Re: printers Now VS. Then

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

rich12345 wrote:
> My Epson FX80 did and still does print hundreds of pages per ribbon
> cartridge.  It's noisy and uses tractor feed.  I have a re-inker
> machine that will refill a cartridge for <$0.50.  It uses cheap black
> ink, like the stuff you use for stamp pads.
>
> I've owned several HP printers since.  All of them are garbage.  When
> the printers shut down, the ink cartridge drips ink into the case.
> They last about 4 months, and then refuse to function.  If not used at
> least once a month, the ink cartridge dries up.  Ink is expensive.
>
> the FX80 is great for printing PDF's, manuals, etc.
>
> It's cheaper to buy a new printer with ink in it already than it is to
> get replacement ink cartridges....  I guess that's ok, because the
> printers are full of gears, stepper motors, all kinds of great stuff.

While I also enjoy a good dot matrix printer (C. Itoh was always
my favorite [ProWriter, Apple DMP, etc., etc.]), I seem to have
much better luck with HP inkjets than you.

I have used them since the very first one (the ThinkJet), and have
generally had excellent service.  There was a "bad patch" somewhere
around the early 2000s when small plastic parts would occasionally
break, and an occasional cartridge would leak.  But I've been using
the same PhotoSmart All-In-One for about four years, putting about
20 reams of paper through it (10,000 pages) and hundreds of photos,
and it still works fine.  Well enough that I bought another one two
years ago as a model closeout for another location, and it's been
working fine, too.

Both machines endure long periods of inactivity (months) in hot and
cold weather, and the (02) ink cartridges and heads (they are separate
in my models) have never given me a problem.

My rule is never to buy the cheapest model--go a couple of steps
up.  This gets you a much more robust mechanism, and often a more
economical cartridge system than the entry level printer.

The HP software is a different kettle of fish--it is needlessly
complex and fault-prone, and it has taught me to use it only in
very ritualized ways to avoid problems.  ;-)

BTW, the ink cartridges shipped with a new printer are only
about half full, so unless you really like to reuse printer
parts, it's not a good way to get ink.  ;-)

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."