[conspire] cheap and printing, an adventure

[bruce coston]

We got my main user a printer for his birthday. It arrived on Mon. I already examined the CIS from Australia that beat the printer to our house. [ he killed a printhead recently to go with the printer he had killed previously ] 
1st 
I got it working under the FC8 derived os on this laptop. [ I finished 2 more os installs before going to sleep.]
2nd
The only real spewing of ink was when I decided to only empty 1 of the bottles of black for the 2 reservoirs built into the fancy ink holder. [ More air means more compressible energy storage, in case you ever decide to do mass printing cheap.] 
Speaking of reservoirs, 
the Australian ones come in a cluster of 6 with air tubes to a smaller plug hole on top and the tubes just feed from the bottom. All 5 reservoirs get their own tiny air filter. Yes, I do have 5 of 6 chambers filled to provide 4 colors of ink to the ip4200. We may never see another w98 printer this good and that matters because we don't have our critical legacy applications working under emulation on our 64x2 box. 
3rd - E - for effort
It's annoying and embarrassing to pay that much and then install the ink; but. when shipped by air these sorts of things tend to literally explode! 
Maybe Australians find removing chips from cli-8 cartridges easy. Maybe younger people can see what they're doing but I had real difficulty putting the canon chips on the cis cartridges. Removal was fraught with peril but they all came off intact. Testing my initial attachment attempts saw 2 chips fall, my thumbnail dwarfs these chips. When I got them all  attached; I got 2 blinking lights that should have matched the 3 solid lights during the printers cartridge check. [ Canon gave these cartridges led lights/ ] I got Ross to confirm the problem. It would have made my life easier if canon had built in some obvious physical difference between chips but printer makers live in a fantasy world where they get rich by selling ink that occasionally does cost more per ounce than gold. [ as a side effect people will buy printers like the ip3500 on sale at Fry's Tues. for $20 AR and just throw it all away vs refilling the cli-8 cartridges. ] So I plugged in the
 soldering iron again and got to smell more melting plastic, the cis maker does recommend this procedure. This soldering iron, the only tool I used that they didn't include in their extravagant kit, has soldered many things. Why does that fact merit mention? It deposited some of this previous solder between electrical contacts. I carefully checked what 15 blinks of the error light means in the printer manual before removing all cartridges again. 
Finally,
I got the printer through its tabletop tests and squeezed it into the computer room. The printouts using the bjc7000 driver set to 4 colors look a bit off, hopefully PCLinuxOS has better drivers somewhere like the ip4000 driver I used on my laptop. The w98 driver showed that this printer knows what to do with a bikini hottie almost as well as I do. 



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20080722/aeae75a5/attachment.html>