Brother MFC laser "cycles" a few times per day, why?

Maybe. If so then there'd be lots of caps in a similar predicament and the printer would be beyond repair from an economical perspective.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

At the cost of printers, these days, just about anything more than an after-market toner refill makes the printer beyond repair from an economical perspective. ...particularly at your hourly rates.

Not entirely true. What's killing them is the lack of available parts. I can get parts for the larger and older printers, but not for the current crop of throw away devices. Inkjet printers are certainly an economic waste of time to repair. Laser printers do better. I can usually do a general cleanup, remove dumped toner, clean optics, and replace a few rubber rollers for about 30 mins labor. The major part of the job is taking it outside and blowing out the crud with my air compressor.

However, there are other considerations. As a general rule, the most customers are willing to pay for computah repair is about 25% of the replacement price. For computahs that require a painful learning experience, perhaps 50% of the replacement cost. However, printers are somewhat different. With the older laser printers, they were so big and heavy that nobody wanted to deal with the logistics, resulting in on-site repairs sometimes for more than what the printer was worth. In other situations, users (and many businesses) are so attached to a particular model printer, that they will prefer to have it repaired instead of replaced. Mechanically, most of the newer laser printers are flimsy junk, compared to the battle tank style construction of their predecessors.

Some also have built in or chronic problems. For example, the sticky solenoids that HP supplies with their laser printers to insure a well controlled delay before the printer starts producing erratic paper jams. Extra credit for magnetized solenoid cores: Fixing these are a good source of income for me as they take little time and little effort to repair. What looks like a ready to toss printer, can be economically resurrected, if the problem is clearly identified and easy to fix.

At this time, the real problem is logistics. Unless the printer is huge, my travel time charges will raise the cost sufficiently to make almost any repair a marginal proposition. It's also difficult to do a proper cleaning job on site. So, if the printer is fairly portable, there's a chance to fix it economical. If not, might as well take it directly to the recycler.

So, how can you tell if the printer can be economically fixed? Just look online for parts vendors. eBay is a good source. Try HP Parts Surfer, Printerworks, and various printer specialty houses. If the parts for your printer are not available, or are available only as large sub-assemblies, it's like that when something breaks, the replacement part will be too expensive to economically replace.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I'm specifically talking about anything in the home, small-business category. The printers used by large corporations are another kettle entirely. They really get abused, so are built to take it.

The throw-aways sold today are better than the small-business units sold ten years ago. Don't bother fixing, replace.

OK, for a printer that's between $25 and $50, or the price of an after-market toner cartridge.

Those are old enough that when they die, bury them. There is a lot of good, cheap, stuff on the market now.

Sure, but weight isn't everything. Tanks are a weapon of past wars.

LOL. A "good source of income" for you doesn't equate to a reasonable expense for me. ;-)

But it will cost more to clean it than Joerg's time to get it to you.

For home/small-office units, if it's not in warranty, it can't be economically fixed.

Not really. My first printers from 1989 and somewhere around 1992 (HP DeskJet and the HP-III) were built like tanks. Never a problem. Not one.

The LaserJet 5L from about 15 years ago was still ok. Had it's isues but minor. Everything more recent is outright flimsy in comparison and consequenctly there are more issues.

But it is also cheaply made. Something gets touched a bit too roughly ... *SNAP* ... breaks right off.

[...]

Sure it can. When I remodeled my office the brother printer wouldn't start up after laying the carpet and moving the furniture in. I forgot what it was but I took it apart and fixed it. It ran fine for another three years or so, until just now. This time it looks like it's really sick and lately it also showed more paper jams, probably a sign that the mechanical parts are beginning to wear out.

I even fixed the clock radio we bought after moving to the US. Part of the LED array didn't work which is kind of important on a clock. It was a cold solder joint, took me maybe 10 minutes. That was less time than the 60 minutes it would have taken to drive back to the store and return it for a new one. Plus they'd have chucked it which is environmentally not good.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Total cost of ownership? Features? Print quality?

Sure, but they don't cost an arm and a leg. The old tanks cost a lot more than a penny a page to print.

Buy a real anvil.

At what cost?

At what cost?

TCO per year definitely less than today because these lasted forever. Had all the features I needed and the print quality was superb. In fact, the Laser (and myabe even the DeskJet but can't remember) had one major advantage over today's printers in that it understood HPGL.

So do the new ones. It isn't much different. In the old days refiling was very easy, nowadays mfgs try to thwart that via cassette ID tricks.

I've always had one.

Miniscule. Even calculating my time it was much less than a new multifunction printer.

See above. 10 minutes of my time, on a Sturday.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Not buying it. At $100, $200 for a very nice printer, TCO is very low. Toner is dirt cheap, now, too.

You just said you didn't have duplexing.

The aftermarket is thriving. A 7000 print cartridge (probably good for 5000) for my HP P2015 is around $30.

Then use it to hammer on things on instead of your printer.

Ah, a *multifunction* printer. Did your tank have a copier? A fax? A scanner. I thought you said your tank had all the features?

Ten minutes? Not buying that one either.

There's a middle ground called SMB (small-medium business). Those are the bulk of my customers which included a few home-office operations. I do have 2 large corporations, who use my services mostly because it takes nearly forever for their service company to drive 50 miles, kidnap the printer, conveniently forget the loaner, and eventually return the printer with new problems. They pay for fast turn around. I did a quick gear replacement on an ancient HP LJ4 last night at 8PM which is used to print payroll checks with overpriced MICR toner. The test page showed 420,000 pages printed, although most of that was for checks. Some of the newer HP printers would never have survived this long.

I deal with those throw away laser printers almost every day. I know junk when I see it. For example, I sorta assume that replacing (or exchanging) the fuser assembly is a common repair item. Todays HP p2055 printer requires tearing the printer almost completely apart, and a moderately complex gear sync acrimony, to replace the fuser assembly. Here's the video, part 1: In addition the fuser has a film sleeve that likes to burn up after about 3 years of normal operation. Unlike the teflon coated aluminum tubes used in prior designs, which would last forever, the film sleeves are expensive to replace and cause slow deterioration in print quality. Actually, the p2055 is one of the better low end HP laser printers in its class. The others are worse.

Compare that with the Laserjet 2300dtn. I have several that I use in home and office. They preceded the p2015 series and are (in my opinion) the last of the low end LaserJet printers that are built well. I know of several with >150,000 pages and have only had the sticky solenoid and burned fuser film problems. I expect them to last forever. I can't say the same for the p2055.

The current low end offering by HP P1606dn: One customer bought one of these at a local retailer because I was sick with a cold and couldn't help them with their label printing paper jam. It's flimsy, rattles when printing, seems a bit slow to start, and seems to gobble toner. The 78a toner allegedly prints 2100 pages for $80/ea. That's 3.8 cents per page, just in toner. I can compare TCO calcs if you want. They usually favor printers with very large toner cartridge capacity, which is NOT the current fashion in laser printers.

I don't have a photo handy, but the recycle bin at the local eWaste operation is full of nice shiny new looking printers. I used to fish them out, buy them, and try to fix them. I gave up mostly because there was no margin, but also because most had unrepairable problems. Stripped gears, shredded servo strips, dumped toner/ink, broken plastic, and intermittent electronics come to mind. What was amazing to me was that many of these printers were only a few months old, and many still had their "starter" cartridges installed.

Tanks and large laser printers are still usable. If you want something that always works and can tolerate substantial user abuse, the old tank style laser printers work well. If you want something that shakes and rattles, comes with a tiny toner cart that holds very little toner, is refill protected (to insure quality), has no spare parts available, gobbles toner so that the print looks super-black, and costs more per page, then a current model printer is for you.

I'll make it easy. Just buy a new printer every 4 years or so, and you won't have to worry about repairs. That's what HP and others want anyway, so you'll fit right in. I'm a little different in that I consider it justified to save usable hardware from the landfill or recycler. If it costs a little more, that's fine.

Cost of transportation and shipping are the killers. Jeorg is about

150 miles from me, which can be an all day drive. Shipping would cost about $30, but that doesn't include the cost of packaging. I've had people ship me stuff to fix, but it's always something that's small.

Incidentally, the local municipal trash collection and recycling operation is now charging for recycling, claiming that the transportation and handling costs of the recyclables has been exceeding their profits for many years. Well, that was predictable.

Nothing I see is under warranty. If I discover that the warranty is still effective, I demand that the customer use the warranty, not me. I had a problem in the distant past over working on warrantied equipment:

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Example: The Brother cost me around $380 with tax. Ran 4-5 years, now dead. The Deskjet cost about the same, ran forever. The HP-III cost around $600 and also ran forever.

To me TCO does include downtime remedy, me wasting time on paper jams, and so on. I cannot create income while clearing a nasty paper jam so that is lost money. Well, neither Deskjet nor HP-III ever had one.

None of my printers including the just croaked Brother does. It is not something I need but something I'd really like to have and can make good use of. Back in the olden days it wasn't available except for super-expensive big-biz copiers.

I've had bad luck with aftermarket toner cartridges but with the Canon I am going to try once more because their toner cartridge costs almost 2x versus Brother. Nowadays there are reviews, at least on Amazon.

The resolution of a hammer printout isn't so great. Plus I'd incur the cost of chisel wear.

I had a scanner and a separate fax. Again, those are not features I need in a printer but they are nice to have because they save office space. What broke in the Brother is not the fax, it's the whole thing that died.

You don't have to buy it but it's fact. I didn't even have my li'l electric screwdriver yet back then. It's simple: Loosen bottom screws, turn around and set on pillow so button pieces won't fall out, lift bottom assy out, turn on, press here and there ... LED segment flickers ... solder ... press and twist again ... stays lit ... drop assy back in, tighten screws, get kiss from wife for fixing her clock radio.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Just to chime in here.. In my experience(*), all-in-one printers generally are not worth the troubl e. And by that statement, I mean "HP showed the world how to make really horri ble PC imaging products!"

I think it was the model 2210PSC or something like that. We had about 4 or 5 of them and they were all TOTAL pieces of s^it, with ap ologies to actual excrement. So bad that to this day, it has completely ru ined any chance that I will ever even consider purchasing a new "all-in-one " from any manufacturer.

There truly is something to be said about a product doing a single job well . If I want a decent photo, I'll use my Nikon D800, not my iPhone. If I want a color printout, I'll use my Brother HLN-4040 printer (or whatev er it is). It's the one that doesn't try to do everything. If I want to photocopy something, I'll use the photocopier down the hall, n ot a scanner and printer, and not my iPhone-email-printer. If I want direc tions, I'll use the Garmin Montana, not an outdated AAA roadside paper map. If I want to fax something... OK-nobody really sends faxes anymore. :)

Sure, there will be times when, in a pinch, an iPhone camera is perfectly f ine. Ditto for the rest. And maybe the above are not the best example, but hopefully you get my point. Like that crap on the infomercials: if it sl ices, dices "AND" juliannes, then it's probably an overpriced plastic piece of shit guaranteed to fall apart on first use and probably cut your finger s off in the process!

I find that if you buy/use devices intended for a single function - the agg ravation factor is usually less. A lot less! For example: A nice Zwilling / J.A. Henckels 6" Professional "S" Chef's Knife for the aforementioned sl icing. Article 31021-163-0 Cost: $80-100. Your mileage may vary. I don't need that same knife to double as a "spork", flashlight, or USB dongle.

That reminds me: A "spork" is a perfect example of "all-in-one" gone bad. Sounds good on paper. Not so good in actual use.

As to the HP Laserjet III and 5L: - fantastic products!! You couldn't hardly kill a Laserjet III if you tried. Worst case, the fuser would die after a half-million (or so) prints, and by the 2nd fuser's death, you could easily justify several Tibetan Monks to p rint your documents on individual grains of rice. Not that monks are paid all that much...

My experience is very different. In a big business you are better off using the copier down the hallway. In a small one-man show you do not even have a hallway big enough to place a copier, let alone the need to run an extra circuit for that.

I was extremely pleased with this all-in-one concept. Yeah, it had the occasional paper jam and I am hoping the newly ordered Canon will be a little better. But other than that it printed nicely and blazingly fast, scanned well, copied nicely and faxing was never a problem either. It shrunk the required space for all this from about 10sqft to four. That's major when you have a home office. The other nice feature is that those machines typically plug into your LAN so they can live almost anywhere.

I do. Sometimes it's a legal requirement. Also, email will never achieve the reliablity of telefax. Many admins are lazy and just blanket-ban whole servers by cheapo "services" like spamcop. Then your email will simply not get there. BT. Or one never reaches you because your ISP does something like that. For telefax it would literally require a tornado to pull telephone poles out of the ground to make it not get through.

The Swiss army knife was one of the best inventions since pivot irrigation. Same with those Leatherman-style all-in-one tools. I carry those on EMC jobs. Because, as Forrest Gump would have said, "You never know what you're gonna get" and I can't carry along everything and the kitchen sink. It might take me twice as long as usual to get #8 bolts off of a cabinet panel but I do get them off without a 10mi drive to the next Home Depot.

I miss the HP-III. But the 5L sits right next to me.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On Sun, 8 Dec 2013 12:04:30 -0800 (PST), mpm Gave us:

I wish you dopes would learn to wrap your Usenet posts properly.

The only truly 'good' all-in-one devices are the HUGE, corporate, high volume printers the big guys buy with collators and staplers, and all other manner of automation.

Ours does B or Tabloid or A3 or whatever it is, and does it fast. It does the smaller form factors as well.

Of course it is a laser printer, not a jet printer, and it does fax and color photocopy really well. I wish they would get the color on it calibrated though, because it misses on pastels pretty badly.

Consumer level though? By a B size specific straight paper path printer for that type of task, and buy a cheaper than industrial level color laser for the letter sized stuff. The price difference will get amortized out by the difference in the amount of print jobs one can perform before the ink/toner runs out. And the quality. AND the fact that the print stays "fixed" longer. Looks better under a lamination as well.

The price difference is so small, there is no reason to buy a jet printer for letter sized stuff, as the high res laser is a better product and worth the difference, and even pays for the difference, and eventually itself as a result.

Not mush doubt that the modern HP knows how to screw up a wet dream but there really isn't any reason that a copier and printer can't share the same plastic, power supply, and interface cards. It makes a lot of sense when you consider that all a copier is, is a scanner and printer.

That said, I don't have one. I have a five year old HP 2015dn. It'll be my last HP, though.

Except my phone is always with me. My Olympus, rarely. The phone is great for business pictures (documenting PC boards, and such), too.

OK. Scanner?

Hmm, down the hall? You mean at your CPoE? Hell, I can print and scan color stuff there, but it's like, you know, stealing.

But that's all a copier is. I have been known to use my flatbed scanner and printer as a copier but it's a PITA.

If it works, and it's handy.

??? I'll use my cell phone. It's updated far more often than any stand-alone GPS widget. Indeed, when we were house hunting two years ago, cell phones had the only maps to about 40% of the houses we were looking at.

Well, I do. But that's business and they have all-in-one copiers. ;-)

But if it's good enough, why require better?

We prefer the Shuns, but whatever. OTOH, there is use for a Swiss Army knife. I'm not in the Boyscouts, but carrying a set of cutlery around isn't a good idea, either. Proper tools...

Agreed. I did use a spoon, once, that had a serrated blade its edge. I wish I could find them. They're great for French Onion soup. ;-)

A friend's was always giving him fits. He did tax preparation and it seemed to get finicky every April.

I have a Brother MFC6490CW B-size all-in-one that I love. $300 all up, good workalike ink cartridges available, scans and prints schematics very well, nice and compact for a B-size printer. Highly recommended.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Some of the HP PSC xxxx series AOI printers were tolerable. Most were junk. I had difficulties getting inside, finding parts, cleaning them, and keeping them alive. Too many things that would break. In general, the ones in the rectangular box, with a flat top were ok.

Please don't generalize that all AOI printers are junk simply because you initially purchased a bad HP model.

I made good money fixing them in their day. Power supplies would blow up regularly. Easy to fix (triac replacement). The relay in the PS used the wrong contact material. Burnishing works, for a while: The stripper fingers in the fuser would collect hardened toner and gouge the fuser roller. The thermostat in the fuser would also collect hardened toner and gouge the fuser roller. I also had plenty of polished rubber feed rollers, filthy friction pads, dumped toner, and blown fuser lamps. What made them good was that if you throw in a rebuild kit every few years (at about 75,000 pages), they would run forever.

The 5L is ok, but has one defect. The paper feed friction pads become coated with toner, dust, or grease. The printer then tries to feed multiple pages at the same time. There are "paper jam" kits available for the 5L which fixes the problem for maybe 50,000 pages, when it happens again. Other than that, they slow, fairly reliable, and can easily run over

100,000 pages.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

You are a braver man than I. I really don't have too much interest in tearing down a laser printer (even a good one) in order to repair it. Too many mechanical issues.

The PSC's we had were not the flat top ones. And in truth, I can't say the printer itself was bad (don't know). What was so horrible is that every single time you were in a rush and truly needed the damn thing to print, it would start its B/S about wanting to re

-install itself. (This was Windows XP.)

Shitty printer, but downright clairvoyant about knowing when you needed it most! Of course, the re-install would never work - or it would only partial ly work. For example, you might get the scanner or card reader working, bu t no print capability. I tried everything (as did practically everyone els e if one is to believe all those online complaints). I think by the end, i t had 11 instances listed in the printer dialog box.

Did you know they don't float?

Trust me on this: Everyone has their limits.

That's one reason I do it. I like doing mechanical things. Laser printers have enough moving parts to keep me fascinated. When I'm not doing laser printers, I'm repairing sewing machines, chain saws, and cell phones: (Note: There are some similarities).

Too bad.

It was bad. Trust me. All inkjets are bad, varying only in how bad.

Oh, you expected the software to work? That's another problem with HP inkjets. Except for the early inkjets, most do everything in the computer. Font storage, rasterization, character forming, kerning, justification, etc are all done in the attached computah. This was actually a good idea as it makes little sense to duplicate the horsepower found in most PC's. Like all good ideas, HP could not resist taking a good idea to its logical extreme and throw everything into the PC software. If a little software is good, then an overwhelming mass of truly useless software must be better.

Consider yourself lucky it printed without trashing the computer. That's what happened to me with some of the more recent HP inkjet printers. My customer goes to Costco and buys an HP OfficeJet Pro

8600 Plus printer. First problem is that it's HUGE and doesn't fit on any normal sized desk. 2nd problem is the software. The customer accidentally installed the printer to run from the USB cable. That worked. However, when I tried to switch to ethernet, the driver refused to reinstall. Uninstall and reinstall did nothing. Rolling back the registry a few days did nothing. The software did something to the OS, and doesn't want to put it back or fix it. The problem was that this laptop had drivers installed for both the 8500 and 8600. The 8500 was in the office and the 8600 at home. They apparently share some files, which the install trashed. I eventually had to find every file owned by HP, remove them, and reinstall. That worked.

Bottom line: HP drivers and software suck.

Yep. That's been my experience. You have to get it right the first time as multiple reinstalls just make things worse.

Recently, I've been making image backups of the hard disk before installing HP products. Paranoia is the key to success.

That's littering. Please recycle.

True. However, you might consider that there's a reason (or conspiracy theory) as to why people continue to purchase HP inkjet products. I suspect that HP has successfully convinced the buying public that inkjet printers are suppose to be self jamming, self clogging, flimsy, expensive ink, unrepairable, and include buggy software. Lacking any examples of decent inkjet printers (i.e. large format plotters), the buying public will simply assume that all consumer inkjet printers are equally disgusting and continue buying the junk as if there was not alternative. Fortunately, I don't expect this phenomenon to continue as the price on color laser printers are rapidly coming down to less painful levels.

Hint: Using retail prices for the toner and ink, the cost of operating a color laser printer is about half that of an inkjet. (Note: The numbers will change with different models and vendors).

Toner/ink Pages = Cost/page Laser color toner

4 cartridges $120 2500 $0.048

Inkjet ink,

4 cartridges $ 60 500 $0.100

If I assume an initial cost of $500 for the color laser, and $100 for the inkjet, the break even point is: ($500 - $100) / ($0.100 - $0.048) = 7,700 pages So, if you plan to print more than 7,700 pages (15 reams) over the life of the printer, a color laser is cheaper. Hmmm... my old HP Color LaserJet 2600n shows 25,000 pages, about half of which were printed in the last 2 years.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

is

Sometimes, if it is in the same printer series. In Linux i use HL-5270dn software for my HL-5370dw printer. Works just fine. Including duplexing.

?-)