Alas, Alack, It’s On Its Back
My trusty HP Deskjet K80 died tonight. I think it’s a motor because nothing moves It was a real pain getting the postcard sized photo paper out of the innards as all of the driver rollers have seized up.
It was a reliable beast [printer, scanner, copier, fax] for about 5 years, but I think the salt air and lousy voltage did it in. It was protected against surges, but it wasn’t on the UPS, so it was subjected to the low voltage that has been a problem for a while.
I have replaced it with a HP Deskjet J4540, which is smaller, lighter, faster, and about 80% cheaper, but it is still change, and who wants change. They asked if I wanted some sort of extended warranty, and I told them to forget it. It has gotten to point that it is almost cheaper to buy a new printer than ink cartridges for an old one, when you can find ink cartridges for an older printer.
9 comments
Hmm. Sorry to say… But I *really* despise HP products! I worked at HP for a few years as a consultant & svc mgr in the 90’s. HP products are built to fail. That’s true of most companies these days of course, but HP were dead serious about it. You can get lucky, I had an old deskjet that lasted almost 6 years, a very long time for one of those. And HP *Customer services* is a euphemism for making it as difficult as possible sop you’ll just give up and buy a new *whatever*. 🙂 And *don’t* even get me started on HP ink’s! Crooks.
I have an excellent Epson stylus photo RX610 (because I wanted a scanner and a printer that would print CD/DVD discs). Epson inks are horrible expensive also though! So we got a continuous inking system (made here in Melb.) Amazingly, the ink quality is actually visibly better than the expensive epson *phto* inks and the price is way better! In an epson cartridge, you only actually get about 8ml od usable ink. A set of 4 costs about AU$40-$45. I can get a complete set of 6 x 100ml inks (including black which is extra for epson) for AU$70! The math is very simple. We’ve been using this for about a year now, and had zero problems so far. 🙂
RIHAC – Continuous Ink Supply Systems
I don’t see one for your printer. But it may have a different model # here (HP do that a lot too!)
PS. RIHAC do export if anyone want’s to save a fortune on inks! 😉
And, for the record… I seriously hate HP! They are on par with M$ IMHO!
Oh! PS 😉 LOL
They gave me a free red sublimation coffee mug! LOL It’s great! It goes a kinda light pink/white when I put hot coffee in, and gradually returns to red as it cools. Handy because I know when the coffee is getting cold and I better finish it! 😆
heh…
Kryten, I’ve had multiple problems with Epson printers in the past (heads clogging, belts breaking, gears stripping), and nary a problem with HP printers other than the one I managed to push off a shelf and it shattered into several pieces (eep!). I even spec’ed one for our assembly line at the factory, it sits at the end happily printing serial numbers onto pre-printed serial number / quick start sheets, no problem even with months-long assembly line shutdowns, it always just works when it gets turned back on whereas an Epson after that long a shutdown would have needed a head cleaning and might not even come back up. I just finished replacing a whole office-full of gear with an HP Officejet Pro 8500 all-in-one. It Just Works, shows up in Bonjour (it’s a network printer), all the drivers that came with Snow Leopard do what you expect, in short it’s a transparent piece of gear that I don’t have to fight with to get work done.
Which is the whole point, in the end…
.-= last blog ..Republicans finally attack something real =-.
noooooo! i don’t want the days to get shorter!
[pretty photo though]
on topic. i’ve always liked my hp stuff. and yeah, the newest printer i bought a couple of years ago is a printer/scanner/fax/cat bed, and it cost about the same as buying two replacement sets of ink for the old printer that had died.
.-= last blog ..What’s it like to be an American living in England and using their socialized medicine? =-.
It may be that they ship different printers to different markets, because I’ve had the same problems that Badtux described with Epson printers, i.e. if you don’t use them everyday they clog, and if you do use them heavily, they break. The other problem is having to use the ‘Net to get ink, which adds shipping to the already inflated prices. I was hoping to save money because Epson used separate color cartridges, but the low use cartridges just seemed to dry out.
HP’s just seem to work and everyone down here carries the cartridges.
I use a printer in fits and starts, i.e. lots of use at certain times of year, and nothing for weeks. HPs seem to be happy with the situation, but the Epsons hate it. I also have a way to get to HP support that regular customers don’t, so, if I really needed assistance I could get it. Actually all I have ever used it for is to get the manuals so I can fix it myself.
As a corporation, HP sucks, and now they have wished Carly Fiorina on the unsuspecting people of California, as a candidate for the Senate. I wouldn’t do that to Alabama.
I have an HP 5L, the first low-end LaserJet, that I bought to do a particular contract almost 20 years ago. It still works. I have an HP 722 inkjet so old that I have to use one of those USB2-to-parallel-port adapters to connect to it. It still works. Over the years I’ve occasionally run into HP PCs that were troublesome, and yes, the corp is sometimes a nasty bit of work, but someone please explain to me why I’m supposed to be unhappy with 30 printer-years of service for a total of about $600 original cost.
Oh, btw, in the interim, I’ve watched several Epsons owned by friends bite the dust. I parodied their slogan: “When you’ve got trouble with an Epson… you’ve got a lot of company.”
Every Epson dot matrix I’ve owned was a workhorse, long hours of trouble free printing. The same for the LaserJets, including those I converted to Postscript machines.
My Epson C80 started out as a great machine, but it didn’t age well, and died at two years from “nozzle problems”.
You use what works for you, based on your own experience.
If my Mother didn’t like color pictures of her greatgrandchildren, I would be back to a LaserJet before the sun set on another day. I look upon color printing as another way of confusing the information you should be presenting, just like the wave after fonts became widely available.
My biggest complaint with the HP Deskjet were the ink cartridges. If you didn’t use it regularly, the cartridge would gum up or go bad. And I especially disliked the 3 colors in one. All three never ever ran out at the same time. So when it died I replaced it with a Canon that has separate ink tanks. It’s actually cheaper that way and so far it’s been happily printing and only occasionally clogging up.
The HP Laserjets seem to work just fine. We have a few of them here in the office and they are workhorses.
.-= last blog ..Curious Chipmunk =-.
The one thing that is an advantage is that the cartridges are new print heads on the HP, but, yeah, running out of blue while yellow is almost full is a major waste. That’s why I bought the Epson, for separate colors, but the nozzles kept clogging after a week without use.
The only problem with Canons that I’m aware of is that you can’t buy the supplies around here, which is a major pain.