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

Deskjet service tip

[Radi-0-head]

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...

Re:Printers, feh!

[ackthpt]

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.....

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.

16ppm Postscript Laser for $200 available in US

[Brian Ristuccia]

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.

HP Thinks Older Printers Were Too Good

[buddhaunderthetree]

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.