Lexmark To Exit Inkjet Printer Market

Barence writes "Lexmark has announced it will stop making inkjet printers and cut 1,700 jobs as part of a cost-cutting restructuring move. Lexmark will stop all inkjet development worldwide by 2013, and close its Philippines-based inkjet supplies manufacturing plant by 2015. This will provide annual savings of $85 million, rising to $95 million by 2015. The total restructuring cost before tax is expected to be $160 million. The company is also looking into the possible sale of its inkjet-related technology." I know there are some purposes for which inkjets are good (modern home photo printing can be insanely good, and we've featured a lot of cool projects which use inkjets to print sensors, solar cells, antennae, and more), but I get just a little queasy whenever I see an inkjet printer purchased by an innocent friend or family member who doesn't realize quite how much it will end up costing them in the long run.

Comments

executive speak demystified

[Hazel Bergeron]

Executive: "restructuring cost before tax"

English: "way to create a paper loss to avoid tax".

Re:executive speak demystified

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? How about obvious?

Re:executive speak demystified

[Kjella]

Long story short if you get a tax on your profits you should also get a tax break on your losses, otherwise say you made $100m one year and lose $100m the next year, the government would take a big profit tax while you in net haven't actually made any profit. This is actually true for people too, at least here in Norway. If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.

The same is true for companies, which is often a problem for a company posting huge losses and going out of business. The government "owes" them a tax break but since companies disappear when they go bankrupt if you don't handle it right the government never has to honor it. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just making sure that the company going out of business gets the same tax breaks as a company managing to stay in business would have had. And no, you still don't make money by losing money...

Re:executive speak demystified

[Anonymous Coward]

> If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.

You crazy socialists with your nanny state government handouts. In Red State America you get a check from the government if your tax numbers go negative. You probably wouldn't understand that because of your socialist government. /sarcasm

Re:executive speak demystified

[Anonymous Coward]

Long story short if you get a tax on your profits you should also get a tax break on your losses, otherwise say you made $100m one year and lose $100m the next year, the government would take a big profit tax while you in net haven't actually made any profit. This is actually true for people too, at least here in Norway. If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.

The same is true for companies, which is often a problem for a company posting huge losses and going out of business. The government "owes" them a tax break but since companies disappear when they go bankrupt if you don't handle it right the government never has to honor it. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just making sure that the company going out of business gets the same tax breaks as a company managing to stay in business would have had. And no, you still don't make money by losing money...

Should a casino hand back all your money at the end of the night when you've blown it all at the roulette wheel or at the craps table?

Good

[alispguru]

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer on a non-Windows machine?

Or had a Lexmark printer do, say, ten pages in a row without smudging or jamming?

Or is it just me?

Re:Good

[Adriax]

I dunno about the quality of prints, I've never used them and forgot they even existed...

Re:Good

[oobayly]

FTFY

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer?

Re:Good

[jittles]

Just you? My Lexmark Ink-jet has very cheap black ink, prints plenty, and I have never had a smudge or a jam until I tried to scan in a 100 page document with the ADF and it backed-up.

Re:Good

[SJHillman]

About ten years ago, Lexmark was my favorite brand for cheap printers that just worked. Nowadays... not so much.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer on a non-Windows machine?

Last 4 words aren't necessary there. I've owned two and both were crap.

Re:Good

[mccalli]

Yes, I certainly have. My old Lexmark Optra SC 1275 EN networked colour laser did absolutely great for years. Eventually, and by 'eventually' I mean after around ten years, I had a motor issue that was too expensive to economically repair, but for a decade that thing sat in my room reliably churning out good quality print.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Good

[Antarius]

I had some good experiences with their lasers, especially in big government departments.

Of course, I was the contracted Lexmark service agent, so my good experiences were in being paid to work on them. ;-)


(To be fair, they were a decent workhorse. That said, they were all equipped with PostScript, so I didn't have to deal with driver issues.)

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah, I've had great results with their laser printers.

Their inkjets are the worst pieces of garbage I've ever seen, of course.

Re:Good

[Tx]

I used to print very little, it could be several weeks between prints, and pretty much every time I tried to print with the Lexmark inkjet I had, I would have to mess around trying to get the dried up nozzles to work, before usually bowing to the inevitable and using a new cartridge. If I had left it with the feed open, the slightest amount of dust seemed to mess up the feed rollers, so that it would feed multiple sheets instead of one, and it was hard to clean that shit out. Of course I might have the same with other brands of inject if used that infrequently, but it certainly didn't leave a good impression. These days I don't print at home at all.

Re:Good

[blackest_k]

I have heard they make reasonable Laser printers.
However their inkjets are cheap to buy very expensive to run and not that reliable, and do not as memory serves support Linux in any way, I think it is different with the laser printers.

On the positive side the extinction of Lexmark inkjet's is coming non too soon. It may improve the situation with Dell Printers which I believe were rebadged Lexmarks.

It should be one less barrier to the adoption of Linux, for the average joe. A dual boot option is much more appealing when all the hardware just works and generally faster than in Windows. Ok not for everyone I know but it is a big negative when people find their printer isn't going to work in Linux.

Apart from Lexmarks soon to be redundant employee's I can not imagine anyone regretting the demise of the Lexmark inkjet

   

Re:Good

[Forty Two Tenfold]

I had a motor issue that was too expensive to economically repair

Do you really believe it?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Linux exclusively in my home office. My first b&w laser was a Lexmark with USB and parallel port. Being a laser it was reliable. The only issue I had was with USB or Cups. I never new which it was. It would work fine for months and then one day stop working. Hours of fiddling with USB plugs, reboot and reinstalling Cups would fix the issue. It would work fine for months again. Eventually I got fed up with this cycle and bought another printer. Still a Lexmark but a network printer instead. I've only had one Cups failure in about two years.

Re:Good

[jkiller]

I dunno about the quality of prints, I've never used them and forgot they even existed...

Driver nightmare in a domain environment. Never had a good experience with these across many, many models. Print quality varies but would not prefer them.

Re:Good

[Zibodiz]

I concur. Lexmark lasers are awsome. I would take a Lexmark laser over an equivalent HP any day. They're the low-end of industrial, and are built like it. I've gotten millions of pages out of some.
I should also point out that I repair printers, and would rather repair a Lexmark T6xx series over just about any other printer on the market. Pretty easy to work on, the parts are affordable & readily available, and they just last forever. I had one at an Office Depot copy center that had over 2 million pages and still had better registration than their $20k Xerox black copier.
Now, their inkjet on the other hand, is only useful as a doorstop. I think their inkjet & laser engineering departments are completely disconnected.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Pinnacle Pro901 inkjet from a MacOX X box works fine.

Re:Good

[timothy]

My experience with a low-end B/W Lexmark laser (not sure of model, sorry, and it's in storage right now because of a move) has been positive. I bought it cheaply, used, with not many pages run through it yet and what I assume is a starter cartridge; no problems yet, works fine with Linux. (For all I know, it's a PITA on Windows, though ;))

Re:Good

[Vrekais]

Not me, I had a WiFi lexmark printer that would fall off my network if you left it plugged in for more than 10 minutes at a time (my theory was the the Power Supply was getting so hot it disrupted the Wifi chip right next to it). Few other friends had issues with them which led to use all saying that "Lexmark don't make printers, they make the idea of printers" :D

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly not me.

I bought a Lexmark WiFi printer a couple of years back, assuming that one should get a network-ish printer working under Linux. Not so: It came with some proprietary, crappy 100MB Windows driver, and its printing protocol was incompatible with earlier Lexmark inkjets (which had Linux support).
I tied to run it in a VM under Linux, but couldn't even get it to work there: I could never get the network bridging working well enough for this thing. The stupid printer driver needed broadcast/multicast and whatnot to discover the printer... and it even tried this "discovery" if you entered the IP of the printer, so that there was no way to simple specify the printers IP!

Re:Good

[dgatwood]

I've had the same ink clogging problems with Epson and Canon inkjet printers for the same reason. The problem there is not Lexmark. The problem is that inkjet technology is a fundamentally unreliable design except for moderately high-volume printing, and is way too expensive to use for high-volume printing.

They could solve the problem of course. They'd need a water or alcohol tank to flush the nozzles when the printer has been sitting there for more than a few hours, and a waste tank to hold the resulting ink (instead of the sponge that they use now). But fixing the problem would mean that they couldn't sell you a new printer every year when the heads fail.

No, inkjet printers should die. Color laser printers are almost as cheap (and much cheaper in the long run) and don't have nearly the level of reliability problems.

Re:Good

[jimbo]

I had an IBM/Lexmark 4019 laser printer for 10 years. A solid workhorse that produced tens of thousands of pages without any problems. Worked well with Windows, OS/2 and Linux.

Finally replaced with a cheap multifunction device as my printing requirements dropped and I needed scanner/fax more and occasionally color print.

I miss the 4019 though, it was spectacular. Do modern printers even have Postscript anymore?

Re:Good

[Fallingwater]

However their inkjets are cheap to buy very expensive to run

Can't say anything about the rest because I haven't printed anything in years, but Lexmarks and, I think, HPs (I might be wrong on the second brand, but I'm sure there was at least another one) were among the very few brands that had the heads built in the cartridges. This increased the prices of the cartridges and made them awfully expensive to run... if you didn't recharge the cartridges yourself. If you did, they had the significant advantage that a blockage resulting from dried-up low-quality ink inside the heads was easily fixable by replacing the cartridge rather than the whole printer. For DIY rechargers, this made them easily the cheapest to run.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is it just me?

No, it isn't just you...
There used to be a notice outside my workshop, strategically placed right above a bin, stating basically if you're bringing me a Lexmark printer to repair, save us both some trouble and dump it here, now, as that's where it's going eventually.

biggest piles of shite imaginable..

Re:Good

[Fjandr]

Yes. I still have a C720 sitting right next to me. Sure, it's beastly slow to warm up because it's so old, but it runs like a champ and is dead simple to replace parts in.

Re:Good

[Rotag_FU]

I agree that color laser printers should be the way to go. However, I think there is still a gap due to their relatively poor color image handling capabilities. I'm not asking for a reasonably priced color laser that can do something comparable to the images you get from the 12 ink photo printers combined with the ultra expensive ink jet photo paper, but I'd like a reasonably priced color laser that is comparable to a midrange CMYK-based inkjet for color image reproduction.

Unfortunately, my experiences (with a previous 7 year old Minolta and currently a 3 year old HP; both in the $400-700 price range) have been that the color aspect of color lasers are really only good for very rough draft color prints or color prints of Power Points or Word Docs where the color is used to augment figures and tables, but does not require significant image quality. Invariably, pictures printed on these printers look washed out, have limited color gradients, and sometimes even obvious banding issues. These are issues that most mid-range inkjets had solved over 10 years ago. Perhaps affordable color lasers have gotten drastically better in the last 3 years, but I am skeptical.

Re:Good

[ryanov]

Some do. Xerox printers pretty reliably have actual PS from Adobe. Most other real printers (not the WinPrinter shite or whatever) do it also, seems. Whatever passes as a standard office type of printer anyway (like the HP 4000 and cousins).

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Used a laser printer c540dn (network connected), price was correct for the printer and the toner at that time.
Except, you were supposed to be able to print ~1500 copy per toner, but for the few one I tried it would just stop at around 750. Even if I could hear there was still a bunch of toner inside it would just say: toner cartridge empty, and there was no way to override this.

So I kicked it out and am using an HP one and so far I'm quite happy.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Nope not just you, been warning my customers for years to stay the hell away from Lexmark because their inkjets were just garbage. bad prints, smudging, jamming, real bottom o' the barrel junk and the ink prices were just nuts. I try to steer them to a Samsung laser if i can, if i can't then a Canon or Epson inkjet, but never Lexmark, they are just designed for the dump.

Re:Good

[mrmeval]

Absolute garbage on Windows. They allegedly have drivers but there are reams of complaints. I can't find were someone replaced the electronics with just enough to run the motors and print head with a minimalist linux driver doing I think PCL. It was back when boards like the arduino mega were 2-300 bucks.

BTW Samsung's ML-2510 toner makes a very good mask for metal etching including PC boards. It does however take some heat. I've used a hotplate to get brass hot enough and an thrift store 1950s era iron for PCBs they get MUCH hotter than the current ones. I recommend paint thinner to get that stuff off, it's adheres that well. The printer was $60 and I've etched about 30 pieces of brass for steampunk and a dozen or so PCBs and it still has a lot of toner left.

Re:Good

[emaname]

Lexmark C543dn color laser on a network in a mixed environment. Performance has been good. Fast and good quality. Toner costs a fortune though.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never had a good experience with a Lexmark inkjet printer, even on Windows machines.

Even the all-in-one units, depended on the computer for everything. The "copy" function didn't work if the computer was off. The ink was very very little in the cartridges, which were empty right away, and like the Epson ones, don't include the print head. Unlike the Epson ones, the print quality wasn't that great anyway. The drivers were very special and even specific to the version of Windows you were running. Windows or Mac OS? Forget it.

Lexmark laser printers are ok.

for Inkjets: Business HP models if you want something that's heavy duty with cheaper Ink. Epson if you want something with better print quality (but ink can dry out, head cleaning is a pain for not-often-used printers).

Re:Good

[dgatwood]

You should take a look at some of the newer color laser printers. By the time I started looking into them two or three years ago, the quality from at least some manufacturers had already come up to the point where they look remarkably similar to inkjet printing (unless you look at the way the light reflects off the paper at a steep angle or something). The test of a laser printer is to see what sort of print samples they use. Good printer vendors use a photograph. Great printer vendors use a properly lit portrait of a fair-skinned human face. That takes serious faith in your printer's output quality. :-)

I'm using a current-generation Konica Minolta printer (9600x600 DPI), and I regularly use it for color photo printing (well, book covers, but photographic book covers). I have zero tolerance for gradient banding, and I wouldn't have bought the printer if its gradient reproduction were anything less than outstanding.

Similarly, in my limited experience (floor sample) with Brother's laser printers, they're also good enough for photo-quality printing, though admittedly the photograph they chose was a fairly bold one, so I can't comment on how well their printers do on lighter gradients.

This is not to say that all color laser printers are up to the task. I've never gotten prints with what I considered to be acceptable gradients from any HP printer (color or black-and-white) that I've used (laser or otherwise). And the one print sample I saw from a Samsung printer (at a MacWorld Expo) was blotchy, dark, and had terrible contrast. So you do have to be careful, but decent, photo-quality laser printers are out there, and they're not too expensive, either.

Re:Good

[jseale]

A dual boot option is much more appealing when all the hardware just works and generally faster than in Windows. Ok not for everyone I know but it is a big negative when people find their printer isn't going to work in Linux.

If you're going to install a printer on a Linux system, make it an HP. Ubuntu and HPLIP especially seem like they were made for each other, nowadays anyway. HPLIP works fine in Fedora as well. Not sure about it on the other distros though.

Not so bad

[kdawgud]

Inkjet prices aren't so bad for those home users that only need to print occasionally. It takes decent volume (and/or time) to make back the difference in start-up costs of a laser in the cases I've seen. Especially if you want access to color printing.

Re:Not so bad

[bratloaf]

Except that if you only print occasionally the ink heads clog or dry up, requiring a ink-wasting cleaning cycle or replacement... A cheap laser, even a cheap color laser, is so much better a choice for anything but photo printing. Decent color lasers can be had for $200 on sale sometimes. Really decent ones for $300.

Re:Not so bad

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Laser isn't as expensive as it used to be.

For around $100 you can have a BW HP laser.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115639

The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money, even if you never recoup the $60 price difference between that and this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828102471

Color laser is closer to $ 170. But most casual printers don't really need color, they just need a readable printout.

Re:Not so bad

[SJHillman]

My inkjet printer is still using the starter cartridges that came with it in 2008 ($30 + free S&H for a networked printer made it too good to pass up). It's just starting to get low on B&W now. There were times I'd go more than 8 months without printing anything and never had a problem. However, once the ink runs out, I'll likely spend the money to get a nice networked color laser printer.

Re:Not so bad

[vlm]

The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money

That's my fear, lexmark will find a way to value engineer lasers to eliminate laser-style quality and reliability.

Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, them dropped quality to the level of rotten canned cat food to generate a modest financial gain, then got out of the sushi market because no one wants to buy rotten canned cat food anymore.

Re:Not so bad

[Derek Pomery]

I don't know about HP quality vs Brother, but I just stopped by my local Staples both times I needed a new laser printer.
The last time the Brother was $80 and also had label maker thrown in.

Re:Not so bad

[Urza9814]

Yea, I was going to say -- I can't see COLOR laser printers being economical for average home use any time soon, but I bought a Brother HL-2040 black and white laser for $70 five years ago, and it's still working great. I love the thing. Never had a problem with it, even on Linux. Paid for itself more times than I can count too.

Of course, the problem with laser printers that cheap, is usually when anything more significant than a toner cartridge needs replaced, it's cheaper to just get a new printer. I found a refurbished drum that I bought a while back when the one it came with died, but even refurb I probably would have been better off just buying a whole new printer, especially considering that they come with some toner...of course I suppose you could say the same about inkjets, but they don't have any real expensive consumables like that (except the ink of course...sometimes I feel like you'd be better off getting a new inkjet that comes with some ink than new cartridges!)

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Your printer is 1 in a million. For the rest of us, buying a laser printer is really a bargain.

Re:Not so bad

[need4mospd]

For the cost of that laser printer's replacement ink cartridge alone, I can get a quality color inkjet WITH a built-in scanner. While I might not need color prints(nice to have just in case), I'd make the case that a scanner is mandatory in any house.

Re:Not so bad

[NJRoadfan]

Option 2 if you don't trust Brother printers: Find an old networked HP Laserjet for cheap. They go for very little and require little to keep running. Parts support is excellent if they do break. The toner and common service items (fuser, rollers, etc.) are cheap too.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of McDonalds... It seems shitty quality is enough to turn people off buying printers but it won't stop them from buying and eating food. Weird.

Re:Not so bad

[Derek Pomery]

Yeah. Never had any problems with the Brother under Linux either.
The other huge advantage besides cost-per-page for the Brother laser is that it is a really reliable tray fed.
Drop in a fresh ream of paper, and you shouldn't get any jams.

Re:Not so bad

[fast turtle]

except you can get a cheap hp bw Laser for under $100 most times with the benefit that toner never dries out and forcing replacement of the cartridge

My first laser was a Samsung bought on sale for $100 about a decade ago and it still works. Toner runs about $50 a cartridge and the really nice thing is, we've only bought 3 cartridges in the last decade. For the ocasisional printing needs, it's been a god send after using inkjets that had cartridge costs of $30+ for each (two needed).

I will agree that inkjets offer a reasonable alternative for those who need color printing but when I'm asked for input, I always suggest a laser printer. If you need to do a photo or two, go to Walmart/Walgreens/Riteaid/Other local store and spend the money for printing the thing out there. It's actually cheaper and better quality.

Re:Not so bad

[Zibodiz]

They call that 'the Walmart Syndrome'.

Re:Not so bad

[caution live frogs]

Yep. My 4M+ is still going strong, 90k+ page count. And I have a 5M at home, even with the extra paper tray add-on (so it holds a ream and a half) was a steal from university surplus at $50 - have been using it for like 6 years now...

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You are saying you have the same ink cartridge that came with it in 2008? How did you get it to not dry up? Is the printer below a swamp cooler or something?

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

My last printer was an Epson CX7400, printer and scanner combo; $49.
Linux drivers available, printed lots of prints (2 kids in school), yet would sit sometimes for many weeks.
Best part the non-oem easily refillable cartridges and the 100ml ink supplies; I went through several hundred ml.
2.5 years of printing for a total cost of $70us, a few dollars more for ink and paper. It died recently with an internal error.
On 2 occasions was it a hassle to clean the printheads.

Now I find that the NX330 wireless is available at Walmart for $49, and the refillable carts are under $20.
Prints and scans via wireless, copies, has LCD and SD card interface.
Can I get another 2.5 years out of this one? I may consider a laser, but unless this thing completely screws up,
it is the cheapest route possible.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially if you aren't dumb enough to pay for the name brand ink. You can buy perfectly good ink cartridges on Amazon for less than $1/cartridge.

Re:Not so bad

[Mythran]

The one thing I don't mind eating from McDonalds...their fake ice cream in a cone (which isn't even really cone shaped, is it?). They don't taste, smell, or feel like ice cream, but I still love them :P

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the joke again? Come the apocalypse, only the cockroaches will be left...and they'll print using Laserjet 4's.

Re:Not so bad

[Geste]

Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, ....

This doesn't seem like a very good analogy. I don't think Sun Myung Moon would let this happen given his lock on the sushi supply chain in the U.S.A.

Hmmmm. Maybe Moon will buy MacDonalds and we will have much-improved Blissfully Happy Sushi Meals!

Re:Not so bad

[jayteedee]

I hope you haven't kept it plugged in these last 6 years. I had one of those and it idled at about 400 watts. You could feel the heat radiating on the outside of the HUGE plastic case. We kept it for a few years and would only power it on when we needed it, but then decided it was just easier to get a newer machine (a Lexmark coincidentally) that idles at about 30watts. Yes the old HP 4 and 5 series were built like tanks, and the parts are still cheap at places like precisionroller.com, but they are not economical to keep plugged in 24/7.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed it is, I haven't ever seen a printer with white ink, much less a combined B&W cartridge!

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Clogging is Epson and HP territory... I *LOVE* Epson print quality for photos, but *HATE* the endless clogging and ink wastage on cleaning cycles.. HP was alright back in the day when they did the ink cartridge+printhead-in-one thing, if you got a clog that wouldn't clear just by wiping down the head with an alcohol wipe, just replace the cartridge and get a whole new set of printheads, but then they went to fixed printheads and although they were never as bad as Epson, they still did clog if you didn't use them occasionally.. I've retired two Epson and 3 HP inkjets due to clogging..

Canon has been the only printer that has *NEVER* clogged on me; not even a little- I've got a 6 color Canon (uses the CLI-100 inks) for my photo printing that I bought probably 8 years ago that maybe gets used once or twice in a year, and it's print-and-go every single time, no clogs ever.. The print quality is as good as Epson, but unfortunately, *ONLY* if you use the Canon Premium paper- on the Canon Premium glossy, the tones are continuous and it's difficult to see the dither even under magnification, but if you try any other paper, the results are pretty horrible; and it also uses ink at a prodigious rate- the pages come out almost soaking wet when printed on the highest quality setting, and take an hour to dry, and another day or two to fully set within the paper's coating (during which time the colors also change slightly- so it takes a long time to profile your printer).. That said, I still put up with it because it doesn't clog and I can just load paper and print...

Because of my good experience with Canon, my everyday printer is another Canon- a color laser this time.. I also had a Konica Minolta Magicolor, which was not that a bad printer, but its toner suffered badly from metamerism, so my spectrometer could never get a good reading on the colors and I could never successfully profile this printer; that said, I used it until it started having trouble feeding paper without jamming, at which time I replaced it with a Canon MF8380, which has a horrible printer driver, but once you get it set up, it prints very nicely indeed..

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market

I think you just described every asian fusion buffet ever.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I just wish McDonalds hadn't put all those independent restaurants that serve hamburgers out of business decades ago.

Re:Not so bad

[jimicus]

You haven't seen Lexmark's drivers or firmware lately. They've already made a damn good start.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Brother HL-1470n 10ish years ago. Networked, good postscript clone, works with everything. I'm on the 1st replacement cartridge. I love it & recommend Brother to everyone.

Re:Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I finally went laser at the home, because color laser printers have dropped below $200. A really decently-built Brother unit has wifi Bonjour printing at 20ppm or so. I was shocked. Even if the "demo" toner cartridges are limited to 1000 pages (and apparently Brother does this with an evil "report empty after N pages" chip), that's gonna pay for itself right there. The only drawback is that I can't print really good photos anymore... something I haven't done in years. For those cases where only physical photos will do, I've been sending them to a service bureau like shutterfly (snapshots) or WHCC (posters).

Re:Not so bad

[s0nicfreak]

$100? Inkjet printers cost $20 - $30.

Sure the replacement cartridges cost more. .. but you can always just buy a whole new printer, take the cartridges out of the box and leave the printer outside for some sucker that wants to buy the replacement cartridges to take. Or if the printer fucks up, just keep the new printer.

Re:Not so bad

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, *sigh*, that's what my dad does. The thing is, the cheap printers suck out of the box. They jam frequently, their install cds include crap ware. I gave him a new laser one year for a present, he returned it because he had just purchased a new printer a couple weeks ago. Inkjet just isn't worth the hassle. IT really isn't

Re:Not so bad

[Fjandr]

Just buy a used commercial color laser printer. They're designed from top to bottom to have all their parts replaced, and once they're outside the business lifecycle toner cartridges and other parts become dirt cheap.

Re:Not so bad

[mcgrew]

For the cost of that laser printer's replacement ink cartridge alone

Laser printers don't use ink. The way one works is the text/pictures are "printed" on the paper with a laser, making where the laser hit electrostatic. The paper then passes over the toner, which is really a fine powder made of plastic, and the plastic sticks to the paper where there is the elestrostatic charge. It then goes through a heater about 3000 degrees F or so, and the plastic dust is melted on to the paper.

Laser printed paper won't run when you get it wet. Ink will. And that toner cartrige is going to last forever, compared to an ink cartrige, without the problems of the nozzles clogging if you don't use it, because there are no nozzles.

I agree that in most homes (mine included), a scanner is more necessary than a printer, but I'd personally not have them both in the same device. If the scanner part quits, you're stuck with only a printer.

Re:Not so bad

[LinuxIsGarbage]

We have some 11 year old Laserjet 5000 and 5 printers at work. 300,000+ prints in an extremely dirty environment and they rarely jam up or have problems. Sadly finding parts is a problem and we're starting to cannibalize old printers, and new printers being rolled out aren't near as robust.

Re:Not so bad

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I bought a $50 Samsung AIO monochrome laser on clearance. I've printed maybe 20 pages in the past year and a half. Every time I fire it up it prints. Not like inkjets that would be clogged solid that an alcohol bath might not even fix. My toner cartridge still has at least another 980 pages left. And the Samsung won't expire and refuse to print with "such an old cartridge" either.

Re:Not so bad

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Of course, the problem with laser printers that cheap, is usually when anything more significant than a toner cartridge needs replaced, it's cheaper to just get a new printer. I found a refurbished drum that I bought a while back when the one it came with died, but even refurb I probably would have been better off just buying a whole new printer

Samsung makes a good budget laser as well. A bonus is unlike Brother the drum is in the toner cartridge. I can't talk to their latest models, but of the ones I've used the "chip" will only make it report low, it won't refuse to print.

I've also started experimenting with refills from http://tonerrefillkits.com/ which can give another charge or two to a cartridge's life. Kits are model specific, they provide replacement chips, excellent directions, some printers don't even need the tool, and they throw a pack of M&M's in the box. If you look on their facebook page or elsewhere you can find 15% discount coupons.

Re:Not so bad

[Urza9814]

Hmm, interesting. I usually get mine refilled locally -- can get the cartridge back the next day, sometimes even the same day if I get it to them in the morning. I'll have to look into these printers that have a drum with the cartridge if I ever get a new one, but I'm a bit concerned about that for two reasons -- first, would that then limit the number of times you could get the cartridge refilled? Would you have to get a refill and a drum refurbishment of some sort (I'm honestly not even entirely sure what the drum does, so if that phrasing doesn't quite make sense, that's why...). And how much would that cost?

Usually I pay ~$30 to get a 2,500 page refill (which sometimes lasts longer)...though it looks like at the moment new cartridges are down around $10 each on Amazon.com. Can't really beat that!

Re:Not so bad

[Whiteox]

Ermm.. New ink printers do not come with full cartridges.

Re:Not so bad

[guruevi]

You know that the 'new' printer cartridges in those $20 or $30 printers are practically empty right? HP usually comes with 10% filled cartridge. Everytime I buy a laser printer, I get a full cartridge that doesn't go to waste. $100 and you can literally print well over 5 years in a home environment (20k pages for a cartridge) without the cartridge going empty or drying up and if you need to replace it, the cartridge is $50 for another 5 years. I haven't had an inkjet survive for longer than 6 months.

Re:Not so bad

[s0nicfreak]

They come with enough for the average home user to use up before the heads clog.

Excellent support!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, after years of complaints and consumer demand, Lexmark bows to the will of the customer and does what everyone so desperately wanted, leave.

Re:Excellent support!

[RabidReindeer]

Finally, after years of complaints and consumer demand, Lexmark bows to the will of the customer and does what everyone so desperately wanted, leave.

Yep. When Lexmark was part of IBM, their printers were allegedly pretty decent, but I already had a printer, so I never got a Lexmark.

By the time I went shopping again, though, Lexmark had done their slimy DMCA thing. I swore I'd never buy a printer from a company that did that.

There might not be all that many players in the printer market, but there's enough that I could use the Invisible Hand and give them the Finger.

So I did.

Re:Excellent support!

[irving47]

Came to say this. For those that don't know the DMCA reference, Lexmark filed lawsuits under the DMCA to prevent ink refill manufacturers from putting out products for their printers. They argued since the code in their printer/carts was copyrighted, the act of circumventing it by putting more ink in was illegal.
Yeah, they made a lot of friends with that one.

Good riddance.

Re:Excellent support!

[Anonymous Coward]

Came to say this. For those that don't know the DMCA reference, Lexmark filed lawsuits under the DMCA to prevent ink refill manufacturers from putting out products for their printers. They argued since the code in their printer/carts was copyrighted, the act of circumventing it by putting more ink in was illegal.
Yeah, they made a lot of friends with that one.

Good riddance.

Very good point...I had forgotten about that little debacle.

Wet paper

[Lord Lode]

I just really dislike this curly, wet paper you get right after printing a big thing with an inkjet printer.

Re:Wet paper

[SJHillman]

Sounds like you're just not using the right kind of paper for a large image. Switch to paper made for printing large images with inkjet and you'll see a world of difference.

Re:Wet paper

[RabidReindeer]

Sounds like you're just not using the right kind of paper for a large image. Switch to paper made for printing large images with inkjet and you'll see a world of difference.

Although you can get by with other stuff, Inkjet paper was supposed to have a clay coating that keep the liquid from soaking the fibers. Although I've been printing laser for so long that I don't really know anymore.

Re:Wet paper

[tlhIngan]

Sounds like you're just not using the right kind of paper for a large image. Switch to paper made for printing large images with inkjet and you'll see a world of difference.

At which point it becomes prohibitively expensive to own and operate an inkjet.

I mean, for photos, between Costco and Walmart (and who use real photo paper), it's pretty damn cheap to have extremely high quality prints made - better than an inkjet and probably an order of magnitude cheaper if you went with the special inkjet paper.

For black and white printing, a mono laser is extremely cheap, and even the consumer "half size" toner carts are still pushing 2,500+ pages for barely more than twice the cost of an inkjet black cartridge (which getting 500 pages is a struggle). Plus the output is nicer and doesn't smudge.

I haven't printed enough "other" stuff to really want to print in color (in a move, I found the old inkjet I had that the mono laser replaced - a Canon, which I hadn't touched in years).

About the only defense for an inkjet these days is that they are cheap - usually pretty damn close to free ($20-ish?). A reasonable laser is still pushing over $100 on sale.

Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailable

[DutchUncle]

Yes, ink-jet costs are ludicrous when you know the technology behind them, but the precision for price is so much better than the old days. Besides, we all finally dumped our LPT: cabled dot-matrix and ASCII printers, so there's not much choice. Laser just doesn't justify at home, and color laser is much higher.

Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers...

[QilessQi]

...to follow suit, and wean consumers off the "cheap inkjet printer" crack pipe. I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on, and when I do it's invariably the black cartridge. My significant other, meanwhile, goes through inkjet cartridges like I go through socks. And I *love* socks.

Amen

[kryliss]

No more will I have to hear, "Can you help me get this Lexmark printer working?", "Yep, here's the box I'll help you pack it back up."

They have finally run out of Unicorn blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Unicorn have now been declared endangered, cutting of the supply of Unicorn blood for the ink cartridges.

Re:They have finally run out of Unicorn blood

[AmberBlackCat]

Maybe they can use quadrocorns...

TIMOTHY YOU *#]IDIOT[#*

[Anonymous Coward]

AGAIN. I was reading through the summary. PLEASE STOP PUTTING PARENTHETICAL ASIDES IN EVERY SENTENCE. Because....know something? IT IS ANNOYING!!!!!!

Ink jets are not dependable.

[goombah99]

Inkjet prices aren't so bad for those home users that only need to print occasionally. .

Occasional printing is precisely what Ink jets are the worst at. Those things clog up and when they do manage to print it's only after a good phlem clearing dump of a lot of ink into the waste bin. It's the laser printers that work well on occasional printing, even with the warm up they need they still are faster than an ink jet, and they don't have unpredictable quality problems when they haven't been used in a while. Dependable when you suddenly need it.

I just bought a new multi-function duplex-printing laser printer from cannon for 77$ including shipping on amazon.com. Even the 500 sheet "starter" toner cartridge will last longer than a full ink jet will, and 3rd party replacement toner cartriges (2000 sheets) will be under $15.

given that's the price now for laser printing for a quality company, Why would anyone buy an inkjet?

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[medoc]

> given that's the price now for laser printing for a quality company, Why would anyone buy an inkjet?

Anyone needing color maybe ? Supplies for small color laser printers are actually more expensive than those for inkjets.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Inkjet prices aren't so bad for those home users that only need to print occasionally. .

Occasional printing is precisely what Ink jets are the worst at. Those things clog up and when they do manage to print it's only after a good phlem clearing dump of a lot of ink into the waste bin. It's the laser printers that work well on occasional printing, even with the warm up they need they still are faster than an ink jet, and they don't have unpredictable quality problems when they haven't been used in a while. Dependable when you suddenly need it.

I just bought a new multi-function duplex-printing laser printer from cannon for 77$ including shipping on amazon.com. Even the 500 sheet "starter" toner cartridge will last longer than a full ink jet will, and 3rd party replacement toner cartriges (2000 sheets) will be under $15.

given that's the price now for laser printing for a quality company, Why would anyone buy an inkjet?

Photo printing. Cheap (even expensive) color lasers are nowhere near the photo quality of an ink jet. For many people printing photos is one of the things they want to do, and want to look good. And, as someone who researched the inkjet vs laser choice recently when bying a multifunction printer, this was the main reason I choose the ink jet. After about a year I haven't regretted. Print occasionally, have not had any clogging or realibility issues at all (suspect some of these stories are experiences with older inkjets as they were more troublesome), and I'm just nearing the end of the first ink cartridges I bought (after the small that followed the printer were empty). And yes, it is actually a Lexmark, Interact S606 WiFi.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are?

You'll need to tell that to my colour laser printer for which I refill with all three colour toners plus black for $26. Search ebay for "cp1518ni toner refill" and you'll see--comes with the reset chips, too! For that $26 I average 1,400 colour pages and another 1,200 black and white pages. That's under 2 cents per page of colour, after which the black and white pages are free.

The best part is the toner washes off with cold water, whereas whenever I refilled an ink cartridge my hands (or forearms if I used gloves--yes, I'm lazy) looked like a science experiment gone wrong for the next week.

But hey, maybe you have a color inkjet that offers a better value. Go ahead, show me.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[adolf]

I just bought a Brother all-in-one inkjet for $50, and some third-party ink carts (2 black and a set of color) for $7, after finally giving up on a Laserjet 5 that I'd been flogging for years and years. The Brother machine even has a document feeder that actually works, which makes scanning documents more joyous, and it's WiFi, which makes it trivial to move around.

To work around the clogged print-head issue, I've set up the following: Every Sunday at noon, the printer prints something -- automatically. It was easy to set up Windows to do this (would've been easier with Linux, but I care not about printing in Linux).

It's all tradeoffs, but I wouldn't exactly call this inkjet printer an expensive item to use.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[goombah99]

> given that's the price now for laser printing for a quality company, Why would anyone buy an inkjet?

Anyone needing color maybe ? Supplies for small color laser printers are actually more expensive than those for inkjets.

Ummm... no they are not. I own a color laser jet and an inkjet, so I know. the cost of cartridges is about 13$ for each color on both.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good golly who prints photos these days? Ordering photos on line these days is fast and easy. Even with delivery charges it's cheaper than ink. You can even print things at walmart if you cant wait.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[maestroX]

Not required. DCP Brothers autoclean (=dump ink into sponge) at intervals in sleep mode while on power. Reconnecting power also triggers autoclean. Running 2+ years, don't do a lot of printing, 1 cartridge set refill -- before, in the print shop, comparable Bro's performed admirably.
Surprisingly good machine, especially cheap, excellent support from Brother (no I'm not), though photo quality doesn't match Canon/HP. (tip: any factory born into sewing machines knows how to properly assemble mechanical devices)
Lasers are going the same road as inkjets.

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a Brother MFC-465cn printer that seeems to do the job ok.The cheap 3rd party Chinese made cartridges on Amazon work great. Four sets on cartridges (16 in all) cost about 15 bucks. Thats cheap enough for me. :)

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[adolf]

It's not a DCP, but an MFC. Googling doesn't reveal a clear difference in the designation.

Thoughts?

Re:Ink jets are not dependable.

[guruevi]

Color laser printers all-in-ones are available for $150-200. What's to complain? The fact that they only do 20,000 pages vs. 200 per cartridge?

kinda like ford stopping car production

[Anonymous Coward]

or microsoft stopping ... oh, i can so wish.

what does this lexmark make if not printers?

lexmark? ibm spinner?

Re:kinda like ford stopping car production

[Grishnakh]

Presumably, they're going to continue with their laser printer business. They make a lot of big office laser printers, and from what I hear they're quite nice actually, totally unlike their consumer inkjets.

So to user your analogies, it's like Ford stopping production of their Fiesta cars, or Microsoft discontinuing their "Home" versions of Windows. Both of these moves would be welcome too.

In the long run?

[Anonymous Coward]

I barely print anything, got my multifunction printer 2 years ago when it was on sale for $35(original price a little over $100) with the black and color ink included. It's still going strong. When I need to change the ink, I will just buy a new printer, as it's cheaper than buying the ink separately.

Re:In the long run?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I need to change the ink, I will just buy a new printer"

And a perfectly printer goes to the landfill. Not exactly environmentally friendly.

Selling everything they do.

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth does getting rid of only the product line that anyone is aware that you make a good idea?

Sure, they will "save on costs", but revenue will be zero when they have no product. I am not a wizard economist, but as far as I know, corporations can't exist on cost-cutting alone - there still has to be revenue.

Re:Selling everything they do.

[Sqr(twg)]

Hire a management consultant, and pay him in proportion to the cost-cuts he makes. He'll give you a brilliant explanation why cutting everything makes perfect sense. (You might not understand every detail, but you'll trust him, because somebody who charges that much has got to be smart.)

Re:Selling everything they do.

[Grishnakh]

Did you forget that they make tons of office laser printers? They'll save on costs by getting rid of their cheap, shitty, consumer inkjets that apparently are no longer profitable. Good riddance to them. Lots of companies (including IBM) have given up on or sold off their consumer product divisions, to concentrate solely on business customers, who are willing to pay a lot more money for products and demand better quality.

Refill Your Own

[Bitsy Boffin]

Refilling your own cartridges is super easy if you pick the right printer.

Brother printers particularly are good, the cartridges (at least all the ones I've seen) are just ink receptacles, they have no electronics, just put more ink in job done.

Ink can be purchased on ebay etc in 100ml bottles or more, for a fraction of the cost of buying cartridges.

Even better, it's pretty easy to find good inkjets for a buck or two second hand, I've bought lots of them, most with empty cartridges, often complete with power and USB. Refill the carts, run a few cleaning cycles, and they work really well.

Re:Refill Your Own

[rsmith-mac]

Frankly I've never had any luck refilling ink cartridges. In theory it's a good idea; in practice those ink refills gum up the print heads in no time flat.

The best decision I ever made was to replace my inkjet with a monochrome laser printer. What I lost in color I more than gained in reliability.

Re:Refill Your Own

[Anonymous Coward]

Refilling your own cartridges is super easy if you pick the right printer.

Brother printers particularly are good, the cartridges (at least all the ones I've seen) are just ink receptacles, they have no electronics, just put more ink in job done.

Ink can be purchased on ebay etc in 100ml bottles or more, for a fraction of the cost of buying cartridges.

Even better, it's pretty easy to find good inkjets for a buck or two second hand, I've bought lots of them, most with empty cartridges, often complete with power and USB. Refill the carts, run a few cleaning cycles, and they work really well.

I'd probably find a way to replace my demand for dead trees before going through that effort. Can't wait until society catches up to that concept. I tire of maintaining physical output.

Re:Refill Your Own

[Nimey]

Brother carts are /slightly/ more complex than that. The ones I've seen have a gear on it that gets moved slightly every time you print, and when it reaches a certain position the printer knows the cart's about out of toner.

IIRC with a proper refill kit you get toner plus a new gear or some way to reset it without breaking it.

Re:Refill Your Own

[dkf]

Brother printers particularly are good, the cartridges (at least all the ones I've seen) are just ink receptacles, they have no electronics, just put more ink in job done.

I've had good experiences with Canon (or at least with the model of Canon I've got, an i560x). The ink cartridges are just ink tanks (with a bit of sponge to control the ink flow); the level detection is done with a little prism built into the wall of the cartridge, and I believe that it depends on measuring how much light is absorbed by the ink due to evanescent waves, or perhaps due to the difference in refractive index between air and ink. Clever use of physics, cheap solution, and the ink is readily available (especially if you're willing to use generic inks).

Re:Refill Your Own

[Anonymous Coward]

Refilling your own cartridges is super easy if you pick the right printer.

Brother printers particularly are good, the cartridges (at least all the ones I've seen) are just ink receptacles, they have no electronics, just put more ink in job done.

Ink can be purchased on ebay etc in 100ml bottles or more, for a fraction of the cost of buying cartridges.

Even better, it's pretty easy to find good inkjets for a buck or two second hand, I've bought lots of them, most with empty cartridges, often complete with power and USB. Refill the carts, run a few cleaning cycles, and they work really well.

I'd stick to Epson, Canon or HP ... why would you even bother with a POS like brother?

Re:Refill Your Own

[Yomers]

Here in Thailand most people use inkjet printers with small modification - huge (like 100 ml each color) ink tanks attached to the side of the printer with tubes leading to printheads.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser cartridges can print a plenty of paper, but once something breaks - tie cost is going to be higher than the printer itself (i.e. better to buy another same one).
I had a color laser Lexmark which was ok in quality (better than any inkjet I had), but when it broke, it turned out to be very expensive (so much that we gave up on it).
Those companies anyway sell you printers for a low margin just to make up on materials later.

Lexmark is still around?

[macbeth66]

In Mid-2004 their stock was around $90. Now it hovers around $22.

It warms my heart to see the scum of the printer industry slowly die. Whenever I was asked about which printer to get, my answer was almost always, "Anything but Lexmark."

Re:Lexmark is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scum of the printer industry? No. That would be Epson.

Re:Lexmark is still around?

[jimicus]

Not sure that means much. Most company's stock value has taken a battering in the last five years.

Re:Lexmark is still around?

[atrizzah]

I used to work for Lexmark as an intern throughout college and grad school, and while I am ASTONISHED that they have made it so long as a company given how horribly managed the place is, I also feel bad. There are a lot of fantastic and brilliant people who work for the company, in many cases because there just aren't too many other tech jobs in Lexington, KY. I hope my old friends land on their feet.

WTF

[rossdee]

So what are they going to do if they stop making inkjet printers? I can't recall any other product that Lexmark made.

Anyway who is going to pay for the disposal of all those useless printers that you won't be able to get ink for now?
(Of course most people just threw them in the garbage when the cartridge ran out anyway - it was cheaper to buy a new printer.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

this is MBA thinking - completely cost/efficiency focussed while assuming little or no impact on revenue and development.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

They will claim to own UNIX and sue the whole world with abandon.

Re:WTF

[LaminatorX]

They do this:

Re:WTF

[LaminatorX]

Hm. let's try that again. :) They do this: http://www.perceptivesoftware.com/company/about-imagenow.psi

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

They only recently bought perceptive. For a small size implementation it would be easily over 100K. Only large enterprises need apply.
They still make great MFC devices(their latest versions). Both color and B/W. If you need single pass duplex scanning in your MFC....they wipe HP all around the floor and put them up wet.

Re:WTF

[atrizzah]

They make laser printers as well, but they mostly sell those directly to businesses so you don't really see them in stores.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[OverlordQ]

What model, been looking to replace our inkjet.

Order the ink online

[millsey]

Well, that's a suggestion I've heard, as opposed to paying full retail price.

Inkjet printers are BS

[mps01060]

This explains it perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV0M9_NwMHY

Compared to other small all-in-ones...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a former office-supply store sales guy who dealt with these machines and all the pros and cons of HPs, Epsons, and Lexmarks and Lexmark is the most economical. They have a couple of models that print about a penny-a-page for the ink. That's a significant savings, even when compared to laserjet printers. Most mid-to-high end laserjets print for 1.5 to 2 cents per page. Lexmark's inkjets print for less money than that.

Re:Compared to other small all-in-ones...

[careysub]

I'm a former office-supply store sales guy who dealt with these machines and all the pros and cons of HPs, Epsons, and Lexmarks and Lexmark is the most economical. They have a couple of models that print about a penny-a-page for the ink. That's a significant savings, even when compared to laserjet printers. Most mid-to-high end laserjets print for 1.5 to 2 cents per page. Lexmark's inkjets print for less money than that.

In my experience, with one Lexmark printer if you did not print for a couple of weeks the cartridge clogged and could not be unclogged. Sure, there was a cleaning cycle, it just did not work. A cartridge that does not print cleanly is useless, so unless I remembered to print regularly and did not go on vacation, after a liitle bit of use the cartridges had to be thrown out. A theoretical 2 cents a page becomes 20 cents a page, or even $2 a page if you did not print much before the clog set in (this happened to me in fact shortly after I bought it and before I discovered its clogging problem).

It was an all-in-one so I used it just as a scanner for awhile, until its drive mechanism broke and it started slamming the scanner across the platen instead of, well, scanning. What a piece of junk. Naturally I have no experience with a second LexMark.

Re:Compared to other small all-in-ones...

[Urza9814]

Really? I have a Brother HL-2040 laser printer, low-end (cheapest one I could find), and last I calculated I believe it was under half a cent per page for toner. And based on what others have been commenting here I was kind of starting to think I was paying WAY too much for that toner...

I think the key word there was "laser"

[alispguru]

I have no experience with laser printers by Lexmark. My inkjet experience with them has been uniformly bad.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[mccalli]

With the exception of an original Stylewriter (which, I seem to remember, shared a lot of components with a Canon in the PC universe at the time), I have never had any form of good experience with an inkjet by any manufacturer. It's actually why I ended up with the Lexmark laser in the first place.

For their time, when your alternative was dot matrix or a third mortgage, inkjet printers were astonishing. That time has gone for a while now I think, time to dump the lot and concentrate on low-end colour lasers.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[NJRoadfan]

The early Stylewriters and the Canon Bubblejets they were based on, were great printers. They usually worked right, and the ink wasn't expensive. A friend used a Canon BJ-200e for years until they needed to print in color.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Zcar]

My best experience with an inkjet is a Hewlett Packard. I bought an HP DeskJet+ in the summer of 1990 and it's still going strong 22 years later.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Grishnakh]

I agree completely; I've never had a good experience with an inkjet, and I rely on laser printers now. They're dirt cheap when you get used business models on Ebay, and the cartridges are dirt cheap when you get the remanufactured kinds, and last for many thousands of pages for only about $25.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[jimicus]

The quality's okay (it works, but don't expect spectacular build quality) but Lexmark's firmware has been shaky for as long as I can remember.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[CronoCloud]

You can still get ink for it?

Locally, I had one shop refuse to refill a cartridge for a 680C claiming it was "too old"

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago, on the BBC1 programme 'Tomorrow's World, they showed a prototype inkjet printer that had one long printhead, as wide as a sheet of A4 paper, which printed very quickly, and was going to be 'released very soon'. Like almost everything else that ever appeared on that programme, it never came out! Does anybody know what happened to it?

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[atrizzah]

I love my HP L7580. The thing's a beast! It prints in duplex, scans, and has massive, off-carrier tanks

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[godel_56]

The early Stylewriters and the Canon Bubblejets they were based on, were great printers. They usually worked right, and the ink wasn't expensive. A friend used a Canon BJ-200e for years until they needed to print in color.

I had a Canon BJ200 and it was goddamn awful. The ink was so water soluble that it would almost run in high humidity. Certainly the merest perspiration on your hands or if you'd washed your hands and hadn't managed to dry them completely, would result in ink being smeared all over the page. Business documents had to be printed out then photo-copied before being sent off.

It was the crappy quality of the BJ200 that finally moved me to lasers, even though they were expensive at the time.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to sell printers. Of all the inkjet models I went through, my favorite was the Canon BJC-600 series (600, 610, 620).

Canon realized that the print head was actually quite durable, so they made that a separate assembly. Since it was one piece, all the alignment between colors was done at the factory, so none of that stupid calibration printing (wasting ink) is needed.

Since you don't need to change the head, you just buy the ink. In tanks. Each color has it's own tank. If you run out of red, you replace JUST the red. Since you'll be printing black a lot, that tank is twice as big as the rest. Our RETAIL price for a color tank was $9.99, the black was $8.99. Oh, and the tanks are semi-transparent, so you can visually see when the ink runs out.

The resolution wasn't as good as the newer ones today (about 360 dpi), but I still think they were the best models out there. My BJC-4100 is still going, although I've run into an unexpected refill problem: the refill's red ink isn't the same as Canon's red, and it looks like an oxblood color when printed. If you get non-Canon refills, make sure they know to use "Canon red" and not just what's in the vat.

If you want a "pity party", look at the demise of the Alps MD-1000 thermal (Dye-Sub) printers. These things not only produced some amazing output, they could swap colors on the fly (they used wax-transfer cartridges), and even came with such colors as silver, gold, metallic hues, and white! We sold one to a regular customer, and within a week we had folks lining up to buy more. Why? Our friend had used the MD to print decals for his model aircraft, and being waterproof and colorful, his planes stood out. He let them know his secret, and we had lots of customers afterwards. Alps has long since discontinued the model, citing lacking sales, but just imagine what that printer could do with, say, PCBs and project enclosures. Are you reading this, Alps?

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[xs650]

I had a Canon BJ-200 and the only thing good about it was that it had BJ in it's name. Paper jammed, printing was unreliable and messy.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I had a BJC-210. It was the first upgrade I had from a slow noisy dot matrix to a shiny coloured printer! After printing 50 pages of colour the BC-05 cartridge ran out. Looked at the prices. . . good lord! So I started running the BC-02 monochrome cartridge as the printer would only accept one cartridge (integrated printhead in the cart, so any "Bubblejet" with these carts were essentially identical). I have never seen a cartridge that could be so easily refilled so many times. It had a very simple print path so it was hard to flub up. Very simple design in total. I remember having to clean the rollers after someone spilled hot cocoa on the printer, that was about it for maintenance. Cartridge wasn't too hard to clean if it clogged.

I replaced it with an HP (Deskjet 3820? I forget the model). Piece of shit broke just after a year. A gear inside had enough and all that would happen is the printhead would slam side to side. So I went all office space on it and smashed it up before throwing it out. This was an incredibly common problem, and someone even started fabbing replacement parts. Eventually HP offered to replace broken printers. Of course after mine was in the landfill.

Since I needed a printer I resurrected the Cannon bubblejet by soaking the printhead in alcohol, and it kept chugging along before I migrated to monochrome laser.

The print quality wasn't that great on this printer (it would tend to bleed on non-inkjet paper) but it would keep chugging along. Three kids went through school with it.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I especially haven't had good luck with Lexmark inkjets. Monochrome laser, even consumer models, seems like a better deal. As it is I don't print a lot these days. Maybe a boarding pass on an online ticket for a movie.I may have printed 20 pages on my laser in the past 1.5 years. But I fire it up and it always works (no clogged cartridges). Text quality is always sharp, and per page cost is lower than inkjet. Hard decisions!

My current model is a $50 clearance AIO Samsung monochrome laser. I've used the scanner more than the printer.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Zcar]

Bought a case about 2 years ago at Office Depot. Not sure if they still carry it.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[Anonymous Coward]

The one and only ink jet printer I have ever owned - and swore that I'd never own another.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[hairyfeet]

Actually for my customers who are too poor for lasers or who tend to print in spurts (say vacation photos, holidays, that kind of thing) I've found the little Canon units to work pretty well. The ink carts are cheap enough online, the picture quality is decent, a new unit costs less than $40, and the drivers are pretty solid yet basic without a ton of extra crap (I'm looking at YOU HP!) and are even easy enough to share across your basic home network. Oh and they don't seem to scream if the cart is half full that its empty either.

But I agree that with B&W lasers in the $80 range and new color units for around $150 there are few customers where an inkjet makes any sense anymore. I picked up a little Samsung B&W for my oldest when he started college, the thing is still printing on the original cart 3 years in and they had a deal where it came with 2 extra carts on Amazon for like $105 with shipping. With deals like that there is just fewer and fewer cases where I can say "yeah an inkjet would work fine for you" anymore.

Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[dtjohnson]

Inkjet printers have a lot of advantages. They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do. They're smaller, lighter, and use a lot less power. Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer. The only thing that makes them expensive are the cartridges which cost $15 to $40 a pop and don't last nearly as long as a laser toner pack. That's a shame because one of the inkjet makers (Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson) could/should have stepped forward and started selling a refillable ink cartridge which would have had a simple refill valve or cap or something on top where you could take the $6 a quart ink and squirt it in to top it off. One quart would last for about 150 refills. That would make inkjet printers cheaper by far than laser printers. Why don't inkjet makers do that? The answer is that they could never get past the razor/razor blade idea where they make all of their money from the ink cartridges and the printer is just the 'razor' that people buy so that they will be locked in as a customer of the ink cartridge 'razorblades.' In this case, though, that way of thinking like an MBA is killing a very nice technology.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Bitsy Boffin]

Refillable cartridges just as you describe are readily available aftermarket items for many printers, just search Ebay

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannon sorta did this (or was it lexmark?). You could reuse the printer heads and just buy ink inserts and replace the heads separately. .
The problem is that the print heads on inkjets don't last very long (typically they are built in the cartage). And after 2 refills the print quality goes down substantially.
 

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Urza9814]

I seem to recall hearing that most inkjet companies sell the printers themselves at a loss -- the ink is so expensive because that's where they're actually making money. If they started charging more realistic prices for these things, the ink would be cheaper, but the printers would be comparable in price to lasers -- and I suspect many people would choose to go with a laser printer in that case. I mean the biggest complaint I hear about refilling inkjet cartridges is that it's an extremely messy process. With how cheap toner is, I doubt too many people would choose ink if the printer pricing was similar...

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its similar to razors and razor blades. They give the razor away and charge a fortune for the blades. I know a lot of people that would just buy a new printer when their Lexmark printer was empty.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Minwee]

the ink is so expensive because that's where they're actually making money.

It's not just expensive, printer ink is more expensive than human blood.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[blackest_k]

Ink jet technology isn't dying its just the end of the worst inkjets ever.

There are decent Inkjet printers around although pretty much all have the ink tax, It might not be too long before critical patents will expire allowing more companies to enter the market and supply the Ink-jets we want to buy.

Personally my printing needs are met by a mono laser and a multifunction hp psc2175 inkjet both networked to an iomega Iconnect Nas running debian (the Iconnect is superb value once you have debian installed it uses just 5 watts)
With debian I can use the scanner over the network which is handy. I don't really use the Ink-jet for printing much but unlike many inkjets when you replace the cartridge you replace the print heads so it can survive infrequent use. My laser is the real work horse. The HP is mainly a copier and scanner for me. If I want good colour photo prints I just go to one of the many places which offer the service. I also don't print every shot I take and will usually do some work to the pictures I want at home first.

Anyway I doubt anyone will miss Lexmark inkjets, Thou I must admit i might struggle to find a modern printer which works better for me than that old HP.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't have to be the case. My first inkjet, a $700 Epson stylus colour (yes, the orignal, before they had model numbers, back when 720 dpi was incredible and not available in a laser printer) lasted for about 3 cases of paper before the rollers wore out and it was showing its age (not printhead wear, but after 10 years, the quality of other printers had made this one a little embarassing). The printheads were permanent, although they could be replaced if you managed to damage them. The cartridges were huge, lasted a LOT of prints, and were easy enough to refill, and were ONLY ink cartridges.

It's amazing to see how far print quality has come at the expense of longevity.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[kelemvor4]

Yep. Check this out, regular price $20 USD. http://www.amazon.com/Lexmark-Z615-printer-ink-jet-18K6281/dp/B0002445QO/ref=sr_1_42?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1346168662&sr=1-42 That's less than the cost of a set of cartridges, and it isn't even on sale. I've often seen printers like this on sale at local stores in the $10 range, and occasionally "free" as some sort of a promotion.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[kelemvor4]

the ink is so expensive because that's where they're actually making money.

It's not just expensive, printer ink is more expensive than human blood.

With almost 7 billion factories making the stuff, I'm not surprised blood is cheaper than ink.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the advantage of using those expensive color inks to print black and white pages that only need the black ink.

Oh, wait..

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Inkjet printers have a lot of advantages. They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do. They're smaller, lighter, and use a lot less power. Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer. The only thing that makes them expensive are the cartridges which cost $15 to $40 a pop and don't last nearly as long as a laser toner pack. That's a shame because one of the inkjet makers (Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson) could/should have stepped forward and started selling a refillable ink cartridge which would have had a simple refill valve or cap or something on top where you could take the $6 a quart ink and squirt it in to top it off. One quart would last for about 150 refills. That would make inkjet printers cheaper by far than laser printers. Why don't inkjet makers do that? The answer is that they could never get past the razor/razor blade idea where they make all of their money from the ink cartridges and the printer is just the 'razor' that people buy so that they will be locked in as a customer of the ink cartridge 'razorblades.' In this case, though, that way of thinking like an MBA is killing a very nice technology.

You know what is another "very nice technology"? Non-refillable ink cartridges that you can create an obscenely high profit model, and then collude across the entire industry to keep that model in check.

Yeah, that's pretty much why. And you certainly don't need an MBA to come to that conclusion, and I would likely question any MBA who would recommend moving away from it from a business standpoint.

TL; DR: Consumer products be damned. Business is business.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer."

Most laser printers have this amazing power-saving technology that drops their power usage to zero when they are not in use for prolonged periods of time. It's called a "power switch". My laser printer is off until I need it, and starting it is a lot faster than the time I usually had to spend cleaning the heads on the inkjet half the times I wanted to use it.

Laser printers also don't have ink that smudges, the head doesn't clog due to infrequent use, they're usually faster, and so forth. I have no use for an inkjet printer for black-and-white, and if I want colour I take the job to a service and let them figure out how to pay for the ink.

Good riddance.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[marcomarrero]

It's an expensive advantage, most won't print 100% b/w text if the color ink cart is missing or empty, regardless if the black ink cart is full. I also found out inkjet printers require multiple attempts until they break into a million pieces.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[k31bang]

They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do.

You should say "than most laser printers do". Many minilabs (photo) use lasers to print on photo paper. The Fuji Frontier minilab being a good example.

Let the giclee (inkjet ) vs laser religious war begin.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Whiteox]

Except the Fuji uses proprietary technology and shares nothing with standard consumer colour laser printers.

"All models use RGB lasers to expose the photographic paper, and process the prints in a modified RA4 chemistry. The CP-48S chemicals have been optimized to improve the print D-max for richer blacks. Fuji Crystal Archive paper is a fine material to print on, and when matched with a Frontier printer the results can be outstanding. "

also

".The scanning exposure system uses RGB lasers, with the G and B lasers being solid-state -- meaning that they use a solid, rather than liquid or gas, as their gain mediums. The two switchable paper magazines use FUJICOLOR silver-halide paper.."

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, laser tends to do a better job than inkjet. though of course, you need to buy something really high end to get really good results. inkjet does good on color photos.. to a degree.

Re:Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[Brianwa]

I had the same printer. We only got rid of it once all of the plastic paper guides had broken off the front, around 10 years after we bought it. I've never seen an inkjet live up to its reliability, and the price of the ink was amazing.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[QilessQi]

HP LaserJet 5MP; I've had it for years and only ever needed one minor repair (when the feeder broke). Printouts are crisp and professional looking, and laser toner doesn't smudge or blotch if you accidentally spill a little tea on it, unlike ink.

I'll grant that if you're printing out photos, a high-end ink jet printer is favored by artists for a good reason -- but those are the top-quality ones with 7 or 9 separate cartridges. Laser printouts on photo paper just don't look right to me.

YippeeiYaa!!!!

[onyxruby]

Lexmark has long been the one of the leading banes of the inkjet printer business. Leading the charge with DRM built into inkjet cartridges that required you to buy /their/ ink. They were on of the worst vendors for lock in and lawsuits, getting lawyer happy and suing people who dared to try to bypass their DRM lock in.

They are an evil company and I have had great pleasure over the years steering many, many an IT purchase /away/ from Lexmark and towards other vendors that did not play their games. I would have to imagine that I was far from alone in steering business away from them.

Anyone got a good story about steering a sizable purchase away from lexmark they would like to share?

Re:Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailabl

[Urza9814]

If you don't need color, a laser is DEFINITELY the way to go, even for home. I bought one for $70 five years ago (Brother HL-2040). My parents have gone through two inkjet printers in that time and a cartridge or two, and they probably only print a few times a year. A laser printer is going to be a lot more durable than an ink jet, and the toner is so much cheaper. Replace the cartridges twice over the entire life of the printer and you probably would have saved money buying a laser printer...unless you just happen to have a stockpile of free inkjet printers (which does happen with how often they're offered for free with [x]...)

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Urza9814]

Same can be said for inkjet printers though, and in my experience they're a LOT more fragile. Christ, I've _dropped_ my Brother HL-2040 and it's still going just fine. My parents have an HP inkjet that hasn't been moved from under the desk since they bought it a couple years ago and it's already falling apart. Won't feed pages half the time, no longer prints color even with a fresh cartridge, the carriage jams...

Re:Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailabl

[Geeky]

Laser printing is a lot cheaper than it used to be - even colour is cost effective at home. They probably aren't much good for photos - that's where the multiple shades of inks in higher end inkjets come into their own - but otherwise they're a reasonable home option now.

For photos, getting them printed online is cheaper and almost always better than using an inkjet anyway, unless you want to mess about with colour calibration or experiment with textured papers.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[blind biker]

And I *love* socks.

Please tell us more.

lexmark to exit

[Anonymous Coward]

As a long time Linux user, all I can say is, who???

Inkjet printers fit my use case very well.

[RoverDaddy]

I probably print less than 100 pages a year. Maybe even less than 50. Yet when I need to print something, I really need to print something so having a printer at home is essential. And while I usually print b/w, I do sometimes need color. With this kind of low-low use and an occasional color requirement, a compact, dirt-cheap inkjet makes much more sense than a laser, even after high-priced ink cartridges are considered. And the fact that the same unit is a page scanner is a great bonus.

Re:Inkjet printers fit my use case very well.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually the worst way to use an inkjet printer, your heads will clog.

Considering a black and white laser printer can be had for $29 on sale, and a colour laster in the $99 range on sale, you're doing yourself a disservice--you need to spend at least $50 to get a colour inkjet that will be at all worthwhile, and you're just going to break it this way.

Re:Inkjet printers fit my use case very well.

[RoverDaddy]

I see a lot of people here report that infrequent printing causes clogging, but I haven't had that problem. I believe this printer has the print heads attached to the ink cartridge, so replacing the ink replaces the heads. Finally, the printer is already 5 years old and still works fine: I think it has already earned it's keep.

Re:Inkjet printers fit my use case very well.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real problem with this is that in most ink-jet printers, the ink dries out eventually when not used, and the print-heads can clog up.

You can either:
1. Print a couple of pages a week to keep this from happening (which will use up ink), or
2. Waste a lot of ink doing head-cleaning, etc.

Either way, you will go through ink just to keep the printer "ready", and when you need to print something quick before leaving the house in a hurry, the clogged print-heads will give you something with funny colors, streaks across the page, or sometimes, nothing at all!

And Nothing of Value Was Lost...

[DrEnter]

I think the subject says it all.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[operagost]

I'm going to guess you really mean HP Color Laserjet 5M. The Laserjet 5MP is B&W, and there never was a Color Laserjet 5MP. The Color 5M is definitely the one to have, as it has more standard RAM plus Postscript and the ethernet card.

ANOVWL

[__aasehi2499]

The recounting of the worst experiences with printers has always started with "My Lexmark printer..."

Re: Drops support quickly

[CrowdedBrainzzzsand9]

I swore off Lexmark permanently for their habit of dropping support for printers so quickly. In my case, I couldn't get a driver for the next version of Windoze after the printer model was dropped. Clearly it was a way to force people to buy a new model. I did...an Epson.

Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[perpenso]

Executive: "restructuring cost before tax"

English: "way to create a paper loss to avoid tax".

No. It is common to cite financial performance before taxes and other things. Hence the common use of acronyms like EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. These things muddy the water when trying to determine income, comparing one year to another, one company to another, etc.

Think of it like reporting your salary rather than the adjusted gross income (AGI) from your tax return.

Also, what makes you think there is a paper loss. Shutting down a plant does have costs. That is why some money losing plants are not shut down when their losses are significantly less than their shutdown costs.

Re:Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[Uberbah]

No. It is common to cite financial performance before taxes and other things.

Yes, it's common Executive Speak, which was the point.

Think of it like reporting your salary rather than the adjusted gross income (AGI) from your tax return.

I think that would be a great comparison if you were able to write off all your living expenses AND your consumer purchases from your tax returns the way businesses do. Everything from the food on your table to the TV in your den to the pontoon boat you use for fishing on the weekends would be tax deductible.

Re:Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like someone who has never had to take an accounting course or try and evaluate how much a company is worth. A little ignorance goes a long way it seems. Here are a few courses that might help: http://genxfinance.com/20-free-online-finance-courses-take-money-classes-from-the-comfort-of-your-home/

Re:Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that would be a great comparison if you were able to write off all your living expenses AND your consumer purchases

You can, however most people choose to use the standard deduction and personal allowances which aproximates this for most people.

Re:Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me know the next time a corporation goes fishing on the weekend. Oh, wait. it fucking doesn't. It also doesn't have living expenses. It has business expenses, which is what creates deductions.

If you want to take all those nice deductions that businesses do, go right ahead. All you need to do is pay for all the work-related kit and consumables. Good luck talking your employer into raising your pay to cover those costs, though. Since the employer gets volume discounts that you, as an individual, do not. Your employer will also bear payroll tax costs for the higher pay that gains the employer nothing. So.. if you just feel like buying all your own work gear rather than drawing on company provided resources, nothing is stopping you. You'll get the deductions that you seem to crave. You'll also get the accounting headaches, and you'll have less disposable income. But, if that's what you want.. enjoy!

Also.. you face an income tax. In order for you to buy $100 of food, you have to earn somewhat more than $100. Making the food more expensive in pre-tax terms. Which is exactly what Lexmark is talking. Pre-tax terms. You don't think like that too often. You're only concerned with dollars you spend, rather than dollars that you never had a chance to spend. Taxes reduce revenues. But they also reduce losses. Such is the nature of a tax on income.

Re:Taxes, etc muddy waters regarding income

[perpenso]

No. It is common to cite financial performance before taxes and other things.

Yes, it's common Executive Speak, which was the point.

Actually the point of the original post was humor and to gain some karma.

If you thought the original post was serious then its point would have been to translate "executive speak" and it did so erroneously.

Re:Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailabl

[rickb928]

Since half of my color printing at home is photos, color lasers are not cost effective at home, for me.

And I suspect many of us.

I will probably get a B&W laser soon, reteach the wife how to choose her printer, and put up with the 'PRINTRR"S NOT WORKING' screams, but it is no worse than now. After severl HPs and one Epson, I ahve a Canon MP620 that is not cheap to run, but is reliable and never fades or sputters ink. It's just a major PITA to get networked.

And I won't be buying an office style laser - too many kwh for me.

Sad, but understandable...

[Anonymous Coward]

...their ink cost (they only mark it up a penny or two for the consumer)
keep going up and up with no end in sight.

Having owned and dealt with lexmark printers

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only say I am overjoyed at this decision.

Network printers and scanners that need 150 meg drivers and create virtual ports rather than just implementing a basic print server (protip: a $3 uC will quite happily run a print server,) ludicrously expensive "pre-bate" cartridges that come with shrink-wrapped licences that would make your average software vendor wince, combined with print heads that are designed to burn themselves out and general "hard reboot ever 20 minutes for best results" engineering quality.

Srsly, fuck lexmark.

Funny Lexmark story

[scotts13]

First, I've never had one good experience with Lexmark inkjets. Bad drivers, expensive ink, shoddy engineering...

About that latter two: I was once doing a presentation on Apple products at a major educational customer. The Lexmark rep was on before me. In response to questions about the cost of ink cartridges, he recommended to the school district they simply buy many, many, new printers and discard them as the cartridges emptied. Seems a set of cartridges cost more than a new printer, and the printers weren't all that reliable anyway...

I don't believe he worked for Lexmark after that. And why do you think most printers come with "starter" ink cartridges these days?

Good riddance..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sorry to see Lexmark exit the inkjet market: they were always the crappiest printers out there- worst print quality, lowest capacity ink cartridges.. And they gave away so many of them (remember the Dell and others' "Buy a system, get a crappy Lexmark printer" bundles?), it's also no wonder that they're losing money..

Too bad they didn't go the other direction

[fustakrakich]

They should expand into 3D printing. The cartridges don't seem so expensive when you produce something more useful than a bean counter's spreadsheet.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Targon]

You have to look at the level of the printer before saying it applies to ALL printers. HP has cheap "disposable" printers in the $120 and under range, and they are complete and total crap, but they also have some fairly decent mid-range units that are MUCH better. The old saying about getting what you pay for DOES apply in many situations. There is also the difference in speed for your money as well, where the lower cost laser printers are SLOW compared to ink jet. I agree that ink jet is better for long-term cost effectiveness, but on the flip side, compare what you get from a HP Officejet Pro 8600 and a laser printer at the same price.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Just Some Guy]

I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on, and when I do it's invariably the black cartridge.

I have an HP Color LaserJet 2600n and it's been brilliant. Except that after not using it for a couple of months, all three color toner cartridges mysteriously ran dry at the exact same time and had to be replaced before I could print a greyscale document. I was glad to find half-price 3rd party refills online; I just hope they don't turn out to suck.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[fm6]

If you do a lot of high-volume printing, then I guess laser printers make sense. But some of us print only a few pages a month on average. The higher cost of lasers just doesn't make sense for us.

LICK MY BALLS, MODERATORS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me down! I'll waste another one of your precious modpoints. Parent is EXACTLY CORRECT.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Urza9814]

Forgot to mention the prices...my Brother HL-2040 was $70, my parents HP was probably around $50 or so, maybe a bit more. Point being that, at nearly the same price point, you can get a laser that can handle some abuse and is built to last, or you can get an inkjet that will slowly tear itself apart even without any abuse. Maybe I'm generalizing too much here, but hell, change your black ink once or twice and your cheap inkjet has probably become more expensive than a cheap laser.

Of course, the inkjet does also have a scanner (that they don't even know how to use) and color printing. Low volume color printing is the one area I would say inkjet may be a better choice, but if you don't need color, or if you're doing more than a couple pages a month, I feel like a laser is probably going to be a better choice. Other than niche markets of course -- others have mentioned inkjet being preferred for high quality photo printing, but that's a completely different discussion.

For me: at the time I bought my laser printer (in highschool), I didn't print photos (still have never had any need for color printing of anything, over five years later) and I was printing a hundred or so pages per month, so it made a ton of sense. Then during college I reached a point for a brief time where I would be printing nearly a thousand pages a month. Did not plan for that when I bought the printer, but I'm damn glad I had it. Would have cost me an arm and a leg in ink, not to mention probably a hundred hours of my time over a year. Or more likely hundreds of dollars at Kinkos. Now since graduating I rarely use it, but if something did happen to it I'd probably be buying the exact same model. Not worth the money to buy an expensive inkjet; not worth my time to screw with a cheap one. And who knows, next month I might need to run off two hundred pages, it's a nice bonus to know large print jobs will take minutes, not hours...

And yes, I'm fully aware my experience is far from typical, but the point is that if all you want to do is print text to a page, you can probably get a laser printer that will be cheaper, more versatile, and more durable than any inkjet.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[6Yankee]

I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on

I have one like that! So annoying when the secretary goes on holiday and I have to change the toner myself... ;)

Just Don't Buy A Printer

[Baby Duck]

I "exited" owning my own printer 8 years ago. I print so infrequently, the ink dries up too much between my last use. I have an account at my local printing/mailing/business shop. Even with the price of gasoline for the round trip, it's much cheaper in the long run.

Lexmark does something that benefits consumers!

[voss]

WTG Lexmark!

I'm OT so mod me down but...

[mcgrew]

...Lexmark inkjet's is coming... Apart from Lexmarks soon to be redundant employee's

I'm curious, is English a second language? If not, how did you manage to get through high school without learning what apostrophes are for? Either way I hope you appreciate a little education.

An apostrophe has two and only two uses: for contractions like don't and can't, and possessives, like "Lexmark's printers, Bob's dog, Phil's book. That is the only two uses. You do not use one for a plural, unless it's a plural possessive ("Lexmark's are bad printers" is wrong wrong wrong). With a plural posessive the apostrophe goes outside: "Dogs' noses are sensitive." If the posessor ends in "s" it also goes outside ("Linus' work has helped the world")

Hope I was of help.

PS: It's inkjets are coming, not is coming. BTW, read some books!!!!

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[Grishnakh]

As an American, I would bet money that he's an American, and English is his first and only language. That's a very common problem among American English speakers. Pretty soon, it'll probably be deemed "correct" here to use 's to indicate plural, since if enough people using a language do things a certain way, that becomes the standard.

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[blackest_k]

not really helpful at all to be honest.

Taking the last point first it's the extinction that is coming (one extinction not many )

from http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html

Can an inanimate object own something?

When considering the use of an apostrophe, possession involves of and for. Consider a notice outside a golf club: Captainâ(TM)s parking space. The captain doesnâ(TM)t own the space; it is a parking space for the captain.

In the case of this carâ(TM)s colour is too bright the car doesnâ(TM)t own the colour; it is the colour of the car.

Another example is menâ(TM)s clothing or menâ(TM)s wear. It is clothing for men.

Using these guidelines I don't feel so bad about my usage. I believe that American English and British English have a few differences in usage. What may be correct in one, may not be in the other. In an International forum the differences should be tolerable. Besides McGrew isn't there a better target for your vitriol ;)

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[mcgrew]

I fear you may be right, and I blame the internet. Before the internet, the only things a person couldf read were books, magazines, and newspapers, all of which were written and edited by professionals, and private snail mail. Now instead of one person reading mail from an aliterate*, hundreds read the aliterate's blogs and messageboard postings.

What's particularly galling about that is there is simply no reason whatever for putting an apostrophe for a plural, except that people who don't read books have seen it all over the internet.

I also blame our incredibly poor education system. People should have learned this in the third grade, and nobody should be able to pass 8th grade this ignorant.

* U'm using the word "aliterate" in a slightly expanded sense here. Rather than someone who can read but doesn't, I'nm using it to refer to someone who only reads if it's on the internet, where all the other aliterates are.

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[mcgrew]

When considering the use of an apostrophe, possession involves of and for. Consider a notice outside a golf club: CaptainÃ(TM)s parking space. The captain doesnÃ(TM)t own the space; it is a parking space for the captain.

I don't own my assigned parking space at work, but it's still mine. I don't own my house, but it's still my house. It's still a possessive; legal ownership doesn't enter into it.

In the case of this carÃ(TM)s colour is too bright the car doesnÃ(TM)t own the colour; it is the colour of the car.

But again, the car possesses the color. You don't have to own something to posess it. If I loan you a book, it's not your book but you are in posession of the book. If you get arrested for a DUI tha cops will tale posession of your car, but it's still your car even though it's in their posession.

Using these guidelines I don't feel so bad about my usage. I believe that American English and British English have a few differences in usage. What may be correct in one, may not be in the other.

The British and Americans use apostrophes in exactly the same way. The only people who say "all the car's are red" are ignorant aliterates who obviously read nothing but internet postings by other aliterates. This is third grade elementary school stuff. Misuse of apostrophes indicates that the writer is incredibly unlearned and it is very, very doubtful that (s)he has ever been to college and most likely dropped out of high school. I can't stress enough how ignorant it makes you look..

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[Grishnakh]

I see the apostrophe-plural-s frequently outside the internet too, such as on store signs and other promotional material.

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[blackest_k]

Let me apologise for the lack of apostrophes as slashdot ate them.

http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html

So what you are saying is that the above linked web site has got it wrong.
as for the is and are the use of a single entity requires the singular
and the use of the plural demands are

The herd is coming this way but so are the wilder-beasts that make up that herd.

To form the possessive you use an apostrophe and you generally don't use apostrophes for plurals.

http://www.eng-lang.co.uk/apostrophe_rules.htm

I know I am slapdash in my use of English and I used to be worse. I would go as so far as to say I wasn't taught English, she only considered English literature as a subject to be taught not language.

You normally have more interesting things to post about, maybe Slashdot is no longer as interesting as it used to be. The posts seem to getting more predictable. Take it easy, stressing over little things is bad for your health.

 

Re:I'm OT so mod me down but...

[mcgrew]

I have, too, but almost always on foreign-owned convinience stores and hand-written placards. There's a convinience store here in town called "7 brothers", run by some Arabs, the sign says "Grocery's, cigerats, we accept link". There's a bar on the north end of town that has "daily special's". But the Arabs speak English as a second language, and the bar owner is probably a high school dropout. I wouldn't expect to see it at a place like /., but it's way too common.

Re:Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailabl

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with laser at home? If you don't need color, you can get a decent laser printer with built-in duplexing plus ethernet and wireless for $80. Even when personal laser printers cost 10x that, it was worth it to avoid dealing with inkjets, but prices have been under $250 since at least 2000. Wait, are you posting this from the late 90s? Now it makes sense...

Re:Inkjet ink costs; dot-matrix ribbons unavailabl

[kat_skan]

I've got a HL-4070CDW I got around the same time and I wholeheartedly second this endorsement. Brother just makes solid, no-bullshit printers. I stuck it on my network and haven't had to mess with it since. The toner cartridges are about $50 each, and each color is independently replaceable, as is the drum unit. I think I've replaced them two or maybe three times. The drivers (assuming the OS doesn't have one already—it speaks PostScript and PCL) are 3MB, and there's versions that go all the way back to Windows 2000 and Mac OS 10.2, plus 64-bit drivers for Windows XP and later. There's apparently even one for Android.

Its only Achilles heel is that the paper doesn't feed straight through, so it mangles the crap out of envelopes. I would assume they fixed that in later models, but if I were in the market for a printer today it's something I'd look out for.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[yurtinus]

You know - I picked up a handful of lighter weight wool socks (lightweight hiking socks) two years back or so. Never gonna turn back. They keep my feet drier than cotton, don't have near the smell, look decent enough to go with dress shoes, and they still have that "new sock" feel when I take them out of the wash. They're pretty spendy up front, but they last way longer. I've slowly replaced just about all of my cotton socks with wool and have yet to toss a pair of the new ones.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[CronoCloud]

That's why a used Laser is a good idea. Ever check the prices on the old HP LaserJet 4series? They're still in demand because they're tanks.

People still think injet costs a lot?

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Wow. My whole extended family uses Brother inkjets, and we buy the LC-61 ink carts for those for under $1 a cartridge, and even with 4 of them each being used by a lot of kids printing like crazy...we spend maybe $30 on ink for all four for a year. Its dirt cheap.

I mucked around with color lasers for a while, but while you could get them cheap with starter toner carts, the regular replacements cost more than I paid for four printers and a couple of years worth of ink!

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[fm6]

It's as big as a tank too. OK, if you only need black and white printing, you need a high-volume printer, and you have the room for it, I'm sure it makes sense to spend $85 for a used LJ4.

But none of those applies to me. I have a tiny inkjet that lives on a shelf above my desk, prints color, and only cost me $35 brand new. It does the occasional letter, printed form, and photograph quite well, and that's all I need it to do. I buy maybe one cartridge a year, so cartridge costs are not an issue.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Fjandr]

I'll second this off-topic. :)

Most people think they'd be uncomfortable in hot weather, but they're not any more uncomfortable than wearing cotton socks. It's taken me about 10 years to wear through my oldest pairs.

coders vs the real world

[swell]

Sometimes we need a reminder that all computer users are not programmers. Many are in business, some are in education, many are home users while others (me) do graphic arts... These people frequently need color and often they need quality color. A simple black only laser printer is not an answer. A color laser prints ugly pages that stick and peel and fade and reflect light unevenly.

If printers were designed with only programmers in mind, there would be a large outcry from the real world. It's nice to know what meets your personal needs, or doesn't; but that is of little interest to Lexmark or other manufacturers who cater to a larger audience.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my inkjet printer to print labels directly onto CDs (about 350 to 500 per year). I know of no laser printer that will do that for me.

Before someone suggests LightScribe, the disks are more expensive than inkjet-printable disks but, more to the point, my printer can print a CD in about 90 seconds while my LightScribe drive takes 6 minutes.

Lexmark announce itself going out business

[Anonymous Coward]

This utterly stupid. Their getting out of the their bread and butter industry. They going under that fast because of the refillers importers? Really?

Not everyone can afford pay big time for a stupid laser jet printer or high-end multi-function HP printer. They should been lobbying to keep importers from murdering their industry if they were so darn touchy about it.

Lexmark is going to restructure itself into a holding company when dust settles. Only the name and products that they already producted will be left behind. Utterly stupid.

I feel so sorry for those workers they laided off.

Good riddance. Lexmark was a horrible company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lexmark was a horrible player in the GNU/Linux printer mark. I'm glad to see them go. HP is the only company I'd recommend. They sell printers that work with free drivers. My only issue of late is that of the quality of some printers.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I have owned both, and having bought a brother A3 inkjet recently, i would never change back. sure it isn't as fast as a laserjet, but ink to do 2400 pages costs 50 bucks, which is about half what my last laserjet cost in toner. Cheap inkjets are terrible, but good ones have become cheaper and better than equivalent laser printers. I would buy a laser printer if i often had to print hundreds of pages, and only had a few minutes to wait each time, but it's not worth the extra ink cost, and I like having the ability to print good quality photos.

tanks for your support

[Anonymous Coward]

of linux computers. one of your useless printers is still in my storage room.

Re:Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers.

[QilessQi]

You are correct -- that's what I get for replying off the top of my head when I'm miles away from the printer. :-(