As I have mentioned before I am a firm supporter of the “right to repair” and that service info and parts should be available for our technical gadgets -and this is a good example of why.
We came back to a “dead” printer, turns out the culprit was a single gear
I’ve got the printer apart** and extracted the cracked gear but, not without much more damage in terms of broken clips than I’d like - I can probably get it back together without too much being obvious but it is still annoying. It is also possible that I have damaged the print head but I think I “got away with it” - all because there isn’t a service manual available which at least covers disassembly.
So a part which is probably less than 1¢ commonly fails (judging from the ease with which I found that specific part and almost no others online) and turns the printer into e-waste (HP don’t sell the part, naturally).
We can’t go on with a “no repairs, buy new” culture.
** Quite a bit of “need to remove A, which means removing B, in turn C and D but D needs A to be removed so having to pull and twist and break some plastic” only to discover later that removing Y and Z some distance from ABCD means I can get the whole lot out and apart without damage, or could have done, had I known
Agree, especially inkjet - printers using ink cartridges are especially egregious - one of the reasons I want to keep this one alive is that it will accept non-HP cartridges (albeit with a warning) whereas newer ones just plain refuse to work.
True, but somewhere in the depths of my memory I think there was anti “lock in” legislation back (maybe way back) in the day in the US, Not for printers but some other aspect of IT. It’ll come to me
Right to repair legislation, and other legislation is currently going through the EU legislative process
It does mention easy to repair things, such as washing machines, TVs etc and also mentions adding phones/tablets etc but not explicitly printers. It also mentions access to repairs and repair materials and also mentions design for repair legislation although that seems to be a separate thing. A step in the right direction, but it’ll probably take a while to legislate and implement.
Edit: Obviously won’t change the situation in the UK, unless they decide to follow it.
Best thing we did was buy an ecotank, it has saved us an absolute fortune on ink, because it is so cheap to use we find we are actually printing out way more pictures for use around the home, printed out all our wedding photo albums as well, it’s excellent
I’ve certainly thought about it - but our print use is actually quite low and I’m not sure they are the best solution in that case.
My son offered to put it through the Uni’s printer but (as Hairbear points out) you need to find a good 3D model, and there might need to be some iteration - as he is an hour’s drive from us (and the round trip is circa £25 in petrol) and Amazon had them in stock for delivery today then I went with the “easy” option.
I have an Epson L3160 printer & scanner that I got in a Black Friday deal two years ago and it has been fantastic with excellent quality and very good operating costs, I went for one with the LCD screen for better usability, it just works with all our pc’s and phones.
