[rescue] Phaser ink

[Phil Stracchino]

Ethan O'Toole wrote:
>> sometimes, but if you keep the printer on, you don't waste supplies in 
>> cleaning cycles.  The deep clean on the latest crop of phasers is far less
> 
> I thought by default the printers also ran through cleaning cycles while 
> sitting idle? I remember stories of offices where they go to use the 
> printer after a week or two, and all of the ink is sitting in the $150 
> toilet tray, a huge black blob?
> 
> Cool printers, but I think they are too costly to operate.

At a former employer, Sales & Marketing declared they wanted a high
quality color printer to print brochures in-house.  I got together with
two of the Marketing designers and our quality assurance engineer, and
we went looking at color laser printers.  We looked at Xerox, Ricoh,
Minolta, and two or three others, most of them with EFI Fiery RIPs.
Several of them were ... nothing short of stunning.  One printer
produced images that were almost three-dimensional in their clarity and
brilliance.

The S&M managers brought in a Tek Phaser 340 to look at.  Because, you
know, it was cheaper.  Never mind that it could only handle letter size
paper, couldn't duplex and couldn't do full bleed, while several of the
printers we were looking at could do full-bleed duplex tabloid size on
heavy card stock.  It was cheaper.

Steve (the quality engineer) and I looked at this thing.  "Hey," we
said, did you realize this thing takes fifteen minutes to warm up before
every print job?  Did you see how much was it wastes, and how much it
uses?  This thing is gonna be EXPENSIVE.  And look what happens if you
set your coffee cup down on top of your presentation."

"But they'll give us the black ink for free!", said the managers.

"Yeah," Steve and I said.  "At the price of the color ink, they can
afford to."

Management went with the Phaser 340.

Three months later, the admin whose cube it was next to was saying, "I
HATE that thing!  Every time it warms up for a print job, CLUNK CLUNK
CLUNK CLUNK!  And it takes fifteen minutes to warm up!"  Marketing was
saying, "You know, we can't print anything bigger than letter size
brochures on this."  Accounting was saying, "Even WITH getting the black
ink blocks free, we're paying fifty cents a page on consumables to feed
this thing!"


Steve and I just said, "Hey, we told you so.  You didn't want to listen."



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.