Inkjet Scam

Please let us know if it works.

My first printer 30-ish years ago was an HP Laser model. At out low print rate then, the first cartridge lasted so long that the second cartridge, very long past its expiration date, wouldn't work.

 

www.amazon.com/100Pin-Memory-Compatible-Laserjet-1200Se/dp/B00DTWT5NY

The Laserjet 1200 came with 8 meg of memory, you can add a 64 meg card for under $15 and have 72 meg, so those .pdfs don't take as long.

 

Many times the toner cartridge includes the photoelectric drum. For best reliability I try wherever possible to use OEM toner cartridges. Years ago I worked for a copier manufacturer. Back then they found third party supplies that came from the same plant but had been rejected by the OEM due to quality issues. I know back in the days of liquid toner we had a lot of support issues due to third party supplies.

I do buy third party for my old HP laser printer because there are no OEM ones made any longer.

 

I find that for my low home usage on my all in one that buying an OEM high capacity cartridge occasionally is not a large expense amortized over the number of pages printed.

We found ink jet cartridges dried out too quickly for our use. The last HP inkjet we bought decided to be out of ink whenever it wanted. HP support was worse than useless so re retired that printer during its warranty period.

 

No, it has neither WiFi not duplex printing. But I need neither of those. It does have USB (along with Centronics!) so that's all I need.

Yes, a few years ago I noticed it was choking on large .pdf files, so I added a 32 MB card that I bought on eBay for under $5, shipped.

I also own a $50 flatbed scanner that lives in a closet and I can drag out when I need to scan or copy.

None of this is as perfect as buying a new printer, but my actual page count is well under 100/year, so it's not worth spending any money on a better printing solution.

 

www.amazon.com/D-Link-DP-311P-Wireless-1-Centronics-802-11b/dp/B0000A0VBM

Parallel, Old and slow, sorry.

USB, slightly newer

www.amazon.com/Linksys-WPSM54G-Wireless-G-Print-Server/dp/B001FO2VM0

 

thanks guys, i'm sold. just gotta do my diligence now

i need something that will print a page or two once a month or so. and the occasional return shipping label, which the ink jet struggles with.

 

I have had good luck with old HP Print servers from eBay & connected to a wired port. Can still access over wireless..

 

I've had my Brother color laser printer now for about 5-1/2 years. Replaced each toner twice and have 40-60% left on the ones in the printer. The toners that come in the machine go empty in a hurry but the replacements last a couple years, so I don't mind buying the name brand ones and have never had a singe problem. I've never paid anywhere near $100 for a toner cartridge. This isn't the cheapest to operate laser printer, but it's a fraction of the cost of inkjet and a million times more reliable after over 9,000 pages and a total of five jams, only two of which were inside the machine.

 

I recently wore out my Phaser 8550 DX, so if you need two 550 sheet feeders, that makes the printer about 4 feet tall, just let me know.

I have quite a bit of ink cubes as well.

I printed weekly Lions Club Bulletins, yearly Community Kitchen Celebrity Waiter Menus, and yearly Theatre Membership Brochures with that, but could not find another even used.

So now I own www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XDM9FG3

 

Just don't forget that the original cartridges shipped with printers are usually not full-size or completely-filled cartridge. They are usually a partially filled starter cartridges. A 'real' cartridge will last much longer. Ink volumes should be disclosed somewhere.

This doesn't fully take the sting out of the Gillette give-away-razor-holder-for-almost-free-make-the-money-on-replacement-blades marketing model, but it will help a bit.

 

Amusingly, the picture in the Print Driver changes when you add options, so the Printer always looks like it really is. The trays wouldn't interchange between a 8550 and an 850. (unless you misremembered and it is a 8500)


It had a hard disk, half a gig of RAM and 4 feed trays so I could load legal, letter, card stock, and specialty paper. And it smelled like melted crayons, one of every parent's 'fear smells'.

 

I finally got around to replacing my Phaser 750 that I bought used 16 years ago or so. The 750 used a traditional laser engine, not the wax cubes. Like others, I had finally decided on a laser because I was a very sporadic printing user: long periods of not wanting to print anything at all, but then I would have a project and want it to come out nice, and inkjet cartridges were always dried out.

I did find that the laser option wasn't a panacea for infrequent use. Sure, the toner didn't dry out. But the 750's fuser was kept slick by a roll of oil-impregnated paper that would index a few clicks along after every page printed, and that stuff would dry out. And it turns out there's a shelf life for the photosensitive coating on the OPC belts or drums too. "They" say a couple years, and I was definitely getting decent quality for way longer than that, but definitely not for sixteen.

More vexing were some paper path and sensor issues late in life. A friend had a nearly-identical model (the 740) that started jamming on paper-pick, and that was how I learned about "damping grease", a specialized grease type for slowing down motion. There was a roller with a solenoid clutch and a spring involved that was supposed to make exactly one turn each activation of the clutch, but as the factory damping grease dried out, the spring tension would make it spin too fast in the second half of the turn, and overshoot the stop before the clutch could reset.

Damping grease turns out to be expensive and hard to buy in small amounts, but camera shops use it (it's what makes the focus rings on good lenses feel nice), and the local camera guy squirted a little wodge onto a card for me to take home.

Given that, it was an easy repair, only the 740 and 750 are built like a brick ... house, and while all the normal consumables are easy to pop in and out, getting to things like roller drives and clutches would be like an hour and fifty Phillips screws to deal with.

My 750 eventually started with phantom jamming issues; I suspected one of the paper path sensors making it think it had jammed when it hadn't (which of course would make it stop in mid-print, and then be jammed for real). Because access was so time-consuming, I just never got to the bottom of it. It eventually got pretty exasperating.

So I've replaced it with one of Oki's LED printers (everything the same as a laser printer, only the image is written on the OPC drums by one stationary LED head for each color, rather than a laser and a spinny mirror). It is nicely built, seems to have pretty convenient access for nearly everything, and weighs a whole lot less than the 750.

It can also print color at the same speed as mono. The 750 had a single OPC belt that, for color, would have to go around four times to pick up each color in turn, and then feed one paper sheet, so color printing took four times as long. The Oki has a separate small OPC drum under each toner cartridge, there's a separate LED head to put the image on each drum, and the image data just gets sent to the four heads with the right delays so that as one sheet makes its way under the four drums, the four color images perfectly line up.

Pretty nifty control trick, that.

I'm a little leery of the down-the-road costs of having four, count 'em, four little OPC drums in there, but at least they are available separately. They are labeled C, M, Y, K but I'm not sure there's really any difference other than the labels and maybe some locating nibs. If those can be filed down, maybe I can just keep one around as a spare and be able to use it in whatever position needs replacement first.

How they pull off the trick of getting four perfectly aligned images onto one moving paper target passing under four different drums is neat. What's under the paper is a continuous transfer belt, and at the far end of the belt there's an I-kid-you-not video camera pointed at it, and any time the printer has been sleeping for a while or had the drums disturbed, while it is warming up, without pulling a paper sheet, it will print test patterns from all four drums right onto the belt, and at the end, the video camera reads them, and the firmware calculates the right delays in sending the four images to correct for any misalignment.

That also lets it auto-adjust the toner density as the cartridges get old and used up. No more of the fun procedure with the 750 of printing calibration pages, comparing them to the specially-printed swatches in the back of the hardcopy manual, and tweaking density settings on the front panel until they looked right. The Oki just reads the test-pattern densities right off the belt and calibrates itself.

What'll they think of next?