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There are three or four aims for this part of the site.
Its a bit of an advert. Most people put a glossy brochure online, we thought we'd be a bit more informative.
Its a general contribution to a community that doesn't get noticed much - the engineers and technicians engaged in printer support and repair.
Its a bit of a honey trap for information as well. If we give out information maybe people will e-mail correcting our misconceptions, telling us how things really work, or giving information about how things developed.
Its a training aid for ourselves and others.
The information given here is for technicians like ourselves. It is based on twenty years experience of repairing printers. We would like to give more information on manufacturing and research but it hasn't been our area - so we rely on Web based research for that sort of thing at the moment - but would welcome information and feedback from manufacturers.
We do give general guidance on how things work (or how we assume they must work) and how they might be fixed.
Specific Printers
We aren't giving guidance on fixing faults on specific printers:
(1) There are several hundred different types of printer out there in user land - so we'd have to maintain hundreds of pages.
(2) It would encourage people to ring us up asking for free technical support - and we have a living to make. On the whole we are very happy to swap information with people who help us but we aren't running a free alternative to the manufacturers support line.
(3) The manufacturers publish manuals for that kind of thing. We could wish more of them would put more information online - but things are improving as manufacturers catch on to the idea that openness helps promote good products.
(4) Most faults are fixed by understanding the principles rather than by following a recipe. Back in the 1980s manuals from the big computer makers were full of flow diagrams that engineers were supposed to follow, almost invariably resulting in big expensive modules being swapped.
Buyers Guide
We aren't giving much of a buyers guide at present. We do recognise that most people just want a swift answer to what printer thay should buy but:
(1) unless you have very specific needs there is no single right answer. For the majority of homes and small offices the right answer is an Inkjet, we'd look at Epson and HP first. We don't usually recommend very cheap printers because the manufacturer aims to make money somehow and that's usually by matching very cheap printers with expensive cartridges. However if you really do expect to print very little this may not matter.
(2) We don't currently sell new domestic or office inkjet printers. The reason for this is quite simple, there normally is no margin in it. We'd have to do it on a large scale to get the level of discount from the manufacturers that would give us competitive pricing. Distribution is quite a different task to support. We recommend Misco.co.uk
(3) The computer industry has a set of a magazines that offer reviews just about yearly - We'd recommend PC-Pro. They do lab tests and comparisons.
(4) We normally see printers when they are broken and out of warranty. Since most manufacturers change their product line-up rapidly our opinions form about manufacturers and ways of doing things - rather than about today's latest photo-pic printer.