On 12/05/10 03:25, John Levine wrote:
My printer is a sturdy old Lexmark Optra T610. CUPS has a driver,
which does duplex, N-up, and so forth. Each toner cartridge is good
for over 10K pages, so I buy one about every two years, and I can
usually find one for $100, making the per page cost very low.
Lexmarks are very badly designed (but very slowly getting better
ergonomically), expensive to run, and crap themselves with generic
toner. ...
So, just to be clear, you're telling me that I am imagining the fact
that my printer has worked reliably for ten years?
You got galactically lucky.
I can believe that Lexmark has made bad printers, but if you can
still find an Optra T, they're great.
Having recently spent some time in a place where I fixed Lexmarks on a
regular basis I'd find that very had to believe. I'd steer clear of any
Lexmark printer, but the T's were the biggest white elephant I've ever
come across- and I have worked on just about every make known. I'd
repair around 100 a week, and many I'd seen the previous week with a
different error. The error codes are enigmatic, and the repair
procedures (by Lexmark themselves) have no clue as to what is really
happening. You just get used to whats what and fix it.
And that was just recent experience. My longer term experience shows me
that this is not an age related problem but an inherent lack of
experience in building printers. IBM make computers- they make very shit
printers, but they were tired of losing to the competition who were good
at making printers, so they decided to throw their hat in the ring as well.
Quality wise they don't even rate either. I'd say Xerox, HP, Canon are
competitive- at the higher end are good photo laser. Kyocera, HP make
the most durable and reliable workgroup class- Kyocera offer a cheaper
rate than any. Oki... not entirely sure. They used to make cheap
photocopiers which were reasonable. Canon and Kyocera SOHO personal
lasers are neck and neck. The rest are so so. But by far my worst
experience has been pretty much anything with Lexmark on it- ink or laser.
Inkjets its between Epson and Canon, Epson are good to OSS and Canon are
cheap to run. Epson definitely produce a better photo though. But an
Epson laser is very expensive to fix.
I have a Samsung colour laser which I had some driver issues with (but
got it working very well now), and I've used Canon inkjets and Xerox
personal lasers. I am a tech and I know what runs and what the monthly
output ratings are, as well as service counters. The monthly output of a
workgroup Lexmark is not even a third of the Kyocera SOHO laser- that
should tell you something: 100,000 pages a month for a Kyocera 1020D
(personal/SOHO), compared to 30,000 for a Lexmark T630 (workgroup).
Ridiculous to think they'd even compete! Plus the Kyocera is around
$500-600 compared to $3000 for Lexmark? I've seen the Lex get replaced
by 2 1020D's- redundancy and duplexing for 1/3 the price! Not even a
second thought...
Good luck to you, but I wouldn't bother looking to repair the T610...
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