10 ms·

Ditto. I have a ten year old Dell 1110 that continues to work despite moves, drops, and abuse. This includes a period when it was stored in a hay barn.

phil21 10y ago
Same, I have an older HP Laserjet I forget the model of that's been rock solid for 15 years. You can also still buy parts for these printers as well reasonably cheap. I was able to find a plastic gear that got stripped due to an object falling into the paper tray - cost me about $8 and 20 minutes of repair time and it's good as new. The average person doesn't print much, but when they do they really need it right now (e.g. boarding passes, legal document to sign, concert tickets, whatever) and having a rock-solid printer that you know just works every time even if you haven't printed in 6 months is great.
- coredog64 10y ago
  I had to give up on my LaserJet IIIP a while ago. I spent nearly as much on trying to recondition all the dried out rubber parts as I did on a cheap laser printer.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Early 90's printers tend to do that. We have a LaserJet IV gathering dust in a corner at work. Turned it on the other day, to a three minute warmup and much smell of dust burning, but it still printed well.
- Thlom 10y ago
  I have a Canon Pixma something or other printer. After an upgrade of OS X, Canon stopped suppling drivers for newer versions. It wasn't even straight forward to use the driver for the previous version. I think I had to extract the driver from their lousy installer to get it to work. Very fun when I just wanted to print flight tickets ASAP. It's a PRINTER. All it does 95% of the time is printing B/W documents. How hard can it be to get this right?
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    Printers are really just a hardware distribution mechanism for printer drivers, which are an unusually bulky form of malware. Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets. If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Been this way for years. Old dot-matrix printers often had a dip-switch to select 'options'. If there were 4 of them, you had a 1-in-16 chance of it working. If there were 8, forget it. Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I had a used HP4000 series that was bough used at a school auction, probably 5+ years old at that time... thing ran for another 3 years on the toner that was in there when I got it and another 3-4 after that before it died and wouldn't come on... replaced it with an hp color laserjet 3-4 years ago, and that one still runs like a tank... When you rarely print, having a laser is better as they can sit a long time and not dry out or gum up like the ink printers.

phil21 10y ago

Same, I have an older HP Laserjet I forget the model of that's been rock solid for 15 years. You can also still buy parts for these printers as well reasonably cheap. I was able to find a plastic gear that got stripped due to an object falling into the paper tray - cost me about $8 and 20 minutes of repair time and it's good as new. The average person doesn't print much, but when they do they really need it right now (e.g. boarding passes, legal document to sign, concert tickets, whatever) and having a rock-solid printer that you know just works every time even if you haven't printed in 6 months is great.

coredog64 10y ago
I had to give up on my LaserJet IIIP a while ago. I spent nearly as much on trying to recondition all the dried out rubber parts as I did on a cheap laser printer.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Early 90's printers tend to do that. We have a LaserJet IV gathering dust in a corner at work. Turned it on the other day, to a three minute warmup and much smell of dust burning, but it still printed well.
Thlom 10y ago
I have a Canon Pixma something or other printer. After an upgrade of OS X, Canon stopped suppling drivers for newer versions. It wasn't even straight forward to use the driver for the previous version. I think I had to extract the driver from their lousy installer to get it to work. Very fun when I just wanted to print flight tickets ASAP. It's a PRINTER. All it does 95% of the time is printing B/W documents. How hard can it be to get this right?
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Printers are really just a hardware distribution mechanism for printer drivers, which are an unusually bulky form of malware. Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets. If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Been this way for years. Old dot-matrix printers often had a dip-switch to select 'options'. If there were 4 of them, you had a 1-in-16 chance of it working. If there were 8, forget it. Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.
tracker1 10y ago
I had a used HP4000 series that was bough used at a school auction, probably 5+ years old at that time... thing ran for another 3 years on the toner that was in there when I got it and another 3-4 after that before it died and wouldn't come on... replaced it with an hp color laserjet 3-4 years ago, and that one still runs like a tank... When you rarely print, having a laser is better as they can sit a long time and not dry out or gum up like the ink printers.