Hey Gravis, we definitely still use lamps in fusers all the way up to high end production level. I think it's a case of it's tech that "just works" and does a great job at what it's meant to do. On top of that, it makes rebuilding fusers a snap because everything is self contained and you just need to unplug and slide them out of the heat rolls. Also "line printer" probably refers to an actual Line Printer. They're big and somewhat ancient printers that are somewhat similar to dot matrix but they print entire lines at once. I worked on a few at the beginning of my technician career and the heads are massive with big rows of tines replaceable in sections.
Yes, I have worked on high end printers and copiers for 30 years, most use halogen lamps in the fuser, some of the newer ones use an induction heating system.
The fact the bulb is so good at emitting infrared and is really quick to heat up (compared to incandescent types) just makes it the perfect for non contact heating. Halogen bulbs get used for this purpose in a lot of different industry fields, too! :O
It was fun to watch! It reminds me of tinkering with my own projects and monologuing aloud about all the stuff that always goes wrong haha. Right down to "bought a new part only for the new part to not work in the same way so you wasted time and money" ending, most relatable experience ever. Good stuff!
There was a reason we sold apple laserwriters in 1987 for use with ibm pcs. Even if it meant we had to write a device driver for the ibm serial port as ibm didn't support the flow control the laserwriter needed. And we were looked at VERY suspiciously at all the apple events we had to visit: "Did you see those two" "Yes, so what" "They sell the laserwriter to peoples with ibm pcs" "you are kidding aren't you - that's impossible" "No kidding - I don't know how they do it either" I even had to go to a repair course for the laserwriter and get a certificate. And as we weren't interested in macs we couldn't even buy them from apple without a different certificate for mac repair I never made. OK, whatever what I wanted to say is, that the laserwriter ran on PostScript and so there was no need for pixelfonts whatsoever. you could print text in ANY rotation you wanted in ANY size. Very useful for people who ran Ventura Publisher on the ibm pc.
When I started as a field technician back in the early 1990s. This was one of the first printers I had to learn how to repair. I still remember my customer had an error 50. I simply asked them for the owners manual. In the back of the book it told you it was a bad fuser. It also told you how to reset the error. I learned early that people just won't read the book. Nowadays people just won't Google it. At night time I worked at the local PBS station. I had the glorious job of running the cables under the raised floor from switchers to operators and out to the studios. If you wanted to know where a cable was I was the man. Great memories thank you.
I have to say that is exactly what I would expect. People don't want to know how it works or how to fix it. They just want to press print and get a page. If it doesn't print they want to call someone so they can keep on lawyering 😝, accountifying, or doing whatever they do! This kept me in business for over 25 years!
Almost everything that went through the HP supply chain had the magical HP part numbers instead of whatever they may have been originally. Classic HP to have every part labelled with an eight digit number known as a 4x4. Later products have 5x5 numbers (10 digits).
HP used to offer a screensaver which resembled a fish tank. The parrot fish on the screensaver was named "MOPy." As you used the printer, you would acquire points. You could use the points to buy items for MOPy. I didn't give MOPy and attention or feed it, and the fish died.
I love the weird incentive to waste your business’s money printing pointless stuff for the fish. Especially imagining a corporate environment with thousands of workstation installs. But maybe all the reports met that quota anyway… Of course, as you say, that’s only to people who are susceptible to virtual pets or life sim games. And I’ve never been one to consistently do Animal Crossing or Nintendogs.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah, it seemed pretty silly. I also wondered if folks printed unnecessary copies in order to buy fish food and toys. Clicking on the screen was the equivalent of tapping on the glass, and it would stress out the fish. The project I was on came to an end, and I was let go. My desk sat empty for a month, and PC unused. A co-worker told me about the dead fish, and I got a laugh out of that.
@@timmooney7528 that’s hilarious. Now I’m imagining a physical equivalent, where corporate’s negligence lets an office fish tank die. Come to think of it, I’ve seen mysteriously empty glass cases or oddly-large terrariums in some offices… maybe that happens more than I expect.
@@kaitlyn__L Either people didn't feed it out of fear of over feeding it, or they ignore it because the care for the fish was someone else' responsibility.
Worked in a shipping/repair warehouse for a few years. Main responsibility was shipping/receiving, but after that I mainly repaired the laser printers. But the newest printer I worked on was apparently released in '08. It was still using those same halogen light bulbs. lol. I imagine part of the reason they don't(or didn't?) use LEDs is simply because they're too efficient? lol. Like you want that heat output, so the inefficiency, the higher power use, is actually a good thing for this purpose. Random semi-related story. When my boss was teaching me them. First time ever repairing laser printers. He shows me this plastic piece near the fuser that frequently broke as the users ripped the pages out after jams or whatever. My boss gets out the hot glue and tells me this is how to repair them... I can clearly see it's literally inches away from the 'WARNING: 180°C/360°F" label, even closer to the actual hot bits. Like maybe an inch. I remember thinking like 'what the ****' as I side-eye him. lol. I never did it, but maybe a few months later a coworker is learning them, and my boss teaches them the same thing, and he does do it. Even before this, we'd get back printers where their fuser rollers were literally fused together. I went to the coworker and said something like 'this is what happens when you hot glue the fusers like that. Ya gotta stop.' I was entirely supposing, had no idea. He did, the boss stopped working on them(or in general), and suddenly they slowed and eventually stopped coming in. lol... So what was happening was obviously the hot glue would melt under the extreme heat. It probably would get stuck in the rollers. Then when the printer cooled, it'd harden again, gluing the rollers together. From there, the next time the fuser heated up, the rollers would be unable to move until the fuser melted away the hot glue. By the time that happened, the rollers were already fused together. Destroying the fuser. So my boss in an effort to save like a $5 piece of plastic, would destroy $200 fusers. So they potentially wasted thousands of dollars of equipment. Like I saw at least a dozen like this. Probably much more. Who knows how many the other 2 saw, or how long my boss was doing this before I showed up. lol.
the vibes of the bit when the printer started working are immaculate, felt like an intern hearing the graybeard's stories and i'm here for it for the switcher, that address, 0xe8000002, feels extremely important for figuring out the problem. i'm no expert in anything but the fact that its failing 2 bytes after a nice round (hex) number makes it feel like its maybe some sort of race condition? like, maybe the computer asks for the first 16 bits, receives them, but then before the switcher is ready it asks for the next two, and then times out waiting for a response to a query that the switcher didnt have time to actually receive? you said that the computer setup was a little newer than the switcher, if it were me i might try running the software on a more contemporary machine/os and seeing if that fixes it
@@kaitlyn__L right, it could be just about anything. In my experience error codes like these are almost never useful unless you happen to work for the manufacturer and have the source material on hand. Even for well known products, documentation of the error codes is extremely difficult to find
@@ThickpropheT for sure. It looks like a memory address, but it might not even be real RAM if all the other hardware is memory-mapped… completely inscrutable.
love this format and honestly this place has huge potential for videos IMO. Also, I've never been so excited to see a printer print something in my life lol, and I hope someone can help with the Trinitry, my two cents is try to clean/reseat/replace the ram on the other cards, who knows, maybe it works all in conjunction or having bad ram one one card keeps another from doing what it needs to do etc. sounds like an easy thing to try at least, otherwise no idea, I hate when errors are just super generic like... so much custom stuff they could've put some proper diagnostic sauce in it lol
Dude. New space: game changer. SO much more dynamic and visually engaging for this sort of 'Show and tell from the archives' content. Such a good addition.
Had a bunch of those printers at a newspaper chain I worked for in central North Dakota in the mid '90s. We installed cards from LaserMaster which added PostScript and upped the 300 dpi output to 600 or 1200 depending on the model of the printer and card. It wasn't there really to speed up the printer, instead it was there to improve the quality of the print output. And those LM cards took forever to boot. Since the LM card was doing the processing of the job, we couldn't use the HP drivers, so had to use LM drivers. In the days before pagination, we'd print the text slugs for the newspapers from Ventura Publisher (DOS) or Aldus PageMaker (Windows) on those printers and paste them up into the pages. We tinkered with early digital cameras and scans from negatives and outputting on those printers, but the quality was never good enough, so kept having to shoot on film and develop photos as halftones. With the fonts, IIRC, the HP PCL print language would only call for the font to be printed, while PostScript (if the printer was configured with it) would send the font file in the print job, hence the need for the font cartridges on the printer side.
Memories. I used to work at LaserMaster in those days and sold a ton of their cards and our print solutions where we labeled our own printer and bundled with various options. The LM1200 was quite a printer that came later even had a hard disk for all the fonts
I remember buying a 2nd hand Laserjet 2 in the early/mid 90s, and getting it to my student apartment by bike. I still have fond memories of that machine.
Mmmm Printers. They don't get the love they deserve! I spent most of my life servicing printing devices after starting a company in 1991. The Laserjet II, IID, III, & 3D are Canon SX engines. The LaserJet 4 & 5 are EX engine variants and the 5Si was the WX engine. The 5 and 5Si are really unrelated. We had a bank customer running almost 100,000 pages per month on 5Sis printing statements. The HP LaserJet II is a Canon SX engine printer. The solenoids on the paper feed pca, attached to the DC psu, have a foam backer that prevents loud clicking when feeding the paper. This foam breaks down causing a delay in clutch engagement after the solenoid releases the pawl. You may find that you get intermittent jams but the fix is pretty easy. Remove the flat pawls from the solenoids and clean off the foam residue then replace it with a similarly thin self adhesive material (I like to use a felt pad). For testing it will work with nothing there but the solenoids are annoyingly loud. The clicking could be a number of things. If you have an original squirrel cage fan the brass bushing can be cleaned and lubed by removing the rubber bushing opposite the motor on the fan. Be careful though, the rubber may be breaking down and can tear. You might also have an issue with the fuser drive. The little 14-tooth gear on the right side of the fuser breaks down with ozone and heat exposure. There could also be something going on in the delivery assembly in the top cover (The part that opens) With the fuser lamp it is CRITICAL that it not get any grease or oils from your hands on the glass so always clean it very well with alcohol before reinstalling then "wear gloves" which is tech speak for just handling it by the ends near the wires. If there is so much as a finger print then the tungsten in the element will plate to the inside of the glass envelope and eventually cause a premature failure (I've actually seen a finger print plated on the inside of the glass) Reach out if you find you need parts. I saved a bin and have quite a few, although not always the one I need.
I imagine all these years you've been using 50Ω coax for video that expects 75Ω and the dirty secret is that the vast majority of hardware copes with that just fine. I mean, until you start running 100s of feet of it, you probably won't notice the extra signal loss compared to whatever the normal rate of loss is for those cables.
hardwiring balanced AES's negative into its ground and shoving it through 30 ohm generic audio cable and having it work fine every time truly lays out the robustness of modern data error correction.
At the start, I like the space! You mentioned proper lighting and I'm sure with studio lights it would look technically better but it looks great, i like the vibe
i am always glad to see More Stuff from you! as someone with zero hobby experience working with computer appliances i'm still always interested in the bits and bobs you have to talk about
I know with at least some TV stations, composite video in particular was in use well past its use-by date simply because component required triple the cables to be run, which made it a pain in the ass, particularly in mobile setups where it wasn't convenient to drag CCUs and associated cabling along. SDI obviously solved that, but there were a lot of composite hold-outs. Ross Video sold the RVS-210A, a composite-only switcher, until 2007.
26:39 - this very shot describes perfectly why mooving half of the stuff from studio to new storage/shoot room was briliant idea. You can setup a camera, put device in front and still have a ton of room to work, moove around, etc. I'm really happy to see that you are working with passion on delivering better and better content (with keeping in mind that before it was really great)!
I used to work a law firm in the late 90s. We used HP 3si and 4si Printers. They where beasts! Each one weighed over 100lb and took at least 2 people to move them, but there all metal parts inside and easy to service.
24:10 serial gets used for plenty more than that. switchers can let camera shaders take over auxiliary busses for doing pip and zooms on their local monitoring feeds, CG boxes can give switchers extra info about how to handle their keying channels, robocam op panels can get and recieve motion data on more modern switchers (telemetrics still uses serial, some other roboheads are all ip ethernet now though), and within brand ecosystems routers and switchers often have deep intergration that allow banks of I/O to be swapped around, audio embed/de-embed to be futzed with, and VANC/CC data to get extracted or injected.
I have a LaserJet 4P under my desk. It's the best printer I've ever owner and I haven't ever had to think about replacing it. I've said it before but I'm fairly sure I could beat someone to death with it and it would still work just fine. I use it for toner transfer for making PCBs seeing as I don't need paper any more :)
Why wasn't I subscribed to this channel? I like your scripted and edited videos, but I also like this off the cuff format. Liked, and now finally, subscribed.
I used to work on those LaserJet II's back in the day! Sticky solenoids are very common even today on "newer" printers. HP didn't invent anything. They used Canon engines. They still use Canon engines and now Samsung engines when they bought Samsung's printer division a few years ago.
Interesting. My printer is a Canon from like 2009, it’s inkjet but the cartridge is almost identical to their older BubbleJet cartridges with an extra tab and rotated a bit.
i would listen to you talk about anything that interests you honestly. your passion is infectious (probably helps that we're broadly interested in the same kinda stuff, but still)
I gotta say, the idea of you being able to make a more on the fly video where you test stuff out but also are able to be more animated and we can see your reactions is super appealing!
Oh man, this is bringing me back to when I had my Risograph. If you ever get the opportunity to take a look at a 1990s risograph (mine was the RC6300), you will see the most preposterous trainwreck of to-purpose software/driver measures combined with like, surgically precise drum printing parameters. I really like your printer videos. Printers might be objectively the worst appliance ever invented, but I have spent so much time with them professionally/on a hobbyist basis that i've picked up a long list of curious knowledge gaps (and, I guess, fondness).
Back when I had a Mac Plus I had an HP Laserjet to print with it. Not an HP Laserjet 4i or something. Just plain Laserjet. Built like a tank. About 2/3rds of a cube by volume. Survived having a ladder dropped on it and falling over a couple times. Would have kept it but never could find the card that would change it from the Mac style serial port to a parallel or LAN interface. It printed exceptionally well for about 20 years without changing anything but toner.
Lexmark was using Fuser Lamps for their Hot Roll fusers as little as five years ago. The modern solution is a metal film that rolls over a ceramic heating element, which reduced Time To First Page by several seconds
The D1 was a video transport format not a video format. That being said, it typically used 4:2:2 YUV Y'CbCr 4:2:2 (CCIR601R) differential component video signals and not RGB. It was an 8-bit sampling rate at 167mb/s. The digital NTSC/PAL format was D3, it used a 4Fsc encoding scheme, with 48Khz PCM and 8-bit video sampling at 143Mb/s. I doubt (I checked google, but couldn't find any info) the Globecaster used CCIR601 4:2:2 encoding, and more likely used "D3" 4Fsc video encoding internally.
Please do more, don't be scared that the video might not have enough to offer. The printer was interesting, as interesting as printers can get (haha) and it's all because of your presentation. The follow up to the Trinity was a surprise even if the outcome is a bummer (ohoho i could feel the disappointed sadness-soaked rage that plastic foil did induce. I had that look, oh yeah) The cozy light was a nice change! And...is that a Yamaha PSR-36? Have you played something on it that is worth sharing?
Oh man hearing about "Mopier" here is facinating because I recently had to figure out why my printer at work would refuse to print more than one copy at a time, and it turns out its because somehow the "Mopier" mode got turned on and was preventing the printing of more than one copy at a time. I'd never heard of it before then
You are correct re the halogen lamps being used as the heating element for the fuser drum. The pickup rollers should be removable for cleaning and for eventual replacement as service items.
i dont really comment on anything, but i just wanted to let you know that this was actually such a good video, i could watch a never ending stream of these
This was a fantastic change of pace for me. I really enjoyed this kind of interaction that I wouldn't get otherwise in a scripted video .. not that those are bad, though I like how organic this was. EDIT: I just realized TH-cam set me up with side channel content and that this wasn't from your primary channel to which I am subscribed. What just happened?!
Hell yes. Behold! The Globecaster! The one on eBay is no longer on there it seems. I could have sworn when I was researching the Globecaster I saw that they'd made a component video card for it, is that not the case? It's wild that essentially all of the Globecaster functionality is now replicated by OBS and one or more capture cards in a PC, and in 4K instead of SD.
@@PaulHindt The one on eBay is listed as a play Trinity I believe and it's still on there. And yeah, I hadn't considered that, maybe you just have to get a different card to have component
I for one enjoy the bench videos, especially for the little guys. Makes a nice break between the scripted videos and the more off-the-cuff ones. It has a nice, personal feeling that the main studio doesn't. I like both but those are my two cents
Can confirm, modern laser printer still use halogen or xeon lamps in the fuser to provide the heat. Some large larger/faster models will use 3 or 4 lamps to heat up quicker and maintain temperature.
I remember the "mopier" - was mid-late 90s and was blatant attempt to sell more toner etc. The earlier printers all worked in text mode - when you print from DOS you are just sending text to the serial/parallel port. Printers that could do more than basic text had some way to tell them what to do - with HP this was PCL (printer command language) so if you had an application that supported HP printers it could utilise these functions by sending the text data along with control codes - e.g. use italic font or different typeface. If you wanted to do graphics then these were mandatory. Depending on the printer you might be able to send the fonts themselves. As time went on and the interface to the printer got faster it was feasible just to send bitmap data to the printer and that allowed the software more freedom to layout content without depending on specific functionality being implemented in the printer hardware. It depends on the software as to how it will send data to the printer - basic printing just involves sending bitmap but software such as Office will use more of the available functionality on the printer to achieve higher quality result.
A lot of current digital printers in the professional space still only accept 1/2/8Bit preseparated and pre halftoned bitmap data over their command interfaces essentially requiring external RIP software.
Basic troubleshooting steps for the caster, remove and reseat any socketed components, check your voltage rails, look for bad caps. I bet somethings loose, bad contact, or shorted.
Absolutely love the format and content of the video. I feel all the same emotions as you are talking and working. You are truly entertaining and I thank you for this content. The mallet next to the pc made me laugh. As for the Trinity caster, wonder if the card might fit in a different slot. There could be a hair line crack. Someone else mentioned bad caps could be an issue too. How would things go if you had an assistant tech/sidekick? There is so much equipment to diagnose and repair, might be a huge help.
"while i feel what is like to be in" (in regards to the room).... you def gotta sort out the vibe before you try to be creative in there, figure out what you want to fix/add. It took me a couple months to get my home office how i want it. I some how crammed in a sim racing rig, a CRT cart with retro games, soldering station, 2 PCS 2 laptops and 4 monitors and a TV (for the sim chair) it took many cycles of furniture Tetris and lighting setups before i got it how i wanted it and it gave me a good feeling
It's very common for laser printer fusers to be heated by a halogen bulb. It's just one of the most efficient non-contact heating methods engineers have been able to come up with. The roller needs to roll.
I remember installing one of those raster boards into a HP laserjet. IIRC it had a special portrait mono monitor and "up res" the printing to 600DPI. While the printing was better, I doubt it was truly 600DPI. That was back in 1990-91. Copiers are cheaper per page than a laserjet. HP just wanted you to spend more $$
I know that cable hanging on the right side of the frame is going into the power strip behind you, but it does sort-of look like it's powering you through a plug on your back. We've never been able to see it before since usually you're sitting down.
Most of my old HP LJ time was spent on the Laserjet 4P and P5 back in the 90's. These were tremendously good machines. The L compact series were trash though
I rescued an LJ2 from going into the dumpster at work. I ran it for a few months, then began receiving memory errors while printing PDF files. I replaced it with a Brother 2070-hn. It's still in use.
Cathode Ray Dude, at 17:21, if where just running photocopy, the after first page was printed the second would just as as if slow photocopier 3rd 4th 5th etc, the as page in bitmap form is already in memory it just doing second copy, by bad programming computer printer drivers etc, could forcing the printer to have redraw the hole once more, so if you where printing multi paged document, the printing out all the pages like 1111, 2222, 3333, 4444, and not 1234, 1234, 1234, 1234, where the printer would have to redraw the hole page for page paper printed out? say 1 minute take print, inn the first example the first page 1 minute to print but 2nd 3th 4th may only be 20 seconds, but doing page just one still going to the hole 1 minute to printout, as has basic redraw the hole page a fresh, from the computer wanting job printed out?
The tiny size of the line printer font makes me think it's meant to let you print the number of columns that would have fit on 14" wide green zebra tractor paper on a standard sheet of paper.
Cathode Ray Dude, at 12:50, the printer draw up all the hole page in its memory (in this case it little memory) as said , abitmap image of the hole printable area a of the page, as big long list 01010101 etc, and just goes, if if try printing say hole page black, the that print may error, ang pring 1/2 to 2/3's of the page, because there not enogh on board memey to hold a full page of black or anything really, the the printer saved most of the time the lot white space on most pages
RG59/RG6 (75Ω) with BNC is kind of irritating to deal with... as you've seen most BNC stuff is actually for radio and is 50 Ω. including the old 10Base-2 ThinNet/CheaperNet standards. I found it just easier to buy a bag of BNC to Type F adapters and use commodity cables I already have leaving the adapters on the cable. it also makes it easier to interface consumer and (semi)pro devices. plus if you actually do keep 50 Ω cables you can now tell them apart at a glance!
in the you got the sort stuff like printer with service contract, maybe toner included sometimes, so the it was costing company (HP in this case, money, fix them on your site) so it was in there intrest to make very serviceable clunk click, job done,
Is that standard 4 pin s-video, or 7-pin s-video? 7-pin works with 4-pin, but it has extra pins which can carry RGB as well(or a variety of other things, sometimes even audio).
No ideas on what to do with the globecaster, but I do love big back-plane devices. Making my own audio system that does similar. The failure hex code could be the instruction it failed on or a virtual address, which might point to a peripheral failing rather than the RAM itself. If there's no manual of errors to look up it might be possible to reverse engineer the application code to figure out what it's doing, but, if you're not set up for that (especially for a win2k app) that's probably more effort than it's worth. Could see if Foone has any pointers xD
Someone gave me an original HP Laserjet a while ago and I had no use or space for it so I tried giving it away. After a few months of it sitting in my garage with no interest I eventually just set it on the side on the road and someone came by and threw it into the back of their truck. Hopefully they enjoyed the 50 lb beast as much as I did.
"I'll talk about fonts in a moment" top 10 most exciting sentences
I have been looking into rasterization of fonts recently... Quite sensual
Let me explain to you the wonders and horrors of _kerning_
literally
@@claysweetser4106don’t you mean keming?
@@kraio-sfu don’t you mean cooming?
I like how this new space lets you emotively walk away all the time
Hey Gravis, we definitely still use lamps in fusers all the way up to high end production level. I think it's a case of it's tech that "just works" and does a great job at what it's meant to do. On top of that, it makes rebuilding fusers a snap because everything is self contained and you just need to unplug and slide them out of the heat rolls. Also "line printer" probably refers to an actual Line Printer. They're big and somewhat ancient printers that are somewhat similar to dot matrix but they print entire lines at once. I worked on a few at the beginning of my technician career and the heads are massive with big rows of tines replaceable in sections.
Yes, I have worked on high end printers and copiers for 30 years, most use halogen lamps in the fuser, some of the newer ones use an induction heating system.
@@zebo-the-fat this is fascinating! I guess if it's not broke...
The fact the bulb is so good at emitting infrared and is really quick to heat up (compared to incandescent types) just makes it the perfect for non contact heating. Halogen bulbs get used for this purpose in a lot of different industry fields, too! :O
It was fun to watch! It reminds me of tinkering with my own projects and monologuing aloud about all the stuff that always goes wrong haha. Right down to "bought a new part only for the new part to not work in the same way so you wasted time and money" ending, most relatable experience ever. Good stuff!
There was a reason we sold apple laserwriters in 1987 for use with ibm pcs. Even if it meant we had to write a device driver for the ibm serial port as ibm didn't support the flow control the laserwriter needed. And we were looked at VERY suspiciously at all the apple events we had to visit:
"Did you see those two" "Yes, so what" "They sell the laserwriter to peoples with ibm pcs" "you are kidding aren't you - that's impossible" "No kidding - I don't know how they do it either"
I even had to go to a repair course for the laserwriter and get a certificate. And as we weren't interested in macs we couldn't even buy them from apple without a different certificate for mac repair I never made.
OK, whatever what I wanted to say is, that the laserwriter ran on PostScript and so there was no need for pixelfonts whatsoever. you could print text in ANY rotation you wanted in ANY size. Very useful for people who ran Ventura Publisher on the ibm pc.
When I started as a field technician back in the early 1990s. This was one of the first printers I had to learn how to repair. I still remember my customer had an error 50. I simply asked them for the owners manual. In the back of the book it told you it was a bad fuser. It also told you how to reset the error. I learned early that people just won't read the book. Nowadays people just won't Google it.
At night time I worked at the local PBS station. I had the glorious job of running the cables under the raised floor from switchers to operators and out to the studios. If you wanted to know where a cable was I was the man.
Great memories thank you.
I have to say that is exactly what I would expect. People don't want to know how it works or how to fix it. They just want to press print and get a page. If it doesn't print they want to call someone so they can keep on lawyering 😝, accountifying, or doing whatever they do! This kept me in business for over 25 years!
And yet people are so concerned with AI. When most people don’t even know how to use Google. I think we will be just fine.
Almost everything that went through the HP supply chain had the magical HP part numbers instead of whatever they may have been originally. Classic HP to have every part labelled with an eight digit number known as a 4x4. Later products have 5x5 numbers (10 digits).
Fun video honestly, just feels like hanging out with a friend whos showing you stuff
HP used to offer a screensaver which resembled a fish tank. The parrot fish on the screensaver was named "MOPy." As you used the printer, you would acquire points. You could use the points to buy items for MOPy. I didn't give MOPy and attention or feed it, and the fish died.
I love the weird incentive to waste your business’s money printing pointless stuff for the fish. Especially imagining a corporate environment with thousands of workstation installs. But maybe all the reports met that quota anyway…
Of course, as you say, that’s only to people who are susceptible to virtual pets or life sim games. And I’ve never been one to consistently do Animal Crossing or Nintendogs.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah, it seemed pretty silly. I also wondered if folks printed unnecessary copies in order to buy fish food and toys. Clicking on the screen was the equivalent of tapping on the glass, and it would stress out the fish. The project I was on came to an end, and I was let go. My desk sat empty for a month, and PC unused. A co-worker told me about the dead fish, and I got a laugh out of that.
@@timmooney7528 that’s hilarious. Now I’m imagining a physical equivalent, where corporate’s negligence lets an office fish tank die. Come to think of it, I’ve seen mysteriously empty glass cases or oddly-large terrariums in some offices… maybe that happens more than I expect.
@@kaitlyn__L Either people didn't feed it out of fear of over feeding it, or they ignore it because the care for the fish was someone else' responsibility.
MOPy Fish! Loved that screen saver
Worked in a shipping/repair warehouse for a few years. Main responsibility was shipping/receiving, but after that I mainly repaired the laser printers. But the newest printer I worked on was apparently released in '08. It was still using those same halogen light bulbs. lol. I imagine part of the reason they don't(or didn't?) use LEDs is simply because they're too efficient? lol. Like you want that heat output, so the inefficiency, the higher power use, is actually a good thing for this purpose.
Random semi-related story. When my boss was teaching me them. First time ever repairing laser printers. He shows me this plastic piece near the fuser that frequently broke as the users ripped the pages out after jams or whatever. My boss gets out the hot glue and tells me this is how to repair them... I can clearly see it's literally inches away from the 'WARNING: 180°C/360°F" label, even closer to the actual hot bits. Like maybe an inch. I remember thinking like 'what the ****' as I side-eye him. lol. I never did it, but maybe a few months later a coworker is learning them, and my boss teaches them the same thing, and he does do it. Even before this, we'd get back printers where their fuser rollers were literally fused together. I went to the coworker and said something like 'this is what happens when you hot glue the fusers like that. Ya gotta stop.' I was entirely supposing, had no idea. He did, the boss stopped working on them(or in general), and suddenly they slowed and eventually stopped coming in. lol... So what was happening was obviously the hot glue would melt under the extreme heat. It probably would get stuck in the rollers. Then when the printer cooled, it'd harden again, gluing the rollers together. From there, the next time the fuser heated up, the rollers would be unable to move until the fuser melted away the hot glue. By the time that happened, the rollers were already fused together. Destroying the fuser. So my boss in an effort to save like a $5 piece of plastic, would destroy $200 fusers. So they potentially wasted thousands of dollars of equipment. Like I saw at least a dozen like this. Probably much more. Who knows how many the other 2 saw, or how long my boss was doing this before I showed up. lol.
the vibes of the bit when the printer started working are immaculate, felt like an intern hearing the graybeard's stories and i'm here for it
for the switcher, that address, 0xe8000002, feels extremely important for figuring out the problem. i'm no expert in anything but the fact that its failing 2 bytes after a nice round (hex) number makes it feel like its maybe some sort of race condition? like, maybe the computer asks for the first 16 bits, receives them, but then before the switcher is ready it asks for the next two, and then times out waiting for a response to a query that the switcher didnt have time to actually receive? you said that the computer setup was a little newer than the switcher, if it were me i might try running the software on a more contemporary machine/os and seeing if that fixes it
Could also be bank 8 (or 80) address line 2. IE a specific chip on a specific stick, or maybe a specific memory cell inside one specific chip.
@@kaitlyn__L right, it could be just about anything. In my experience error codes like these are almost never useful unless you happen to work for the manufacturer and have the source material on hand. Even for well known products, documentation of the error codes is extremely difficult to find
@@ThickpropheT for sure. It looks like a memory address, but it might not even be real RAM if all the other hardware is memory-mapped… completely inscrutable.
Fast forward 10 years and Gravis owns the whole building.....
not even renting it any more, Gravis has just bought it outright
love this format and honestly this place has huge potential for videos IMO. Also, I've never been so excited to see a printer print something in my life lol, and I hope someone can help with the Trinitry, my two cents is try to clean/reseat/replace the ram on the other cards, who knows, maybe it works all in conjunction or having bad ram one one card keeps another from doing what it needs to do etc. sounds like an easy thing to try at least, otherwise no idea, I hate when errors are just super generic like... so much custom stuff they could've put some proper diagnostic sauce in it lol
Dude. New space: game changer. SO much more dynamic and visually engaging for this sort of 'Show and tell from the archives' content. Such a good addition.
Had a bunch of those printers at a newspaper chain I worked for in central North Dakota in the mid '90s. We installed cards from LaserMaster which added PostScript and upped the 300 dpi output to 600 or 1200 depending on the model of the printer and card. It wasn't there really to speed up the printer, instead it was there to improve the quality of the print output. And those LM cards took forever to boot. Since the LM card was doing the processing of the job, we couldn't use the HP drivers, so had to use LM drivers. In the days before pagination, we'd print the text slugs for the newspapers from Ventura Publisher (DOS) or Aldus PageMaker (Windows) on those printers and paste them up into the pages. We tinkered with early digital cameras and scans from negatives and outputting on those printers, but the quality was never good enough, so kept having to shoot on film and develop photos as halftones. With the fonts, IIRC, the HP PCL print language would only call for the font to be printed, while PostScript (if the printer was configured with it) would send the font file in the print job, hence the need for the font cartridges on the printer side.
Memories. I used to work at LaserMaster in those days and sold a ton of their cards and our print solutions where we labeled our own printer and bundled with various options. The LM1200 was quite a printer that came later even had a hard disk for all the fonts
Genuinely impressed with your wiring - the lights didn't dim while that printer warmed up.
I would definitely watch more stuff like this, and be glad to continue to support stuff like this :)
I remember buying a 2nd hand Laserjet 2 in the early/mid 90s, and getting it to my student apartment by bike. I still have fond memories of that machine.
Mmmm Printers. They don't get the love they deserve! I spent most of my life servicing printing devices after starting a company in 1991. The Laserjet II, IID, III, & 3D are Canon SX engines. The LaserJet 4 & 5 are EX engine variants and the 5Si was the WX engine. The 5 and 5Si are really unrelated. We had a bank customer running almost 100,000 pages per month on 5Sis printing statements.
The HP LaserJet II is a Canon SX engine printer. The solenoids on the paper feed pca, attached to the DC psu, have a foam backer that prevents loud clicking when feeding the paper. This foam breaks down causing a delay in clutch engagement after the solenoid releases the pawl. You may find that you get intermittent jams but the fix is pretty easy. Remove the flat pawls from the solenoids and clean off the foam residue then replace it with a similarly thin self adhesive material (I like to use a felt pad). For testing it will work with nothing there but the solenoids are annoyingly loud.
The clicking could be a number of things. If you have an original squirrel cage fan the brass bushing can be cleaned and lubed by removing the rubber bushing opposite the motor on the fan. Be careful though, the rubber may be breaking down and can tear. You might also have an issue with the fuser drive. The little 14-tooth gear on the right side of the fuser breaks down with ozone and heat exposure. There could also be something going on in the delivery assembly in the top cover (The part that opens)
With the fuser lamp it is CRITICAL that it not get any grease or oils from your hands on the glass so always clean it very well with alcohol before reinstalling then "wear gloves" which is tech speak for just handling it by the ends near the wires. If there is so much as a finger print then the tungsten in the element will plate to the inside of the glass envelope and eventually cause a premature failure (I've actually seen a finger print plated on the inside of the glass)
Reach out if you find you need parts. I saved a bin and have quite a few, although not always the one I need.
I imagine all these years you've been using 50Ω coax for video that expects 75Ω and the dirty secret is that the vast majority of hardware copes with that just fine. I mean, until you start running 100s of feet of it, you probably won't notice the extra signal loss compared to whatever the normal rate of loss is for those cables.
hardwiring balanced AES's negative into its ground and shoving it through 30 ohm generic audio cable and having it work fine every time truly lays out the robustness of modern data error correction.
@@famitory I believe Canford had AES3 running over wet string at a trade show.
At the start, I like the space!
You mentioned proper lighting and I'm sure with studio lights it would look technically better but it looks great, i like the vibe
RG58 are used in ham radio applications and radio comms in general, so it kinda makes sense that broadcast would use the 75 ohm cables
i am always glad to see More Stuff from you! as someone with zero hobby experience working with computer appliances i'm still always interested in the bits and bobs you have to talk about
I know with at least some TV stations, composite video in particular was in use well past its use-by date simply because component required triple the cables to be run, which made it a pain in the ass, particularly in mobile setups where it wasn't convenient to drag CCUs and associated cabling along. SDI obviously solved that, but there were a lot of composite hold-outs. Ross Video sold the RVS-210A, a composite-only switcher, until 2007.
Slight Usagi vibes from this format.
Which is obviously a good thing!
26:39 - this very shot describes perfectly why mooving half of the stuff from studio to new storage/shoot room was briliant idea. You can setup a camera, put device in front and still have a ton of room to work, moove around, etc. I'm really happy to see that you are working with passion on delivering better and better content (with keeping in mind that before it was really great)!
I enjoyed this! It's like I have a techie friend showing me around his collection, and tinkering and stuff!
Thanks!
I used to work a law firm in the late 90s. We used HP 3si and 4si Printers. They where beasts! Each one weighed over 100lb and took at least 2 people to move them, but there all metal parts inside and easy to service.
“Help, plumber? I think there’s blood dripping from my ceiling?”
“Oh, sorry madam, you’ll need an exorcist.”
I loved this video and I love this format. It’s like hanging out at a friend’s house.
24:10 serial gets used for plenty more than that. switchers can let camera shaders take over auxiliary busses for doing pip and zooms on their local monitoring feeds, CG boxes can give switchers extra info about how to handle their keying channels, robocam op panels can get and recieve motion data on more modern switchers (telemetrics still uses serial, some other roboheads are all ip ethernet now though), and within brand ecosystems routers and switchers often have deep intergration that allow banks of I/O to be swapped around, audio embed/de-embed to be futzed with, and VANC/CC data to get extracted or injected.
Huh! Well shit!
Very excited to see more stuff in this format, already adore it
I have a LaserJet 4P under my desk. It's the best printer I've ever owner and I haven't ever had to think about replacing it. I've said it before but I'm fairly sure I could beat someone to death with it and it would still work just fine. I use it for toner transfer for making PCBs seeing as I don't need paper any more :)
Why wasn't I subscribed to this channel? I like your scripted and edited videos, but I also like this off the cuff format. Liked, and now finally, subscribed.
Had no clue you had a 2nd channel! Love everything post! Love you!
This is an excellent video!! You’re up and moving around…
The new space is all coming together. Awesome! Is great to see this video so soon after the Patreon update. Cheers
Fan is screaming for you to take it out of it's misery LOL -- looking forward to you linking up to the IBM PC with that fancy card!
I used to work on those LaserJet II's back in the day! Sticky solenoids are very common even today on "newer" printers. HP didn't invent anything. They used Canon engines. They still use Canon engines and now Samsung engines when they bought Samsung's printer division a few years ago.
Interesting.
My printer is a Canon from like 2009, it’s inkjet but the cartridge is almost identical to their older BubbleJet cartridges with an extra tab and rotated a bit.
They should repopularize desktop formfactor cases so that you can stack it under your laser printer
i would listen to you talk about anything that interests you honestly. your passion is infectious (probably helps that we're broadly interested in the same kinda stuff, but still)
I gotta say, the idea of you being able to make a more on the fly video where you test stuff out but also are able to be more animated and we can see your reactions is super appealing!
The laserjet II is the most robust printer ever made. I replaced the toner on one that had the original fuser and had over 1,000,000 prints on it.
I used to re-manufacture toner cartridges for laser printers of that vintage.
I fixed and rebuilt dozens of those II's (and III's) back in the day.
Oh man, this is bringing me back to when I had my Risograph. If you ever get the opportunity to take a look at a 1990s risograph (mine was the RC6300), you will see the most preposterous trainwreck of to-purpose software/driver measures combined with like, surgically precise drum printing parameters. I really like your printer videos. Printers might be objectively the worst appliance ever invented, but I have spent so much time with them professionally/on a hobbyist basis that i've picked up a long list of curious knowledge gaps (and, I guess, fondness).
Back when I had a Mac Plus I had an HP Laserjet to print with it.
Not an HP Laserjet 4i or something. Just plain Laserjet. Built like a tank. About 2/3rds of a cube by volume. Survived having a ladder dropped on it and falling over a couple times. Would have kept it but never could find the card that would change it from the Mac style serial port to a parallel or LAN interface. It printed exceptionally well for about 20 years without changing anything but toner.
Lexmark was using Fuser Lamps for their Hot Roll fusers as little as five years ago. The modern solution is a metal film that rolls over a ceramic heating element, which reduced Time To First Page by several seconds
The D1 was a video transport format not a video format. That being said, it typically used 4:2:2 YUV Y'CbCr 4:2:2 (CCIR601R) differential component video signals and not RGB.
It was an 8-bit sampling rate at 167mb/s. The digital NTSC/PAL format was D3, it used a 4Fsc encoding scheme, with 48Khz PCM and 8-bit video sampling at 143Mb/s.
I doubt (I checked google, but couldn't find any info) the Globecaster used CCIR601 4:2:2 encoding, and more likely used "D3" 4Fsc video encoding internally.
Please do more, don't be scared that the video might not have enough to offer. The printer was interesting, as interesting as printers can get (haha) and it's all because of your presentation. The follow up to the Trinity was a surprise even if the outcome is a bummer (ohoho i could feel the disappointed sadness-soaked rage that plastic foil did induce. I had that look, oh yeah)
The cozy light was a nice change!
And...is that a Yamaha PSR-36? Have you played something on it that is worth sharing?
32:50 RG-8, RG-58 and such are 50ohm cables. RG059, RG-6, etc, are 75ohm cables. They are not cross compatible in most cases.
Oh man hearing about "Mopier" here is facinating because I recently had to figure out why my printer at work would refuse to print more than one copy at a time, and it turns out its because somehow the "Mopier" mode got turned on and was preventing the printing of more than one copy at a time. I'd never heard of it before then
You are correct re the halogen lamps being used as the heating element for the fuser drum. The pickup rollers should be removable for cleaning and for eventual replacement as service items.
21:31 be careful with your back gravis please! lift with them leggs instead, we need you to stay around here:))
This was delightful, keep em coming!
Aww, yeah! This thing was "the family printer" most of the time I was growing up, eventually upgraded to the LaserJet IV...
i dont really comment on anything, but i just wanted to let you know that this was actually such a good video, i could watch a never ending stream of these
This was a fantastic change of pace for me. I really enjoyed this kind of interaction that I wouldn't get otherwise in a scripted video .. not that those are bad, though I like how organic this was.
EDIT: I just realized TH-cam set me up with side channel content and that this wasn't from your primary channel to which I am subscribed. What just happened?!
Hell yes. Behold! The Globecaster! The one on eBay is no longer on there it seems.
I could have sworn when I was researching the Globecaster I saw that they'd made a component video card for it, is that not the case?
It's wild that essentially all of the Globecaster functionality is now replicated by OBS and one or more capture cards in a PC, and in 4K instead of SD.
@@PaulHindt The one on eBay is listed as a play Trinity I believe and it's still on there. And yeah, I hadn't considered that, maybe you just have to get a different card to have component
@@CathodeRayDudeGaiden Ah, you're right. i missed that one. I had seen a different one, labeled as a Globalstreams Globecaster, but it is gone now.
@@CathodeRayDudeGaiden There appear to be at least two GC component encoder cards on eBay at the moment.
Those old HP Laserjets were designed to be serviced. I wish the modern ones were more like them.
I for one enjoy the bench videos, especially for the little guys. Makes a nice break between the scripted videos and the more off-the-cuff ones. It has a nice, personal feeling that the main studio doesn't. I like both but those are my two cents
Can confirm, modern laser printer still use halogen or xeon lamps in the fuser to provide the heat. Some large larger/faster models will use 3 or 4 lamps to heat up quicker and maintain temperature.
Is a dead bug stuck under the backplane and shorting things out?
Glossy black Dell XPS 420! Got that one from Dell in ‘06 and it’s still me main gaming rig lol 😂
Red Means Recording! Woot!
Why am I imagining this new space as bringing us a sort-of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood but with old tech" vibe?
I remember the "mopier" - was mid-late 90s and was blatant attempt to sell more toner etc. The earlier printers all worked in text mode - when you print from DOS you are just sending text to the serial/parallel port. Printers that could do more than basic text had some way to tell them what to do - with HP this was PCL (printer command language) so if you had an application that supported HP printers it could utilise these functions by sending the text data along with control codes - e.g. use italic font or different typeface. If you wanted to do graphics then these were mandatory. Depending on the printer you might be able to send the fonts themselves. As time went on and the interface to the printer got faster it was feasible just to send bitmap data to the printer and that allowed the software more freedom to layout content without depending on specific functionality being implemented in the printer hardware. It depends on the software as to how it will send data to the printer - basic printing just involves sending bitmap but software such as Office will use more of the available functionality on the printer to achieve higher quality result.
Came here from the future! (your main channel video about the storage) - and great thing I did because I didn't know about the side channel :O
Alr I really love this new format please keep doing it
You can have any font you want, as long as it's courier
A lot of current digital printers in the professional space still only accept 1/2/8Bit preseparated and pre halftoned bitmap data over their command interfaces essentially requiring external RIP software.
Basic troubleshooting steps for the caster, remove and reseat any socketed components, check your voltage rails, look for bad caps. I bet somethings loose, bad contact, or shorted.
i love the vids when you tinker with things and dont forget little guys lol
Absolutely love the format and content of the video. I feel all the same emotions as you are talking and working. You are truly entertaining and I thank you for this content. The mallet next to the pc made me laugh.
As for the Trinity caster, wonder if the card might fit in a different slot. There could be a hair line crack. Someone else mentioned bad caps could be an issue too.
How would things go if you had an assistant tech/sidekick? There is so much equipment to diagnose and repair, might be a huge help.
"while i feel what is like to be in" (in regards to the room).... you def gotta sort out the vibe before you try to be creative in there, figure out what you want to fix/add. It took me a couple months to get my home office how i want it. I some how crammed in a sim racing rig, a CRT cart with retro games, soldering station, 2 PCS 2 laptops and 4 monitors and a TV (for the sim chair) it took many cycles of furniture Tetris and lighting setups before i got it how i wanted it and it gave me a good feeling
room for activities
It's very common for laser printer fusers to be heated by a halogen bulb. It's just one of the most efficient non-contact heating methods engineers have been able to come up with. The roller needs to roll.
lmao, distinct memory of my dad picking up his clicking laserjet II and dropping it to get it to print again.
I remember installing one of those raster boards into a HP laserjet. IIRC it had a special portrait mono monitor and "up res" the printing to 600DPI. While the printing was better, I doubt it was truly 600DPI. That was back in 1990-91. Copiers are cheaper per page than a laserjet. HP just wanted you to spend more $$
I've got some of the postscript font chips for one of those printers.
edit this must not be a postscript printer.
@@ScottGravleeI guess they reused the case after PostScript. Maybe even a lot of the smarts, too.
@@kaitlyn__L PostScript is still used in printing and pretty new at that point. Not sure when Adobe PostScript was used in HP laserjet printers.
You'd be surprised how many semiconductor industry tools use lightbulbs as heat sources
I know that cable hanging on the right side of the frame is going into the power strip behind you, but it does sort-of look like it's powering you through a plug on your back. We've never been able to see it before since usually you're sitting down.
Most of my old HP LJ time was spent on the Laserjet 4P and P5 back in the 90's.
These were tremendously good machines.
The L compact series were trash though
The postscript printers, which were contemporary with the HPs (Like the LaserWriter) were using outline fonts.
I rescued an LJ2 from going into the dumpster at work. I ran it for a few months, then began receiving memory errors while printing PDF files. I replaced it with a Brother 2070-hn. It's still in use.
Was worth the watch.
Fantastic
This is my second favorite channel!
It's the Cathode Ray Digital Warehouse! :D
Love the icon. Konata was the first time I felt seen as a weird nerdy girl in high school (as I was when it was new,)
Cathode Ray Dude, at 17:21, if where just running photocopy, the after first page was printed the second would just as as if slow photocopier 3rd 4th 5th etc, the as page in bitmap form is already in memory it just doing second copy, by bad programming computer printer drivers etc, could forcing the printer to have redraw the hole once more, so if you where printing multi paged document, the printing out all the pages like 1111, 2222, 3333, 4444, and not 1234, 1234, 1234, 1234, where the printer would have to redraw the hole page for page paper printed out? say 1 minute take print, inn the first example the first page 1 minute to print but 2nd 3th 4th may only be 20 seconds, but doing page just one still going to the hole 1 minute to printout, as has basic redraw the hole page a fresh, from the computer wanting job printed out?
The tiny size of the line printer font makes me think it's meant to let you print the number of columns that would have fit on 14" wide green zebra tractor paper on a standard sheet of paper.
Ah, that makes sense. I was scratching my head because I thought they were all 10-12pt (14-12CPI)
Cathode Ray Dude, at 12:50, the printer draw up all the hole page in its memory (in this case it little memory) as said , abitmap image of the hole printable area a of the page, as big long list 01010101 etc, and just goes, if if try printing say hole page black, the that print may error, ang pring 1/2 to 2/3's of the page, because there not enogh on board memey to hold a full page of black or anything really, the the printer saved most of the time the lot white space on most pages
RG59/RG6 (75Ω) with BNC is kind of irritating to deal with... as you've seen most BNC stuff is actually for radio and is 50 Ω. including the old 10Base-2 ThinNet/CheaperNet standards.
I found it just easier to buy a bag of BNC to Type F adapters and use commodity cables I already have leaving the adapters on the cable. it also makes it easier to interface consumer and (semi)pro devices. plus if you actually do keep 50 Ω cables you can now tell them apart at a glance!
in the you got the sort stuff like printer with service contract, maybe toner included sometimes, so the it was costing company (HP in this case, money, fix them on your site) so it was in there intrest to make very serviceable clunk click, job done,
Is that standard 4 pin s-video, or 7-pin s-video? 7-pin works with 4-pin, but it has extra pins which can carry RGB as well(or a variety of other things, sometimes even audio).
No ideas on what to do with the globecaster, but I do love big back-plane devices. Making my own audio system that does similar. The failure hex code could be the instruction it failed on or a virtual address, which might point to a peripheral failing rather than the RAM itself. If there's no manual of errors to look up it might be possible to reverse engineer the application code to figure out what it's doing, but, if you're not set up for that (especially for a win2k app) that's probably more effort than it's worth. Could see if Foone has any pointers xD
Xerox machines used halogen bulb late in the 90s.
Someone gave me an original HP Laserjet a while ago and I had no use or space for it so I tried giving it away. After a few months of it sitting in my garage with no interest I eventually just set it on the side on the road and someone came by and threw it into the back of their truck. Hopefully they enjoyed the 50 lb beast as much as I did.
Thanks Gravis ♥