Why are printers such pieces of crap?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yes, it's the Eco-Tank ET-5850.

Interesting to hear that those suffer exactly those problems I was afraid of. Those things aren't really that cheap either, so you'd expect some form of durability...

The big problem I have with the lasers is the cost of the damn toner. The HP laser machine that basically fell apart had just recently had its four toners replaced....about $400 down the drain.

True, but replacing all 7 ink cartridges in my former Epson with "high capacity" new ones would probably also set me back about $200~$250 and would probably yield less than 1/4rd of the pages what my color laser would be able to achieve on a set of fresh toners. The other thing you need to factor in is the photoconductor/drum unit, which also needs replacement after about 7 to 10 toner changes on average, but even with those costs factored in, laser will still win for me.

But yeah, replacing all the toners in your average color laser is quite an expensive hobby. That's why I keep a B&W printer around, a new toner for that machine is more like $75 and I can print a few thousand pages with it. It will also not magically drain your color toners when printing black and white, because it's printing some nefarious invisible watermarks with other colors. Most stuff I print doesn't need color anyway, so it's a great way of keeping printing costs down. The B&W printer also was comparably cheap and had a duplex (2-sided) option, that saves a lot of paper.

This new one prints every day, but doesn't print pictures or "big color" items every day, so that's probably what's caused the banding of the colors.

To me, it looks like Epson really has a printer-head clogging problem. While I had plenty of issues with HP and most other cheap inkjet printers, the printer head clogging problem seems to be an Epson hallmark.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

My previous office printer to the one that inspired this thread was a laser …. You guessed it, an HP. The top scan part started falling apart, then it wouldn’t grab paper out of its drawer anymore, but it would still print. Then it started to get more and more finicky about when it would print at all, to the point I gave up. I must have restarted that thing at least 300 times. It started its last round of bad behavior, you guessed it, right after I’d spent $400 replacing the toner packs. THAT was what made me switch to the inkjet with refillable tanks.

The last printer I bought a few years ago was a Brother L2370 Laser, just B&W. I don't print a ton of stuff, I probably go through a ream of paper a year, and this printer is still on it's first toner cartridge. Granted it IS loaded with a high yield cartridge that is good for 3000 sheets. It also came with a spare toner cartridge, and replacement high yield cartridges are 78 bucks and change from Amazon. The Brother replaced an older IBM 1334 color laser that was given to me by one of my customers about 10 years ago. It worked great for a long time, but when it died I went with the B&W, because it's way cheaper to drive the couple of miles to Office Max and have color stuff printed on their 20K dollar printer.

[Marcel Birgelen]

printer-cheese.jpg
If your printer thinks it's a kitchen appliance making a grilled cheese, it's time to run...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

^^^ Now that's a printer I want here at home! ^^^