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Lexmark Recalls 40,000 Laser Printers
ack154 writes "An electrical shock hazard has caused Lexmark to recall about 39,400 laser printers. The printers were sold under the nameplates of Lexmark, IBM, and Dell. From the article: "The recalled printers include Lexmark E232, E232t, E330, E332n, E332tn; IBM Infoprint 1412, 1412n; Dell 1700 and 1700n." Contact information is provided in the article in order to get your free replacement."
See, if the printers were open source, then this problem would have been caught much earlier!
I never was a real fan of Lexmark printers but they are actually pritty popular because they can take a lot of paper trays. I have seen some 4 or 5 high with paper trays. They are very popular at banks. I havent been to a bank yet that doesn't use Lexmark Printers. That may just be because banks are cheap. But reparing some lexmark printeres and seeing where there are a lot of oversights in the design process of the printers where there could be a problem like that. There not like HP or Xerox (I am talking about Laser Printers not the others) printers which are designed quite well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No reason to recall these printers. Who here, wouldn't mind getting a nasty little shock every once in a while, besides me ? I wont be participating in this recall, no thank you Lexmark.
My first good discharge, when I was 13, working on the circuit board of a commodore monitor. Not sure what I touched but I could feel the wave of electricity going up and through my arm, couldn't move, literally I was stuck for at least 2 seconds. Pretty scary but thrilling at the same time. I wouldn't call it a near death experience but it was damn near exciting.
Peace.
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
Take off your tin foil hat for a second? DO you even understand the difference between inkjet and laser?
Thanks for the great gift idea, slashdot. With Christmas just around the corner I know that my PHB will just love a printer in his office that's his very own.
Or put on a tinfoil body suit and ignore the recall!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...you can't set a laser printer on 'stun'?
So now you have a "get out of lexmark-hell free" card. Return your old printer for the recall and get the new one fresh in the box. Sell the new printer as "brand new in box" on ebay or in local papers. Then go out to the store and get a decent printer.
Don't Tread on Me
Do to massive copyright infringement, whenever someone prints out copyrighted materials they will receive an electric shock!!
I find it weird that people (or stockholders) would react so negatively to news like this. Making millions of consumer electronic items, there will always be some mistakes made. What matters is not that shit happens, but how it is handled.
Ofcourse it would be nice if products were perfect, but I don't regard a manufacturer any worse because of a mishap like this. If they handle such a recall in a painless and professional way, that would more likely boost my confidence in them. Problems like this are often very minor things, and say nothing about the overall quality of their product.
I would think worse (and less likely buy something) of a company that tries to look good, sweep problems under the rug, and pretend nothing happened.
Netcraft confirms: Lexmark users are dying.
You, my dear, have never worked in journalism.
In journalism, 39400 is a difficult number. Many reporters have trouble understanding numbers such as those. Thus, it is rounded up to 40000, because that's both easier to comprehend and it looks cooler (lots of zeros).
Next in line are the editors. The editors like round numbers, that's why the reporters always round their numbers up. Most editors like round numbers so much that they round them up to, let's say, 50000, which obviously is half of 100000.
You might also have noticed that lexmark stock is down $3.46 from this morning. Let's apply the same techniques that we learned earlier. Let's make this a nice, round figure of $5.
Now, Lexmark has about 129.5 million shares outstanding. This means, in journalist-speak, that there are 200 million lexmark shares on the market. Multiply this with the figure you got earlier (this part is very difficult for most reporters and editors) and you get $1,000,000,000.
This looks very impressive, right? Still, there's something missing. Of course there is! Let's add the word "over". What do we get?
LEXMARK MAKES OVER $1,000,000,000 LOSS ON PRINTER RECALL
Isn't that a headline to be proud of?
Of course, you might ask what the heck I'm smoking and what this has to do with reality. If you do that, you've uncovered one of the greatest secrets about journalism - it has nothing to do with reality at all.
Oh, and by the way, where did all those $1,000,000,000 USD go? Well, I'll tell you. In fact, I could use a bit of help in transfering those to a private bank acount. If you care to help me out, I can offer you a 30% share of the money...
Fire in the Lexmark
Fire in the rebadged dell
Fire in the Lexmark
Fire in the gates of hell
Don't you want to know how we keep starting fires?
It's my Lexmark, It's my Lexmark, It's my Lexmark
Don't you want to know how we keep starting fires?
It's my Lexmark, It's my Lexmark, It's my Lexmark
Danger! Danger! High Voltage!
When we touch, When we print
Danger! Danger! High Voltage!
When we touch, when we print
when we touch
This is a fact - you'll also find that Dell don't provide the same level of driver support on these rebadged pieces of crap.
I recently had an experience where a friend of my Dad bought a Dell printer for his ageing Win98 box. The supplied driver disc was for Win2K/XP only. A little research yielded the fact that the Dell model (A920) was the exact same as the Lexmark X1150. I remember the model numbers due to the trauma involved... Lexmark provide a Win9x driver for this model. Dell don't. Attempts to install the Lexmark driver were hampered by the fact that the printer identified itself as Dell.
Even worse was the fact that upon calling Dell it was suggested he buy a new machine - from Dell of course. I started wondering if there was some specific reason for the lack of support - Surely Win9x support means you would sell more printers! Ah, you want to sell more of those boxes instead...
A friend of my sister works for Dell front line support. I asked him about the situation and he said "yeah, we had a few calls about that..." and nothing else.
Me: Why no 98 driver? The Lexmark version has one - surely a trivial matter for one of your guys to customise it for the Dell version.
Him: But it's a Dell printer - a Lexmark driver won't work.
Me (slapping forehead): Why is there no 98 driver?
Him: Yeah, we had a few calls on that.
Me: I can see how you got that Dell job.
Him: Thanks!
He bought a new box (not from Dell, thankfully) and the old machine was donated to a local school. I guess all's Dell that ends Dell...
Back before there were laser printers for PCs, the first laser printer I encountered was an IBM unit the size of about 6 racks and had a drum with a diameter of about 3 feet. It used the old pin-fed paper and like the line printers it stood next to, took paper by the box. It could go through an entire box of paper in 7 minutes.
Thus, you had this huge fast spinning drum in a very dry environment. When it was first installed it was improperly grounded, and soon afterward one print room employee got severly shocked, with the static charge arcing about a foot, knocking him across the room. The details weren't made public, but I believe he got a decent settlement from IBM.
I guess you could say this isn't the first incident of electic shock from a laster printer...
e to the i pi equals negative one