Canon printer hacked to run Doom (opens in new tab)

This is what me and my wife did. She bought the same laser printer she has at work for home and it works amazing. It was cheap, and not being caught in the ink racket makes it cheaper.

There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.

This is what I did. I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (HD-53??) back in 2012 for use printing out college junk. If memory serves, I was on the starter cartridge for a year or so, In fact, I may still be on the starter cartridge. I can't even remember if I bought a new cartridge.

The total cost has only been about $150 or $200.

I'm not nostalgic. Back in 2002, I bought a cheap little Brother laser fax. Refills ran $30 for a few thousand pages; I could make copies; and life was grand. In 2007, the output degraded to crap when the drum died. The cost of a replacement drum was more than I paid originally, so it went to the dumpster. I've pitched a lot of printers over the years. Other than the three I have currently, the only two I gave away in working condition were the Star I bought in 1988 and an Hp 550c [a printer that made pleasant noises unlike the 600 series that succeeded it].

Anyway, I'm tired of pitching printers. Wide carriage allows printing US B size drawings. Tractor feed means not running out of paper in the middle of a job. And impact technology means not thinking about running out of Magenta every time I print something.

I don't want to wait for nozzles to.clean or fusers to heat up. I just want the damn thing printed quick enough that I don't have time to browse HN. It's about flow.

Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models.

e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers

Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver:

e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520

Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more.

--EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.

This is exactly right. Of course to understand it you have to have experienced an 'early' inkjet printer which would, if left alone for a week "break" by not printing one or more colors. That led to printers with a wiper sponge and a bit of ink solvent. Better but not really all that reliable, and that led to the current squirt+clean+vacuum sort of systems which had been standard in large format printer/plotters for a while.

And yes, given the price per oz of ink the process is quite expensive (I've heard that it is as high as 0.25/cleaning). And in the least expensive Canon printers the "waste ink" sponge is irreplacable leading to a planned obsolescence of the printer itself. Most of the 'key' ink jet patents have expired so it may be possible for someone to build a printer that is more economical but so far no one has. I suspect if they externalized the true cost of the printer and avoided the ink subsidy that they would not sell enough printers to stay in business.

I chuckled at the idea of using an old 24 pin dot matrix (or why not go seriously old school and use a line printer) printer, it is informative to note that people used inkjet printers that broke down a lot rather than use the older dot matrix printers. Granted the Canon system sucks, the Epson system is a bit better but not by much, HP, well HP can't really afford to lose any margins in their printer business.

So perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new printer from a new company.

Yep, printer drivers are already available in Windows, which is nice. According to the manual, the 4m uses 195W when printing, and 55W in standby. The 5m is 300/80, and 22W in "power save" mode. I'm guessing that's a mode where the fuser is fully cooled off, so it's probably slow to spool up if you enable that.

Everyone has their own priorities and processes. For me, being able to throw half a dozen pages into a document feeder and get a small, good-quality PDF in my email a minute later is a big step up from the effort I used to put into assembling image files into multi-page online resources for my students.

What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles? (Every time I've photographed printed pages, I've wound up feeling stuck with a bunch of work to make the output actually look reasonable.)

I bought a scanner earlier this year, but I use it exclusively for scanning film negatives. (and positives on occasion; slide film is gorgeous!)

I also bought a dedicated semi-pro photo printer last year. A full load of ink costs me $120 for 8 itty bitty tanks.