Out of Pod Experience

meh.. you could say the same about everything if the point is to just make out the negatives.

positive about printers: boobie posters

One way to tell the age of that comic is the printer cable comment. All printers are either USB, Network, or wireless now. I can't even remember the last time I used a printer cable.

I can also explain half of that page, at least from a color laser jet standpoint, but not ink.

Toner cartridges are extremely expensive because they are roughly 70% of the printer. Not only is the cartridge a convenient place to store toner, it also holds the components that will wear out very quickly. This design saves the customer the trouble of having to replace their entire printer every 2000-10,000 pages.

This also brings up the next point with the cyan being out when you are trying to print a mono page. In most printers where you have a CMYK set up, the gears in every cartridge will turn regardless on if you print in color or mono as the entire printer is one big track. If the parts don't turn, you'll simply jam on the first cartridge the page hits. Because of this, the computer must look at 3 items on the cartridge to determine the life of the cartridge: Toner level, OPC life, and Developer life. If any of these reach 0, the cartridge is out of life regardless of how much you have actually printed. In other words, its a bad idea to buy a color printer if most of your documentation is in mono. Of course most printers have an override function which I highly suggest enabling because there really is more toner in there than you think.

This also brings up the point of the no expiration date, which is false. Toner is electrically charged by a chemical compound which allows it to have its static bond. Now another component on the inside of the cartridge is a stirring blade that continues to mix the toner and push it forward while the printer is running. Again like the other parts, this continues to rotate regardless on what you print. After a while it will actually break down the chemical compound and the toner will lose its static bond, thus causing a defect that we refer to as spitting, because it literally just spits toner at random on the page. p.s. ink can evaporate.

Now if you really don't want to purchase 2 separate printers but want to continue running mono jobs, then I would suggest looking for a color printer that has a carousel, but keep in mind that you will sacrifice speed for wear n tear.

As for the picture statement, this is a regular complaint among customers. When we test a printer, we determine its life expectancy or yield at 5% coverage. So at 5% coverage you should get the yield that we say on the box. When you print your entire family vacation at Disneyland, you'll be using far more than 5% yield which means shorter life expectancy. The complaint that we see is that the customers are trying to print menu's or color intensive pamphlets and for some gosh darn reason the cartridge that they just bought ran out of toner after 300 copies instead of the 9000 that is stated on the box.

I know, the whole is supposed to be a funny joke, I just can't help myself sometimes.

I actually think that CLJ picture quality far exceeds that of inkjets but I may just be biased because I work on them. I made a believer out of my father when he sent me a .PDF to print when lightning took out his inkjet. He was really impressed at how much brighter his photos on his house flyers were and I think that's due to more color control. On CLJ's each pixel is basically a 4x4 grid giving us 16 boxes. As you print, the laser is marking essentially where each little piece of toner will go so a grid may have 10 cyan, 4 magenta, and 2 yellow. The motors on the lasers run at over 8000 rpm to put all that information on the page.

However you are very correct on price. I believe our cheapest desktop CLJ is currently at $200 and the cartridges are like $50 a pop. People don't want to dish out that kind of cash, especially when you usually get a inkjet for free with your store bought computer. On the plus side it is a carousel so you don't have to worry about the above wear n tear that I mentioned earlier. Personally I want to get its little brother the MFP but the scanner and fax automatically crank it up to $400. Not that I really need to worry when I have a lab full of printers to choose from.

The average price for many of the home/small office CLJ's is upwards to around $700 and cartridges ranging from $40 to $150.