathological hatred of trees, your mileage should vary :)
They sure as hell don't make 'em like they used to. But if you've got a chance to pick up a IIISi on the cheap, (and you have enough space to put it!), get one.
The root of many of your issues lies with internal relationships. I know many employees and contract employees at this company. Management shuns engineering and employees (including contract) and fights against itself for projects to be moved between sites. Most of the engineering staff is dissillusioned and pissed at the new management for wasting money and resources on jets, mergers, and perks.
Remember Office Space? "Well Bob, that [fear of loosing your job] will only make you work just hard enough not to get fired." That is where the employees are right now.
The company has potential, but only if high management quits sucking the company dry. Mr. Plat in all of his excess spending and extravagance did nothing compared to the current management.
Back to the issues you mentioned, the 4550 was one of the first trials in color laser that HP did and quite frankly was shoved out the door to compete with others from over seas. From an engineering perspective, bad move (inferior product). From a mgmnt perspective, needed move (loose market share, no way!). Customer perspective, bad move (doesn't work). Business perspective, needed move (good enough for consumables profit).
Price points are more of the focus in the laser printer market because of competition. Printers of 5-10 years ago were made of steel and made to last, just like their medical equipment division. But spinning off that division seperated HP from those ideals. That isn't to say that the printing/imaging divisions did not have those principles, it is to say that management made them forget them.
Having said that, HP's product cycles still go through an insane number of quality checks and revisions just to make sure that a product goes out the door with no issues to the common user. For large office printers and their users, a university, there are far more issues to deal with, so many that cannot be anticipated in testing environment. Universiting printing is far more intense than the worst testing done to a printer in the lab.
As far as QA goes I am speaking about firmware here, not hardware. HP buys it's hardware from Cannon or other foreign manufacturers so it doesn't have to have as many fab facilities. Most of your issues seem hardware related, which is the subject of many lawsuits between suppliers, and HP.
So all of this isn't to say or not say "buy HP." They have good stuff but are currently playing the part of the kid at a party, blindfolded, swinging at the pinata. They know what they need to do, but something keeps them from being efficient.