Know Your Printer

Whether you are a large company owning many A3 colour laser printers, a mid-sized company with the odd inkjet printer or laser printer connected to each workstation or just an ordinary person at home with your “all in one” printer that can print, scan, fax, copy and scratch your back, there are ways to cut down maintenance calls. Doing some DIY maintenance on your printer, fax or copier not only cuts down maintenance calls and save you money on call-out charges (if you don’t have a maintenance contract) but can save you a lot of money over the years on cartridges wearing out before their time, cartridges discarded wrongly because you thought that the cartridge was the cause of an irritating problem, but wasn’t! Also, a printing device out of action for any length of time can have a huge impact on your business, as it sits there in the corner sobbing, awaiting the technician who decided to go home early that day, leaving your call until the following day! That’s assuming he doesn’t get drunk that evening and call in sick the next day!

I know, you’re thinking “How does this guys mind work?” Well, to be honest, I have been a technician for over 22 years. I started out as a trainee fax engineer in 1986. Back then there were only the thermal fax machines that appeared to be filled with heat sensitive toilet paper. They used a crude heating element to heat the paper in the right places to create the image. Well, they worked ok and the image was ok, but upon storing your curly-copy, you would notice the image started to fade and of course would go dark if you left it in sunlight! So working on a beach in the Bahamas was a bit of a no-no. I can just picture all of you around my age reminiscing the years when all office equipment used to turn yellow with the nicotine in the air. Keyboards dusted with cigarette ash!! Bring back the glorious past!! Yeah right! Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Then, as inkjet (according to HP) and bubble jet (according to Canon) became a more popular technology, thermal faxes and printers began to decrease in popularity. At this point it became necessary for faxes to become printers and printers to become faxes, and while they were at it, somebody decided to also cancel the need to find a spare port for the scanner and glued one on to many printer/fax devices. Wow, brilliant, we all thought. Not so! It is great when all works fine, but if your printer stops working, so does your copier, fax and possibly even your scanner if it’s an electrical problem. Now, we have a multitude of products each designed to meet a need relating to usage volume which would vary from business to business and from business to individual to individual (wow, I’m even making up my own language!).