[elky] Re: First "Asylum"
- From: Ray Buck <rbuck@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: elky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:02:21 -0700
At 06:47 AM 12/11/2009, you wrote:
Nice pic but Ugh why an Epson. I hate their printers with
a passion. If you run out of a color it won't still print in black
it has to have all colors full. ETC ETC. They are only good with
refillable cartriges with resetting chips that always show full or
a CISS with the same resetable chips but has external bottles to
refill and hoses running to the print head.
My main printer has refillable cartridges and my second is getting a
CIS system. I agree...the basic concept is just a hole to throw
money into. But they do very nice prints...and they're cheap. You
can get a brand-new printer for $200 on eBay. Since a new printer
comes with new ink cartridges...and a whole set from Epson costs
$120....well, you can see the big picture there. They sell the
printer at a loss, then make their money on supplies. The computer
industry's been doing that for decades.
Among other things I worked on were "proof machines" that printed the
MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) characters on the bottom
edge of the check while making sure that the batch (that had been
collected by the bank tellers) balanced...that is, the total of the
checks matched the amount on the deposit slip. Burroughs almost gave
the machines away...and they were expensive suckers to maintain. But
the real profit came from selling the magnetic ink ribbons. They
were a "one-time" ribbon: a strip of plastic with the ink on one
side. When a hammer hit the ribbon and the check, the character that
was on the face of the encoder wheel on the other side would be
transferred to the paper of the check. The usual usage was one
ribbon per machine per day. Since the field engineers (like me) were
responsible for selling supplies (and lemme tell ya, that was more
important to company management than keeping customers happy by
keeping their machines running) we had to devote a lotta time to
selling overpriced products. No wonder I've had a bad attitude about
personal selling.
I'll stick with my HP which I can take a syringe and
refill a cartrige in seconds for practically nothing. Geri has
finally figured out why I hate epson printers and cant' wait till
hers runs out of black ink and I can smash it to pieces for all the
frustration it has put me through.
I had a printer like that once .. Started with an L..... CRS .....
no blood in my coffee system.
Lexmark. Totally disposable printers. Company owned by Micro$oft, iirc.
If you think about all the prints I made this year and all the
bouncing around the printers got (I'd have my laptop and one or both
printers in the Burb so I could make prints immediately at whatever
venue I was at) they did pretty well.
And I only went to the Epsons when I couldn't get decent prints out
of my HP no matter how many color cartridges and different types of
HP paper I used. Btw, the HP will print if one of the colors in the
cartridge is empty...but the print is useless. So as soon as you run
out of one color, you have to replace the whole thing....at least on
the model I have. It's a trade-off.
Ray
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