Johny B Good wrote
Rod Speed wrote

The first of them that I personally owned, an LA180 was as big
as a washing machine and I could barely put one in the back
of a Golf alone, and I was completely stupid to have done that.

Wow! I thought I was the only one daft enough to buy such
a monster from my local 'Government Surplus' dealer. :-)

I bought mine new, but I was flogging DEC LSI-11s with them and
other hardware, mostly to accountants and operations like that.

The LS120 was much heavier and I was never actually stupid enough
to try putting one of those into the back of the Golf by myself.

I had to rewire the parallel interface (including adding
an inverter or two) to make it 'Centronics Compatable'
for connecting to my Transam Tuscan S100 Bus machine.

I used mine on the DEC LSI-11 that I also had at home, serial.

It only printed unidirectionally but the bi-directional version
wouldn't have sped it up very much since the carriage return
action was so swift it was more akin to its predecessor, a
Teletype Model 33 ASR.

I didn't have one of those at home, just at work.

I think it eventually got replaced by an HP Deskjet 960C

Mine was initially replaced by an LA50
on the DEC Rainbow that I added later.

and I eventually hauled it out of my basement 'shack' to sneak
it onto the back of an untaxed wagon that had been illegally
parked across the road for the past couple of months ( I thought
that if we'd had to put up with this eyesore which was seemingly
being pointedly ignored by the authorities for the last two
months or so, I might as well get some utility out of it :-)

I've still got at least one LA120 or something in the big pile of stuff.

That was replaced by a much smaller dot matrix printer
that I only stopped using when I got the first inkjet printer
that produced a much better result and cost peanuts.

I gave up on inkjets long before they 'got cheap'.
The plain fact is I simply didn't do enough printing
to stop the heads clogging up between jobs.

I likely print even less than you do and don't
find that the Canon ip3000 clogs up at all.

I'd have done much better using a good old fashioned
impact dot matrix or daisywheel printer and a small
box of re-inkable ribbons (cartridge or open spool).

I wouldn't, basically because I did print quite a few CDs and DVDs.

The price of the consumables for all inkjet printers is hundreds
of times greater than that of the impact based technology

Not when you use the cheapest generic carts off ebay.

They in fact cost a lot less than the ribbons for the LA50
used to. It still works but I haven't used it for decades now.

which, imho, is a total disgrace.

That's why I deliberately bought one of the last of the Canons
that doesn't use chipped carts, for the very low price on ebay.

I stopped using that when PCs no longer supported the interface.

Presumably you're talking about Major OEM branded
ready built PCs like Dell and HP/Compaq et al.

No, I have always assembled my own using components.

The latest MoBos I bought brand new about four years ago still sported
the centronics/LPT header to connect a printer connector backplate to.

My latest doesn't. Is only a year or so old.

I suspect this may no longer be true today.

Yeah, it wasn't when I was picking a motherboard,
at least with the other things I wanted.

I guess I'll find out in a year or so's time
when I next upgrade my machines.

I replaced that with a decent USB inkjet and had that
work fine for years. Its just had an electronics card failure
and since I had picked up a spare at a garage sale for just
$5 it wasn't worth even changing a failed cap. It's the only
one that has actually died rather than become obsolete.

The last inkjet I purchased was a Canon Pixma iP4000 about
5 or 6 years ago which I'd specifically chosen for it's inclusion
of the centronics interface (to match a printserver) and the
ability to print onto CD-R /DVD-R printable media.

Yeah, that's the last is the main reason I changed from
the previous BJC-4310SP which likely still works fine.

I only renewed the 5 ink tanks twice using cheap
compatable carts before I realised home printing
with inkjet technology had become a mug's game

I don't believe that, particularly for printing on CDs and DVDs.

(and this was just for black ink printing, no colour photo follies).

I do prefer to print colored stuff colored. I don't print photos.

I really only used it to print optical disk media labels
to make them look a little more presentable than the
freehand permanent marker labelling I had used.

Yeah, I did it for that reason too. My writing is so bad
that people would whinge about the product key.

I only needed to print in black ink but, it turns out that
the black ink cart is totally ignored when printing on optical
disks and the photocolour 'black' mix is forced onto the user.

I don't get that with the ip3000. I normally print in blue tho for no
particular reason, just looks better than black on CDs and DVDs.

Once I realised there was no way to get around this reliance on the
colour carts to print onto optical media, its days as a printer were
numbered until I finally finished off the black ink printing to paper.
Now it just sits on it's little table in mute testament to the futility
of inkjet printer technology as sold to the gullible consumer by
the self destructive manufacturers. I'm sure I can't be in a
minority in this regard.

I still print a bit of stuff, but mostly for others who don't have a
printer.

We've had a couple of mono laser printers connected to
the LAN over the past 5 or 6 years, courtesy of my son,
now replaced by a colour laser, also purchased by him.
This nicely serves our very modest printing needs.

I don't print enough to warrant feeding one of those
even if I got one for peanuts in a garage/yard sale
and they don't print to CDs and DVDs. I print much
more of those than I ever print on paper for myself.

Any photos that I might deem worthwhile getting printed will be dealt
with by the likes of Asda or Max Spielman (or whoever) where proper
photo printing technology will provide prints at least as colourfast
as the traditional photo printing from film media (the same chemistry
just raster scanned with laser beams instead of directly projecting an
image from a colour negative).

True. I just don't print photos at all except when I chose to front the
magistrate after having got booked doing 160KM, to show him that
there was no danger doing that speed there. Didn't end up actually
needing to show him the photos, he let me off after I lied to him.

In my opinion, no home inkjet photocolour grade printer
can compete for cost and quality when asked to print photos.

True.

Once you've cast that 'advantage' aside, there's no point in wasting
money on another inkjet except, perhaps, on one designed specifically
for printing to optical media using cheap ink carts

Yeah, that's the reason I got that printer.

(preferably able to use a dedicated black ink when monochrome
is all that is needed rather than force you to consume an expensive
set of colour carts to print the job in photo black).

I just use one of the colors and print in that.

However, optical media seems to be going
the way of the Dodo (afaiac) so maybe not.

Yeah, I don't use it much anymore. Can be convenient
to post them, we can post them for the normal letter
stamp. You can do that with SD cards too, but with
the blanks you don't care if they come back or not
and they work better for the techklutzes that usually
can manage to put a DVD into something they have
to play the TV program that they missed or that they
have got me to download for them.

I suppose we're still going to have to 'fiddle' our own fixes to
the 'consumerism' driven 'planned obsolescence' of toner carts
that rely on a counter to prematurely declare exhaustion (in
one case, according to the recent BBC programme, "The Men
Who Made Us Spend", by a 'safety margin' factor of three!).

I just ensure that I don't buy those by researching them
properly before buying them, but that has changed a
bit now with that stuff showing up at garage sales
and facebook buy sell swap groups for peanuts.

I've no doubt the printer manufacturers will continue
to erode durability of laser printers and carts in their
never ending quest to shake down their 'consumer'
and milk the suckers[1] for all their worth.

Yeah, but it will be interesting to watch how
many bother to print much into the future.

I print almost nothing now, just the CDs and DVDs mostly.

The last thing I printed was a blowup of my driver's license
that I needed when claiming some unclaimed money of mine.
Their system did have a decent online form to fill in, but
printed that and wanted a copy of that sort of proof of
identity stuff posted to them. You couldn't upload that.

I've just done something similar for someone I know
who had to submit some documentation for a permanent
resident visa who doesn't have a printer or net service either.

The way the Printer Manufacturers are carrying on, the
dream of a "Paperless Office" might finally come true
a lot sooner than anyone would have expected! :-)

Yeah, it will be interesting to watch.

[1] Specifically, the suckers referred to in PT Barnum's "There's
one born every minute" quotation that seems to have been
taken to heart by globalised industries and manufacturers.