Tech: Printer Rant

Subject: Printer Rant
From: olddude
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 10:33 AM

So my doc buddie crashes his PC mother board dead. Calls me in a panic. Well he bought a new PC, I yanked his hard drive from the crashed PC inserted it in my portable USB and restored all his accounting for him. Simple. Well he has a Dell 924 printer combo system, scanner, fax, printer yada yada. No driver for Windows version 7. I go out to Dell website, no driver for Windows 7. Call Dell none available. So now he gets to throw away a perfectly good printer combo unit because of a lack of a driver. Never, Never buy a printer from Dell. Stick with the big guys for your printers Lexmark, HP etc ..

No wonder this country is in such a fix huh

Subject: RE: Printer Rant
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 11:11 AM

Thanks. I'll remember this.

Subject: RE: Printer Rant
From: GUEST,Ghirotondo
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 11:39 AM

Be careful. I have an HP C5180 All-in-One with six (!) ink cartridges. Lately my printer says that several cartridges are too old, and the validity date of the inks is expired, thus it refuses to print EVEN IN BLACK!
I don't print very often in colour, I bought this printer to print some nice photo I made during my travels. Now I have to plan in advance the printing of a whole bunch of images, so to use the most of the inks before the expiring date. What a drag!
Lanfranco.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: olddude
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 11:44 AM

That is amazing, they will do anything to get you to buy printer cartridges ... holy cow ... never knew that ... thank you

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 11:55 AM

Ghirotondo: I doubt that your printer really knows how old your cartridges are. In other words, I doubt that the cartridges are marked with any date that the computer can read. Maybe the computer simply computes how many days have passed since you installed them. Maybe you could fool the printer by removing the cartridges and reinserting them, as if they were new. (I suppose if they were really diabolical, they could make this impossible.)

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 12:01 PM

It's cheap and easy to print your photos at Costco or Target or any number of places, now. It seems pretty hard to justify a photo-quality printer & ink if you are not printing photos regularly.

Last week we tossed a perfectly functioning HP printer because a tiny plastic hinge broke when I was replacing a printer cartridge. The top would no longer close in a way that the printer recognized, so it wouldn't work.

Fortunately, we have a second one (unbroken) of the same type as the printer that broke so our unused ink cartridges won't go to waste.

In setting up the new printer, the feel of the top was just the same... cheesey.

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 12:07 PM

There are a lot of pieces of equipment that have been slow to put in Win7 drivers. I have a couple here I've had to retire or hand over to other computers to use.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Bill D
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 12:32 PM

The term "planned obsolescence" will never itself be obsolete.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: GUEST,DWR
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 01:32 PM

I have gotten used to the whole Aero bit, and have everything set exactly as I like them, BUT everytime I load up my Nero 7 (no relation to Windows 7) it crashes the Aero and messes everything up except for Nero.

So I just don't try to do much of anything else until I am done with my Nero project, then I reset the Aero. Great Fun.

I normally use Nero just once a week, so it isn't a great pain. Now if I wanted everything to play nice together, then I would update to the latest version of Nero, but I'm fooling them. I'm making do.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: GUEST,mg
Date: 16 Sep 10 - 05:01 PM

I promised myself long ago I would only buy HP printers, although I am sure others are good. I would never, ever, under any non-forced circumstances, buy a Dell anything and I hope to persuade others to join my mission. Really awful products and service for what we got for work, and the threat of a big university coming down on them didn't faze them. mg

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: EBarnacle
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 02:48 AM

I have become disenchanted with with HP of late. We got a color laser printer a couple of years back and, too late, discovered that whenever we printed anything, even in black and white, all of the cartidges wasted toner. When you are looking at approximately $250 for a set of carts, this could hardly be called economical.

When I called them on it, their response was "Everybody does it that way."

How can they call themselves green when they are so wasteful?

As far as the outdated inkjet ink, I ran across the same thing in a three in one I was checking out last week. We were able to reset the dates [I don't know how, I wasn't the one who did it.] to finish the checkout but it was a tedious process.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Joe Offer
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 03:28 AM

I'd agree with EBarnacle that HP ain't what it used to be. I bought a $200 all-in-one HP printer/fax/copier a while back, and I had constant problems with it - carriage and paper jams, mostly. I got no long-lasting help from HP support, and then the warranty ran out. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, but I bought another all-in-one, same model, but for $100 - and it has served me very well! It's still working, but showing signs of wear.

For quite some time, I've had my eyes on an HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless, which I think is the best inkjet printer HP makes. When the priced dipped to $200 in June, I bought one - but I'm still waiting to run out of ink for my old printer. I finally broke down and installed the new printer when my stepson went back to school a couple weeks ago and needed a network printer - and the new printer works like a charm, even with Linux! Here's hoping it stays that way.

The new printer has two moving print heads that apparently hold a small amount of ink, and then four stationary ink cartridges that feed the print heads. Ink costs are supposed to be substantially less than with earlier models - we'll find out if that's true.

The wireless connection to my network went without a hitch, and the machine even does scans well on the network connection - that was a shortcoming of my old machine.

My wife needed a photo printed in a hurry today, and the printer did a wonderful job.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Anne Lister
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 03:44 AM

We have a Canon MP780 which used to be great - photos, printing, fax, scanner AND it would print on CDs. It's now refusing to print anything at all, says the print cartridges are empty (when they're not) and even when we can coax it into doing something in the way of printing (like photocopying .. cheating) it puts stripes over everything. Yes, we've cleaned the print heads. Yes, we've done everything we can think of. We'll get my techno-savvy brother on the case at some stage and see if HE can think of anything, but it's looking to me as if we need a new printer. Again. We have a colour laser but that won't print on CDs.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 03:47 AM

When HP 'cleverly' introduced all its cleverness into the inks for its printers, based on personal experience of such 'cleverness' before, I swore I would never touch another HP printer!

The last printer I can remember having no hassles with was one that had a daisy wheel and ribbons ..... :-)

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Edthefolkie
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 06:24 AM

Dell printers used to be rebadged Lexmarks, don't know if they still are. Lexmark used to be IBM's printer division which Big Blue were forced to sell off!

We're still running a ten year old (!) Epson 870 which is just about OK for A4 prints but I guess can't last for ever. What do we do then? A3 printers are enormous, and there don't seem to be any good photo A4 printers any more. You have to buy a so called All-in-One, or Con. Our old 870 has a copying facility in software, and what the hell do you use a fax for in 2010? You can't scan slides at high res either.

Looks like I'll have to go for an A3 jobbie (and a mortgage for the ink) in the end. But why do these manufacturers and big stores impose their choices on us? It's an identical situation with cameras - unless you buy a DSLR there's no optical viewfinder any more so you can't frame your shots. But you do of course get about 100 fairly useless modes like in camera sepia toning! Bah humbug, back to my Speed Graphic and Burroughs drum printer (I jest....)

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: artbrooks
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 08:27 AM

The basic rule of thumb seems to be that, the less the printer costs, the more expensive the ink will be...and you have to use the brand name ink if you don't want to void the warranty. This article from PC World covers recent multi-function printer combos.

Lexmark makes Dell printers, but they aren't identical - that is, for example, you can't interchange ink cartridges.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: pavane
Date: 17 Sep 10 - 10:44 AM

Desert Dancer - it is often possible to wire around a broken sensor switch.

And for Epson printers only, it is possible to get continuous flow ink setup, where you just top up reservoirs when needed (with cheap ink)

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: GUEST,Ghirotondo
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 01:36 AM

Hi. Jim,
I think that each HP cartridge has an embedded chip that keeps track of the usage (so i was told by tech friends). Maybe there's a way to reset the chip (a friend of mine has one for her Canon printer, chip resetter )but I am not able 'till now to find something that works on HPs.
Bye
Lanfranco

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 02:11 AM

It is a sorry reflection on the world when it is cheaper to buy a whole new printer/scanner/copier combo than it is to buy replacement cartridges to go in it...

And not all those cheap 'compatable' cartridges will 'talk' to the damn machine. Supermarket own brand ones are considerably cheaper and allegedly compatable but I have had nothing but trouble from them. I just don't print out anything in colour any more.

LTS

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Edthefolkie
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 09:37 AM

Just realised I said yesterday that our printer could do copying in software - D'OH! I meant our flatbed scanner could, sorry.

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: CupOfTea
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 09:52 AM

Dear Lord, but I can get on board with printer ranting!!!

I recently spent a sweaty Saturday afternoon swapping out a "broken" printer for a new one. This is a MAJOR production for me, moving furniture, getting up and down from the floor itself is an engineering feat for my bad knees these days. HOW was the printer broken, praytell?
An HP all-in-one choked on a piece of cardstock and stopped being willing to print.
The print cartridges wouldn't move.
Because the print cartridges wouldn't move, it kept demanding I FIX that before it would do any scanning.

Scanner weren't broke, were it, dagabbit!!! (insert screaming and cursing here)

I'm running a soundless limping along XP, but from my last job I realized that XP has a driver for an HP LaserJet4L. I bought said printer back in the early 90s. It's nearly 20 years later. The thing still works, I can still get cartridges, so I unplugged it from my Win 3.1 machine and now I've got a Newpiceofcrapfrom HP all in one that'll do color and suck ink like an addict as well as an ancient venerable HP from the days when those suckers knew HOW to make machines to do my black and white.

The $100 & under machines are merely vehicles to have you buy overpriced ink cartridges. We have a color LasserJet HP2550 at work, and I haveta say it's quite reliable.
But.
It was a top of the line sort - quite expensive - and the color toner cartridges & "imaging drum" are wayyyyy expensive.

I ascribe this to the "big box" view of consumerism. that dictates we can be sold little that can be repaired, and be forced to buy new, even more poorly made crap with each breakdown.

Joanne in Cleveland

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: MikeL2
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 10:13 AM

Subject: RE: Tech: Printer Rant
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 18 Sep 10 - 02:11 AM


<"And not all those cheap 'compatable' cartridges will 'talk' to the damn machine. Supermarket own brand ones are considerably cheaper and allegedly compatable but I have had nothing but trouble from them. I just don't print out anything in colour any more.">

Hi liz

Like several here I too have had problems with printers. We have used HP,Epson, Lexmark etc.

A couple of years ago my wife wanted a "cheap & nasty" all-in-one printer so we bought a Brother.

We have been more than pleased with it's performance. We have printed most things both in black&white and colour. The results are great. We haven't tried to print at photo quality because we find it more convenient,cheaper and better to take a disc to our local Jessops shop.

What's more we have used both compatible cartridges witout problems and had those re-filled at an ink shop that does this. The rfe-filling is actually slightly more expensive that buying the compatible cartridges !! So that is what we do. In fact I am just on the point of ordering some more. For the model we use it costs us £11.99 for the four cartridges ( 3 Colour and 1 black).

We would have no hesitation in replacing this one with another Brother.

As well as being completely reliable it is easy to use and has a very good user manual that is simple to understand.

I have to say that we haven't used the Fax facility but I have no concerns about whether it will work OK.

Regards

MikeL2