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

[Richard E Crislip]

Since we are talking about printers, I have an older HP CP4550 Color 
LaserJet Printer. It weighs 130lbs soaking wet, carried it down my 
basement stairs determined that if things got out of hand it would 
definitely beat me down the stairs. I'd deal with the pieces part later 
8-). Anyway! I said all this to say that for $60 I bought 5 genuine HP 
toner cartridges from Amazon. The three coulor cartridges and 2 black 
cartridges. The school I teach at has a much newer HP Color LaserJet and 
they got the same deal from Amazon. If we were to go to Office Max, 
Staple, or Office Depot, we'd have paid $60 for just one cartridge. So 
check it out. To keep this sorta on topic, I haven't tried to print to 
it from the CoCo via DW yet. That's why I been enjoying this discussion 
I want to do that soon.

On 01/11/2014 06:41 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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