Printers - Videokarma.org TV - Video

lnx64 · #1 10-13-2020, 12:31 PM

So I have a thing for old printers. I find them cheaper to maintain (ribbon vs ink, or even toner if a laser), more reliable (they are like tanks), and sometimes you can find a 64-bit driver if you have a new computer and a means of connecting it.

My daily driver is an Epson LQ-570e. It was given to me, and only had one broken part in shipping which I fixed with foam tape to prevent gear slippage. New ribbon cost $8 so I bought a 3 pack for 20 bucks shipped as a discount, and a 25ft parallel cable to my modern PC which still has a parallel port. This printer once had 64-bit drivers made, and I don't know where this driver pack came from, if it was ported by someone or what, but it actually works on Windows 10 natively. DOSBox can even print to it if the parallel output is set to "dev file:lpt1" and doesn't even need drivers for it, DOS programs see it directly.

Does anyone else share this passion with vintage printers, and prefer them over the new stuff? I find every new printer I try breaks down in just months these days, and the ink costs always 2x the cost of the printer which came with ink (though never a full tank). I honestly believe older printers are workhorses and are worth it.

Heck even a 20 pound box of paper was 20 bucks. Far cheaper than a ream of copy paper. I never print color so I never saw the need.

bgadow · #2 10-14-2020, 10:07 PM

A regret: the company my mom worked for was in bankruptcy in '99/00 and they had lots of cheap office equipment. I bought a couple IBM/Lexmark laser printers for almost nothing. They needed toner cartridges, which cost more than I paid for the unit. I used the larger one at work, running constantly, and would get at least a couple years out of a cartridge. They were getting hard to find towards the end. When I closed my business I tried to give it away but no takers. And so, my regret: I tossed it in the dumpster. I truly believe that if I'd found another cartridge back in 2013 I could still be using that thing at home here today on the same refill.

nasadowsk · #3 10-23-2020, 03:37 PM

I almost never use a printer. Last stuff I printed was an order form and UPS label to send a package out, and a few pages of deer pictures so my coworker could show me (arrow) shot placement.

Everything we do now is via PDF, and if the customer insists, we just send it to a print shop. No more 3 copies of each submittal to the engineer...

Mad-Mike · #4 10-26-2020, 05:20 PM

I am pretty much paper-less these days except my vintage machines. For the most part, being an I.T. Professional, I hate the blasted things new or old because they are so much trouble to setup and keep running save for maybe old Dot Matrix.

That said, my favorite old Printer, if I had to pick one, would be those old Okidata Dot Matrix printers from the 80's that were Pin Feed. I owned one a long time ago (Unisys rebranded), and I also used to use those all the time at the Auburn University Library as a teenager to print out long technical documents and game rarity lists to read during lunch and whatnot.

MadMan · #5 10-27-2020, 12:56 AM

I have a LaserJet IIIp that always used to wrinkle the end of the paper. I never got around to fixing that, and now the toner cartridge is bad. Unfortunately, you can't find new ones, or (properly) remanufactured ones... at least not at a reasonable cost. Shame, it was a real good old fashioned workhorse.

I luckily found a much newer Brother laser printer at a thrift store not long ago. Didn't work, but I found a cheat code to reset it. It needed the cartridge and the drum, together about $40, but well worth it. Besides needing to be reset (dumb planned obsolescence) and the thingy, it works like a champ. It's my main shop printer now. Granted, we don't print a whole lot (receipts are still hand-written), but when we do, it's been perfectly reliable.

I also have a LaserJet 6, but I think that had the same cartridge problem as the IIIp, the drum wiper perishes and doesn't wipe anymore.

Tube TV · #6 10-27-2020, 04:34 PM

Slightly envious....
That would look great connected to my IBM Aptiva.

Sure prints nice.

mr_rye89 · #7 10-28-2020, 10:25 PM

I dumpster dove a Laserjet 4050 some years ago, jet direct card and everything! those old beasts are good for a million pages or so. Kinda screwy with linux for some reason, send job....spits out page 5 minutes later lol.

I had a Panasonic 24 pin color dot matrix printer when I was a kid, Worked with WinXP okay. Tossed it out one day, probably shouldn't have.

Jeffhs · #8 11-02-2020, 11:08 AM

I have a Hewlett-Packard 832C printer which I purchased new 20 years ago. It still works every bit as well as it did when it was new; the only maintenance I have had to do on it, so far, is to change the ink cartridges every so often (not very often, actually, since I don't use the printer too much, only to print receipts and the occasional document; in fact, the black ink cartridge now in the printer has been there literally for years and hasn't run dry--yet, anyway).

This printer seems to work well with Linux, the operating system I have been running for several years; no problems of any kind so far. I don't know why your printer is causing you trouble under Linux; it should work as well under that OS as it will under Windows.