We replaced our Canon MX922 today, December 17, 2021. This had me reflecting on the printers past and present in our lives.
Printers range from reliable workhorses to necessary annoyances. Thankfully, we’ve never purchased a problematic printer. Knowing which brands and models to avoid has helped.
The printers we use, almost daily, are both HP models: an HP LaserJet 1320tn and a Color LaserJet CP2025dn. For longevity, nothing comes close to HP printers in our experience. The 1320tn is 17 years old and the 2025dn is 10 years old. Not many peripherals last a decade, much less two decades.
HP LaserJet 1320tn
The HP LaserJet 1320tn model has an extra tray and networking support (“tn”). I upgraded the 1320tn to 80 MB of RAM and flashed the firmware on October 24, 2004, shortly after purchase. The memory upgrade required a 64MB DIMM and remains worth its original inflated cost for duplex printing at the ProRes 1200 DPI setting. The printer supports rendering in PCL 5e, PCL 6, and PostScript Level 2, making it the perfect monochrome printer for every operating system. It manages nearly 18 pages per minute.
The 130tn offers the best paper handling of any printer we’ve owned. It has two full-sized paper trays, with support for 11-by-17 paper. A single-sheet feed handles heavy card stock beautifully, without creasing or curling the paper.
The printer has travelled with us from California to Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Texas. After 45,018 pages printed, the internal log notes only two paper jams. The 1320tn keeps chugging along. It sits in the corner of my desk, serving as the printer for school papers and teaching handouts. It’s my go-to printer, as I rarely need color.
A C|Net review of the HP LaserJet 1320 series from 2004: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hp-laserjet-1320-review/
HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn
We purchased our HP Color LaserJet CP2025n in 2009, while I was working on my dissertation. I recall we had just moved into our first house and this printer was a big upgrade.
olor printing was a big deal at the turn of the century. (Yes, that sounds funny to me, too.) Our first color laser printer was a monstrously oversized and complex HP Color LaserJet 4550n. It managed a pitiful 4 pages per minute in color and couldn’t match the monochrome speed of the 1320tn, even after upgrading the memory from its default 32 MB with an additional 128 MB. The color toners rotated, like a Ferris wheel, as each color printed one at a time like an old-fashioned ink press. You could hear the machinations.
We ended up gifting the 4550n to one of Susan’s colleagues, the printer arriving in Minnesota via her visiting parents because it failed to find its way into the moving van.
Compared to the 4550n, the 2025dn is a speed demon. From 10 to 15 pages per minute for color output, and 20 ppm for monochrome, the 2025dn remains the fastest printer in our household. In 2012, I upgraded the printer with an additional 256 MB of RAM, which also improved the speed of printing complex pages. The “ImageREt 3600” maximum resolution looks as sharp as any printer on the market today.
And again, this is a printer with PCL and PostScript support, making it ideal for our Mac-Windows-Linux household.
Color toners are in a straight line, resting in drawer. There is no Ferris wheel motion. In fact, you can feed card stock straight through the printer. The design seems more durable. We’ve printed 35,400 pages on the 2025dn with fewer than a dozen jams or misfeeds.
A C|Net review of the HP Color LaserJet CP2025n from 2009: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hp-color-laserjet-cp2025-review/
Canon MX922
Laser printers aren’t the best photo printers. For photographs, inkjet printers remain the best choice.
To conserve desk space, we opted for a multi-function printer (MFP) several years ago. We could then make copies, scan duplex documents, and print photos on coated papers.
The Canon MX922 was an impressive piece of hardware, especially for the price we paid. It was purchased from a Best Buy in Boardman, Ohio, probably in late 2013. I did a lot of research before buying an MFP.
It really disappointed me that I couldn’t easily fix the problem. At first, I hoped the error message indicating a printhead failure (Error Code B200) was a simple glitch. Many online forums offered ways to reset the message if the printhead wasn’t actually dead. If resetting the error code didn’t work, videos showed how to clean a possibly clogged printhead. I did that, too.
The printhead was dead, however, with a visible bubbling around the elements. A new (remanufactured or who knows what, really) printhead is $150 on Amazon from a third-party or $32 “plus shipping” from a seller on eBay.
I get attached to things, especially tech.
The MX922 is now $400 to $500 online. That’s how great the printer is: it has loyal users who post about owning three or even four MX922s over the years. For a printer model released in 2013, it’s still a best-of-breed design.
PC Magazine review of the Canon Pixma MX922 from 2013: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/canon-pixma-mx922-wireless-office-all-in-one-printer
Susan and I had to choose between an Epson or an HP MFP for her office and decided on the Epson EcoTank ET-4850 after reading a lot of Reviews. It’s tiny compared to the Canon MX922, yet has most of the same functionality. I like the look and build quality of the HP 9025e. It is a nice device. However, the photo output gave the win to Epson.
Printers Gone By
We have had some good printers over the years. My first printer was an Epson FX-80, a fine dot-matrix printer. I upgraded to an Okidata OL400 LED (like a laser) printer in college. Susan owned an original HP InkJet that never died. We also had a Lexmark laser printer.
I’m pretty sure there’s a reason HP and Epson have retained their leadership positions. Our printers from those two companies have never died. They have been replaced by upgraded models.
The Annoyances of Printers
Every printer has some compromises. The prices of toner and inks for HP printers certainly annoys their owners. The short lifespans of photo printers frustrates photographers and other visual artists. The tradeoffs we make for quality, reliability, or speed seem curiously disproportionate.
HP inkjet cartridges cost more because the printhead and ink tank are a single unit. Each time you replace the ink, you’re also getting new printheads. Canon’s inkjet cartridges are merely ink tanks. The Canon printheads are separate hardware. Look at the bottom of the Canon cartridges and you’ll see where the tank rests on a transfer sponge. Supposedly, the Canon printheads will last the “rated lifetime” of the printer. Yet, it was the printhead’s failure that doomed our MX922, since Canon doesn’t sell the printhead anymore.
Both Canon and HP use thermal printheads, basically creating bubbles with heat. The printheads wear out from the heat. Between the two designs, I’d rather pay a lot more for the HP cartridges knowing the printer will last as long as cartridges are available.
Epson uses nozzles called Micro Piezo technology. Basically, it’s a microscopic array of water guns that squirts tens of thousands of dots per inch onto a page. The benefit of this approach is that inks that would clog in a heated element work with Epson’s technology.
Yet, there’s a downside to Epson’s technology, too: it’s slow. Printing with our brand new Epson takes four or five times as long as the Canon required for the same photograph. The quality of the Epson prints, however, makes the slower printing and higher up-front cost justifiable.
So, you can pay a lot per ink cartridge (HP), pray the printhead never dies (Canon), or accept that the best photo printing is slow (Epson).
Not a Hardware Issue
When it isn’t the printer annoying us, it is an operating system or application causing headaches. Printers, of all devices, should be as close to “plug-and-play” as possible.
How can our reliable HP LaserJet printers annoy me?
Technically, it isn’t the printers. It’s the lack of direct support in Windows 10 that causes headaches. It took two hours to configure the printers, after I discovered you can use Windows Vista drivers with Windows 10. Otherwise, I would have resorted to generic PCL and PostScript drivers for the printers, losing some functionality.
Hardware that lasts should be accompanied by software that maintains support for what works. How much effort would it be for HP to update printer drivers? Surely Microsoft and Apple want to support older printers.
One of the selling points for WordPerfect was its support for almost every printer sold. No matter which printer you owned, you could print and the output would look its best.
Even current drivers stink. They require paging through tabs to check settings. I don’t expect printing to be as simple as CTRL+P / Command+P, but there’s no excuse for the complexity of printing in Windows and macOS.