In article , Grumps wrote:
Well, I really thought Epson made better printers.

On what basis?
That they sell a lot of printers? That they get a lot of
advertising space? That they're as cheap as crap?

Epson have, and do still, make some very good printers. But they
also turn out a lot of crap that's engineered down to a price, and
designed to cost you 10 times as much in consumables as you paid for
the printer. Distinguishing which is which isn't particularly easy, but
a good starting point is the price tag. Crap is cheap.
At work, we run a number of 10 year old Epson inkjets that have
had tens of thousands of feet of continuous-feed roll and fan-fold
paper of use, and have gone through thousands of pounds worth of
cartridges each. All in dusty, salty, electrically harsh environments.
And we intend to keep on using them until the last one is dead, then
we'll mourn. You see, they have a bug in the firmware that allows you
to print arbitrarily long rolls of printout without any page skipping
(if you speak to them in ESC/P2).
£700 Epson printers whose most important characteristic is a
bug. Sums it up quite well really.

Penny cogs failing and trashing the entire machine sums the
commodity printer market up pretty well too.

What to do about it - buy a couple of second hand broken ones
off eBay, pay for the postage, and odds-on, one will have the cog you
need. But watch out for the postage costs.

--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Wed, 06 Dec 2006 01:15 GMT, but posted later.