The laserjet II was based on the Canon LPB8 engine, which in my opinion is the most reliable laser printer ever designed. As you say, they go virtually forever, and if and when they DO break, they are actually repairable. The thing is, though, that they were designed to a specification, rather than a price. As such, originally they were VERY expensive, but by god they LAST.

Nowadays, even in the business sector, much fewer devices are designed this way. (I can think of a particular car audio system, but I digress) The vast majority of products are designed to be cheaper than the competition, rather than better. Sure, there are exceptions, and if you're in the business that requires this sort of thing you happily pay the price, but in the consumer market everything is designed to be as cheap to make as possible.

Inkjet printers are a very good example of this, as are razors. Both rely on a consumable, both have the obvious main bit (the printer itself, or in the case of a razor, a stick) practically given to you, and both make you pay through the nose for the running costs. In the case of printers, I have seen some, such as an apollo one, which really did cost noticeably less than a set of genuine replacement cartridges.

one guy I know spent a couple of years doing a lot of printing, and simply bought a new printer every time the ink ran out, and threw the used-up ones away. It saved him about 30% over the cost of buying new ink, and he dumped about one a week. As an engineer I object strongly to this design philosophy, but the market seems to require it.

The epson printers are perhaps the worst of the offenders. They are cheap, yes, and also produce what may be the best output of any of the lowcost printers I've seen, but they are also the most expensive to run and the most unreliable. What really irks me is that I knew this, and still bought one

The HPs are better in many ways, since the cartridges are cheaper, don't have a little chip which locks the cartridge to the printer and disallows third-party suppliers, and have the head incorporated into the cartridge which gets around much of the blocking problems, but they just don't have the same output quality. For real photorealistic quality, I haven't seen any inkjets that beat the epsons. At least for a week or so, until the printer dies!

Colour laser printers aren't really an option. I do in fact have one, a Xerox Docuprint C55MP, with network card, loads of supplies, spare drum in addition to the new one in it, all for £200. And no, it wasn't nicked. It came, 'dead', from the company of a friend's wife, and I fixed it. As it turned out, the problem was that it had been used by an idiot, who had somehow managed to fill most of the mechanism with bright blue toner, bend several important bits inside when vacuuming the toner out again, and bugger the drum. The drum was replaced, but due to the bent bits it still didn't work. They bought yet another drum, then decided it wasn't worth the effort, and binned it along with all the supplies. The thing has only done about 5000 prints, which is less than a third of it's rated monthly output!

It took about half an hour to get it working perfectly, and for a lot of things it's damned good. Quite fast, very sharp output, and actually very cheap to run. Even though I have loads of toner, etc, the cost of replacements vs the number of prints on those replacements makes it quite economical. The problem is that it's no good for photo-quality output, since the dot size is too big. It's also built like a tank, and weighs more than you would believe possible from it's size. I keep wondering whether the chassis is made of depleted uranium

I still think, unfortunately, that the only viable solution is a dyesub.

pca