The Downfall Of Inkjet Machines
In this series of articles I would like to discuss the history of inkjet printers and were they stand in today’s market. Old style inkjets had a very simple functional design with very few options, built durable and easy to use. Now they have fancy sleek black covers, a small design, complicated insides, and disposable units that drain your wallet as fast as they use ink. Not a very promising outlook for end users looking to purchase a new long lasting machine. Maybe with more articles and complaints about the poor quality of recent inkjets compared to the old trusted durable style, manufactures will see the need to change the quality of product they are putting out to save their already tarnished reputations. In this first article, I’ll give you a brief history of the inkjets and talk about some of the aspects of these devices that gave them such a good reputation.
The Beginning of Inkjets
Inkjet technology was first patented in the late 1800’s. However, they weren’t first used commercially until the 1950’s. Skip a head a few years to the late 1980’s early 1990’s when HP came out with their mass produced DeskJet series that made inkjet printers an affordable machine that just about everybody could afford. Some of these early DeskJet’s like the 500 and 550 are still in operation today.
Inkjet Early Years  Â
13 years ago, straight out of High School, I started working for a small local office supply, service, and repair company. In 1998 everybody was purchasing custom build PC’s and further expanding their home office setting with affordable inkjet printers. It was a fascinating time in the life of a future technician like myself. I had soon fallen in love with HP’s new 670, 680, and 690 series DeskJet models. These durable little machines with their fast print speeds and high quality output had people like myself excited about what the future inkjet market had in store. These machines sold for around $300 to $400 and all parts inside the machine were easily purchased from HP. They had about a total of 30 parts in the whole machine. Majority of the parts inside the machine, with the exception of the mainboard ,sold for under $20. So with a $60 to $75 service charge plus maybe a $20 part it was an easy decision to repair a machine rather than replace it.
Inkjets Use to be Easy to Repair
The second nice feature with these old machines was there basic design. Besides the mainboard, paper sensor PCA, and two motors all the other parts were mechanical in nature. These machines could be torn down to nothing and rebuild in less than an hour, making them a dream repair machine for technicians. Repairs were easy, parts were cheap, and happy customers would walk out the door ready to get back to work with their repaired inkjet printers. Repair companies like myself gladly worked on these machines. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s we were seeing about 25% to 35% percent of our repair jobs on inkjet printers. Pretty good percentage given the fact that just a few years before we weren’t working on any.
Cartridge Technology in Early Inkjets
Another great feature was the printhead or ink cartridge. Machines like HP DeskJet’s and Lexmark’s used ink cartridges that had the printhead built into the cartridge. Why is that so nice? If you had a print quality problem majority of the time simply replacing the cartridge would resolve your issue. Little need to take your machine in for repair when you could fix the issue by yourself.
Affordable Cartridges
Probably the best thing about these machines from an end users point of view was the value of the ink cartridges. Yeah, they still cost about $25 to $35 per cartridge but you only had two cartridges. 1 black and 1 tri-color. You knew when the cartridge was out because you could pick up a new one in one hand and the used one in another and could actually feel the difference in weight. The 45A ink cartridge sold in the 700, 800, and 900 series inkjets had about a 1000 page yield. Cartridges had indicators on the front to tell you the level and some like the 26A and 29A had clear plastic covers so you could easily tell when the cartridge was near empty.
Durable Inkjets
In my opinion the best thing about these early machines was how dependable they were. Majority of these old machines still could be used today if people hadn’t thrown them away. They had very few problems and with them, being mainly mechanical inside, the repairs were always cheap. It wasn’t uncommon to have a machine for 5 to 6 years before replacing with a new machine. With that being said, most of these machines weren’t replaced because they were non-repairable. They were replaced for newer technology, machines that weren’t repairable, leading to the invent of the disposable inkjet.
Conclusion about Old Inkjet and DeskJet Machines
These old machine were great. Kind of like old cars. They were very basic without a lot of bells in whistles. When things went wrong you could take it to any repair company and have them fix it. The prices were in line with the value of the machine and you didn’t have a lot of unwanted internal gadgets breaking all the time causing expensive repair bills and unfortunately constant replacement of machines. The cartridge technology and prices made it seem, while somewhat expensive, more comparable to laser printers toners and the machines would last forever if you wanted it to.
Next Article
Alright that’s it for now. I don’t want to make these articles five pages long to keep you from coming back or falling asleep at your computer. In the next article, I will talk about the middle years to present day machines using this technology and in the follow up article I will discuss the pros and cons between the old technology and new and what HP and other manufactures don’t want you to know.
For More information involving Printer Repair and some articles I have written check out: http://blog.marketpoint.com/
