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Never buy Epson printers

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Re: Never buy Epson printers

#101

Post by mbell »

bbcbasic wrote: post #68
mbell wrote: post #49

I haven't owned a printer in probably 10 years and I'm not particularly young (32). I get their usefulness in some aspects of business operations but I'm a bit at a loss as to why an individual would purchase one. What are the use cases now? The only two I can think of are printing photos, which I get but it seems better handled either through a photo printer or an outside service or for printing 'offical' documents…

There are a few. Tickets. Boarding Passes. Government forms that cannot be filed electronically. Carrying information you need where you don't want to reply on a phone whose battery could run out. To read something in a focused way, with no internet to distract you. I printed out a plane ticket today to fly in a country where waving your phone with the same ticket is apparently not satisfactory.

It doesn't surprise me that there are edge cases where you need paper. It surprises me that those edge cases are numerous enough that you would own a printer and deal with it.

All of my boarding passes are covered via phone but on the occasion that I need a pass for an airline that doesn't have that option I would just spend 5 minutes at a kiosk to get it.

On the occasion I have to file a gov form that isn't available digitally or I can't fax (via email), I'll just get it printed at whatever local place can do so.

Point is that home printing really isn't a necessity anymore, and depending on circumstance it's debatable if it's a time/cost savings. As a result I would expect the home printing market to get more and more expensive.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#102

Post by jschwartzi »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #70
creshal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lasers do have disadvantages – mainly their excessively high power consumption and their air pollution. Modern gel inks don't dry out in my experience, and make for very efficient printers that are much less maintenance intensive than lasers. And ink is cheaper than toner unless you print several hundreds of pages a month.

I'm sure I'm having a brain fart and missing something obvious, but why are inkjets cheaper than laser only at lower monthly page volumes? Seems that your savings would just continue to increase the more you print. Or is there something else that affects the inkjet price per page at higher volumes?

It's the per-page cost. A toner cartridge will print several-thousand pages before it runs out, but most people don't print that often. The base cost on a color laser might be $300, while for an inkjet it might be $50. If you never burn through the sample cartridge that comes with the inkjet then you're ahead of laser because of amortization. However, if you manage to run out of ink more than once then laser will end up costing you less, assuming you print equal amounts with both printers.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#103

Post by IshKebab »

JensRex wrote: post #31

I bought a Brother (HL-2170W) laser printer about 8 years ago, and it's still using its original cartridge. I do very little printing, but I do need it from time to time. During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal, and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the box. I've talked m…

Well to be fair I bought an Epson inkjet printer (Workforce something) several years ago and never used up its original cartridge. Granted I don't print much but I was still fairly impressed.

Of course that doesn't invalidate the point of TFA. Also they have an ink dump that is chipped - when it is "full" they force you to buy a replacement rather than just empty it.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#104

Post by eosrei »

vardump wrote: post #14

I don't currently have a printer. I think I'd want an economic laser printer. Probably going to print less than 50 pages per month. Needs to work fine under Linux. Any suggestions?

HP 4200N. It's not light, but you can get them cheap and they run forever. You turn it on and Linux, OS X and Windows automatically detect it on the network and can print. No hassles and no nonsense. I've had the same cartridge for going on ten years since it's good for 12,000+ pages. I'm sure I should do the scheduled maintenance, but it's good enough print quality for my needs.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#105

Post by Spooky23 »

veddox wrote: post #60
StreamBright wrote: post #51

Reminds me of: "I am going to spend the rest of my career focusing on the hard problems of computer science: printers, projectors, and screen sharing." https://twitter.com/britt/status/611996866146779136

Printers are my biggest IT nightmare. No piece of modern computer hardware fails so consistently, so ununderstandably or so frequently as a printer.

Not true at all. Buy a good management solution (we use PrinterLogic) and buy good printers.

By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.

Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.

Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees, etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're shipping a lot of printers back.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#106

Post by mchahn »

gherkin0 wrote: post #95
mchahn wrote: post #42

Not too long ago I bought a cheap printer (don't remember the brand), took it home, and returned it after seeing the horrible quality of the print. Then I brought home another cheap printer of a different brand, had the same experience, and returned that. The reason I was buying cheap printers is that they were the only ones locally available, other than one very expensive model, the epson XP800. Apparently the marke…

Is there a name for the scenario where market forces push new products to be objectively inferior to older ones?

Maybe planned retrogression instead of planned obsolescence?

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#107

Post by motti »

JensRex wrote: post #31

I bought a Brother (HL-2170W) laser printer about 8 years ago, and it's still using its original cartridge. I do very little printing, but I do need it from time to time. During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal, and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the box. I've talked m…

The Brother color lasers also are happy to print without color toner cartridges present.

By contrast, HP's cheaper color lasers require the cartridges to be present, and if they run out and are left in the machine, they cause banding over your printouts. This is due to their integrated drums wearing out, so you have to replace the color toners even if they're not being used (or hack around with transferring chips onto less-used old cartridges, even black ones so they're seen as colour ones).

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#108

Post by qb45 »

csomar wrote: post #34

Multi-function inkjet printers are a Scam. No, I'm serious. 1. The printing functionality is flawed. A cartridge will not last for more than 100 pages. (I tried Epson, HP and Canon). 2. The cartridge will dry and not function after a few weeks only. 3. The original cartridge cost almost as much as a new printer with the cartridge. 4. The printer will not function (Scanner or Fax) without the full cartridges (black an…

> 4. The printer will not function (Scanner or Fax) without the full cartridges (black and colours).

My parents recently scraped an Epson all-in-one. Something had broken inside and the printer insisted that there is a paper jam and refused to do anything, even scanning.

They took it apart trying to figure out what's wrong. This thing had probably hundred moving parts or more, mostly made of plastic. It was so overengineered I'm surprised it had ever worked at all.

My favorite part is the CD/DVD tray which takes like 10 seconds to eject because the drive is hidden deep inside and the device has to rearrange some of its guts to bring it to the front. As much as I admire people who were able to pull it off, this is sick.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#109

Post by rileymat2 »

manyxcxi wrote: post #7
walrus01 wrote: post #5

Never buy any inkjet printer. I threw in the garbage a Canon multifunction that refused ton work as a SCANNER when its ink was empty. If you have the space and print a lot of black and white, buy an eight year old used HP LaserJet with an Ethernet interface.

I don't know why people still bother with inkjets. It's like the companies are actively punishing you for buying these models of printers. If they are necessary for work, then MAYBE. But even then, if you're buying commercial hardware you're not dealing with this junk either. It also used to be that laser was incredibly expensive in comparison, now they're about the same price if you compare color inkjet to black and…

Some people like to print photos. Unless some things have changed, they are better at printing photos.

Re: Never buy Epson printers

#110

Post by johnminter »

tdicola wrote: post #22

Get a cheap consumer black and white laser printer and never look back. I can't think of any time I've needed or wanted to print color. For photos and such send them off to be printed with real photo printers.

We came to the same conclusion. My wife is a teacher and we often print her notes, tests, homework assignments, and worksheets to be copied at school. The B&W laser "just works" and is both fast and economical.
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