Here are the printer comments
MVANHOUTEN at PCI.ALBION.EDU
MVANHOUTEN at PCI.ALBION.EDU
Fri Feb 6 10:17:34 EST 1998
Wow! Due to popular demand, I'm sending this summary of comments to
the list.
Mike
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We're using the old HP 4L's. They work great especially since the paper
tray is somewhat "hidden". If you really want color though, I would
suggest looking into the Lexmark line of inkjets. They're quite a bit faster
than Epson, Cannon, and HP. They run about the same price too. The
only draw back is the cartridges are hard to find.
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Look into HP682's... I've had quite good experiences with them.
LaserJets 4 and III are pretty good... For heavy duty loads, I suggest a HP
Laserjet
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I bought an HP5N with a JetDirect server card. Now the CD-ROMs,
Netscape, staff pcs (about 22 or 23) feed that one high speed laser.
We use the Jet Admin software to crank down the quality of the public
print jobs and staffers can enhance it for important stuff. And, we have
a couple of shared Deskjets for private staff work. It's fast, cheap, low
maintenance.
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We currently operate two sites with public access printing facilities. Our
Central Library uses our old back-office printer, a Data General Laser
(which uses a Texas Instruments engine). It prints at 4ppm and serves 5
public access workstations. We use a microplex M205 print server to
enable connection to our ethernet network.
The other site uses a serial print sharer to share a HP 5L Laser Printer
amongst 3 workstations. If you are looking at using a printer per
workstation, the 5L could certainly suit your requirements. It's not the
fastest printer, but it has a small footprint and is rated at 600dpi.
Both of these printers have worked faultlessly for us in these
environments.
I certainly tend to prefer lasers as opposed to inkjets or bubblejets for
public printers. Our first public access PC used a small inkjet printer and
we had nothing but problems with it.
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We're using several HP 672Cs at our library, and they're both fast
(relatively) and cheap ($200). They can print in color, or you can set it to
gray, to conserve on the costly color cartridge. Best buy in its class,
right now, although there are better printers by this same company. In
my office I use the Epson 400 Color, which is nice but way too slow for
public access.
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For about 3 years we used Deskjets (520's). We had frequent problems
with paper pickup, the students occationally would steal the ink cartidges
($20-30 each), and the printers worked very slowly with graphics
images (eg. anything off the web and in particular, pdf files)
This year we went to networked laser printers (hp laserjet 5m's). While
not trouble free, the cost per page is less and they are mechanically
more sound.
*************************************************************We have tried a
panasonic dot matrix hooked up to two of our OPAC terminals, a deskjet
(HP 540) hooked up to another two, and an HP 5M laser printer hooked
up via the network by JetDirect card to the rest of the OPAC's. We like
the laser hooked up via the network the best, by far, and we are
planning to hook the rest of the OPAC's to the HP 5M.
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HP DeskJets--usually run extremely well--yet some drawbacks.
1. They're (HP) are phasing out the older, simpler models. We run
DeskJet
600's--black ink only. The newer ones include color, which is pretty
expensive--patrons will probably choose color over black and white.
Cartridges tend to run 25-30 bucks for the original HP. You can refill, but
HP says it voids the warranty.
2. If you plan on high volume using inkjets, plan on grabbing a bowl of
warm water and a lint-free cloth. DeskJets can get dirty really fast if you
do alot of volume. Takes about 15 min. to clean each one. Ours here
started streaking etc. I called HP and they said to do the above
measures. Not that bad--but does take some time to get in the nooks and
crannies.
3.If you do much volume--DeskJets are slow. Compared to LaserJets,
they do extremely well-printed copies and resolution is very good, but
man are they slow. If you're in a rush to print something for the patron,
seems like they take forever.
4.With all this, I would still recommend a older black-ink DeskJet for low
volume workstations. Incredible printers. We have over 12 of them and
they run well.
HP LaserJets
While I cannot speak for the higher-priced LaserJets, I can tell you about
two models. We run both the LaserJet 5L and 6L printers. Basically,
they are the same printer, 6L's are the newer version. Here are some
thoughts:
1. Incredible printers--they print fast, extremely good resolution (600 dpi),
and we have had not one break down yet. We have 10 of these mixed
between 5L and 6L.
2.Cartridges from HP from places like CompUSA run $55 apiece. The
printers have a toner-saving mode you can use. With this turned on, we
had cartridges last 3-4 months apiece. This may seem short, but we do
alot of volume on our Internet terminals. While you can refill the
cartridges--we just plop a new one in. HP, probably in an effort to sell
more, recommends that you use new ones. This is strange, because in
the box they will pay
UPS to ship your old cartridge back to them for recycling?????
3,We have had minor problems with the printers--but I feel that is due to
patrons. What are the problems? Instead of using the vending cards,
changers, etc. for the printers, we simply leave the paper bins on the
printers empty. Patrons buy paper from the circ. desk or the ref desk
and put it in the bins themselves. The problem with this is that the way
HP designed the printers, sometimes they don't pick up the paper if a
patron only puts one sheet in. If they put more than one page in, the
printer usually has no trouble. If it can't pick the sheet up--it usually
flashes a paper jam message. It's not jammed, just can't pick the sheet
up. Another problem--or maybe not--is that the printers use the memory
and processor of the pc to print the page. This usually results in better
printing, but if patrons are trying to do too many things at once, the
machine will lock up.
To get around this, I have turned off the spooling of the print jobs so that
when a patron pushes print, the machine will not let them do anything
else until the page prints. The printer also has a regular driver as well.
Another problem is patrons push print, and then keep pushing it. We had
one machine with 35 print jobs. This locked it up. Another sticky point is
that when the paper does jam--it's somewhat of a pain to get the sheet
out if it rips--have to dismantle front part of printer to get to it.
All in all, I like our HP's. I guess of course, everybody has a favorite
printer, but these have really worked well for us. We have one Epson
around
Stylus 800+, but it is terrible--print heads been replaced twice, really
dislike the machine. Another point is that HP has good phone support
usually. Is a toll call, but can usually talk to a technician in under 5 min.
If you want, here are some web sites that might help you decide:
www.hp.com www.zdnet.com www.pcmag.com
Hp's site is very good--you can download drivers, faq's and
troubleshooting charts.
The other two sites are for computer magazines and you can get
reviews, etc.
You might also want to go to Dejanews--it's a search engine that
monitors, archives newsgroups, and you can see what others are
saying about printers.
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We added HP DeskJet 870cxi printers with our new public
workstations
(our old workstations had Epsons as well). The price is fairly
reasonable (we paid $400), and the speed and print quality are good.
These are color printers, though you could default them to grayscale
printing only through the printer settings. Your environmentally
conscious students may also appreciate being able to recycle paper,
or
do back-to-back printouts, as the tray is open. In almost two months,
I've only seen one paper jam (out of 8 printers), and I caused it!
The one downside seems to be the rate at which we go through ink
cartridges. Ten to fourteen days seems to be the short end of the
spectrum for usage, which could lead to piling expenses if you have
constantly heavy usage. The black cartridges $27-$30 each.
All in all, we're still pretty happy with this choice, as opposed to a
shared printer.
I would like to add a general warning, and apologies if you've heard
this before. If you are using Windows NT on your workstations, be
sure
to check that the printer and its drivers will be compatible with NT.
A hardware compatibility list comes with the NT Workstation
software.
Fortunately, the NT drivers for the 870cxi are available both from HP
and from Microsoft, and this seems to be the case for many of the HP
models.
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We're using HP DeskJet 620 at our public (reference) Macs but there are
newer models out. I think they're past the 682 and 855 and up to the 870.
We have one for each of 4 workstations right now.
There were some changes in the design from my old HP 520 that I was
not happy to see. There is a flimsey plastic tray over the paper that
interferes with printing when it is shifted by students carelessly loading
paper. Since the area is not closely supervised, this happens a lot. The
old HPs were more heavy duty. Also, the new HPs will not print at all
unless two fairly expensive ink cartridges are installed -- one black and
one color. No, an empty one or two black ones won't fool it. The old HPs
would print with either cartridge installed.
The printers themselves are inexpensive. They are very fast in
grayscale, much slower in color mode. The printouts from the web are
absolutely beautiful. I saw something that impressed me the other day.
Daughter of someone in the library had sent photos to be developed at
Mystic Color Labs and paid the $4.95 or whatever to have them delivered
via a passworded URL.
She emailed the password to proud grandmother who looked at the
photos and printed her favorite on one of our HPs. The printout is great;
sky, grass, fleshtones and all. Not how we had intended for printers to
be used but impressive none the less. Since we don't monitor them, I can
only imagine what the students print out. Fleshtones....hhhmmmm????
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I recommend some of the newer reasonably priced (usu. under $400)
personal laser printers, e.g., the Panasonic KXP6100 or the HP
LaserJet6L (have used both, but not in public PC set ups). Both can do a
lengthy full-text article in practically no time at all (just did a 24 page doc
in about 3-4 minutes on an HP), have a small footprint, get good reviews,
and seem to have good maintenance records. The HP (unsure about the
Panasonic) can also be hooked up to an A/B switch box if you want two
PCs to share a printer.
I've always been a fan of inkjets, but most of them seem to be color now,
and unless you actually *want* color capability, the presence of
graphics, links, etc.on a Web page can slow printing to a crawl (and
most users won't know to adjust the settings to grayscale). Even the
simplest OPAC record can take forever.
If inkjet is your preference, one caution: if you decide to go with a
commonly-purchased printer like an HP, be prepared to replace ink
cartridges which occasionally travel to that similar model back in the
dorm. Doesn't happen a lot, but the cartridge is so easy to remove, the
temptation is hard for some to resist.
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We currently us the Deskjets at the public terminals. We started out with
a variety of printers, but these have held up so well, it is all we buy.
I must say that the workhorse out of the group is the old 500 series.
We have 6 in almost constant use with no problems whatsoever. The
new printers we have added are the 682C. They appear to be fine, but
one was bad out of the box. They are easy to use, easy to
troubleshoot, easy for the public to figure out.... I recommend them highly.
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We're using Nec Superscript 860 printers on each workstation. It's a
laser, 8ppm, costs $399. It's the fastest 8ppm laser printer I have ever
seen - the first page is usually out within 10-15 seconds. They have
excellent output quality. Our patrons love them. The only downside is
the cost of the toner cartridges.
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We've had trouble with HP Deskjet 680Cs for this kind of use - the
costly color cartridge primes itself with each reboot, then if no color is
ever printed, begins to gum up. Eventually the priming operation fails and
the printer stalls, demanding a new color cartridge before it prints B&W
again. We've had good luck with 600 and 600C printers - but we've
decided to get B&W-ONLY printers next time for B&W applications.
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Well what I'd suggest concerning the 680 models is to take out the color
cartridge...
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Problem is, they won't work without a cartridge loaded, and it can't be an
empty cartridge, either.
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That's been our experience, too, but Mr Davidzon told me his DO
work without a cartridge, so maybe there's hope. Are we talking about a
680C
Deskjet here? The 600C let you switch between a color and a B&W
cartridge.
I'd love to beat this - our department head grilled some HP reps a few
weeks back and they had no ideas either. For use on a staff desktop
they're great little color printers, but in public areas they die quickly (it's a
long story why we have them instead of the 600Cs we ordered). >
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Because of the per-page printing costs of inkjets, we removed our inkjet
printers from public areas and put networked laserprinters into place.
(We removed Deskjet 600's, and now have 19 library owned, and about
35 computer center-owned PC's printing to a combination of 3
HPLaserjet5M printers.)
I remember per page estimates of the cost of consumibles for printing,
something like 2 to 2.5 cents per page for laser, and 4 cents per page
for inkjets using black ink. That would probably be based on 5%
coverage of the page with ink. Many web pages produce output that
requires far more ink than that. So the real costs may be twice as high,
or more.
This shifts the economics from cheaper to buy inkjets, towards cheaper
to print laser printers.
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Another alternative is to use the old HP500's printer driver with the
newer Ink Jets... we've been able to do this and put empty color
cartridges in the printer without any problems.
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My experience is thatdeskjets are great. Anything dot matrix or with
continuous feed paper is a real aggrevation for patrons and librarians.
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Our campus has a WindowsNT server running a custom print server
package.
My explanation is long. Sorry..
Basics - How it Works for Us
============================
Client "popup" software on all of our public PC's in the Library and in the
campus "Web Labs" directs printing to managed queues on this server.
After printing, a user walks over to a "Print Station" in the Library or in
the Web Lab where they are working. The Print Station is a
PC running another piece of software to display the appropriate print
queue from the server.
The user inserts their id card (with a cash-value magnetic stripe on it).
The Print Station displays the waiting print jobs, so the user can select
the ones to print. Users can password protect their own jobs, so that
others are unable to print or delete them.
(Unprinted jobs are deleted from the queue after a fixed number of
hours.)
A per-page fee is deducted from the cash value on the user's ID card
and the pages print on a nearby networked laser printer.
Specifics
==========
6636 Cedar
Ave S
Richfield, MN 55423
Contact: Shelley Hamilton
shamilton at cdp-ikon.com
How Long it Took
================
>From installation in late August, it took until November for us to feel like
things are working reliably. We had some trouble with our NT server,
various other glitches. I don't work with the server and am somewhat
ignorant about that side of things.
This was the first NT server our campus staff had set up, and I believe I
heard there were some problems with the server hardware to
complicate the matter.
My Biggest Library-Related Headache
====================================
In the Library, we used to lock down our software configuration with a
Win95 "security" package. It worked well, none of the student "hackers"
had found a way around it. But I was unable to make UnipriNT work
with it. I do NOT think it was UnipriNT's problem. The security package
we were using seemed to cause problems with Windows 95's built-in
print spooling features - in a manner that prevented UnipriNT from
working.
Now, instead of locking down the public PCs in the Library, we are taking
a different tack: We will let users make changes, as long as we can
easily and quickly restore a PC to it's normal configuration.
How We Maintain the Desired PC Configuration
============================================
We are setting this up this week. (We know it works, because the
campus
Web Labs are already set up this way, and use UnipriNT.)
We are setting up the PC's to rebuild when they boot. Also to rebuild
when a "rebuild" command is selected from the Win95 "start menu". We
also can boot from a floppy and rebuild a hard disk.
To do this, PC-Rdist. A master copy of the hard drive is stored on a
network drive. PC-Rdist can detect what has or has not changed on a
PC by comparing it to the master copy. Desireable features include:
Rebuilding only needed pieces (its NOT "all or nothing")
Ability to use different sources to rebuild specific
Win95 components, such as the registry files, which
will not be the same on each machine.
The choice of what source to use for rebuilding can be
automatically based on a PC's network card "mac address".
Ability to temporarily move all files that users have added
to a specified folder for later deletion..
Or, if you choose, to delete those files immediately. An interesting
essay related to this:
http://act.kent.edu/stapp/win95rem.htm
A link to the company that produces PC-Rdist:
http://www.pyzzo.com
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Our experience has been that you'll go broke with inkjets. Laser
cartriges are more expensive but they last MUCH longer than the 3:1 cost
ratio. Consider also that you can get Laser printers that can hold a lot
more paper. Constantly refilling paper is a big drain on staff time and
most inconvenient for the patrons.
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