[svlug] good cheap Linux-compatible printer?

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Wed, 16 May 2007 23:00:10 -0700, Mark S Bilk wrote:

> I bought an H-P color inkjet about 7 years ago.  Initially it 
> worked fine, but when I didn't use it for a while, it developed
> problems.  Inkjets spurt the water-based ink by vaporizing a tiny 
> bit of it with tiny little resistors.  The problem is, if the 
> nozzle holes get clogged because you don't print every day and 
> the ink in the nozzles dries out, the ink doesn't flow, and it 
> doesn't cool the resistors when they're pulsed.  So the resistors 
> burn out, and appear as open circuits.  The microcomputer in the 
> printer senses that, and refuses to work, saying that you have a 
> bad printhead.  Oops, you're suddenly out forty bucks, and there's
> nothing you can do about it, because you can't reprogram the 
> little SOB.  Plus the head is slowly leaking black and multicolored 
> ink and making a real mess in there.

OK, you've riled me up enough to start an Epson rant: You were (arguably)
lucky. You had an HP. That meant that when the print head developed the
above inevitable problem, all you had to do was replace the cartridge,
since the print head was made a part of the cartridge by virtue of being
such a consumable item. Contrast that with Epson, where the print head is
a non-replaceable part of the printer that lasts for (read as "defines")
the lifetime of the printer, yet doesn't last a second longer than an HP
print head!!!