Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...
inkjet because it clogs, dries up, and...
The only inkjets I have ever worked with which didn't clog themselves up on a regular basis were those HPs where the printing head was built-in to the cartridge such that every time you changed the cartridge you got a new print head, but then you could never tell whether streaky prints were due to clogged jets or running out of ink and they still needed dismantling in order to clean the head-cleaning sponge, which eventually filled up with so much congealed ink that you got brown ink smears all over the paper. Oh, and every time you changed a cartridge you needed to re-align the heads, which wasted both paper and ink.
I also owned a Xerox Phaser (solid ink) printer. It was a fantastic machine in many ways, and the ultimate evolution of inkjet technology, but even it - which went through a comprehensive cleaning cycle every time it came out of standby, and had as one of its consumables a roll of special cleaning fabric - suffered the occasional blocked jet which mostly could be cleaned by repeated runs of one of the cleaning cycles (and waste a lot of ink in the process) but had as part of its firmware a "jet re-mapping" procedure so that permanently clogged jets could be substituted for by adjacent ones. Replacing the print head was an extreme expense, and after 12 years in use that kind of spare part was difficult to find. I didn't replace it because it wasn't working (I think it only had one, maybe two permanently-blocked jets after all that time) - I replaced it because it needed a new drum as well as a new set of ink, and I bought a Lexmark colour laser printer, twice the speed, with "starter" toner cartridges claimed to do the same number of pages as a standard set of ink for the Phaser for somewhere around 2/3rds the price of maintaining the Phaser. It uses less electricity too.
Then again, I was looking for a laser to recommend to a friend the other day and noticed that very, very few of the "affordable" models come with paper trays which can hold a full ream (500+ sheets of 80gsm) of paper. I even found one model where the optional 500-sheet tray cost more on its own than buying the printer + starter toner + 250 sheet tray!
Perhaps the problem is that in a domestic situation printers get such intermittent use that inkjets are bound to clog up. Perhaps in an office they're better? Back in the day when we had a photographic shop on our high street, their massive poster printing machine was essentially an inkjet and seemed to be working fine whenever I was in the shop. Then again, at the prices they charged for a poster print, perhaps they could afford to replace print heads fairly often.
Whatever happened to dye-sublimation printers? I still have a Canon Selphy 6" x 4" photo printer and have often wondered (cost aside) what one of those would be like to use as an everyday A4 machine.
As a final thought, and not wanting to be too cynical about profit from sales of ink, is this just a "not invented here" thing? Am I right to remember that Epson manufactures its own inkjets, but that Epson lasers are badge-manufactured by someone else? More in my line of work, Epson has never (to my knowledge) produced a DLP-based projector; all their projectors use LCD technology. LCDs have traditionally had lifetimes of well under 10,000 hours because the filters and the LCD shutters themselves degrade in the light from the discharge lamps. I have had DLP projectors from Panasonic which have lasted well over 30,000 hours - the originals of those replaced LCD units where the "optical block" was only specified for 4,500h. However, with lamps moving to Laser and LED-based units which are cooler and produce less UV, perhaps it's time to revisit LCD projectors, which can produce "nicer" images than (single-chip) DLP under some conditions.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
