How To Avoid Beingcaught By A Lemon

The Age

Monday May 1, 1995

George Skarbek

Thinking of a second-hand printer? George Skarbek offers some guidelines to assist you to get the right deal.

BUYING a secondhand printer can save you money but the rule is: buyer beware. It's easy to be caught with a lemon. Here are some guidelines to help you stay out of the traps.

First, be aware of the prices of new printers. Someone who bought a Hewlett Packard laser printer about five years ago for $5000 or more and used it infrequently may think that selling it for $1000 is giving it away. However, a new HP laser can be bought now for about $850 and the new model will have far more fonts, more memory, better print quality, a full toner cartridge and will come with a guarantee.

So, old, basic laser printers should be purchasable for about $300.

New monochrome inkjet printers now cost less than $300 as do 24-pin dot-matrix printers. Second-hand dot-matrix printers sell in the $50 to $100 range with 24-pin wide carriage models selling for about $300.

The quality of 9-pin printers is inferior to the 24 models, and this is reflected in their price.

All printers have a self-test function that will print one or more pages of printout and possibly give printer information, without being connected to a computer. Don't even consider purchasing a printer unless you can see and hear the test page(s) printed. Even if the test page is perfect, there may be other reasons to reject the machine.

If you are considering laser printers, the printer may have insufficient memory to print more than small graphics. If you intend to print anything other than text or simple graphics, then the printer should have at least 2MB of memory.

The test page should show how much memory is available. It should also show the total number of pages the printer has ever printed. If the figure is above a quarter of a million copies, then some parts may be nearing the end of their useful life, although this figure depends very much on the quality of the printer.

Unless the laser is a well known brand, make sure that you get the printer driver disks for your applications, such as WordPerfect.

Without these, your applications will not print correctly, if at all.

If the seller says the printer is fully HP compatible, be wary. Some are but others have limited compatibility and can give you unexpected results in some cases (as in downloading fonts correctly). Ensure that you get the original printer driver disk for those printers. Only an expert can tell how much toner is left in the cartridge, and a reconditioned toner cartridge costs about $100.

Laser printing costs are about 5c a page. If the test page is not perfect and has vertical lines over the text, the fuser roller is probably scratched. This should be examined carefully. The seller should be able to point it out to you, or you can find it in the documentation, which should be supplied with the printer.

If there are scratches on the roller, (careful as the roller will be very hot immediately after printing) then it must be replaced. A reconditioned fuser assembly will cost around $350 fitted. A reconditioned roller alone will cost about $35, but fitting requires considerable skill and time.

With Inkjets, a poor page usually means blocked jets. If they cannot be cleaned by using the printer's cleaning mechanism, then a new cartridge must be purchased. Color cartridges cost about $50.

With dot-matrix printers, if the test page is OK, check the paper feeding mechanism, with power off. Many printers have been damaged by users turning the paper knob by hand, with power on, against the force of the stepper motor, and this often leads to damaged gears. Any horizontal line on the test page almost certainly means a broken pin in the print head. A new print head for a 9-pin printer costs about $100. A genuine Epson 24-pin print head costs about $350. In most cases this is more than the secondhand printer is worth, and you should not consider buying it.