20 year old printer still going strong!

[Hugo Drax]

Currently running an HP 2600n that has to be close to15 years old. Still works fine but drivers have been a problem. Got it running on Win 10 but cant remember how.

Lot different from my original Epson MX-80 and Panasonic impact printers. Id take those back before an inkjet.

Oh The good thing about those HP Printers is they use PCLx (ie PCL4,5 etc..) and/or Postscript. So you are in luck All you need to do is find a PCL5 generic driver or generic Postscript driver. That is the beauty of these printers with thier own CPU and memory. They will just take the raw PCL or Postscript data and do all the heavy lifting of interpreting the page description language and outputting it to paper.

IF you really like geeking around, you can actually write(describe) objects ie a circle, some text etc.. in PCL using nano(or vi) etc.. and then pipe that file straight to your printer and it will print it for you.

I sure dont miss those dot matrix printers back in the days, Okidata and Epson were topnotch printers back then.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Oh The good thing about those HP Printers is they use PCLx (ie PCL4,5 etc..) and/or Postscript. So you are in luck All you need to do is find a PCL5 generic driver or generic Postscript driver. That is the beauty of these printers with thier own CPU and memory. They will just take the raw PCL or Postscript data and do all the heavy lifting of interpreting the page description language and outputting it to paper.

IF you really like geeking around, you can actually write(describe) objects ie a circle, some text etc.. in PCL using nano(or vi) etc.. and then pipe that file straight to your printer and it will print it for you.

I sure dont miss those dot matrix printers back in the days, Okidata and Epson were topnotch printers back then.

Interesting, reminds me of when we would play around with Zebra label makers, they used a rather simplistic language too, we used a script to test them and it would output text. I guess now days most printers are probably super proprietary right? So no choice but to use their shitty drivers.

 

[thebestMAX]

Oh The good thing about those HP Printers is they use PCLx (ie PCL4,5 etc..) and/or Postscript. So you are in luck All you need to do is find a PCL5 generic driver or generic Postscript driver. That is the beauty of these printers with thier own CPU and memory. They will just take the raw PCL or Postscript data and do all the heavy lifting of interpreting the page description language and outputting it to paper.

.

Thanks for that info. Ill give it a shot. HP stopped supporting (big surprise, huh?) this printer long ago and drivers have been a problem since Win 7 I think. Got all the computers working now except a new laptop so I have something to play with that wont disable anything that is working.

 

[BurnItDwn]

PC Load Letter, What the Fark does that mean?

 

[Rifter]

The day i retired my Laserjet III was the saddest day of my printer life but it finally broke for good about 7 years ago, i owned it for about 10 years. Still have not found a printer that even comes close in terms of reliability and build quality. On the flip side i was able to sell its ram upgrade module and Postscript cartridge for more than i originally paid for the used printer so thats a bonus.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Jesus. You even get snobby jackasses in old hardware threads.

Yeah, I tried to reason with them, but probably wasted the time spent. At least I tried civil discourse.
His choice of avatar is in direct conflict with his proclamation, but I think that goes without saying for the most part.

 

[HeXen]

Yeah, I tried to reason with them, but probably wasted the time spent. At least I tried civil discourse.
His choice of avatar is in direct conflict with his proclamation, but I think that goes without saying for the most part.

I told the truth. Truth hurts. Did you want me to lie about it?

 

[Muse]

These HP Printers just wont die, I have a Laser jet 4000 that still prints great. I have a feeling it will last another 10 years. It is ethernet connected and drivers do not seem to be an issue so far. Cost per print is tiny. 10K print carts go for 50 bucks.

I did buy a new printer 3 years ago, an HP M651dn That sucker is huge, made in Japan and I suspect will last 20 years or more. It cost me 1100 so in 20 years that would be 55 bucks a year.

Sad when you see people buying those disposable Inkjets printers that last about a year and the refils cost as much or more than the printer.

I still have the HP4M that I bought in 1993. I guess it works but it has an issue or two and instead of dealing with that I simply bought a $150 Brother printer around 3 years ago and I love it. It duplexes and I don't even bother to ethernet connect it to the network, it prints fine via wifi to my router. The HP4M doesn't duplex which is a major drag. Home many times did I faux duplex with it by hand feeding one-side-printed sheets into it?

I've never had an ink jet printer, the cost and hassle of maintaining them just turned me off. I found an HP4+ on the street one day around 2010, got it working pretty easily and that became my every day printer. So, I've had 3 printers... the HP4M, HP4M+ (got a postscript module for the HP4+ cheap), and the Brother. All are B&W toner printers. Color would be great maybe but I figure it would be a hassle and expensive.

I like the look of quality laserjet B&W prints. That HP4M's prints are so sharp, when I saw them I was thrilled. 600dpi >> 300dpi, which is what you got on the cheaper HP 4L, whose output looked absolutely crappy in comparison.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

I told the truth. Truth hurts. Did you want me to lie about it?

Your version of the truth implied that because I do my own work that you send out to some studio that I personally would not trust with my art, I must be 16 and hang rock posters all over the house. That is far from the actual truth. So, in fact, you did lie about it, but it's fine, I won't see any more of your nonsense comments and life will continue to be just grand.
Maybe you need to learn the skills of that 'studio' you use to frame your pictures., buy a good printer, pick up a mat cutter and a miter cutter for fillets and try doing things the way I do, it's a lot of fun and you can make quite a lot of money once you develop your photography skills and art expertise besides saving the money you used to toss out because you couldn't do the work yourself.

 

[andy2000]

I use a hp 4m+ with the duplex option every day for my business. It has had some issues over the years, but I don't mind fixing things. I have a $5 parts donor in the closet for any major parts. I had to replace every capacitor in the printer and duplexer, so I wouldn't recommend one unless your handy with a soldering iron.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I still have a NEC Superscript 1400 with a couple of new laser toner cartridges. They stopped supporting it up to XP. I still use it on occasion using an XP laptop.

 

[rh71]

Laser tech that old must've cost a lot back then. I can't believe how cheap they are now and the toner is great as it doesn't dry like inkjets and last a long time. I used to hate printers because we would only buy inkjets due to cost.

 

[Pulsar]

Your version of the truth implied that because I do my own work that you send out to some studio that I personally would not trust with my art, I must be 16 and hang rock posters all over the house. That is far from the actual truth. So, in fact, you did lie about it, but it's fine, I won't see any more of your nonsense comments and life will continue to be just grand.
Maybe you need to learn the skills of that 'studio' you use to frame your pictures., buy a good printer, pick up a mat cutter and a miter cutter for fillets and try doing things the way I do, it's a lot of fun and you can make quite a lot of money once you develop your photography skills and art expertise besides saving the money you used to toss out because you couldn't do the work yourself.

Even more than that - I have a standard run-of-the-mill laser printer. I have several "prints" on the wall that I matted and framed of my wife's flower garden. We get constant comments on how beautiful the pictures are.

I'm so upset. Just imagine the comments if I'd done it RIGHT instead of being tacky. Bwhahaha.

 

[Muse]

Laser tech that old must've cost a lot back then. I can't believe how cheap they are now and the toner is great as it doesn't dry like inkjets and last a long time. I used to hate printers because we would only buy inkjets due to cost.

I paid ~$1800 for my HP4 back in 1993 or so. And it was used! Well, barely used, it had printcount of 6. I don't really know why the guy sold it to me, it wasn't clear, but he wasn't shady, seemed to just feel it wasn't what he wanted. That figure includes the postscript cartridge I bought for it separately. It was an HP4 and adding the cartridge made it effectively an HP4M (although it lacked the AppleTalk feature, I guess, but I didn't need that).

Yeah, the $150 Brother HL-5470dw printer I have now just seems like a no brainer upgrade. To turn my HP4M+ into a duplexer I'd have to buy the duplexer attachment. I looked into that. It's not cheap and the dang thing is bulky, IIRC. At 12 pg/min that printer is pretty slow, the HP4M was 8 pg/min.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Even more than that - I have a standard run-of-the-mill laser printer. I have several "prints" on the wall that I matted and framed of my wife's flower garden. We get constant comments on how beautiful the pictures are.

I'm so upset. Just imagine the comments if I'd done it RIGHT instead of being tacky. Bwhahaha.

Our friend's walls at home, and why he assumed ours looked tacky:

 

[Oyeve]

I still use my HP 4250. 17 years old and 1.8million prints! Still going and I changed the fuser once.

 

[manly]

Laser tech that old must've cost a lot back then. I can't believe how cheap they are now and the toner is great as it doesn't dry like inkjets and last a long time. I used to hate printers because we would only buy inkjets due to cost.

HP introduced the personal laser printer in 1989, the LaserJet IIP for $1500.
A slew of competing printers were available soon thereafter for around the same price point:
https://books.google.com/books?id=u7WbsmbttwYC&printsec=frontcover

My dad had a small home office, so we actually bought the Panasonic KX-P4420 around that time. We were a middle class immigrant family, so it is expensive by today's standards. But in general, PCs didn't commodify until sometime around Windows 98.

Looks like the first low end HP LaserJet was the 4L (still $1229), and the first one that was truly affordable was the LaserJet 1000 in 2001:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet

IIRC by then there were a number of competitors with entry-level laser printers for under $400.

 

[HeXen]

Your version of the truth implied that because I do my own work that you send out to some studio that I personally would not trust with my art, I must be 16 and hang rock posters all over the house. That is far from the actual truth. So, in fact, you did lie about it, but it's fine, I won't see any more of your nonsense comments and life will continue to be just grand.
Maybe you need to learn the skills of that 'studio' you use to frame your pictures., buy a good printer, pick up a mat cutter and a miter cutter for fillets and try doing things the way I do, it's a lot of fun and you can make quite a lot of money once you develop your photography skills and art expertise besides saving the money you used to toss out because you couldn't do the work yourself.

So you have a problem with someone being honest with you. Super cool, but I don't care about your butt hurt nor do I aim to fondle your emotions over printing out stuff to hang on your wall. Again, it's not my house.

 

[sdifox]

I had an HP 4L that lasted 15 years, wish it still worked.

At 4ppm I would give it up. Gave mine away at least a decade ago.

Still have a 4si in the basement

 

[sdifox]

PC Load Letter, What the Fark does that mean?

Paper Cartridge load paper

 

[Freejack2]

One Achilles heel of the HP printers, is their love of using solenoids with a pad. After a few years, the pad on the solenoid falls apart and will start to stick. In paper trays this will only result in double feeds or jams. But on your M651, there's a solenoid in the fuser drive assembly. When this starts to stick, it knocks the fuser gears out of alignment, and the printer stops working until the whole drive assembly is replaced. I attached a picture of where it is. You can expect to shell out about $500 in five to eight years, to have that replaced when the solenoid pad starts to stick.

 

[Scarpozzi]

My first ever printer was a Star Gemini 10X and I loved that printer. When I moved after college, I accidentally broke the cover and got mad and threw it away. Otherwise I’d still have it. I’ve toyed with getting another off eBay but I’m running out of space.

My dad used to sell Star printers in his computer shop and I remember having a Gemini at home in the Amiga 500 days... Dot matrix really has only been irrelevant the past few years....but you always hear people talk about the good old days and green bar paper. I used to work for a data center and we bought a brand new dot matrix printer in like 2006 to send out customer statements. The worst thing about those is the amount of paper dust those printers create when doing mass print jobs (mainly from perforated paper).

When my wife was going into a med school program in 2008, I bought a refurb Dell laser printer. The drum was smearing print really bad out of the box so I called support. In those printers, they had cartridges and replacement drums. Dell Printer Support was in Canada and the tech sent me a high capacity replacement drum and cartridge for my $130 printer that would do 6000 pages. It got her through school and lasted another 8 years until it got smashed while in storage. It was due a replacement cartridge by then so I didn't lose any sleep over it. Just saying, laser is the way to go...especially if you don't need a color printer. Printing color costs a lot more (could quadruple the cost of toner and they never run out at the same rate)

 

[eng2d2]

I have a brother hl2040 and its not bad. Still working and ink is very cheap for 2500 prints. Its black and white.

I also had a panasonic dot matrix printer 1180 that someone purchased from me.

 

[PlanetJosh]

My low end HP inkjet printers are still doing well after 15 years or so. A little off topic but I wonder how people like me, an old guy, managed without a photocopier built into the printer or a standalone one back in the 60's and maybe some of the 70's. It got old having to drive to the copy shop.

I'm assuming most families couldn't afford to buy a copy machine for the home back then. My dad wasn't willing to pony up for a copier back then so we just drove to make copies if our carbon copy method became impractical for the task.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Printers are like automobiles. They are not intended to last a long time as that would work against the manufacturer's business model of getting fools and idiots to buy a new one every handful of years.