*sigh*

[piranha]

dear self --

whether you actually need to print anything or not, do not leave your printer sitting around for two months without printing a page every week or so. because gravity sucks. and printheads clog. they clog so badly that regular maintenance self-cleaning will no longer manage to clear them.

and then you have to remove the printhead and try to unclog it.

and that's not how you wanted to spend tonight or possibly even longer.

Comments

sympathy

[(Anonymous)]

Been there, done that, went through a lot of isopropyl alcohol and qtips.

After I fatally dropped my laser printer when I moved early last spring, I went printerless for awhile. Thinking about a new printer put me in a waffle between laser (colour terrible, fast, decent price per page, no clogs) and inkjets (excellent colour possible for reasonable prices, clogs, terrible price per page, slow), and I kept waffling until I wound up researching printers for work.

Xerox makes postscript -- full up Postscript 3, not emulated -- printers that use solid ink; these are more workgroup printers than personal printers in intended market, but they do 2400 dpi, decent -- not as good as Epson or Canon 8 dye sublimation jobbies at the same sort of price point, but decent -- photo printing, are smoking fast (eight and a half by eleven photo < five seconds, since it's single-pass colour; 30 impressions-per-minute generally), come with duplex, model-specific PPD files, and are several kinds of network printer out of the box. Generally darn near the perfect general purpose printer, especially for linux. Because the ink sublimates and solidifies on to the paper, they're incredibly non-fussy about paper, and the ink is color-fast.

The only fly in the ointment is that the solid ink tech is a thermal process, so warming up from sleep mode is fairly lengthy and the peak power draw is a fright. (Couple minutes and 2.5 kW, respectively. Operating power is way more reasonable, couple hundred Watts. Sleep mode is something like 2 W.) On the plus side, I'm pretty sure -- having done it -- that you can leave it in sleep mode for a month and not have any kind of clogging problem.

Not sure if this is at all helpful, but I thought I'd throw this in because I'd never heard of this tech and so far as I can tell it's just outright better than either inkjet or laser.

The model number of the thing I've got is a Xerox Phaser 8550; the 8500 is cheaper but doesn't do 2400 dpi.

-- Graydon

Re: sympathy

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i did look at that one a while back because i tend to keep an eye on printer tech, and would have liked to have a look at a live one, but it pretty much priced itself out of my range before i went much further. it was way more expensive than what i ended up buying, and its consumables were also much more expensive. and, at the time there were no linux drivers, and i read a fair number of negative reviews (though also some glowing ones).

if i ran a small graphics business, that would definitely be a top printer to look at, but my needs are more moderate, and fit the inkjet market better. i do wish ALPS hadn't stopped making its MD-5000 (which did actual dye sublimation at a superb price) -- i still have that sitting here, and it's a wonderful printer, but supplies became very hard to get, and now i don't even have a machine with a parallel port anymore.

so you did end up buying that xerox printer, and got it to run under linux?

Re: sympathy

[(Anonymous)]

I did wind up buying one. (Work bought one, too, along with a large format laser -- when you're sending stuff to be printed in the Far East, you want your output and their output to look the same, which puts a high premium on the Certified Postscript part.)

The only issue with getting it to run under linux is that the correct ppd files weren't in the available download tarball; they should have been, and the support guy sent me the right one very promptly. (The tarball ought to have been updated by now; there was certainly a bug raised against its lack of contents.) At that point, it was "tell CUPS printer IP address; hand ppd file to CUPS; print". No challenge at all. (The default CUPS postscript driver worked, it just didn't have support for a lot of features.)

And, well, for-real 2400 dpi. You can read the tiny silkscreen numbers over the traces in printed pictures of circuit boards; I need a magnifying glass to do this, but the numbers are there, and sharp.

-- Graydon

Re: sympathy

[velochicdunord.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Goodness!

1) Haven't heard from you in ages, which is one reason to get excited.

2) Tell me more about your experiences with Xerox thermals. Is this an older model? Second hand? I was just down at the Print World trade show at the Ex yesterday, and aside from oohing and awing over new presses (and gather specs like crazy) and the wide format ink jets (12 ft!) the other thing that I was keeping an eye out for (long term, very long term) was the eventual studio colour digital output.

Re: sympathy

[(Anonymous)]

The 8550 is current, and was bought new. They seem to be maintaining their 500 USD rebate for the thing until 31 Dec 2006, which gets a new one down to 800 USD (although you have to pay full price and register and suchlike before you get the $500 back.)

piranha is right that the consumables are expensive to buy (though there is a thriving generic supplier, with much lower prices); the price-per-sheet isn't bad (beating it in laser requires a ~10 kCAD laser printer), and the Xerox consumption estimates are (on experience so far) a bit on the high side. (We're seeing ~1200 sheets where they say ~1100 at work, but that's still a small sample.) They're also rather green -- little wax blocks that one plunks into a feeder -- as opposed to laser toner cartridges and fusers. (There's a surplus ink tray that needs changing every 30 ksheets, but it's also recyclable.)

Xerox alleges that the thing will do Pantone colours, within the usual CMYK limitations; I have not messed about with trying to set this up.

There are several earlier models of solid ink printer; from the breadth of the generic ink-maker's stock, they keep running pretty well and someone is using a lot of them, but I have no idea who that might be.