I have 4 HP Laserjet 4+ printers myself. One of them fell off the table it was on, on to some papers and the internals are a bit wedged and now it jams on every print, the other 3 have jamming problems as well and Print reliably only off the manual feeder only. I also have the duplexer and PostScript simms in them.
I also ended up buying a Canon for my wife, as she did not have the patience to feed in a page at a time. I use the HP in the basement on my office down there. With all printers even brand new ones the rollers wear at a rather predictable rate. There's tons of new roller kits available for the 4+ but every time I think about buying a roller kit I end up finding another entire 4+ for free and Use that instead. That's why I have the other printers saved. One of these days I'm going to run out of free 4+s and just have to buy the roller kit. I'm very tempted to come pick up your printer Galen. But if someone asked me "can I have all your 4+ and I'll take Galen's and put them all together to make a working Printer" I'm sure my common sense would win out and I'd happily hand them all over! I have also refilled the 98A toner cartridges, it is pretty easy to do and the toner bottles are extremely cheap. You can usually get 2 or maybe 3 refills on a cartridge before the drum starts losing the photosensitive material. The problem with the toner cartridges for these old printers is typical of parts for many older computers and electronic devices. The same problem exists for batteries for older cell phone models and for auto parts for older cars. What people don't realize is that there's a huge industry in China that specializes in making parts for electronic devices that are obsolete. Apple for example has a vested interest in getting people to buy new cell phones so they price replacement screens and batteries for older phone models sky high. The 2005 movie "Robots" just highlights this problem. Thus the Chinese industry has grown up. They reverse engineer parts like toner cartridges, brake pads, lithium batteries and so on. And because it's all being sold to people who don't have a lot of money and can't afford brand new devices, they engineer for least cost. That toner cartridge printing grey was probably made in a factory in China 3 months before you bought it. The parts in it are all least cost, the photoconductive material is cheaper and thinner, the toner particles are uneven, etc. It isn't failing much more quickly than "it should" It's failing more quickly because it's engineered to fail more quickly because it's least cost materials. It's fairly easy to run the numbers and determine if buying those cartridges is worth it. A 98A cartridge brand new was rated at 6,800 pages at 5% MSRP was $165. Actual retail when they were still available was around $100 as I recall about a penny and a half a page. Today the market is flooded with counterfeits that are $30 per. A brand new Cheap Chinese 98A cartridge is around $30. But it's going to fail long before hitting 6,800 pages. So, if it fails at 2000 pages, then guess what you have just achieved the very same 1.5 cents a page that the original manufacturer's cartridge was able to do. If it fails at 1000 page then your cost per page is probably still 1.5 cents if you factor in the amortization cost of a brand new printer. If it fails at 500 pages than it's cheaper to buy a new printer. That's why the cheap Chinese industry engineers their 98A cartridges to fail at around 1500 pages - that's the sweet spot - cheap enough that people will still buy them not so bad they will give up the printer because it's now costing them money. These calculations are not hard to do, anyone can do them. They can be done for any of the older electronic devices. So there's no point at claiming the cheap Chinese cartridge is "supposed to last 6800 pages" It's not. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Galen Seitz Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 12:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PLUG] HP Laserjet 4M+ with duplexer free to good home On 12/19/23 11:15, Michael Ewan wrote: > It seems there are a lot of sources for the #48 toner, is "decent" the > problem? Yes. The past two or three cartridges I have purchased have worked well initially, but the print quality has degraded much more quickly than it should. In September I contacted PrinterTechs.com about it. They sell printer parts, so there is incentive for them to sell me parts for repair. Despite that incentive, here's part of the response I received: "Remanufactured cartridges would be the way to go if you decide to keep the printer, but I'd recommend getting a newer printer. Age is starting to catch up with the 4 plus, we see power supplies failing more often in that model than we used to." galen -- Galen Seitz [email protected]
