Printer whiners

All this greatly depends on the climate you live in. Out here we have summers where it can be 100F for weeks. If you live eco-friendly and don't run the big fat A/C then it can be a toasty 90F in the office. Takes just one summer for pretty much any ink cartridge to gunk up. Lasers don't have that problem.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Ah, but this is Wisconsin! Our summers aren't quite as nasty as in the South, but it nonetheless gets to the 80s and 90s for weeks at a time, with similar humidity.

Add to that, I'm on the upper floor of an apartment with no central AC (I do have AC, but it's only in the bedroom... no way it's doing any good in the rest of this place!). Summers are sweaty here. :)s

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

With high humidity the cartridges have a chance. Our summers are also bone-dry and that aggravates the problem. Anything that contains even minute amounts of moisture will have those sucked out within days. Very visible outside, where grass can turn yellow and then brown in a matter of days.

Can be here as well, because we have a small evap cooler in the living room. Not much of that makes it here into the office but I have a very high tolerance for climate extremes. One of the reasons why my large laptop is one of those mil-spec deals :-)

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I have a few Laserjet CP1525's, which are great color laser printers if you don't print a lot. The toner price is silly for quantity printing. They seem to be perfectly reliable, but they do whine... they clean or calibrate themselves at random, and it's pretty dramatic.

We have a huge Sharp digital copier at work, all networked. It works as a very nice, very fast, B-size printer and we buy toner by the pound. It will feed and scan stacks of paper into PDFs and dump that onto a server. Very cool.

In the bathroom downstairs here, next to the toilet, I have an Epson dot matrix printer with 11x14 fanfold paper. Guests have to work around it.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

I've seen 4, got one. Still works last time I tried it. It's slower. I use cheap ink. It does use a lot of ink turned on. Works pretty fast on draft mode. I'm using a do all network printer, and I can print with iPad. I'm also turning it off to conserve ink. Greg

It was introduced in Oct 2004. You have no more than 8.4 years of bragging rights.

The Canon IP6000d printer is unique in that it has a removable and replaceable print head. That makes it very easy to remove the print head, baptize in dilute ammonia cleaner, and any head clogs should be cleared. For desperation cases, I use a low power (4 watt) ultrasonic cleaner. Oddly, I rarely see clogged heads on the older Canon inkjets.

However, the newer models are awful. Fixed print head (like Epson) that can't be removed or easily cleaned. The best you can do is run a paper towel soaked in cleaner through the paper feed to clean the print head. The firmware is apparently uniformly suicidal in that it will often NOT park the head over the rubber seal in the parking position, preferring instead to drip ink into the mechanism. This ink is eventually caught by a felt sponge at the bottom of the printer, which is difficult to access. I'm not quite sure exactly where Canon transitioned between quality and junk, but my guess(tm) is that it was about 2006.

You might want to check out the prices on color laser printers. The initial costs are down to $150 for refurbished: A 4 color toner refill kit is $20 on eBay. Carts are about $23/ea for about 1400 pages or about 7 cents per page.

Compare that to an inkjet printer. About $60 for a decent refill, that's good for maybe 500 pages, on a good day. That's 12 cents per page, ignoring the cost of the counterfeit refill protection chips.

Incidentally, the color laserjet is rated at 17 ppm and delivers about

15ppm, while the typical inkjet might be rated at 8 ppm color, and actually do about 4 ppm at a resolution similar to the laserjet. Fast is fun.

I solve the inkjet printer and fax problem for my customers by refusing to repair them beyond a simple cleaning. I coerce them into buying a laser printer, usually an AOI (all in one) device. Nobody has complained (much): Hmmm... The price has been going up and down between $120 and $99 since about November 2012. No clue why.

--
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

The Color stability in the printed images is very good. I have a print that is over a year old and still looks fantastic. It was from a 2025 or something like that, the refils are $80 for each CMYK and Black.

Cheers

The CP2025 is a tolerable color laserjet printer. I've fixed a few and found them somewhat tricky due to flimsy internal construction. They didn't seem to be very solidly built and tended to rattle quite a bit when running.

The CP2025 will deliver about 3,000 color pages, for about $28/cartridge on eBay at about 4 cents per page. At $80/ea, you're overpaying.

I have an HP 2500n in the office and an HP 2600n at home. The 2500n like to do weird things, like vaporize the bottom 1/4th of the page, or produce odd colors. The 2600n has this problem: which I've been too lazy to fix. The most common problem with the CP2025 so far, are caused by dirty connections to a toner cart that caused a bright magenta strip across the page. Wipe off the crud from the contacts occasionally.

--
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

to

and

matrix

Isn't 11x14 a bit large for TP?

to

themselves

very

and

matrix

I have some big guests.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

a

.

s

I've pretty much reached the conclusion that I will never be 100% satisfied with a color printer. We still have the inkjet HP something-or-other, the Brother HL-4040CN color laser (2 of those), and the previously mentioned E l Cheapo Brother B/W laser. For the latter, we still haven't found the rig ht combination of secret herbs and spices to get it to play nicely with our corporate LAN.

That said, there are a couple things that might get me closer to 100%. For instance, if staff would quit printing in color when only a few insignific ant portions of the page are actually in color - such as a logo at the top of a datasheet when everything else is B/W.

We went around and set "black only" as the default but of course, not all p rograms enforce those settings (I guess they have their own defaults?) We should probably rename the printers too: color - B/W.

Another thing: Not everything needs to be printed in the first place.

I know I sound like the "Print Czar" or something. It's actually just a pe t peeve, I guess. (And speaking of pets: maybe if we got that unicorn some one here mentioned previously as our company mascot we could DIY the blood use to make all those ink cartridges!) :)

matrix printer with 11x14 fanfold paper. Guests have to work around it.

Have you considered using softer 2-ply paper? :)

-mpm

Logging printer for some kind of security system?

Or, there are some electrodes and pumps and chemistry-set stuff in the bottom of the toilet, and guests get a free analysis printout a few seconds after they flush?

Or maybe something like this:

(Douglas Adams, "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy")

Matt Roberds

The initial contact for much of my business comes via the telephone. Therefore, I try to stay near the phone at all time. I started by installing a POTS phone in the bathroom (called the "head phone"). That was replaced by a cordless phone after the POTS phone corroded beyond repair. Next, I brought my cell phone into the bathroom with me. When I added a VoIP system, I ran ethernet to the bathroom, and plugged the phone in. When I got a smartphone, I installed a docking station to use and charge the smartphone. However, I was missing calls when in the shower, so I installed an allegedly water resistant phone inside the shower. Occasionally, I drag a wi-fi connected laptop into the bathroom, to do some reading. If my Usenet postings ocasionally have a rather anal flavor, this might explain why. I haven't installed a printer in the bathroom quite yet. However, I believe that I understand why yours is a dot matrix. Many AOI laser printers have a relative humidity sensor that will shut down the printer if it detects a condensing moisture. Inkjet printers print very badly in high humidity environments, where the ink never really dries. What's left is the dot matrix, which seems ideal for bathroom computing.

Bathroom connectivity... the final home computing frontier:

--
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

Too much garlic and cabbage in your diet?!

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Or teenage daughters that take daily 1/2h showers each :-)

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Humid climate... something I'm not bothered with, and you're not bothered much. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.