printers

[dchenes]

Sometimes I wonder if I haven't got an overdeveloped sense of "caveat emptor". I've finally decided that although having a printer that fits on my desk is nice, and having gotten the thing for free is nice too, it doesn't really win out over the $35 I have to spend every time I need new ink cartridges and the fact that when it's out of ink, it simply won't print at all (no error messages or anything) and then it has fits for about ten minutes before it gets around to actually printing when I replace the cartridges. On top of which, it would be nice not to have to think about whether anything I've printed is going to get wet and run when it rains.

So this morning, having discovered that lo, the printer's out of ink again, I went looking around for a used laser printer. Ebay had a used LaserJet 6P, which is the printer I had at Tufts and got along very well with, going for $55. My immediate reaction was "Wow, I can even afford that!", but then almost instantly I started thinking "All right, what's wrong with it?" The blurb didn't say there was anything wrong with it, but I still didn't trust it enough to actually bid on the thing. (Aside from that, I'm not sure I trust PayPal anyway, but that's another story.) I went off to Kinko's and spent $35 on ink cartridges and decided that I want to be able to actually lay my hands on any used laser printer I'm thinking about buying.

So I think tomorrow, I'll go to the local computer repair/used computer shops and see if either of them has refurbished laser printers. I suspect I won't be able to beat $55 plus shipping, but at least I'll be able to actually see the thing before I buy it. Besides, now I've got at least a couple of months before I need to buy ink cartridges again, so it's not like I desperately need to buy a laser printer tomorrow if not sooner.

If I do finally buy a laser printer, I'm going to have to rearrange my living room a bit. The only problem with laser printers is that they all seem to be modeled after Sherman tanks.

Comments

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

The 5L and 6L eat paper like snackicakes, but I haven't heard anything too bad about the 6P. Better price its cartridges before you buy though.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

The 6P cartridges look to be around $85.

[dchenes.livejournal.com]

I can deal with that. In the three or so years I had the 6P at work, I remember changing the toner two or three times. The public printer was a 5-something, and ran out of toner about every other month because people seemed to insist on printing the entire internet.