Machines aren't entirely reliable and sometimes users and even knowledgeable IT staff can't sort out the problems. If the technology is relatively new as laser and inkjet printers were in the late 1980s things are still more difficult. Organisations who bought these machines had to keep them going so they bought service contracts.
Service contracts are an insurance policy, not for fire or theft but against failure.
Insurers work from actuarial tables. An average man or woman aged 30 has a small probability of dying over the next year, most likely from accident but possibly from illness. Insurers look at the actuarial tables, dress up the results in confusing legalese and offer a life insurance contract that will generally give them a good profit but will sometimes give the beneficiaries of the policy a handsome payout in a distressing time.
IT service contracts aren't the same because there are no actuarial tables for the equipment - at least not initially. It takes several years to discover that small form-factor PCs almost always have fundamental weaknesses in their PSUs and replacements will cost a fortune.
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Actuarial figures for printers emerge after a couple of years.
Acturial figures often apply to customers - it is the customer who causes the intractable problems.
Customers who have at least one skilled IT person will raise far fewer issues.
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The profit for a retailer selling a PC or printer is often in the extended warranty.
Managing customer expectations is the main issue with contracts.
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With printers the contract typically doesn't include the consumables - toner, developer and drum; users are expected to replace these themeslves when the printer prompts them
The market has changed. Tesco an Wilkinsons sometimes sell basic inkjet printers for less than £30.
Printer Repair & Maintenance
A computer might live out a four or five year service life without going wrong. Computers generally have only two moving parts – the fan and the disk. Semiconductors rarely fail, so if computers were not full of flakey software they could be very reliable.
Printers include a substantial amount of mechanics. Mechanical devices inevitably wear out, so they give trouble. Even the simplest thermal printers contain a rubber motor driven platen roller that will age and a printhead that will wear out. Inkjet printers often have only one truly unreliable part, the printhead, but there are the rubber seals of the service station, pickup and feed rollers and a separator pad.
Multi-tray laser printers contain dozens of moving parts powered by several motors. Mechanical failures are innevitable in printers. Add into the formula the effects of badly written printer firmware, drivers, defects in paper and user errors and printers can be a real problem.
Printer Service Lives
People may also expect to get a longer life out of a printer than from a PC. PC specifications advance rapidly in 3 or 4 years, and near the end of this time there is an obvious advantage to buying another PC. Advances in printing have been less obvious, a printer that put neat text on paper 5 years ago still does so now. People are not willing to spend money on new equipment unless it will clearly do something extra.
Printer lives are likely to shorten because the market is changing.
Printer designs are advancing in several directions
- Inkjets are particularly appropriate to colour handling, so they are very suited to handling diagrams and photographs. New inkjet designs commonly provide resolutions beyond 4800dpi, which produces much better looking print than older 300dpi machines - sufficiently good that the printer can reproduce photographs to a standard better than high street photo developers. Machines are faster too, commonly rated at "up to 20 pages per minute". A new inkjet printer should give markedly better photos than a 5 year old model.
- Mono laser printers are suited to fast printing, so designers have aimed mainly at making the print engine faster. New laser printer designs can give resolutions up to 2400dpi, but designers tend to aim more at high-speed operation with 600 dpi resolution. Laser printer users are also commonly want duplex printing, document preparation and the features needed to support network use.
More people are including diagrams and photographs in documents and these do not reproduce well on old printers with 300 to 600 dpi resolution. However resolutions beyond 1200dpi are really only useful for fine photography.
Low-cost printers intended for "home/office" use can almost be treated as disposable. If a printer costs less than £100 to buy then the repair cost has to be very low if the job is to be worth-while. There are two ways printers like this can be repaired:
By users:
if they are sent to a central depot, accumulated in quantity and then subjected to triage - identifying some for repair and the rest to be scrapped for parts.
More expensive printers may be repairable - providing parts do not cost too much. The problem here is logistical. Suppose a printer sells for £300; it probably left the factory at a price around £150- £180 and the rest of the money goes on transport, distribution and sales.
Maintenance
The idea of maintenance comes from an engineering tradition that dealt with long-lasting machines. Traditionally machines need cleaning, lubrication and a check on parts where the specifications might drift.
Computer printers used to need regular maintenance. A typical printer had lots of moving parts that would wear out and there would be a heavy build up of paper swarf and dust during the printer's operation. were part of this
Warranty
It might seem that printer manufacturers and indeed their retailers should give users a lifetime of free warranty support with their machines - after all this is what network equipment companies offer.
Network equipment is almost entirely semiconductor circuits with no moving parts and no externally changeable software.
Printers are partly mechanical, with user changeable consumables and choice of paper. Print drivers are also rather complex, particualrly if high speed and quality are required from colour printers.
Things do seem to be moving in this direction with a few companies offering long warranties to the public sector.
A long warranty seems to show a manufacturers confidence in their product. Warranties also look like good value to end users because they are extended by the manufacturer and apparently free.
Of course not all warranties are everything they seem.
Printer manufacturers are keen to emphasise the quality of their equipment, so they may offer long warranties. A manufacturer would certainly find it difficult to give a long warranty without some confidence in their designs. However printer warranties can also be viewed more as interesting marketing tools than as a manufacturers guarantee of a working machine.
However a major manufacturer cannot be seen to drop behind the pack in terms of warranty – if Hewlett Packard offer a three year onsite warranty then so will other manufacturers. The very competitive nature of the printer market means that warranty cannot be a free-gift from the manufacturer.
Buyers tend to settle on a printer design because the specification seems good. They will perceive a warranty as a guarantee of quality, and an "extended warranty" seems like a courtesy from the manufacturer rather than a rip-off.
In the small print manufacturers invariably state that only manufacturers original cartridges or authorised recycled cartridges can be used. A warranty call where the wrong brand of cartridge is found in a machine might result in "sorry- you must replace the cartridge" . This is quite likely to be followed up with an invoice for the manufacturers standard field-service call out – generally not less than £100 and possibly much more.
Spares:
It can be difficult to repair proprietary PC designs and monitors without spares, printers can be virtually irreparable.
A perfect example is the Compaq Pagemarq 20, a big, sophisticated 20 page per minute network laser printer. This is a good machine with a below-average collection of design faults, amongst them that the fuser rollers are driven by a white nylon cog which de-natures in the hot greasy environment it is required to work in. The cog eventually loses some of it’s teeth and the printer jams continually. Without a spare there can be no repair and a big expensive printer is finished.
Compaq are useless a source of spares – they only made the product for a year or so in 1993-4. I once phoned Compaq to ask about the printer and the dialogue went like this:
"-I’d like to speak to someone about a problem with a Compaq printer"
"-We don’t make printers"
"-You made this one last year, it has a Compaq badge on the front"
"-No, we never have made printers, someone must have stuck the badge on the front."
The Pagemarq is actually a Fuji-Xerox engine and is also sold with Xerox, Apple and DataProducts badges as welll as Compaq. Xerox will not sell parts ("Why should we help people undercut our own service business"). Apple are notoriously unhelpful to anyone who isn’t an Apple authorised dealer. DataProducts have a UK based repairer who also sells spares – but for some time they claimed to have no stock of these cogs. In fact closer questioning showed they could "refurbish the motor drive chain" – which included replacing this cog if necessary (in fact failure of this cog is the only known fault in the drive chain). A "refurbishment" was well over £100, but after a little persuading they decided they could send one through the post. Luckily they now have a supply of cogs at more reasonable prices.
It would have been possible to get another cog milled in brass for about £100. This didn’t seem a good alternative because it might have conducted heat back to the next stage in the chain, could have damaged the fuser cog and might have proved noisy. In fact the new Fuji-Xerox cogs are made of a grey plastic which seems much more robust.
The Pagemarq has other problems.
Machines sometimes give the message "System Check" and simply will not work. Nothing seems to be wrong with the engine (there are actually a whole library of tests accessible through the front panel). The major electronics on the system board all seem perfectly workable. The fault is almost certainly either the checksum in the user setups stored in an EEPROM or in the control software stored in ROMS. The best solution at present seems to be an exchange system board from the US, which is quite expensive. What is actually being provided seems to be an upgraded set of ROMs.
Another problem is a tendency for the Ethernet port to sulk. The printer engine and system board work and pass self test. The Ethernet port can be seen responding on a network sniffer – but nothing is printed. The Network Interface board can be bought from the US as a spare but costs more than £350, the easy answer is to use the parallel port together with a print-server. Printing speeds do not seem to suffer very much and print-servers are half the price of the interface board.
The Compaq Pagemarq strongly illustrates the common problems and solutions in printer maintenance. The real manufacturing cost of the cog is unknown, but is unlikely to be more than £1 – yet without it the printer is dead. The only real limit on the price of the cog is the point where it seems preferable to scrap the printer - and a full functional replacement is likely to cost over £2,000 and could take several hour’s work replacing workstation printer-drivers. By these standards a £100 cog is a bargain.
Manufacturers follow a range of policies on the price and availability of spares.
A decade ago Mannesman Tally used to supply spares at a price which meant that the purchase price for all the parts needed to build a printer was three times the price of the printer itself. Superficially this seems rather expensive – but in fact it was probably the most user friendly policy any company ever adopted. A couple of years later this policy was quietly dropped and MT parts became more expensive. It is difficult to nominate a manufacturer with a reasonably fair parts policy currently in place – many seem to be raising a major revenue stream through spares sales.
Tektronix made pen-plotters in the mid 80’s, they used electrostatic mats to hold the paper in place. The original price of the multi-pen plotter was over £3,000. Pen plotters are now obsolete, replaced by inkjets, but in the early 90s quite a few of these machines needed repair. Tektronix’ price for the electrostatic mat alone was £2,000. A copy of the manual was $130 US, or £160. "Surely that’s the wrong way round" I once said to someone in Tektronix spares – "it should cost less in pounds". "Not the way we do it" was the reply.
Hideously expensive spares might arguably be rather better than non at all. Xerox will not supply spare parts.
Hewlett Packard’s attitude to spares has recently been quite .
Hewlett Packard is quite unusual amongst printer manufacturers in having a world-scale engineering field service operation with a presence in most major cities - their only rival in this is probably IBM. Of course the engineering network is primarily targeted at delivering support for large multi-user computer systems rather than at printers. they can
Most manufacturers run a repair operation themselves. The main revenue stream probably comes from selling extended warranty and maintenance contracts.
A secondary revenue stream will come from workshop repair. One off repair usually involves a non- refundable evaluation fee for the quotation, followed by other charges for parts and labour. The evaluation fee is often set around £75, so that an extra £125 for a repair doesn’t seem such a bad option. Return un-repaired might also attract a penalty- such as a £15 packing and courier fee.
Manufacturers are generally hostile to the idea of other businesses repairing their equipment.
Set a high price on maintenance manuals -
Manuals
Warranty:
Extended Warranty: