Torrentus wrote:
Well if you use old printers for text only printing then I see no problem, but I can't believe that an old laser print from 1993 can beat latest mainstream inkjet printers when printing 32Bit high resolution photos that contain fine complex gradient levels. This would be too good to be true
Not only that. It would be impossible, seeing that it's a black and white machine only

I did print a couple of pictures just for shits and giggles and they turned out surprisingly well, but nothing I'd use for a photo album. Then again, I'm not into photo printing at all. I keep it digital at all times and if the need arises, I'll always go to the copy shop, drug store or a professional photo studio. Their machinese are way better than what you can get for household use and also cheaper, unless you print pictures in insane quantities.
Torrentus wrote:
Yea, 50.000 pages is really a high number, this is only logical because back in the 90's planned obsolescence wasn't that aggressive as nowadays.
Well, since it's a business printer, 50k isn't that much. Considering that if you printed like 150 pages a day, you could plow through that in a year. I'm really surprised that they did implement such a mechanism that early on. Back in the day, the hardware had to last, because it was expensive and people wouldn't just scrap it for a new replacement. Also, it wouldn't do your brand name much good seeing that the market was much smaller back then but with a lot more competitors (Olivetti and Oki come to mind). So, I'm still sceptical about that rumor. May be the message will pop up, but may be it can also be ignored. Imagine the printer just refusing to work during a busy work day for no good reason other than reaching an arbitrary number. That would be the end of the business relationship between me and HP.
Torrentus wrote: In today's standard, hardware engineers program and limit the counter to a really low number, home office printers will likely to start having a strange behaviour after 5.000 pages or so... But there are already hackers and crackers that have programmed mini software which resets the counter to zero
Unfortunately, this is true. And seeing that some printers are sold at prices that could be considered lower than the production cost of the unit, it's really no wonder. But it's not always a page counter that stops the printer dead in its tracks. Ink cartridges have chips that might signal the printer that they have been used up. The Canon MGS 5250 had those and the chip resetter I used with them wasn't reliable. It required the user to refill as long as the chip still detected ink. Once it locked down the cartridge for being empty there was no way back. Also, after I sold the machine, Amazon was flooded with complaints of this printer model breaking after what seemed like an arbitrary amount of time. So page counters aren't always the culprit. I print extremely little and despite that, almost each and every one of my inkjets broke for no good reason.
So the consequence I take from that is that I will only get laser printers, since they are build for huge printing quantities and are also build to last longer. So far that worked out well. If I couldn't get a reliable old laser printer for so little money, I'd refrain from buying a printer at all since it's almost a pure waste of money considering the low printing costs at copy shops. A hundred bucks could net me a nice printer, but for that money I could also print 3300 pages at the copy shop around the corner. I don't think I ever printed more than 500-1000 pages at home in the last 20 years. No way I could make an inkjet pay for itself.
Torrentus wrote:
But inkjet printers are generally better when printing photos but also with problems
They most likely are. But then again, I don't see the point in going through a quality degrading digital-analog conversion just to get them on a tiny piece of paper instead of just showing them in all their glory on a huge TV-screen or computer monitor
