Printer advice

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glenwilson

glenwilson

NRU Heed
NRU Member
15 Mar 2012
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Falkirk, United Kingdom
My advice is never EVER EVER EVER buy a printer that doesn't have a screen on it. Had to set-up two now and it is the biggest pain ever.


Neighbour got a £25 HP from Tesco which actually works fine for text printing. That took 90 minutes of pain to set up.

I bought an Epson Ecotank ET-2710 for £120 and it is a really great printer. Should get about 2000+ pages out of the ink that comes with it. (My Mum just paid £70 for two cartridges for her HP printer). However, setting it up took about 2 hours and had to resort to a USB wired connection as the app was effing useless. Spent about 3 hours yesterday trying to work out why it was no longer connecting.
 
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my advice is: Get a laser printer. Ink cartridges are awfully expensive and on the long run the laser printer will save you a ton of money.
 
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I won an IBM b/w laser printer ages ago in a competition. Cartridges were about £100.

The Ecotank printer I have costs £32 for a full set of refills and you get about, according to the blurb, 4,000 prints. Even if I get 1,000 it will still be cheaper than normal ink jets. Printer cost me £120 and was normally £220.

A cheapish HP laser jet is about £160. A set of cartridges cost £150 with a page yield of about 1,000. Just not viable.
 
glenwilson said:
I won an IBM b/w laser printer ages ago in a competition. Cartridges were about £100.

The Ecotank printer I have costs £32 for a full set of refills and you get about, according to the blurb, 4,000 prints. Even if I get 1,000 it will still be cheaper than normal ink jets. Printer cost me £120 and was normally £220.

A cheapish HP laser jet is about £160. A set of cartridges cost £150 with a page yield of about 1,000. Just not viable.
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Where the hell did you get this info? Laser printers should have much larger yield
 
glenwilson said:
I bought an Epson Ecotank ET-2710 for £120 and it is a really great printer.
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This. I also have an Epson EcoTank, I've had it for 4+ years and I'm still using the ink that came with the printer. It was an expensive printer but the ink doesn't dry up so you save a lot of money if you don't print much.

Setup was eh, mediocre at best. I had to mess about a lot to get it working on the WiFi. I do recommend giving the printer a static IP address in your router. It's really annoying when you can't print because the printer suddenly has a different IP :ROFLMAO:
 
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Whats the difference between a LaserJet and an InkJet :unsure:
 
RIZLOID said:
Whats the difference between a LaserJet and an InkJet :unsure:
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Here's a quote from my best friend Google:

"The biggest differences between inkjet and laser printers is that an inkjet printer uses ink, is suitable for low volume printing, and is the traditional choice of home users, while a laser printer uses toner, is ideal for high volume printing, is mostly utilized in office settings but is also suitable and is a more economical choice for home use."
 
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I know that bit laser printer v inkjet printer but I see everywhere LaserJet printers.
Let me put it a different way a laser printer v laserjet printer whats the difference ?
 
The tactic IP address is a great idea as that is probably what the problem I had was.


Difference between laser and ink jet…

<cough> <cracks knuckles>

Laser printing uses a process called Xerography. The paper is passed over a charged wire which give the surface of the paper an electrical charge. A laser is then fired at the paper using a rotating prism to scan across the paper to remove the charge from the pixels that you do not want toner to be. The paper then passes over the toner which is attracted to the paper creating the printed image. The paper then passes through heated rollers that fuses (melts) the toner to the paper itself. For colour printers you need to either have a print engine for each of the colours or you need to pass the paper through the device for each colour of toner to create the image.

Ink jets use a piezoelectric principles. So each colour print cartridge has a piezoelectric pump that fires out a minute quantity of ink. As the paper is fed through the printer, it stops and the print head passes across firing the four colours as necessary to build up the shades of colours or black for print. The paper will then be fed through one line and the print head moved across the page thus the familiar noise they make. Though the volume of ink is small the cost is high because of the need to have a print head built into each cartridge.

In both cases the pages are formatted on the PC and the images along with the print control instructions sent to the printer. Though generic drivers can do a lot of the processing individual types of printers will have their own print drivers.

Small/domestic laser printers are fast but the cost of the device is higher because of the mechanical and thermal processes required but toner is relatively cheap. Ink jet printers are mechanically cheap to produce but the printer cartridges are expensive. You also need to be careful about what paper you use in each. Laser printer paper may not have properties suitable for ink jet printing and vice versa.

Duplex or double sided printing is easier in laser printers as you just need to flip the page over and send it through again but for ink jet you have to let the ink dry before flipping it. The result is that laser printers can maintain nearly the exactly same speed when duplex as when printing simplex but ink jets slow down considerably.

When I was working in production print all the systems we used were laser based technology but it looks like they have moved to inkjet. We had a couple of printers that cost 500k withe the servers used to run them being about 15k each. Could do about 200 A4 sides a minute. These had a continuous roll feed (sheets were cut automaticall) with sheet feed bins for different colour papers.

7AADB9F2 5B13 466F A895 39CD18528687
 
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I think Océ are now part of Canon. Visited the factories in Germany a few times when we were looking to replace our old Xerox printers. Quite a few nights in a restaurant under the Rathaus. Was probably quite ratted afterwards. We also looked at IBM printers but they just lied about what their printers could do. Xerox was basically just buy Océ they are much better.
 
I have a printer/network question.
I have a virgin media router (main) in my house situated on the second floor next to my pc and connected to it.
My (wi-fi) printer is on the ground floor.
The main router has wifi but sometimes my wife would moan over the signal failing to reach the tv plus a host of other wifi gadgets around the house including the printer.
So I bought another router which has a very strong wifi signal with 5 aerials and also does 5G (Tenda) also on the second floor and covers the whole house/garden/even to the car and pub 40m away. The printer is on the Tenda network, so fine with all wifi stuff (also on that network). The problem is my pc is connected to the main router so no access to the printer.
I see 2 options, connect my pc straight to the Tenda router or install a wifi card and connect through wifi (Tenda network)
1605537100512
Or is there another wizzardly way where I can access the printer through the main router ie: pc talks to main router who talks to Tenda router which then through wifi talks to printer :unsure:
without changing cables or changing the printers network every time ?
Are you lost ? I am too :ROFLMAO:
 
I assume only your main router is serving DHCP and not both routers? What mode is the 2nd router in?
 
RIZLOID said:
I have a printer/network question.
I have a virgin media router (main) in my house situated on the second floor next to my pc and connected to it.
My (wi-fi) printer is on the ground floor.
The main router has wifi but sometimes my wife would moan over the signal failing to reach the tv plus a host of other wifi gadgets around the house including the printer.
So I bought another router which has a very strong wifi signal with 5 aerials and also does 5G (Tenda) also on the second floor and covers the whole house/garden/even to the car and pub 40m away. The printer is on the Tenda network, so fine with all wifi stuff (also on that network). The problem is my pc is connected to the main router so no access to the printer.
I see 2 options, connect my pc straight to the Tenda router or install a wifi card and connect through wifi (Tenda network)
View attachment 7895
Or is there another wizzardly way where I can access the printer through the main router ie: pc talks to main router who talks to Tenda router which then through wifi talks to printer :unsure:
without changing cables or changing the printers network every time ?
Are you lost ? I am too :ROFLMAO:
Click to expand...
It sounds like you have to set the Tenda router to access point mode (If it has this option), then you should be able to reach the printer from your pc.
 
All I know is main router has 5 cat5 outs + 1 in so 2 outs are used, 1 to pc and the other to the Tenda in. Any connection to printer with wifi is fine but from my pc I have to e-mail the stuff to the printer ( printer has its own e-mail add ) so I can send stuff to the printer from anywhere ( why? 🤷‍♂️ )
 
I think this is one those solutions where you need to get your hands dirty within the set-up. The Virgin Media Hub isn't great. I would switch the Virgin hub to modem mode and only use the Tenda as the wifi source and connect the PC directly to that and anything else via wifi. Adding two routers to a network initially can be Ok but the addresses can really start to get borked after a while as they start to conflict.

Dynamic Page Builder | Virgin Media

www.virginmedia.com www.virginmedia.com

I ended up doing a similar thing. Put the Virgin into modem mode and then used my D-Link router as the main WiFi source. Connect the PC to the D-Link Router and then have one dumb switch for other ethernet connected devices like hubs for lights, heating, media servers etc and another switch for Sky box, Apple TV, Receiver, Mac Mini Server, etc

The printer and all other devices connect to the printer as that is routed through the D-Link.

Network
 
RIZLOID said:
All I know is main router has 5 cat5 outs + 1 in so 2 outs are used, 1 to pc and the other to the Tenda in. Any connection to printer with wifi is fine but from my pc I have to e-mail the stuff to the printer ( printer has its own e-mail add ) so I can send stuff to the printer from anywhere ( why? 🤷‍♂️ )
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It sounds like you have it set up so that the 2 routers create two seperate networks. This is why your pc in the first network can comunicate with the printer in the second network. If you set the second router (Tenda) to access point mode, it just extends the first network in stead of sperating the two.
 
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We have a HP colour laserjet I used in my home office, I got the printer for free from the company I worked for when I retired as it was about 5 years old and weighs half a ton. I buy good generic cartridges and these are not that expensive but still produce good prints and lots of pages. Printing over wifi works fine, drivers are stable and my only complaint is the very noisy, frequent and unsolicited calibration and cleaning :rolleyes:

We used to have an inkjet and it was fine but the major problem was whenever we didn’t print anything for say 8-9 days - the nozzles dried up and that was a real headache...
 
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