I got myself a Xerox printer because I figured I’d be familiar with the interface since all the offices I worked in had Xerox printers, plus I figured getting a near-corporate printer might keep some of the bullshit away since Xerox would probably not want to motivate their corporate customers to switch brands. AFAICT they probably get most of their business through service, not so much product.
So far it has worked out well. I have yet to buy a Xerox brand toner cartridge, and I’ve had this printer for several years and I keep getting consistent high quality prints. Some of the features are not super intuitive, but I don’t think it’s terrible to have to read the manual once in awhile.
I had a problem where there was ink left (this was a solid-ink printer, the ink came in blocks you could easily see), but the page count had run out and it wouldn’t print. So we found the flash memory IC that held the info – it used I2C to communicate. There’s a similar IC on consumer RAM to store the manufacturer info. We swapped it in, hex-edited it so there were a huge number of pages left, and put it back in the printer.
It worked fine!
Then, days later, I noticed that the printer’s web interface let you reset the page counter by just pressing a button in a web browser. So the whole hack had been completely unnecessary :D
Actually, I work in it and had to install a xerox printer for someone’s home office yesterday. Grab the driver’s, go to install and it completely failed. I told the guy to restart and we’ll try again tomorrow since it was the end of my shift. Guy messages me back, the printer and PC restarted and when he walked back to it, there was a page printed that said congrats on your new printer.
I got myself a Xerox printer because I figured I’d be familiar with the interface since all the offices I worked in had Xerox printers, plus I figured getting a near-corporate printer might keep some of the bullshit away since Xerox would probably not want to motivate their corporate customers to switch brands. AFAICT they probably get most of their business through service, not so much product.
So far it has worked out well. I have yet to buy a Xerox brand toner cartridge, and I’ve had this printer for several years and I keep getting consistent high quality prints. Some of the features are not super intuitive, but I don’t think it’s terrible to have to read the manual once in awhile.
I have a funny story about a Xerox printer!
I had a problem where there was ink left (this was a solid-ink printer, the ink came in blocks you could easily see), but the page count had run out and it wouldn’t print. So we found the flash memory IC that held the info – it used I2C to communicate. There’s a similar IC on consumer RAM to store the manufacturer info. We swapped it in, hex-edited it so there were a huge number of pages left, and put it back in the printer.
It worked fine!
Then, days later, I noticed that the printer’s web interface let you reset the page counter by just pressing a button in a web browser. So the whole hack had been completely unnecessary :D
Actually, I work in it and had to install a xerox printer for someone’s home office yesterday. Grab the driver’s, go to install and it completely failed. I told the guy to restart and we’ll try again tomorrow since it was the end of my shift. Guy messages me back, the printer and PC restarted and when he walked back to it, there was a page printed that said congrats on your new printer.
Fucking thing failed successfully.