[Coco] Printing on cheap crappy printers with a CoCo was Re: Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 11 January 2014 05:40:01 Aaron Wolfe did opine:

> On Jan 11, 2014 12:23 AM, "Gene Heskett" <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> > Yup, but it comes with a 17,000 lb bull elephant too.  In the form of
> > once fired up the first time, you don't dare let it sit for a week
> > else those submicron sized nozzles are plugged, often forever.  I
> > managed to keep an older Epson ink squirter going for quite a while,
> > several years, but it
> 
> had
> 
> > its cost because to keep it from plugging up, I had to run a full page
> > color output daily.  That added up to about $300 for ink a year.  Way
> > more than the $10 for a ream of paper.  I solved the lack of exercise
> > problem
> 
> by
> 
> > using it to print the nightly amanda backup report which at that time
> > also use some color in its column headings.  Sadly, someone took the
> > color out of the raw template so its all B&W now.  I didn't even
> > notice at the time.
> 
> Since we're miles from the topic anyway, here's something I always find
> funny..
> I don't print things hardly at all, so it takes a couple years to use up
> the ink a printer comes with.  For all I know I'm not even using it all,
> it's just drying up or evaporating.
> Anyway, the last 3 or 4 times that I've run out of ink, I go to an
> Office Depot or Max or whatever and they will have brand new printers
> for sale cheaper than a set of cartridges for the printer I already
> have.  So I've ended up with new $30-$40 printers (with ink) instead of
> ink each time. Seems bizarre, but I guess the profit model is all
> geared towards selling the ink, not the printers.
>
Absolutely.  Unforch the sub $100 stuff comes and goes so fast that linux 
drivers are not written for many of them, ever. The rare exception thats 
right on the borderline costwise, is Brother.  Their bottom of the line B&W 
laser, selling at about $120, has linux drivers that work quite well.

TBT I haven't researched any of the $20 to $40 ink squirter's, but I don't 
see many requests for drivers for such go by on the gimp/gutenprint list.  
These folks apparently can only see the windows market.

I was very happy with the Epson C82 all those years ago, a 4 color printer 
that had excellent color, real reds, with archival quality inks that I 
printed and sold wedding pix from because it was that good.  But I didn't 
take it with on a long trip to the UP and needed to print some stuff while 
I was up in Iron Mtn, so I ran over to Radio Shack and got a then current 6 
color C-89. Biggest piece of crap I ever paid a $189 bill for.  Nozzle 
clogs, etc were weekly, it fed half the paper through it crossways, jammed, 
etc.  Anything that could happen to a printer did and I threw it in the bin 
a month after I got back to WV.

But I was still an Epson fan and bought the NX515 sitting here to replace 
the C82 when the C-82 finally blew its head.

While it feeds good paper ok, nozzle clogs were almost daily and ink, 
supposedly the same inks the C-82 used, didn't have the reds, shifted off 
to the orange like HP's have always been, and 4 tanks went from around $40 
to about $90.  I tried to keep it going by sending the amanda reports to 
it, but even that wasn't enough.  I don't think you could have kept it 
doing usable work doing 2 or 3 full page color prints a day.  Brand new it 
couldn't hold a candle to the work that C-82 did.

Neither can this color laser, but at least a toner cart lasts several reams 
of paper.  The quality is decent from a distance, and I'm still playing 
with the knobs on the Brother supplied driver, but I don't think I'll ever 
see wedding album quality prints from it. At $400, it is their entry 
quality color laser.

I haven't mentioned lexmark or cannon because they officially hate linux so 
bad, that if they hear a hint on one of their printers being driven by 
linux, there is no warranty.  Many of those are children of a parent 
company, as is memorex, plustek etc, and thats a parent company enforced 
policy.  As a linux user, I have a list of folks who have screwed me, and 
when that happens, their products are forever off my shopping list.

Lexmark was the first to use the same toner in every printer they sold, 
from the 300 dollar entry model to the $1100 home office model, but the 
difference was in the fins molded into it.  It didn't take us long to 
figure out you could bust the right fin off a $50 toner & use it in the 
$1100 printer they also sold toners for, at $350 a toner.

Then when they sued and put out of business, all the other toner re 
filler's was the last straw.

We bought several at the tv station, and I spent entirely too much time 
putting those little steel pin wheels they moved paper with back in them.  
I did that to one of the $1100 ones twice but when it happened the third 
time and tore the drum up fatally was when me and the GM had a very noisy 
discussion about the true cost of buying the cheapest thing on the rack to 
do a 5000+ page a month job.  We had a business to run and needed something 
that just worked, and lexmark's weren't it by a heck of a long row of apple 
trees.  But there, not even a pair of HP-4550's, complete with maintenance 
contracts, could survive a year in the news dept.  So I believe there is a 
big 20,000 page a month rated Minolta in there now, and 2 different models 
of Minolta business copy machines are on the 2nd floor.  All under contract 
of course.  Cheaper in the long run & Tim finally understood that.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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