All Things Geek

[Muzhik]

Those 8100's (and the 8150 that replaced it) were great printers. The energizer bunnies of printers, they just kept on going. We put millions of copies on ours, with nothing more than toner replacements and the routine maintenance kit every 350k copies.

I know what you mean. The only reason we started replacing ours (and that was just before I was downsized) was because we had a number of departments that still relied on fax. Apparently there were legal reasons that some contracts required fax copies rather than emailed copies -- I think that people could swear in court that the faxed copy was a true and valid copy but they wouldn't swear that an emailed copy hadn't been electronically altered. So the 8150s were replaced with different models that acted as printers, scanners, copiers, and fax machines. Basically beefed-up MFPs that were geared to use laser printers and could handle business-grade duty cycles. Don't know how long they lasted or how often they needed to be repaired/replaced.

 

[bowers baldwin]

Those 8100's (and the 8150 that replaced it) were great printers. The energizer bunnies of printers, they just kept on going. We put millions of copies on ours, with nothing more than toner replacements and the routine maintenance kit every 350k copies.

My favorite was the 9000 series, had a customer put 6 million pages on it in the first year, to put this in perspective 1 million pages would be 12 stories high.
Don't get me wrong the 8000/8100's were great. But incapable of 6 million in a year...
The only thing wrong with the 9000 were the fans, there were 7 of them, and if any one of them seized you'd get an error 57.x and you couldn't print until it was fixed. 7 chances for a $1 fan to shut you down.

 

[Ian442]

I am the after hours printer tech for hundreds of HP printers at the hospital. Toner this Fuser that... they are getting away from the laser jet 4200 series and have gone to newer 4015, 3015, and a couple even smaller one for basic office jobs. But the ones I find to be the biggest PITA are the huge all in one 4555 that constantly are plagued with electronic issues with 49.xxx errors.

 

[bowers baldwin]

I am the after hours printer tech for hundreds of HP printers at the hospital. Toner this Fuser that... they are getting away from the laser jet 4200 series and have gone to newer 4015, 3015, and a couple even smaller one for basic office jobs. But the ones I find to be the biggest PITA are the huge all in one 4555 that constantly are plagued with electronic issues with 49.xxx errors.

I assume you tried pushing the latest firmware, also try disabling the sleep features, these things are junk anymore...

 

[Coss]

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one that had his fair share of print problems.
When I was starting out in IT for a big company (I had worked as Field Engineer for a couple of different shop prior to going Corporate) was for a place that did Medial Transcriptions; this is prior to EMR's (Electronic Medical Records) we had the people that typed out the Doctor's dictations, so this included printing them for the records departments and Hospitals and Clinics. I did learn that I was on-call 24x7 until after I started. And I had my fair share of print problems at 2 & 3am more than once. After the Transcriptions I went into the Title and Escrow companies; talk about a place to goes through forests a month, that's the business. Closing packages, Loan packages, Legal Packages; anyone that's bought a house knows about that mountain of paper you get after you close. The last place I was at, I started in 2003 and was there over 10 years; I was a working Head of IT. So finally when I got to steer the boat (3 months after starting) I turned the place to all Dell; Workstations, Servers, Printers, used their switches and never had a problem, at first, then they switched for 3Com to some kind of junk, had 5 fail within 2 months of installing. They changed builders, and it went back to flawless.
Dell Printers are Lexmark/IBM they ran circles around the HP's and were 1/2 the price.

 

[bowers baldwin]

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one that had his fair share of print problems.
When I was starting out in IT for a big company (I had worked as Field Engineer for a couple of different shop prior to going Corporate) was for a place that did Medial Transcriptions; this is prior to EMR's (Electronic Medical Records) we had the people that typed out the Doctor's dictations, so this included printing them for the records departments and Hospitals and Clinics. I did learn that I was on-call 24x7 until after I started. And I had my fair share of print problems at 2 & 3am more than once. After the Transcriptions I went into the Title and Escrow companies; talk about a place to goes through forests a month, that's the business. Closing packages, Loan packages, Legal Packages; anyone that's bought a house knows about that mountain of paper you get after you close. The last place I was at, I started in 2003 and was there over 10 years; I was a working Head of IT. So finally when I got to steer the boat (3 months after starting) I turned the place to all Dell; Workstations, Servers, Printers, used their switches and never had a problem, at first, then they switched for 3Com to some kind of junk, had 5 fail within 2 months of installing. They changed builders, and it went back to flawless.
Dell Printers are Lexmark/IBM they ran circles around the HP's and were 1/2 the price.

I can remember when I first started working on Lexmark units, I thought they were junk because of the mostly plastic cases, but I soon learned they just ran and ran even when in dirty environments, they were a good printer, not sure about now-a-days, but everyone makes junk in my mind. If it doesn't cost more then a grand, it's disposable...

 

[Rob Croson]

Printer quality varies a LOT. I've found that the higher priced business models are generally (though not always!) much more economical to run, more solidly built, and more reliable. A lot of businesses, especially small businesses, tend to buy the cheaper consumer models. These are much more shoddily built, and tend to break down quicker.

Don't get me wrong the 8000/8100's were great. But incapable of 6 million in a year...

We didn't print *quite* that much! It took us several years to put that much on ours, but we sure did! Last I saw that pair of printers, they were both over 6M, and going strong.

 

[bowers baldwin]

Printer quality varies a LOT. I've found that the higher priced business models are generally (though not always!) much more economical to run, more solidly built, and more reliable. A lot of businesses, especially small businesses, tend to buy the cheaper consumer models. These are much more shoddily built, and tend to break down quicker.


We didn't print *quite* that much! It took us several years to put that much on ours, but we sure did! Last I saw that pair of printers, they were both over 6M, and going strong.

I wont say impossible, but most companies would replace them around 5M, mostly due to windows driver issues (the universal driver does not support the accessories like the stacker/stapler/sorter) that and main drive issues crop up around the 5M mark, by then they were well over 10 years old and really owed you nothing at that point. I loved to point out to people that everything in their office was newer then the printer (PC's/phones/carpets/clocks) the only piece of tech that was older was the ancient T.I. calculators.

 

[Coss]

I wont say impossible, but most companies would replace them around 5M, mostly due to windows driver issues (the universal driver does not support the accessories like the stacker/stapler/sorter) that and main drive issues crop up around the 5M mark, by then they were well over 10 years old and really owed you nothing at that point. I loved to point out to people that everything in their office was newer then the printer (PC's/phones/carpets/clocks) the only piece of tech that was older was the ancient T.I. calculators.

Agreed, we'd replace them around 4m to 6m; I had one place that did the 6m in 3 to 4 years and at $890 for a printer, we got our money's worth.

Cost to print; I got in a lot of toe to toe matches with the copier people; they would come up with the fraction of a cent to print, but never include the price of the unit, extended warranty service costs, and their strong point was, the toner was part of the extended warranty service.
When you would compare them taking all of those points in, the Dell printers were still cheaper, cost per page. (like .0009 cents per page) plus you don't have to lay out as much at first.
Used to have to cost comparisons for internet service too; the phone people always wanted to "bundle it in" but the contract was a lock in, and the speed sucked.

 

[Muzhik]

Not to get off printers, but I ran across this in someone's online xkcd collection. Having done some Perl and dabbled in Lisp in an earlier lifetime, this strip tickled my fancy: