[conspire] (forw) [svlug] Free HP Color LaserJet model 2605DN if you hurry

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> The cost of cartiges is most often close to the cost of the printer, no
> doubt.  And, additionally, the printers themselves suffer from feature
> bloat.  But my M551 has been really quite econominal.  It is not as
> economical as my HP Laserjet$, which was a tank before my ex-wife
> intentionally destroyed it, but the cartrages have outlasted their
> specification by a long shot.  
> 
> Lets face it, it a game.  To a large degree, especxially with low end
> printers, they are trying to give you the machine for free, and run you
> dry with the cartiges.

People keep falling for that old "Give 'em the razor; sell 'em the
blades" trick.  It's depressing.  I warn and warn and warn, but so few
people listen and say only 'But that inkjet was so _cheap_.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing
Note Lexmark DMCA chicanery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing#Printers

My own now-late mother went shopping with my help around 2005 or so, and
directly against my strong urgings to the contrary, and to my distress,
bought an Epson Stylus colour inkjet printer (as her sole printer).  It
really pained me to see my own mother walk resolutely into one of the
dumbest errors in merchandising.

Why?  Because she'd also bought a fullpage scanner with a slides
attachment, claimed she was going to digitise many hundreds of old
slides and snapshots from prior decades (she never did), and thought
she'd need the ability to _occasionally_ print in colour.

She almost never actually needed to print in colour, but the thing about
inket printers (or at least that particular model series) is that, it
turns out, you cannot configure the printer or its drivers to _avoid_
printing in colour.  Print a Web page with a red background, and the
printer splurges expensive red ink everywhere because you cannot say
'No, just do this one in B&W.'  The only solution to the problem would
have been to move the Epson aside and buy a cheap B&W laser to serve as
her _main_ printer.  This was what I urged after the Epson's money trap
became evident even to my mother -- but then she didn't want to buy one
because she already had a printer and another one would be 'too
expensive'.

I almost wanted to (metaphorically) drop an anvil on the Epson (er, make
it fail), so that it could have inexplicably needed replacement and Mom
could have ignored that wretched Epson, gotten a decent printer, and
saved money.  It would have been like the parable of Hamaguchi Gohei
setting fire to the rice fields to save his town's population from a tsunami:
https://ihatov.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/hamaguchi-gohei-a-living-god-by-lafcadio-hearn/

So many people, having made a hapless, destructive error, feel a need to
double down.  (Happens in politics, too.)

> But the M551 is a true work horse, industrial grade.  I've printed 2
> hundred 5 page booklets on it, answer a few emails, get up and puzzled
> why it wasn't printing, only to discover it was done.
> 
> I researched it for 2 years before buying it.  When I got some money, it
> was my first purchase.  It far excedes my expectations.  And while it
> doesn't print color to poster like quality, it is still amazingly
> impressive.

Ah, there you go.  I see from looking up the model number that it's
specifically part of an HP _Enterprise_ model line.

One of the bits of advice I gave to Robert, a recent CABAL attendee
looking to buy a used computer to run Ubuntu on (if he didn't have aa
vendor build a new whitebox, instead) was to look for business-grade
model lines and carefully avoid any model lines marketed as for _home_
use, as they would be underbuilt, flimsy, inadequate and terrible in
many ways, because
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-bicycles .

To my wonderment and gratification, he followed my advice and got a 
really good 2014 beefy business-grade workstation at Weird Stuff in
Sunnyvale.  (This was in recent postings, here.)

For a printer, what do you most need?  You want it to not bleed you to
death for supplies, and you want it to be ultra-reliable.  To me,
anything else is gravy including print quality / resolution (within
reason).  Thing is, when you really need something printed, you need it
_now_.  Sometimes like last night whenI was running late getting to
SVLUG, I need to print something just before running out the door, and 
the printer jamming or hanging is a big problem.  A printer breaking
down and needing service is much bigger problem, of course:  Most of us
don't have a spare workhorse printer sitting around gathering dust, so 
you have serious problems while a printer is in the shop or you're
frantically shopping for a new one.

So, yeah, it makes all kinds of sense to me to pay a bit more to get
something from an enterprise model line.

My hunch is that toner cartridges for popular models of business
printers like the historical LJ III, 4, and 5 series tend to be cheap
per page because of a very competitive market for supplies (notably
including third-party cartridges).  I'm not sure of this, which is one
reason why I say check the cost of supplies and try to estimate average
cost per page, before buying any specific printer model.

> I do also have a Epson Artisan 1430 which is a large format inkjet that
> does print photograde images on postersize paper.  It is hugely
> expensive to run, although the printer itself was very cheap.
> 
> Those cartriages cost a fortune.
> 
> I rarely use it.

IMO, this is the only proper (niche) role for an inkjet:  Something that
fills a specialised need for which it's necessary, but that is otherwise
carefully not used because it's too damned expensive in supplies per
page.  Like if Mom had moved the Epson Stylus to the side and used a
cheap B&W laser printer except in exceptional circumstances when she
actually needed colour and was willing to pay through the nose to do so.

The usual excuse I hear from people owning an inkjet as sole printer is
'Well, it's expensive per page but I seldom use it.'  This is the
characteristic sound of someone who carefully never runs the numbers
lest he/she confirm having made a dumb mistake and it being smarter to
start over.