Printer Makers' Ploys

Ellen Spertus writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article on printer makers' ploys, such as lying about print speeds and selling printers with crippled cartridges. I'm sure that slashdot readers could identify more deceptions. Are there any printers that actually live up to the manufacturers' claims, ideally with Linux support?"

My Printer of Choice

[MxTxL]

HP 2200

Full duplex. Fast. Ethernet ready.

mmm...

i sold hp for a while...

[psychalgia]

basically they teach you not to lie but they teach you lies and hype about the product. its amazing how three companies cna do 9 independant studies and arrive at 27 different results.

Lexmark inkjets and Epson inkjets

[Andy Dodd]

It's probably improved a bit, but a few years ago Lexmark had *NO* Linux support.

I don't know about speed, but quality-wise when printing photos, Epson is one of the best AND has *excellent* Linux support. (Not from the vendor, but Epsons always seem to get the coolest new driver improvements under Linux.)

Re:i sold hp for a while...

[macdaddy357]

I fix HP, and other brands. The following is a true story about an Officejet G-85 a customer brought in for repair that would not fax or receive fax. It gave an error message, and prompted to cycle power when either was attempted. HP is a sinking ship. Before the merger, HP had serious problems, all of which have been aggravated since the merger. They have lost market share, and are losing money and don't for a minute think it's because they give lousy customer service. I am a repair technician. Recently, a customer who bought an Officejet G-85, a single unit that prints, scans, faxes and copies. It failed in about a month, but more than 14 days, so the retailer wouldn't take it back. The end User called HP. Lexmark, Brother, or just about any other manufacturer would have replaced the unit, but the customer was told to take their G-85 to an authorized service provider, so it came to me. My company was not able to repair the unit. Like all ASPs, we were only authorized to "facilitate repair" by sending it in to HP. They sent me a replacement with no automatic document feeder; with out which the unit was useless. When I complained, they said one was on it's way, but instead sent a manual and cable set. This whole process took three weeks. At this point, I asked HP to just send the end user a new G-85, as they should have done in the first place. They refused, and sent me a document feeder, but the emblem that says HP Officejet G-85 was missing. Again, the unit was incomplete, and I could not return it to the user. By now, it had been one month. I e-mailed Carly Fiorina, and called their headquarters, all they did was offer phony apologies, and pass the buck, blaming other people. Eventually, the end user, called HP, and was accused of wanting something for nothing by a man named Jim Williams. He told me at that point that he was going on vacation, but the problem would be handled. The end user would get a new unit. A week later, I heard from the end user, who still had nothing. I e-mailed and called again. Finally, they replaced the end user's unit with a new one. It had been nearly six weeks. They also kept sending me parts, including a second document feeder, worth $185.00 retail. When it was over, they asked me to return the G-85 base unit only, without either automatic document feeder, the accessories, or the manual and cable kit. They instructed me to just throw away more than $400 dollars worth of parts. How can a company that is losing money afford to just throw away four hundred dollars, when they couldn't afford to give an end user any customer service or customer satisfaction at the outset? I have not thrown away the parts, and hope I will have an opportunity to use them, but I don't have a lot of storage space. HP has angered a customer who will never buy their products again, and probably tell dozens of people why. They have also made a service technician, namely me, lose confidence in their products, and stop recommending them to anyone. HP is a sinking ship because Carly Fiorina, and the entire executive staff view their customers as a dirt-cheap commodity, and take them for granted. Based on the news, they must also think that their employees are a cheap commodity, too. People are starting to call them Hewlett Packard Bell all over again, and this time, it is not because they are confusing two companies.

Re:What about paper type?

[zangdesign]

Most people don't know about paper quality. HP inkjet paper has a higher density and brightness than the standard paper you run through your laser printer. It is designed to hold the ink better.

The trick here is that they want you to buy HP printer supplies, but reality is Hammermill and Weyerhauser have perfectly good inkjet paper that is just as bright and dense.

So whenever is says HP quality paper, think "bright and dense". That's all it takes.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

1989 HP IIp Bought for $25

I have gone through 3 toners since I bought it 4 years ago.. Still going strong.

We use HP 4050 and 4100's

[jmichaelg]

I run a business that entails printing about 20,000 sheets of paper a week. At that rate, we're swapping toner carts almost weekly. I spent a fair amount of time analyzing which printer could deliver the best image at the lowest price and the two HP laser printers came in ahead of Lexmark and Xerox. Inkjets were way out of the picture due to the cost of the ink cartridges and the fact that they're slower. I don't recall what Xerox's deal-breaker was but Lexmark has a very subtle one. Though the printer's toner and initial prices are quite reasonable, the Lexmark hits you for $250+ at 100,000 copies when the drum needs replacing. The HP's drums go out at around 200,000 copies and cost about the same.

Ignoring paper costs, the HP can deliver an image at about .7 cents/sheet as compared to 1.2 for the Lexmark. Though .5 cents doesn't sound like a lot, it adds up when you're cranking 20K copies each week.

Print speeds are as advertised, I get 17 ppm from the 4050's and 24 ppm from the 4100. I looked at some very high end printers because I didn't want to wait forever while the paper churns through. The 40 ppm, and better, printers came in above $10,000. So instead, I bought 3 HP's and wrote a little bit of code that spreads the load out over the 3 machines. Saved $7,000 and had fun while I was at it.

Unfortunately, there has been a downside. All of this ran on Windows 98 with not too many problems. I had to write a prompt into my code to remind me to disable power saving sleep mode whilst printing and it helped if I rebooted before firing off the printer job. I was fairly happy with the setup but thought I could do better if I migrated to Win 2000. (Stuck in Windows for other reasons.) At any rate, Win 2000, Excel, and HP do not seem to get along. One of those three pieces seems to drop a bit every so often and away goes a print job. Away, as in, I've got to watch the printout carefully to catch random imaging problems. I don't know if it's Microsoft trying to coerce me to upgrade from Excel 97, which didn't help, or HP not fully testing Windows 2000 with the 4050's. Right now, you don't want to be around me when I struggle with the mess the problem engenders. Ain't a pretty sight. Fortunately, the bug has migrated from Heisenbug status to reproducible so it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.

Re:Lexmark inkjets and Epson inkjets

[garf]

Lexmark do support linux, after a fashion.

Sadly, I had numerous problems getting a windows 98 client, with the offical Lexmark driver, to print to a samba (linux) server, wired up to a Lexmark Z52. Talk about the windows printer driver sending samba in to a complete rage.

Never again...now it works after I fiddled with the lexmark driver on the windows machine.

I mean who needs windows printer drivers that talk to you?

Samsung

[DragonMagic]

Samsung ML-1210

Came with an extra toner cartridge, works with my XP Home, Win 2K Pro, and Mandrake 8.2 boxes extremely well. It's fast for graphics and text once it warms up (takes only a couple seconds even for that) and it's relatively cheap.

USB and Parallel compatible. Black only, though.

Re:i sold hp for a while (thanks for the info!)

[King_TJ]

Thanks for writing about your recent experiences with HP! I'd have to say I had similar suspicions about their products over the last few years - and this was even before talks of the merger began.

Traditionally, I always recommended HP for anyone buying a laser printer, and almost always for a networked inkjet. (I never thought their inkjets matched Epson's ability to print near-photo quality images - but Epson's print drivers can really bog down a network print server.)

Nowdays, I have to really re-think that.

A while back, I had problems with a Deskjet 1600C that died - and was met with endless frustration getting it repaired. (Despite this being originally a $1400+ business-class inkjet with optional paper tray, HP acted like it was disposable - and couldn't understand why we wanted to fix it instead of just buying a newer model.) HP refused to sell the repair parts needed, and insisted that we ship it in for repair.

In another case, we bought several HP Laserjet 6L printers, all of which developed problems jamming when feeding paper. After over a year of putting up with this problem, HP *finally* acknowledged it as a design defect and offered to ship customers a "repair kit". When I got the "repair kit", it turns out it was simply a piece of cardboard with a double-sided block of sticky foam on the end. You were supposed to use the cardboard to shove the sticky foam down inside the printer, so it would stick to a part beneath the vertically stacked pieces of paper. That way, it was again able to "grab" sheets without trying to suck in too many at once and jam up.

Granted, this work-around did cure our problem - but it's obviously not going to be a permanent fix. HP screwed up and used a rubber material that got hard over time and lost its "tacky" characteristic needed to grab paper. They should have supplied a substitute part for the defective one - not a stick-on-top band-aid fix.

Re:Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

Also ML1450 and its predecessor ML6060.
They are great! Cheap (Fry's sells them for $299), reliable, good print quality, work with Linux, and 6000 page toner is something like $99. I purchased about 10 of them. On the higher end: HP 8150, it supports both PS and PCL. Never had any problems with it or Samsungs.
As far as inkjets go, this I heard from a guy who supplies us with toner, look for ones without the printhead built in the cartridge. They are supposed to be much cheaper and easier to refill. From what he said, Epson makes them. Don't take my word for it though, I have no personal experience with inkjets. I am just passing on what I heard, so double check on that.