HP LaserJet 5L
My On Christmas Eve of 1994 my parents gave me a HP LaserJet 5L. At the time it cost somewhere around $400 – $500, but was one of the most affordable laser printers for home use. Over the years it’s been particularly helpful to have a laser printer around home. With the wonders of toner (over ink) it’s been a great, reliable printer, except for back in 2001-2002 when I had to replace the rollers because they were no longer picking up paper. Tonight the pickup rollers stopped picking up paper again. I haven’t investigated if it is possibly something more than the rubber on the rollers, but I hope not.
I’ll probably first try to clean the rollers with alcohol, but I may just have to buy a kit like this one and replace them. I’m tempted to give the printer up to the gods, but that’d be a bit wasteful, so even if I give it away I’ll probably get it into a working state first.
It’s a great PCL printer and works great with Windows, but as OS X uses Gimp-Print / Gutenprint for its generic drivers, dithered images tend to look like poo. That all makes me want a PostScript printer, but one of those won’t be very cheap. It would be really nice to have one with a built in print server so that I could finally stop using the (as old as the printer) 10baseT / 10base2 JetDirect EX Plus. Although that thing works great too, and any OS which can do any sort of network printing at all can find a way to send data to it…
So, I’m not sure what I want to do yet, but I do know that I can’t quite afford a new printer. Ah well, at least it’s had a good run.
I’ve got the same one still cranking. Before that I had the 4L and recently found a bunch of 4L’s at Goodwill which had barely been used. Grabbed one for my father for $20. The first 4L I bought back in 93 cost $700.
I’ve been thinking of trying to find a 5MP, just so I can have one that does postscript. They aren’t too expensive, nor do they take too much power… But some of those Xerox color devices are tempting, and not too expensive as well.
We’ve got one of the brothers – It’s been a very reliable bit of kit, and I remember that it didn’t cost the earth at the time, either. I think it has a licensed copy of ghostscript in it – it’s certainly postscript compatible without the horrendous licensing fees.
Ah, thanks. I’d forgotten about those… One of my coworkers has the duplexing / networked cheap Brother and likes it, although he doesn’t do anything beyond install the Windows driver and watch it go.
I really think I will give one of those a look, especially if I can find it a bit cheaper than normal, which shouldn’t be a problem.
Oh, and throwing 128MB of RAM or so into it should make it really, really snappy.
A friend at work has one, and had the same problem. He dinked around with trying to clean the rollers for a few months, finally caved and bought the kit, and he says it’s been clicking along fine again for the last couple of years.
My bet is it’ll last as long as you care to keep rebuilding it every 10 years, or until it gets killed by a lightning strike or something.
Yeah, I’m thinking I just need to do a rebuild on it… Then maybe I’ll give it to my parents, as they could probably use it.
we’re re-building parts of one of our big HP color lasers here at the liberry. it has served us well, and it’s still cheaper to replace rollers and pieces here and there than it is to buy a whole new unit.
Yep, and it’s really actually pretty easy to do, and less wasteful.
Sounds like pickup rollers, especially given how long it’s been since they were last replaced.
A word of advice – when you do replace it, avoid getting an HP laser printer. The quality has gone down horribly. We have been replacing all of ours here at work with Xerox printers over the past 5 years and are far, far happier with the Xerox product.
Also, when the time comes, I have a fantastic local Xerox vendor/service outfit that you may want to consider if you don’t want to have to self-service. We’ve used them since shortly after I started here and they are by far the best I’ve ever dealt with, hands down.
:)