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back to article BOFH: Don't be afraid - we won't hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

"There's a problem with my printer," a user whines down the phone at the PFY. "The multifunction - what, is it jamming again?" the PFY asks. "No, it's my desktop printer." "Put it in the bin and use the printer in reception," the PFY says in a manner that bears all the hallmarks of professionalism. "No, no, it's just not …

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        1. Stoneshop
          Reply Icon
          Alert

          Re: Dot Matrix Printers

          Now consider a VAXcluster, with one node crashing and printing its stackdump, the other nodes spewing opcom messages that they're missing a fellow cluster member.

          Very distinctive, and sure to raise your attention.

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    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Dot Matrix Printers

      Noise? A mere trifle, compared to a floor-standing drum printer running at 2000 lines/minute. Elf'n'Safety would probably mandate ear defenders if they were used today, more like a machine gun than a screaming toddler.

      Ah, happy days.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Dot Matrix Printers

        We used ear defenders back then if we had to stay around them. Perhaps your company was less responsible.

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    3. Anonymous Coward
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      Thumb Up

      Re: Dot Matrix Printers

      Fond memories of my old Panasonic KXP-2135.

      24 pins of goodness and a cheap ribbon that lasted about a year. Back then I used to print EVERYTHING because I found Paintbrush fun.

      The noise it made was somewhat musical, the Underworld song 'Two Months Off' sounds a bit like it. The whole 'Dur-dur-Dunnnnnnn, dur-dur-dunnnnnnnn' as it did line by line. Almost a mechanical 'surprise gopher' sound.

      Currently I have 2 printers. An HP all in one that refuses to believe that the ink cartridges I gave it are actual ink cartridges, and some sort of Kodak effort that is gathering dust as it requires Windows for some reason and the closest Linux drivers are just about incompatible to properly print.

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  2. Anonymous Blowhard
    Pint

    $%^&ing printers!!!

    <rant>Anyway, the wife got fed up of not being able to print in colour, so we binned the HP all-in-one, actually a so-so scanner with non-working ink-jet printer attached that had printed about 30 pages, and replaced it with a Brother network colour LED printer that is satisfyingly difficult to lift</rant>

    Anecdotally, a friend of mine who is a very mild-mannered GP once became so frustrated with his ink-jet printer that he violently assaulted it and threw it in the bin (apparently the Hippocratic Oath does not extend to ink-jet printers).

    All this talk of ink-jet printers is leaving a bad taste in my mouth; roll on beer o'clock!

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  3. Killraven

    I can't be THAT different! I've never had an inkjet printer break down on me. I've usually ended up replacing them after 2-3 years for a higher quality (newer) model.

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    1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      I can't be THAT different! I've never had an inkjet printer break down on me

      Ditto. Actually, I still have a HP Officejet Pro K550 - if it wasn't that the cartridges are now hard to get I'd still use it because it beats the living crap out of all the newer printers I have when it comes to speed. It has a full 500 sheet and it is *seriously* good at working its way through it (that's also why it weighs a tonne and needs a stable surface - anything with wheels goes on a journey when this thing gets going :) ).

      However, I too am looking at colour laser. The only inkjet I may still buy is an A3 one. Unless I find an acceptable LED/laser version of that too which doesn't cost a fortune in supplies...

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      1. Wzrd1 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        "However, I too am looking at colour laser."

        Don't waste the money. The Phaser wax jet/solid ink units are cheaper to operate in the long run and deliver photographic quality for images.

        The wax ink takes up less storage space than a toner-drum unit as well.

        The only inkjet I'd ever buy would be a plotter.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          " The Phaser wax jet/solid ink units are cheaper to operate in the long run"

          I'm actually doing a little research on these at the moment.

          The phaser print quality is excellent and I recommend them unreservedly for marketing, graphics design and the like, where they are in more or less constant use.

          They have two disadvantages:

          First, they use a lot of power on standby, because they need to keep the wax wells hot. The latest ones are much more economical than the older ones, but they still use quite a lot of power.

          Second, if you buy a cheap one, you pay through the wax. The wax blocks are designed to fit only a particular model range, and the wax for a cheap Xerox costs about 6 times as much as the wax for an expensive one. They are only cheap to run if you spend over about £1200. The excellent 9300 series A3 machines cost around £15000.

          Nice machines but not for home/small office use. For which, buy a cheap photoprinter from Canon or Epson for a few prints, and and HP business inket or a Ricoh Gelsprinter for everything else.

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    2. theblackhand
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      Are ink jets that difficult?

      But did you buy the cheapest inkjet printer available or even better, get it free with the ink cartridges?

      The problem is that the set of "good inkjet printers" is a very, very small subset of the larger set of "inkjet printers" and there is no intersection between the sets "good inkjet printers" and "cheap inkjet printers".

      The set "cheap inkjet printers" is also wholly contained in the larger sets "inkjet printers that constantly jam".

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      1. Helldesk Dogsbody
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        Mushroom

        Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

        I've had the misfortune of supporting the "cheap ink jet printers" sub set (approx 2,000 of the damn things) to the point where on being informed of a printer issue my standard response was "Ah, a printer issue. Do you have a hammer to hand?"

        It was cheaper to replace them than attempt to fix issues and if it wasn't thoroughly broken at the start of the phone call it would be by the end. They weren't worth the time or effort to attempt a repair, just drop them off the desk a couple of times and/or deliver a few adjustments with a hammer/ a n other blunt implement so I could ship a new one out to site and install it remotely.

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        1. Wzrd1 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

          "Do you have a hammer to hand?"

          I happen to keep a 10 pound hammer at hand, just for use as a universal repair tool.

          If that fails, I can always bring in the 23 pound hammer I inherited from my father. *That* thing could sink a modern warship!

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      2. Nigel 11
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        Thumb Up

        Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

        Never buy a cheap ink-jet printer. With these it's true that they are made to sell expensive ink cartridges.

        I have good experience of HP Officejets in the £80 - £120 bracket. I have several K550, K5400, 8000 models with 25,000 pages printed - some over 50,000 pages. Average print-out at time scrapped probably 35,000 pages.That's a per-page cost of 0.4p down to 0.2p, which is small compared to the ink cost, which in turn is lower than the running cost of any colour laser printer I know of. Plus colour quality is higher. Minus operating speed in duplex mode is slower, because of delay for ink to dry on one side of page before the other is printed. Latest HP8100 looks good though it'll be a couple of years before I can be sure.

        Although not cheap ink-jets, they are cheap enough to treat as consumable when they do eventually fail. You can't say that of any colour laser printer that has comparable running costs.

        No experience of other makes, so read nothing except their relative hostility to Linux into that omission.

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      3. Killraven
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        Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

        I've never bought the top end (always consumer models), and a few have been upgraded because of the "free printer with ink" price. I've owned two Epsons and at least a half dozen Canon. One of the Epsons was discarded because it was one of the first models where they played with chipping the tanks, allowing only so many "pages" of print regardless of how much ink was actually left. I refuse to buy HP, mostly because I find their consumer models to be poor construction and horridly loud. I also only buy printer models that use individual color tanks.

        Now, I can see why my original comment would gather no upvotes, but what on earth about it would garner downvotes?

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        1. rototype
          Reply Icon
          Meh

          Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

          I bought an inkjet 3-in-1 (printer/scanner/copier) a couple of christmases ago, Still going strong. Ok, so I mostly use it for the scanner - the cartridges officially cost more than I paid for the device in the first place and yes I use it so little I have to clean the heads every time I use it (which I don't if I can help it, I've got an old HP Color LaserJet 4500dtn for most of my printing needs, especially since I picked a s**t load of consumables for it when the company I was working for at the time decided they wanted the space more than it wanted the cartridges for these old printers it rarely uses any more.)

          To be honest the main reason for buying it was the fact that my xmas cards that year didn't want to go through the laser printer. I also needed a scanner with a Windows 7 driver (old one came with '95 originally) so £30 was quite well spent. I've since found that some of the cheap replacement cartridges from some supermarkets are 100% compatible and work just as well as the genuine article.

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    3. Anonymous Blowhard
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      Never had an ink-jet printer break down on you? Who are you? Teela Brown?

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      1. Killraven
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        Thanks to wikipedia, I now know who Teela Brown is. :-) (No, that's not me.)

        Seriously, I've never had one break. Now admittedly I did have ONE go non-functional, but that was because I used some generic ink cartridges that didn't seal properly and leaking ink ruined the print head. My current Canon multifunction is over three years old and going strong.

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  4. Michael Habel

    The best part of Inkjet Printing

    Is when you unwrap your shiny new Cartridge to calibrate your Printer and shuffle off a few Documents, only to come back about a Month latter to have to waste Two Dozen Pages and 75% of your Ink in order to get the blasted thing to print off a few more Pages. Thankfully I've had the good sense to move to Laser. Which just works EVERY TIME!

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The first inkjets were alright

    I can still remember smiling because Canon techs evidently managed to get the term "BJ" past marketing for their first bubblejet, I think it was the BJ 80.

    I switched from a dot matrix tractorfeed to a wide carriage BJ on tractorfeed which certainly helped preserve some of my hearing, but I then joined a new company where I used a bubblejet so widely out of spec that I ended up with Canon UK management on site because we burned through an ink cartridge in about 2..3 weeks instead of the expected 2..3 MONTHS.

    When I told them on the phone I was using it as a cheap way to mass print barcode labels on standard tractorfeed label stock I was told it wasn't designed for that and it would fail in weeks. At this point I told them I'd been doing that almost non-stop for over a year, and in the end I had their UK head of Sales visit us because she wanted to see that for herself :)

    Given that it was operated by not-so-gentle people it was seriously well built. We used this to label incoming goods and the whole thing was driven by a PSION Organiser II with some barcode printing code I'd written - it transformed the formerly manual stock taking and made it last days rather than weeks.

    Ah, those were the days. :)

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    1. Wzrd1 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: The first inkjets were alright

      "Ah, those were the days. :)"

      Yeah, when if you had no driver, you wrote one.

      Today, you'd need to bribe the OS vendors for a digital signature...

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      1. Alan W. Rateliff, II
        Reply Icon
        Paris Hilton

        Re: The first inkjets were alright

        "Yeah, when if you had no driver, you wrote one."

        Right! Remember the books that came with printers showing you how to send ESC sequences to the printer to get it to do all sorts of neat things!

        "Today, you'd need to bribe the OS vendors for a digital signature..."

        Nah, some people just steal them. (Search Google for "stolen code signing cert" and you'll find Opera, Microsoft, Adobe, and other vendors have fallen victim.)

        Paris, ain't nothing but a victim, kid!

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    2. Fihart
      Reply Icon

      Re: The first inkjets were alright

      Mono inkjets were fine, big old Canon bubbleject jobbies with refillable ink tanks bought secondhand and dumped when the heads failed.

      Higher res or colour inkjets never worked for me so I switched to mono laser and never looked back.

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  6. bed

    inkjet v laser cost benefit

    Good rant. Been there. Done that. It is relatively easy, though time consuming (mostly getting all the data), to do a cost benefit analysis of a shared network laser printer compared to a on-my-desk inkjet. The cheapest to run was an Konica / Minolta A3 photocopier which could spit double sides pages out at a furious speed - and collate and staple them. The noisiest was a 600lpm drum printer (long since retired) when printing a 132 character line of the same character.

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    1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: 132 colums

      Haha, that throws me back a few years: the decision process to buy 80 or 132 column width, printer ribbons, tractor or roll feed, the screaming of dot matrix heads (and some fooling around to produce music), the works.

      Ink tanks? LUXURY! (bring on the Yorkshire accent :) ).

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    2. Stoneshop
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: inkjet v laser cost benefit

      The noisiest was a 600lpm drum printer (long since retired) when printing a 132 character line of the same character.

      Well, you get a rather distinctive sound when printing a line of the same characters, but if you want LOUD, then figure out the character pattern that makes all the hammers fire at once.

      (the one with the ear protectors instead of the glasses)

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  7. Alan 6

    I remember once at college, we decided to race a Epson FX80 dot matrix printer and an IBM golf ball printer. Very techincal, just ran this little bit of code on the RM 480z computers they were connected to

    10 For X = 1 to 1000000

    20 Print X

    30 Next X

    Everyone reckoned the FX80 would win by miles, but it didn't, the IBM was so violent it actually shook the Epson off the desk, it didn't break the printer, but it did rip the serial cable out, so we declared the IBM the winner

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    1. plrndl
      Reply Icon

      @Alan 6

      My first post-uni job was doing electrical repairs for a cheepo retailer. On Friday we got paid at lunchtime and repaired (sorry) to the pub till closing time (2.30pm in those days).

      Friday afternoons were spent doing "customer simulation tests" where we tried to emulate the bizarre ways customers had destroyed our products. Your printer race sounds remarkably similar.

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    2. Jess--
      Reply Icon

      Ah the infamous fx-80, the printer so basic it's driver would control any other printer just fine.

      Ibm equipment of the same era was so over-engineered that it was near indestructible, remembering the original PS2 Towers here where the only way to kill them was to clean the dust out of them (as long as the 6 inch layer of dust was present inside they worked perfectly)

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    3. Oblivion62
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Erm. Doesn't line 20 just print the value of X to the screen? Any printer that vibrated hard as the monitor scrolled numbers was probably being used by the finance director and his secretary for "dictation"...

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      1. jonathanb Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        There would be some way to pipe the output to the printer rather than the screen. Probably you would have whatever command required to run the prog followed by ">" then something like "lpt1" or "prn"

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        1. Steven Roper
          Reply Icon

          @ Oblivion62 and jonathanb

          I wouldn't know how it was done on the system described, but on the Commodore 64 (the machine of my misguided yoof) redirecting the output of a for-next loop to the printer would have been accomplished by:

          10 OPEN 4,4 : CMD 4

          20 FOR X = 1 TO 1000000 : PRINT X : NEXT X

          30 CLOSE 4

          Damn me, why am I wasting brain cells remembering how to write in CBM BASIC after more than 25 years?

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    4. El Zed
      Reply Icon

      I remember once at college, we decided to race a Epson FX80 dot matrix printer and an IBM golf ball printer...

      Oh ye Gods, the IBM Golfball printers..how the hell did I ever forget about those buggers.

      There used to be one sited right next to the Tektronix 4010 I used to hog (don't ask, 'twas the early '80s, it involved FORTRAN..and ALGOL)

      You'd be sitting there, things all nice and quiet, coding away merrily with nary a care (other than some other fscker crashing the mainframe) then this thing (on a supposedly sturdy stand) would suddenly explode into life (usually printing out stuff that really should have gone to either the line or drum printers), stand swaying away merrily..occasionally lifting slightly off the floor..

      The only printer I currently have in the house is one of those Brother inkjet all-in-one things, I find it to be a most useful and invaluable device as it's currently sitting on its side, base end out, blocking a gap beside the KVM switch, routers and firewall, thereby keeping the cats out of what they regard as a nice warm sleeping spot with benefits (i.e. cables to play with, ergo chaos to cause.. )

      other than than, yes, Inkjets, I never want to see the insides of another one for repair, so a pox on them!

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    5. Tomato42
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      aah, win by technical knock-out

      they don't do benchmarks like this any more...

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  8. Chicken Marengo
    Thumb Up

    Just like everything else...

    ...you gets what you pays for (to an extent)

    I used to run a photography business, we had three main printers. A very expensive large format inkjet for archival and large printing, a very expensive dye-sub for large runs and proofing (and I never did work out why clients felt the need for hundreds of copies of the same image, but hey, they're paying) and a cheap and cheerful laser for invoices and letters.

    The inkjet ran faultlessly for years and was surprisingly cheap to run, with cartridges the size of my car's petrol tank. We even went up to a size bigger than we needed because the value of the ink supplied with the initial purchase meant it actually cost no more than a smaller printer and spare set of inks.

    The dye-sub, again faultless, for huge print runs you just needed to replenish the ribbon and paper every 700 or so prints, 5,000 prints in one go with no hassles. It did get dropped once, we had to repair the floor.

    The laser printer? Absolute nightmare, chewed more paper than it printed. God knows where all the toner ended up, it certainly consumed more than ever went on the paper and speaking of toner, per unit volume it cost more than Ch Latour.

    Yep, good engineering costs money, but it saves more in the long run.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Do people still own printers?

    I thought most people realised inkjets are as useful as a handbrake on a canoe and just did all their printing at work.

    Remember if you want to secure print something like your CV, sandwich it between some work documents.

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    1. theblackhand
      Reply Icon

      Re: Do people still own printers?

      Be careful with this - printers have a detector for improper use and throw up an error that will baffle most users. The error is "Out of paper". Most users don't know where to look for a paper tray and the few that do are too lazy to get up from their desks...

      That's why so many people have to visit HR when more paper is loaded.

      CV's...

      Porn...

      Insults about cow-orkers...

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      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Do people still own printers?

        I hestitate to ask how one orks a cow, although it does sound like an act worthy of insult.

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        1. Jedit Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Pirate

          "I hestitate to ask how one orks a cow"

          You paint it red so it goes faster, obviously. WAAAGGHH!

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      2. Stu_The_Jock
        Reply Icon
        Facepalm

        Re: Do people still own printers?

        Ah, thank you for bringing back a fond memory of seeing P45 appear across a users face as I helped their IT man by fixing their colour laser printer (back around 2001 so not full photo quality) . . Having swapped out the broken cog, the print queue starts appearing, and it seems it died outside office hours as lets say the first prints out were using a lot of magenta and yellow. Seems the company didn't approve of XXX printout, as the user concerned tried to hide behind his screen, the IT man pauses the printer to go check the queue for user IDs.

        On my next visit to the office there was a distinctly tidy, empty desk in the corner.

        As for the Canon people allowing models with BJ in the name, I had a customer (not in the UK) who's name was "B.J. Services" Who thought that was a good idea ?

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          I had a customer (not in the UK) who's name was "B.J. Services"

          BJ Services operate in the UK as well - I worked for them briefly as a contractor. If you're wondering how they thought the name was a good idea, they also thought it was a good idea to employ a HR manager who didn't know that contracts could be dissolved by mutual agreement. So when my contract was completed ahead of schedule, he fired me.

          (To be fair to the company, who as a whole did me no wrong, that gentleman's post became vacant very shortly after.)

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Do people still own printers?

      Doesn't work. Most decent office machine log the jobs they have performed. As someone who worked in a Government department found out when he was asked why he printed a load of documents called invoice_xxx.doc at the end of every month. He was running a business from the office...no longer.

      He appeared not to have realised that the "Audit commission" actually audited things.

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  10. Alister

    Pah!

    Lasers, Inkjets, Dot-Matrix; modern claptrap.

    When I first started playing with computers, I had a GPO type 7 Teleprinter which I used for RTTY and packet BBS.

    It took two people to lift it, and every time it did a carriage return it used to jump about a foot to the right

    You could hear it for miles around - chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga... CRASH!

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Actually, I recall having something teletype-like with a punch tape. I have no idea what it was normally used for, but you could type something and it would punch a tape of it, if you ran the tape through its reader it would type it all again.

      Made me really popular by my sister who once came back from school with the job of writing 500x "I shall not .." before the weekend. I made her ask if she could type it "because she was learning how to type", which is naturally not something a school teacher could credibly refuse.

      One looped tape and a noisy half hour later and I had a happy sister :).

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    2. Jess--
      Reply Icon

      Don't forget the Bell

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      1. Alister
        Reply Icon

        RE: Don't forget the Bell

        Of course, can't believe I'd forgotten that bit:

        chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga... CRASH! ... Ting!

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        1. pepper
          Reply Icon

          Re: RE: Don't forget the Bell

          Alister, I like to think of your printer as a steam locomotive in disguise. To be fair I never experienced most of these printers in real life.

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        2. Down not across
          Reply Icon
          Coffee/keyboard

          Re: RE: Don't forget the Bell

          Thanks. That rather viivid description triggered some memories. Still undecided whether good or bad.

          I do recall some runaway print jobs. Literally...as the printer went for a walk.

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  11. mittfh

    The joys of inkjets

    I used to be a school IT technician. The main experiences I remember are:

    a) a South-facing IT room, where the venetian blinds were (predictably) broken. Come in after a hot weekend to find the cartridges had spilled their contents all over the base of the printer and the table they were sitting on.

    b) A3 business inkjets (used for D&T projects). Supposedly capable of 2ppm A3, in reality they were closer to 0.75ppm, so inevitably students sent multiple copies of their work to the printer. Eventually I persuaded the HoD to buy some printer management software, so [i] the printers could be fed off a single queue, and [ii] I could delete duplicates.

    c) A3 business injects again. As the cartridges were quite expensive, the department decided to buy in clone cartridges. Half of which couldn't be used because the cartridges were chipped, so if the printer thought it hadn't got HP originals, it would refuse to use them. Admittedly we could return them for replacement, but it was a pain! The queue manager came in useful again here, so I could tell it to only point at a single printer if the other one had run out of ink (and there were no usable replacements in stock).

    Oh, and mum had an inkjet she rarely used - almost inevitably when she did she'd have to buy a new cartridge as the old one had dried out, and no amount of priming could unblock the nozzles.

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  12. GlenP Silver badge

    Can empathise with a lot of the above!

    Had IBM printers where we taped the box location for the paper 'cause if it wasn't exactly right the printer would jam.

    Had various ink jets in use over the years (can remember the early DeskJets with rubber belt drive for the head and no registration system - after a year or two alternate lines would be 1/2 a character out unless you turned bi-directional printing off). We also had an Epson at one company that had to be used every week or the print heads would jam and need replacing.

    Installed various lasers including, on corporate instructions, colour Lexmarks that were cheap to buy but would chew through a full set of toner cartridges in a couple of days if heavily used.

    When we moved I took the opportunity to scrap most of the individual printers and go with decent MFDs - cost not much more than a couple of decent printers, dirt cheap to run, fast and reliable.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Dot matrix, laser bah modern fangled technology, give me a daisy wheel printer anytime. Memories of repairing them as a very young technician in the secretarial pool. I was lying underneath this bugger that had print head registration issues replacing the multitude of Bowden cables used for moving the head backwards and forwards, kept getting disturbed by a secretary walking backwards and forwards fashion at the time was long length skirts split at the front and buttoned up strange how every time she walked by another button was undone - I think that was one of my longest repair times ever

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