[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 12:52:48 Louis Ciotti did opine:

> Your not the only one who has done that.  The one thing I have noticed
> is that the ink included in those printers is actually a low capacity
> cartridge, so it does not last very long, you might get 100 pages out
> of that initial set.  The confusion I have is what they call the
> refills now. For epson the have moderate, standard and high capacity in
> that order for capacity.  And depending on where you go sometimes the
> standard is cheaper than the moderate, go figure.  I honestly wish they
> would flip the cost model around.  I would much rather pay more for a
> printer that would built to last and has lower cost ink/toner.  The
> last laser printer I had I ended up tossing because the toner was 3x
> the cost of the printer itself, and having it refilled was 2x the cost.

That is just as true of the low end lasers, but the print quality is 
buckets better, and a $75 toner cart (for one color) will still print 5x 
the pages per $ spent using the laser.  Paper cost is a tossup if you 
discount that the lasers seem to want 24lb paper.  But I have a ream of 
20lb on hand that will get feed tested in the next year because I am about 
due to refresh all my linuxcnc documentation, on a job with the HL3170CDW's 
duplexer turned on.  Its about 650 pages in 4 volumes.  It works well with 
the heavier 24lb.  And out in the shop, I need the ruggedness of the 24lb, 
so the 20lb will get tested on the startup book since I am well beyond that 
level of usage.

So, for me, its ink jets 0, lasers 1 for game score so far.  But since my 
game isn't fully played yet as I am coming up on the 80th, the final game 
score is still TBD. :)
 
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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..

Maybe, several miles, but for us coco lovers, the inability to print 
without first exporting the file, and then running d2u (or its equ in 
windows) on it to convert the line ends from cr to lf's so its printable on 
one of our bigger machines, can rapidly become a PIMA.

However, I just, sitting here thinking (I shouldn't do that) I just 
rediscovered why I wrote my bash scripts to do that is because the raw text 
file that DW saves, can't be sent directly to cups as it barfs and wastes 
paper by the ream if the cr's aren't converted.  That doesn't mean I 
couldn't write another 10 line bash script to do that however, and I'll 
publish it here if and when I do if someone else doesn't beat me to it 
since I'm out of the dw business until I replace my SALT chip.

On that note, if ANYONE has a decent internal diagram of that chip, one way 
more detailed than is in the coco manuals, I would be forever grateful to 
get it in some printable form.  The internet so far, has all that behind a 
pay-wall.

I may not be feeding it a power supply correctly in my conversion to an AT 
power supply for everything. It is getting a full 12 volts on its +- pins 
ATM.  In stock coco3 use, its only getting 8.5 volts on average.

I got the chips yesterday, and now need to discover how much room I have 
for a heat sink super glued to the top of it, since it has to clear the 
bottom of the 2 meg disto memory kit too.  I may have to mill half the fins 
off of whatever I can salvage from my midden heap.

Post Mortem's can be embarrassing. . .


Cheers, Gene
-- 
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