If it makes you feel any better, there are some printers that do actually burn their paper. (More or less.) They use a thermal paper that reacts to heat. Not sure why anyone does this, but there you go. Side note: one huge disadvantage of using a printout from thermal paper is that you can't use a pencil eraser on one because the friction of a rubber eraser generates heat and thus makes black smear marks on thermal paper. Oops. Of course that was many many years ago that I last used one. Maybe they changed?
Text in the quick scroll at 0:18 Ink dries out, meaning that the printer has to either constantly be performing a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather regularly which, in this paperless age fewer and fewer people are doing. The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer. Ink cartridges are usually priced at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into buying generic ink which often clogs the inkjects so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Because the ink is a liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink has dried. Water-based inks are likely to completely wash away if the paper they are printed onto becomes wet, meaning shipping labels printed with some inkjet printers can be rendered completely unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain. None of these issues plague laser printers, so despite their higher upfront cost (and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance modes", the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to dry, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the suspect of this video and you'll soon see. That said, Techmoan recently reviewed[0] an inkjet printer that was actually pretty decent in terms of the ink cost, so even if a "maintenance mode" were to waste ink, it's not like it's wasting super expensive ink. Perhaps one day I'll rejoin Team Inkjet. Particularly for photo printing (and images in general) inkjet remains supreme. But for now, I'm planted in the realm of toner so that, when I have to do my taxes, I don't have to waste time, energy, and money fighting a stupid inkjet with clogged heads. [0] th-cam.com/video/sMIl4TA7wYU/w-d-xo.html
Oops. I read those paragraphs at first but somehow missed them when transcribing them. I've added them and then a link to the Techmoan video I think it's referring to.
Inkjets are commonly used for direct to garment printers. Especially their 60+ inch wide variety. As well as direct to canvas as a Giclee substitute, used for on-demand printing of optical discs and case art, pigmented inks with 100 or more years of fade resistance can be found in Epson's home printers with their DuraBright CMYK inks.
You, my good Sir, have just helped me solve a Problem that has haunted me for at least the last year! After many toner cartridge and toner drum swaps, my printer still printed either very thin or extremely blurry around fine details. I cleaned the toner drum and fixing unit with rubbing alcohol but nothing helped. After watching this fine example of audio-visual excellence, I went to look for this fine row of LEDs and after a quick cleanup with rubbing alcohol, the prints are crisp, sharp and as new! You have just saved me from buying a new printer. Consider me as a part of your notification squad!
The toner cartridge boxes for my old 1990s era Okidata LED printer used to come with an alcohol swab pad and instructions to do that as part of inserting the new cartridge.
@@Network126 before you go all r/thathappened Think about the fact that way way WAY weirder things have happened. I found this channel by chance and so did you. That's pretty much how most people find new content. They may have interests that are similar and watch channels that are similar to this one and all it takes is for the TH-cam algorithm to say hey this person should see this video and boom.
Your channel is perfect. No bullshit and all really cool information. I never fully appreciated how complex some old technologies were (like cathode ray tubes), before watching your channel.
Seriously, the way he tells the information is perfect. Thats how Linus started, but now with all that garbage banter and shit we dont care about it became like reality tv. This is perfect
I actually work on printers and copy machines, more often than not, a lot of the newer printers that are manufactured seem to be using LEDs over laser, I even work on some machines that use a hybrid of both laser and led. Laser is generally about as reliable as LED from my experience, the "spinny thing" you referred to in the laser unit is called a polygon mirror motor, after a certain time these will get stuck or not spin as fast causing failure. I've yet to have an actual laser or led die on machines I work on and some of them push over 1 million copies/prints in months. The only real advantage to a laser only setup I could see is the resolution and the lack of toner getting on the laser blocking portions of the print. LED only printers have the downside of toner generally will spill on the LEDs and block light. Also it's worth mentioning not a lot of newer machines and depending on the manufacturer don't use corona wire anymore, they use something called a charge/development/magnetic roller, terminology varies per manufacturer and there's normally an upper and lower looks like the one in your video have a roller from what I saw. Hope my knowledge helps! Great video!
fellow print wizard here and can concur that laser and led have about the same level of reliability. So many other parts are going to wear out so much sooner than the laser mirror that outside of a print-shop or heavier environment, its pretty much a non issue. what i want to bring up is that samsung that was used in the video and the reason it is that much slower to print color. now the reason is not that it is laser vs led, its that the machine appears to not use a primary/secondary (belt) transfer system but transfer directly from the developer roller to a single large photo conducting drum. from the look of it, it must do a pass for each of the colors waiting for the 4th pass to run the paper past for transfer and then clean the pc drum. not necessarily a bad system, its just trading speed for less expensive consumables. but enough about drums and charging, lets talk about the real hot topic. the move away from heating fusers via incandescence to sexy sexy induction heating.
Unreliable thing in laser printers is bazillion of plastic wheels in paper transport that requires PhD in mechanics, not laser with a mirror or LED strip and thing that heats paper ;) It's easier to grasp a gearbox in a motorcycle than paper transport in laser printer that has duplex and few trays.
Have yet to have an actual laser or led die on machines you work on?? What magic fairy dust are you sprinkling on them? The polygon mirror is the most common failure, but I had a couple of LED arrays with a partial failure leaving blank lines. Some laser diode failures also, normally a code for no beam detect when the polygon mirror spins freely.
Shall I bring up the time in the 1980s when I had a copier with both a thermistor failure and a thermal fuse failure so that the halogen lamp stayed on until the aluminum heat roller melted to a puddle into the silicon oil pan under the press roller? It was a Mita DC-312RE as I recall. The customer phoned it in as "smelled hot". There was fire extinguisher residue all over the machine.
One minor footnote: Usually (if not always) in laser and LED printers, the polarity of the toner is reversed from my explanation. Parts of the drum that receive light attract toner, and dark portions do not. Rather frustratingly, I can't find where I had read this (pretty sure it was just on everyone's favorite source of knowledge, but visiting my recent pages and some Ctrl-effing hasn't helped). If my unreliable memory is correct, this reduced wasted toner because it allowed for stronger repelling of toner in the unexposed parts of the drum. Or something like that.
I have a similar printer (3150CDN) and all I can say is the most reliable printer I ever had. It never jams, never out of ink mid-job, it can print in long batches or be left unused for months to come back and print perfectly. The quality still is not on par with an inkjet, but for documents you can't beat it. I noticed your toner holders and cartridges are kinda messy, are you rechargin yours or using alternative ones? if so, how's your print quality and does it damage the imaging unit?
Well, I've inherited this printer from my parents who wanted an all-in-one for copying and scanning. From day one it's been using generic toner replacements, and some years ago there was a bad batch of cartridges that leaked everywhere. In recent years the availability of decent generics has much improved, in fact a good full set (plus an extra K cartridge) runs around $60 on Amazon. And indeed, this printer has been very very reliable. The only bummers are that this model doesn't do duplexing, and that it takes a while to warm up. Recent laser printers can warm up in something like 6 seconds which is awesome! I have a newer basic B+W printer (also a Brother, though I think it actually is a laser printer) that does auto-duplex and warms up much faster, so the HL-3040CN stays idle unless I need color. Which is quite rare. Honestly it's pretty much a spare at this point. But a very good spare!
The new printers use a different method of fixing the toner. The good old ones used a large halogen bulb inside a teflon-coated aluminum tube. The paper was squeezed against this tube and a soft, flexible silicone-roller. In the new printers the heating is done by a thick-film heater - a ceramic substrate made from Alumina (Aluminum oxide) has a deposited track of resistive material on it. Over this heating element there is a spinning loop (tube) of what seems identical to the reusable teflon cooking sheets we use in our oven. The paper is squeezed against this loop and a soft, flexible silicone-roller. There is almost no thermal mass to heat up, so the fixer is ready in an instant!
LED printers are still laser cause of the led being used if you look in to fibre optic communications most modern fibre optic communications uses a LED laser for the light component and not a traditional laser, even in CD players you will find it is an LED laser as it’s light source, so still a laser. So the LED printer uses an LED lasers have a look at the Bluray laser diode that is also still an LED as it’s a diode. Pays to look into things a bit more closer Alec.
Another advantage to the Brother-style setup is that you can have a fully straight paper path using the manual input tray and the back door that bypasses the roller that flips the page over and out the top, letting you print on thicker paper that would otherwise jam or curl too much, or on labels that would otherwise have the possibility of peeling off inside the mechanism.
Companies make to much money on printers, otherwise you'd think they'd make them plug and play (like literally every other device for your computer) with affordable refills. I beg, borrow and steal when it comes to me needing to print something.
I actually loved working on printers, especially laser/ LED printers, as the lion's share of the problems were mechanical in nature, not electronic, or even software in nature. They were frequently easy to correct, but you had to have parts on hand to fix them. HP's being the most popular when I was doing computer work, were the most popular lasers, and Okidata was the most popular dot matix. Keeping some denatured alcohol, a couple of fusers, pickup rollers and a printhead or two on hand, and I could bang out several easy, high-profit printer service calls in a day!
I've got a variant of that Brother printer. Despite me being an engineer and curious about anything technology related, it never occurred to me that it was an LED printer rather than a Laser printer! Thank you for enlightening me! A favourite thing about these vs. inkjets: You can go a month between prints and it comes out perfect the first time. Downside: It repeatedly warns that toner is low months before it actually quits working due to low toner.
Look up how to fool these into thinking they have a fresh toner cartridge installed. If I recall correctly, it involves pushing some buttons with the lid open. I've been fooling mine for around five years and it's done over 10k pages on the stock sampler cartridges with no picture quality issues whatsoever. Maybe I just got lucky and they ran out of sampler carts at the factory, reprogrammed the EEPROM in some regular ones to report only 1k page capacities, sold them as samplers, and called it a day. Or maybe all sampler cartridges are like this. Who knows.
I have a Brother color "all in one" that is an LED printer. The "Toner Low" warning it TOTALLY BOGUS! In addition to coming on far too early, it counts copies ONLY without regard to whether they are color. As a result, it will start demanding replacement color cartridges even if you never run color copies. Fortunately, the counters can be reset from the printer control panel. Google the model number of your printer and "toner reset" or something similar to get directions. I was very confused the first time I opened my new "Laser Printer" and found the line of LED bars and drums. It didn't take too long to figure out what it was, but it totally blew my mind that I had never heard of the technology. I'm seeing several comments that the print quality of LED printers is sub par and can only say I find the quality just fine! It's definitely better than my eyesight! LOL
I have a HP Colour Laser CP1515n sitting next to me, which I've had since the late 2000s. I only occasionally print, and am still on the original starter colour toners. Needless to say, I've been using the override for several years now, and there's still toner left in them (probably getting a little low by now!)
I was a color copier technician for 28 years and mostly worked on the Canon line. The very first model I worked on was the Canon CLC 200 series. I also repaired typewriters, fax machines, shredders, electric printing calculators and almost every other kind of office equipment commonly used in the mid 1980's. Of course, this included several makes and models of printers. Ink plotters, ink jet as well as toner types, both black and white and full color. One of the most unique printers I have worked on was the full color thermal printer. They had 4 colors of plastic film with a multi-element thermal print head for each color (C, Y, M, Bk). They then, "burned" each one in layers to reproduce the image. So there was no need for a drum, no led array nor any laser assemblies of any kind. Another advantage these machines had was not needing a fusing unit. These machines were considerably more quiet to operate than the others. The lack of a fusing unit meant it would not heat up the room. No corona wires meant there would be no unpleasant ozone scent would be filling up a room. Unfortunately, this type was quite a bit slower and the films frequently jammed or tore. The yield of how many pages could be printed per roll was also, quite low. This made the cost per page considerably higher when compared to other methods. Also, the rolls of film were rather large, making the "footprint" or the copier larger than most. These issues, in my opinion, spelled their doom when compared to the other methods and full color thermal printers fell by the way side, disappearing altogether rather fast. I am not even certain if they are still available at all today but I'd love to see you do a video on these! *One curious quirk to laser printers/copiers that stood out to me was when trying to create a picture frame that hugged the outer edges of the paper. Instead of a nice squared set of corners and straight horizontal lines, it would be crooked. This occurred because it was impossible for the spinning mirror to guide a laser beam from one side of the drum, across its entire length, to reach the other side before the drum made some rotation. Basically, a straight, full length horizontal line, is impossible to create using a laser and spinning mirror. Optical, Ink, LED and thermal methods did not have this problem.
I also was a copier/fax/network service tech for Canon, Toshiba, and Ricoh but I worked in Canada. Do you remember the very first Canon colour (Canadian spelling) copier. I believe it was called the CLC 1? I was one of the first to be trained on it in Canada. The drum diameter was the size of a basketball and had no black toner. The blacks were a combo of yellow, cyan, and magenta and would result in blacks that looked more like dark brown. This first colour copier was also the only one that was totally analog. This beast was larger than a household freezer! I remember the CLC 200 and the CLC 500/550. Very nice machines. Not mentioned in the video is the reason the Laser printers are much slower with colour than black and white printing. With LED printing the paper passes the LEDs/drums/developers once, no diference with the paper path for either. In a Laser printer, the paper has to pass the optic section once for each colour or 4 times around the drum/charging/developing area. Now-a-days a copier is nothing more than a printer with a built-in scanner unit. Do you remember when copiers used liquid toner? Led printers work basically the same as a fax machine.
@@mclancer currently im a copier tech for canon and ricoh also for about 7 years now in middle east and im leaving this company going back to my home country pretty soon. imo canon is so much better than ricoh. ricoh is such a pain in the ass to troubleshoot and replace some consumable parts and the build quality does not really look durable. looks like a piece of plastic toy made in china.
The printers for plastic ID cards still use films. Had to use a Zebra for a while that would throw a sulk in the middle of a print run, and spit out a card that only had yellow applied. It seems that for other uses, dye sublimation printers now use liquid instead of film.
Even though I worked in a printing room, I never knew LED printers were a thing. I just checked my printer (also a brother) and it's advertised as a LED Laser printer. Thanks for another intriguing episode.
Haha I was just wondering about a mechanic like that! It's like how CPU manufacturers have managed to get features smaller than the wavelength of light by offsetting the masks (I think)!
When I was a kid and saw my first laser printer I thought it burned the paper :) I thought it had to be true because the paper was warm and smelled unique.
I used to have an Oki LED printer. It was shockingly small, for its time. It wasn't as wide as an inkjet. There was just a bit more depth to it. It was much smaller & lighter than laser printers. I thought for sure that there was some "gimmick" to it, but it actually had decent resolution and quality. It was also reasonably fast.
I actually repair copiers for my job, you did an awesome job showing everyone how printers work. I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find an LED printhead instead of a LSU. Especially when I discovered that a printing press sized 136ppm production printer (about the size of a large credenza) had an LED printhead in the process unit and that a small table top printer had a laser write unit that was a third the size of the machine. Always enjoy your videos!
You know what I love about this channel? No jarring SFX of pointless (and such a waste of effort!) animations and music. It just reminds of the good old days when there were genuine good knowledge programs on TV rather than today's animation frenzy.
The Wife used to use an OKIPage LED A4 printer almost 20 years ago when she used to own a Pharmacy. Completely reliable and more than fast enough for a busy Dispensary. Running (consumables) costs were not that bad either.
Sorry to jump in two weeks late... I used to work for OKI in the early 90s, their page printers (as they called them) used an LED array in place of a laser + spinning mirror. Came with a life time warranty, so yeah, actively promoted as a feature...
NJOHN1970 OKI printers are damn near indestructible. They're the Nokia 3310 of the printer world- nothing fancy, they just keep working day in, day out, often in harsh environments. Their dot matrix printers are the standard for warehouses and shipping depots, often in dusty places without climate control.
I was like "what, is he making a joke about how it transfer toner along with the virus? Oh wait, this video is older than Corona", then I skipped back a few seconds and listened "wires" correctly this time :)
So my family is finally replacing our ancient inkjet printer, and I was asked for suggestions on what to get. Imagine my joy when I searched "Technology Connections printer" and you did in fact have a video on printers! You are my go to source for informing myself about these sorts of things. Heat pumps, can openers, printers, portable AC units, dishwashers, etc., I look to you to get informed. Thank you so much for all your time and hard work making these videos. I personally find them an invaluable resource.
@@kikicat123 do know that. thx U, this about but led printer, but I never herd LCD printer, like LCD (Liquid crystal display), and I don't think LCD emitting any Type of light, I not sure how the printer read LCD, as for LED does emit light, but just as I said, I have never seen an LCD printer (Have seen ink, laser, pin & matrix Printer, but first for me about LCD printer. (hard to keep up with computer change technology) Think for your Help.
I was seriously about to report this video for animal cruelty because I felt SO BAD for that cat... before I realised how stupid I was and that it was only placed there for humour in the first place.
I worked on the control circuitry for an LED printer. The control pulses for the printhead were nearly identical to the Laser version, and we used identical controller boards for both laser and LED models.
Im a Field Service Tech for Fuji Xerox. Laser Printers have Transfer Belts, just like LED printers, that mean a paper path is NOT impacted greatly by the technology of the write side of Dry Toner based printing (in fact you basically completely forewent the Transfer Belt side of all color printing with Dry Toner). We have both LED and Laser printers in service, the laser devices are usually in the larger, more color accurate machines, whereas office machines use LED's. Both technologies have mechanical and quality ups and downs, however i do appreciate your "laymans explanation" on the dry toner process. Most people do not understand how light based Dry toner printing works! Good video!
I remember having an office with laser and LED printers in the printer pool (separate, obviously) decades ago and the B&W LED printers were notoriously slow compared to their laser sister printers. When I asked IT why we had the LED printers at all, they told me, "Price." Apparently they were much cheaper. But they gave similar results (for documents anyway) and I thought, "Hey, nifty." Now today we have much better LEDs. And it would seem, at least in color printers, they have an advantage. Neat!
Just an FYI from someone who worked listing products on Amazon for 3 or so years: Amazon is definitely not the ones saying those are lasers. All that info is put in by the listing creator and Amazon provides little to no information or categorization on a listing. Not a big deal, just something to be aware of
They're probably just listing it as laser because nobody searches for "led printer". The technologies are similar enough so nobody really cares. EDIT: Not to say it's not a distinction worth making, it's certainly interesting to know. Just to say that as far as buying a printer, most people won't care about it.
The listing creator is the first person who makes the product available for sale on Amazon dot com. It could be anybody working for anybody who has one or more with interest to sell there. It could have been a direct employee, since they also sell that brand of printers. Some even have a feature to instantly order a resupply of toner with supposedly the convenience of their instant order buttons that you can link to any product available through them.
@@jasonlisonbee while this is true in a general sense, HP definitely has brand registry set up to prevent this sort of thing. Given brand registry, they are the only ones able to create product listings under the "HP" brand name
I’m a packaging engineer and my company used to have some LED label printers. They were basically the setup shown here, but scaled up a bit and set up for roll-fed label stock. It probably has more to do with the specific manufacturer and model of our printers, but they were a maintenance nightmare. VERY sensitive to humidity levels, and I spent a lot of time breaking the image drums loose when they’d jam with bits of label or clumped toner. We also had all sorts of firmware problems, but that’s on the manufacturer. Oh, and the toner mishaps were a constant issue. We had to clean that printer regularly throughout each shift.
I used OKi color printers for more than 20 years and never had a problem with the output. So much quicker than color laser - and seriously cheaper to boot. Great presentation as ever. thank you.
You are just wrong about paper path.. Your LED printer uses a transfer belt (as seen around 6:47 mark black shiny thing), paper never actually touches any of the CMYK photoconductors... Rest of the printer works as you describe, but toner is transferred to the intermediary transfer belt below them not to the paper... Paper itself just makes a L turn at bottom, touches the transfer belt while going up, then it passes through the fuser and gets out on the top... How do I know?? Its the exact same proven setup for any *proper* home/office laser printer including what I own (CS-310DN)... As such, those printers have exactly the same color and grayscale print speeds... Today, only the cheap (read: garbage) color lasers actually have longer and more complex paper paths for color printing... From experience (with few printers I've owned in the past) transfer belt provides several advanages; a) on my older printer without transfer belt, any tiny little problem with paper feed on such a long&curved path will make colors all mixed up so it was not only slow but also highly unreliable as printer ages... b) the transfer belt also prevents dust/dirt stuck on paper from damaging the photoconductors, as belt is continuously cleaned by a rubber blade before touching the photoconductors... c) belt also speeds up the printing by seperating paper feed and rasterization processes, printer can start drawing image to the transfer belt well before moving the paper.
Hadn't realized that was a transfer belt! Oh well. Still, the linear arrangement of this printer is an advantage compared to a carousel of some lasers. I think the intermediate intricacies are more or less trivial but I appreciate the correction!
Technology Connections Thanks, and I appreciate all your videos... Its quite rare for me to watch a video on youtube a few times over only to make sure I haven't missed any technical detail; and all your videos fall into that category. Keep up the good work!
Technology Connections as my comment above, i still have and use a carousel based transfer belt laser, slowest dinosaur i have but it just wont die.....
HPs 2500 series had the toners on a drum. Each one rotated into position to transfer its color to the belt in 4 passes. Then the paper would be run through. Four times as long as black. But if you didn't specify to print in greyscale so it'd rotate to black only it would cycle all 4 and increment their page counters while taking as long as a full color page. What was the first color laser to put the toners in a row to do simultaneous overlapping transfer to the belt or directly to the paper?
I find myself endlessly fascinated and indeed shocked that simple concepts like this in tech always seem to manage to scale down, or up, to such small sizes, efficiencies, and volume. The idea that you can electrically charge a region of paper, transfer toner to it and melt it to create SOMETHING in the way of an image doesn’t seem surprising. The fact that these regions of charge can be scaled down to 600dpi at the speeds of modern printing is really quite astounding. I find myself likewise continually amazed that we have managed to scale down so many other simple concepts to mind blowing levels of detail and efficiency. Reminds me of the late Richard Feynman quote “there’s plenty of room at the bottom”. Of course he was speaking of the subatomic but the metaphor holds that our simple human intuition breaks down beyond anything smaller than we can easily visually perceive.
@@stevenlein4772 that's true, and in fact that we are reaching that limit now with out photolithography processes in the making of microchips. Individual transistors on chips are getting down to a handful of atoms across. Quantum tunneling starts to become a problem beyond this point.
Locut0s Actually, Feynman's speech by that title listed many of the benefits available as (future) tech is scaled down from what was common then all the way to a tunneling electron microscope seeing individual atoms of chemical and biological substances.
We had an OKI LED mono printer back in the day. The most amusing thing about it was the driver was set up to have a voice. You'd be printing away and it would loudly announce "PLEASE LOAD PAPER INTO THE AUTO SHEET FEEDER!" Then you'd load more paper and it would respond with "THANK YOU!" Always made me giggle.
our photocopier at work is crazy. it scans a sheet of paper in like 0.1 seconds and prints just as fast. the paper just flies in and out of the machine
Great printer. Have the same exact print bought 13 years ago. Bought it as it was cheaper than replacing all 4 toners in my Oki C5150n printer I bought in 2005. Also "laser" printers that do color at 1/4 the b&w speed (or less) usually do so because they are actually printing 4 times, rotating which color is currently printed. The reason I bought the Oki back in the day was it was one of the few non commercial color ones that printed in a straight pass, allowing you to print much thicker stock though it.
Our data center evaluated a couple of Xerox printers in the early 90s, laser and LED. My bosses went with the laser units since it would print at a resolution of 300 spots per inch. The LED printers were only 240 SPI available at that time. Got two duplex page printers rated at 600,000 images/month, which we abused at nearly a million images each.
Dot matrix printers are incredibly expensive. For example, this Oki (www.staples.com/OKI-ML420-OKI-62418701-Black-and-White-Dot-Matrix-Printer/product_505246) runs nearly $500, which is not cheap for a very basic mono printer.
It's not really on topic, but as you mentioned in your gigantic scrolling text, there are now some inkjets with reasonable ink cost. Because they are fitted from the factory with a continuous ink supply system, where you fill ink tanks and the heads are fixed (or somewhat fixed, HPs still can have the heads replaced). Those models are sold at a higher upfront price because the ink is sold at a cheaper price and seem to me a better fit for home use and small office use than a laser printer, but your mileage may vary
I have one of them the Epson ET-4550. Yes, the ink is dirt cheap. The problem is the heads dry up and clog if you go too long between prints. You gotta keep the spice flowing.
I have seen two of those printers that were "dead" because the ink in the hoses connecting the tanks to the print heads clogged with gooey ink. So instead of just dried shut nozzles in the print head there's also the additional problem of piping to fail. Their per print cost is lower than the "payed by ink" printers, but I guess you have to print a lot to keep them going. Personally for me there's no way I'll ever go back to ink jets again after having a laser printer.
Clogging is probably going to be a worse issue than with regular cartridge inkjets. And to make matters worse, I think some of the mechanisms are based on regular inkjets with some tubing and a tank slapped on the side. At least the first Epson EcoTanks and HP GT series looks like that: an existing model that they slapped the CISS onto. But for people with regular printing, that require color or photo prints, they may make sense. And around here they are cheaper than a color laser.
At least in Europe you can buy old HP LaserJets with 2000-3000 pages toner/drum left for less than the cost of a new 5000 page toner cartridge. For home use it's just wonderful:)
@@shana_dmr HP has cheapened some of their LaserJet line. In the time of the original LaserJet through the III series, they were all built to a high standard, able to last through at least a million pages. I've seen one IIId with over three million pages on its counter. The 4 series continued that trend. Just saw one last week in use at a funeral parlor. But HP introduced the L line same time as the 4. The 4L has nothing in common with the 4 aside from the LaserJet name. It and the 5L and 6L are tiny and slow. Their toner capacity is tiny and price per page high. There have been more cheap laser printers like those while the more durable "tanks" are rarer and not built for millions of pages.
I am watching you for quite some time now and just now it hit me: You are the MKBHD of the ordinary. But luckily your videos are also highly educational at the same time. Thanks for coming to my ted talk, I hope this comment boosts your engagement!
Early Xerox machines looked like enormous bellows cameras. Back then xerography was a manual process more akin to photography, with the toner being dusted by hand onto a flat surface instead of an motorized drum. This type of Xerox machine was a staple of the animation industry for many years. By replacing the tedious process of hand tracing pencil drawings with ink it speeded up and reduced the cost of traditional cel animation. That's why Hanna-Barbera cartoons from 1968's onward list a Xerographer in the credits.
Where I work we used to have some huge old Xerox copiers which took a photo of the document to copy it -- instead of a green scanner thing going back and forth across the page, you just saw a single strobe flash. Those were the last "analog" copiers we had, before everything was replaced with digital copiers which are really just a scanner permanently attached to a laser printer. One of the Xerox service techs told us that back in the 1960s, Xerox copiers came with a fire extinguisher because the temperature in the fuser was so high that there was a risk of a paper jam catching on fire.
Some versions of linux contain an error code that can be called to indicate that a printer is currently on fire, though no proof of whether or not it's ever been used in seriousness exists.
I found an old photo of a manual Xerox machine at www.ssa.gov/history/photocopy.html It's installed in an overhead configuation (note the prism shape near the operator's hand. Early animation xerox machines were mounted on a long table and pencil drawings were imaged vertically. The only image I could find was from an old Hanna Barbera cartoon. www.flickr.com/photos/93980414@N08/8580249436/in/photostream/
What an enjoyable presentation! I am sick to the teeeth of researching printers - then I found YOU! So eloquent in your technical knowledge, then there's the 'spinning thing'...so hi-tech! You had me chuckling more than once and I really enjoyed it! Anyhoo, back to the grind. Been researching printers for 3 days now. My quest? To find a decent, small or compact, reasonably priced, colour, laser printer. Print speed is not an issue for me nor do I expect to produce hi-quality limited editions or works of art. I want it for mainly for arty-farty stuff including printing on a variety of papers and surfaces for use in mixed media art projects. The techniques I want to try all require a laser printer, hence my quest. I already have a Brother print/scan/copy inkjet which I will keep, but it's no good for what I want to do. Has to be laser. I've always used Brother so I am familiar with their printers & they have never let me down. Then this LED thing kept cropping up. Brother have a few that peaked my interest but before I commit to a purchase, I really must know this: is the end result, the finished print, exactly the same as a laser print? I mean. does the difference between Laser and LED lie only in how the toner is 'transferred' onto a surface? I know, I know. You probably already explained but it would mean so much and make me very happy if you would confirm this! I'd really appreciate your input and expert advice. On saying that, I don't really expect a reply coz it's been a few years since you uploaded this but I had to reach out. I had to try. Thanks for an excellent video. x
watched this video years ago when it showed up in my sub box, now legit just watching this on repeat because the CompTIA A+ exam is for some reason OBSESSED with laser printing and the process just does not stick in my head. who knew this would actually be relevant someday.
Reasons that he doesn't like ink-jet printers: -Ink dries out, meaning that the printer needs to either constantly be preforming a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather frequently which, in this paperless age, fewer people are doing. The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer. -ink cartridges are usually priced at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into bbuying generic ink which often clogs the inkjets so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't -Because the ink is liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink is dried. -Water-based inks are likley to completely wash away if the paper they are printed on becomes wet meaning shipping labels printed on some inkjet printers can be rendered completly unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain.
I accidentally hit enter xD There's one more bit - None of these issues plague laser printers, so despite their higher upfront cost(and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance" modes, the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to try, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on, but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the subject of the video as you'll soon see.
The main issue for me with inkjets is the drying out. I have a printer at my mom's location that I only come by once every year to visit. No fears wit a laser/led.
Canon inkjets don't have most of those issues, especially not "maintenance" pissing away the ink. Canon printheads are easily removable so in the very rare event they clog they can be soaked in rubbing alcohol overnight. A cleaning cycle or two has them working again. It takes a long time idle for a Canon head to dry up when unused, more than a year if tanks with ink are left in.
@pmailkeey cleaning does waste ink in every inkjet, but only when initiated by the user. My HP Photosmart 3310 did "maintenance" almost every time it was turned on. HP claimed the ink was "recycled" but that was BS. More than once when a tank was almost out when I'd turned it off suddenly was conveniently empty the next time I turned it on and it just had to do "maintenance" again.
LOL! I got that EXACT model of printer too(HL-3040CDN) It's been running with off-brand toner carts for over a decade and it's still going strong 😄 Protip: It can take a 144pin SO-DIMM ram module up to 512MB, I got one on fleabay back in the day for like $10 incl. shipping. That speeded up print processing by like a factor of 3-5X, especially in 'fine' print mode. Honestly this is one of the best purchases I've ever made: a networked, upgradeable, 2400dpi color 'laser' printer that can take $25 toner carts and it only cost like $120 back in the day(early 2010s).
At 0:18 (sorry if this has already been posted, I didn't see it): Ink dries out, meaning that printer has to either constantly be performing a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather regularly which, in this paperless age fewer and fewer people are doing. The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer. Ink cartridges are usually pried at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into buying generic ink which often clogs the inkjets so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Because the ink is a liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink has dried. Water-based inks are likely to completely wash away if the paper they are printed on becomes wet, meaning shipping labels printed with some inkjet printers can be rendered completely unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain. None of these issues plague laser printers so despite their higher upfront cost (and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance modes", the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to dry, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on, but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the subject of this video as you'll soon see. That said, Techmoan recently reviewed an inkjet printer that was actually pretty decent in terms of the ink cost, so even if a "maintenance mode" were to waste ink, it's not like it's wasting super expensive ink. Perhaps one day I'll rejoin Team Inkjet. Particularly for photo printing (and images in general) inkjet reigns supreme. But for now, I'm planted in the realm of toner so that, when I have to do my taxes, I don't have to waste time, energy, and money fighting the stupid inkjet with clogged heads.
I enjoy your technical talks. This one hit home. I worked for Xerox and a couple of other mom & pop shops as a Copier repair technician. So allow me to point out some trivial things. I say trivial because they really don't matter to the end user, but make a big deal to us techs that troubleshoot and repair them. The first, in your description of how the image is formed on the drum, is missing a little bit of info. Again, this only really matters if you need to troubleshoot the image quality. Some of the imaging systems will use the laser to erase the charge for the toner to get attracted to the drum. We refer to this as 'write black' as in writing black to the drum. Which was the method you described. The other method is 'Write White'. In this method the laser clears away the charge on all of the area where the toner will not stick. So basically the laser is writing to the drum as if it were a negative of the actual image. The other thing was how the color image is transferred. On the machine you had, when you pull out a drum, you will see a conveyor belt below all the drums. This is called a 'image transfer belt' or 'ITB' (often we just called it the ITB or transfer belt). This is used to transfer the complete image at once before getting to the paper. The paper never touches the drums. The drums transfer the image to the ITB, which once completed can be transferred to the paper. Some color machines do not use the ITB method, but instead send the paper around the machine up to four times, to get the image on the paper. Sending it once around the machine for each drum to be used. The drums on some of these machines would be on a carousel, and be rotated after its image is transferred to the paper, and the the next one gets a go at it, before it then gets sent on to the fuser. Again, this stuff doesn't matter to the end user. But to us techs, it means a lot. Especially when you need to fix things. (especially when the customer breaks these things by using the wrong kind of paper, or paper that is stale. Yep, paper past its shelf life).
these videos are so nice when i’m sneaking out my house, informative videos like these calm me the fuck down when i HATE the silence of walking alone at night
One major advantage that Color LED has over color laser you forgot to mention is that color laser printers pass the page through the same fuser 4 times. You need buy thicker paper so that the 4x heat doesn’t curl up the pages.
I am a copier/printer technician (and have worked for a company you mentioned), so this isn't exactly anything new to me. But I keep seeing it come up in my suggested videos so finally clicked. I don't use the term LED printer with anyone outside the trade, because they wouldn't know what I was talking about. To the layman they are all "laser printers". One interesting thing between the old analog copiers and the modern digital (laser/LED) printers is that the polarity is backwards between them. Had a customer once with an old analog copier and a newer digital one where the toner cartridge wasn't quite different enough. They put the analog toner into the digital machine and made a huge mess.
I work for Fuji Xerox in Australia working mainly on office printers and I've never really thought about it much since I'm not the one using the printers, I'm the one fixing them, but every single colour printer I've worked on has had an intermediate transfer belt between the drums and page. Basically all four drums write their image onto the transfer belt as the belt rotates (if you stop the printer mid operation and look at the belt you can see the fully formed image) and then the page runs up against the belt where a magnetic transfer roller pulls the full image onto the page all at once. Whether the image is in colour or black and white the process should be exactly the same, I've looked through a manual for one of the models I work on and it seems to be saying that the transfer belt does a single pass of all four drums and the image is drawn all at once. This would mean there should be no difference between black and white vs colour printing, the colour drums simply have no image drawn to them at the start. Where you do see a difference is in the colour vs black and white models of the same printer, a black and white printer only has one drum so no transfer belt is needed, just pull the image from the drum to the page. You can see the LED printer in the video has this same setup or at least very similar, you can see the black transfer belt underneath where the drums sit at 6:45 or a close up at 5:44 One thing I will say is that reliability aside these LED strips would probably be a lot easier to replace than a laser unit and be much less likely to be damaged in transit. The laser is pretty bulky and fragile and is buried deep inside the printer so they are a pain to replace on most models, though it is far from the hardest repair.
the samsung color laser printer i got uses a belt as a transfer medium between paper and drum. the drum collects the toner of one color, moves it to the black belt and repeats that 4 times in color mode and then the belt transfers it to the paper. never heard about these led printers, but a quick amazon look revealed, they are really affordable... as long as the toner is affordable too
the toners for LED printers is rarely that affordable as the cartridge usually contains both the drum and the toner cartridge. just like the cheapest ink jet printers. It is all a scam!
This is an excellent video, and concerns a prescient topic, given that this is still perfectly relevant in an area that changes so much - so frequently. I have a nerdy fondness for topics like this, so I have to ask: Have you considered doing a similar presentation on other printing technologies? My favorite example: Something that discusses...solid ink? Most people aren't familiar with these things. These printers appear to use ....crayons, rather than tonor. The claimed print speed is surprisingly competitive, compared with laser printers. The cost is (almost) on par with color lasers, and the output is just ....(invariably glossy) cool. The inner-workings, along with the history of the tech is potentially a cool story. No complaints - at ALL, just...sayin (giving unsolicited advice), so of course - ignore without concern. But darnit - these are basically printing with crayons, which is funny and cool: (one example) The ColorQube 8580.
bought an old hp 2420dn from a college's surplus store for $20. had toner (no idea how much is left) and a full tray of paper. it's got ~54,000 pages of use according to the service menu and is working great for me. plugged the ethernet port into my router and I can even print to it from any device on my network. what a sweet deal. it feels modern in its plug-and-play usability today. also it's crazy fast compared to my parent's inkjet printer. this does 30-some-odd pages per minute while my parent's does like 2
Are solid ink printers still sold? I know someone who got one, useless thing it is. Bubble jet is more or less inkjet, but is Cannons way of putting ink on the paper. Maybe why I like Cannon bubble jet printers.
Some of the early inkjet printers in the '80s were called "spark-jet" because they used an electrical spark to form the ink into characters. Reviewers said the printing quality was poor and you could smell the ozone from the spark discharge!
back in the 90's I had a Okidata (i don't know when they shortened it to OKI) LED printer, it was fantastic for a couple reasons, back then I was in the Navy and I was in charge of my ships news letter which I printed on my Okidata, they were usually 7 to 8 pages and I was making 70 copies every month. My unit came with 2 meg ram, I added 16 meg for 18 meg total so no matter how complex the image it printed just fine with no errors. Best of all the toner cartridge was separate from the image drum, and the toner was about 10 or 15 dollars, and I might replace 5 or 8 of them before there was any issue with the drum and replace it. this made the operation cost so much cheaper the say a comparable HP laser printer at the time which I think was either the model II or the III. Added bonus I had a page scanner that had a parallel port pass through and connected to the printer I could make copies without the computer even connected. As time went on eventually I got newer printers and scanners and such and gave the Okidata and scanner to my dad who used it until he retired in 2006, sadly after that it went to goodwill i believe.
yes, they are usually cheaper than laser printers, but often produce prints of lower quality, and the fact that the toner and drum are usually put into the same cartridge means toner cartridges are more expensive than printers with separate toners, drums and fusers. You usually don't need to replace the drum with every toner cartridge replacement. The same thing can be said for those cheap-ass inkjet printers like that +-50 $ hp printers. they are cheap because they don't have print heads. In those printers the printhead is a part of every ink cartridge (making those cartridges even more expensive)
I intend to buy a mid level Epson inkjet with EcoTank to test it out. But I believe the ink for ecotank printer's isn't that higher quality pigment-based ink, but rather dye-based. Also those new HP laser jet pro color printers intrigue me.
I noticed you say this in another comment--the drum and toner cartridges are separate on the printer featured here. Whether or not a manufacturer integrates the drum into the toner cartridge has nothing to do with it being LED vs. laser. In fact both of the printers that I have experience with which used a combined toner and drum replacement cartridge were - you guessed it - laser.
Many low cost "lasers" are actually LED. The Dell c1760nw, which often goes for as little as $70, is a popular color "laser" that uses LEDs. Quality is not as good, but for a second or third printer, it does not matter.
A rule of thumb is that LED printers are in the range below 24ppm. This is limit is created by the time the LED requires to get dim again, while a laser is just manouvered by the prism and has shorter on-off response.
Transfer belt unit, used in color printing process. Paper does not come in contact with the drums in these units. Instead the color is created on the transfer belt first and then applied to the paper. My research on your LED printer shows that your printer, also has a transfer belt. The laser printer uses a polygon mirror which allows the smooth transition of the laser from left to right, This does add a bit more size to the laser component but the LED strip for each color could result in failed LEDs in the strip, requiring the entire strip to be replaced to correct it. LED strips are also used in scanning, but they are also measured for intensity across the array. To guarantee that there are no areas brighter or darker. I do like the LED printers, and I believe that in the future, they will become part of a tonerless system. That also utilizes UV instead of a fusing unit.
Thank you for clearing up why when I've stripped some printers in the past I never managed to find a laser diode anywhere inside a 'laser' printer. There never was one to find!
Speaking of laser printers I recently realized that I worked on the worlds first laser printer. Xerox of course held the patents on the xerographic process used in copiers but strangely IBM beat Xerox to the market on the laser printer by several months. The first such printer installed in a customer environment, there were naturally some engineering models before then, but the first laser printer in the real world was installed at the F.W. Woolworth data center in Milwaukee in 1976. I worked on that printer many, many times but it wasn't till just a couple years ago that I realized that was the first laser printer ever installed in a customer environment.
@@robertjenkins6132 Broke: Boicotting Corona beer Woke: Astroterfing boicotts of Corona beer on facebook while secretly buying up tons and tons of it in hopes that they'll go out of business and become a piece of history collector's item
I had an Okidata LED printer in my home office back in the late 1990s. It worked great. Inexpensive and the results looked absolutely just as good as on the multi-user network laser printers at client sites.
Brother has to be the best printer brand out there. I owned a lot of brother products. I can say one thing for that Samsung printer. It’s pretty damn quick, but one flaw I’ve seen in it is photo printing. I’ve always had to lighten the photos up almost drastically when I print or the photos come out dark.
This guy could host a show about how different types of paint dry, and i would probably watch it.
Second this.
Well if he would go into deep atom level of drying and why this drying that fast and this slow, them them i would watch it !
Hells to the yeah!!!
Ditto
Pablo Fawkes Oh my! LOL
I still remember the disappointment when I found out laser printers don't actually char the paper with lasers.
They do essentially. It creates an opposite charge which attracts the ink to the paper. I believe that’s what he meant.
Sadly, they also don't go "pew pew pew".
Like when Darth Vader realized the Death Star couldn’t make planetary tattoos
Yes they do shut up lalala I'm not listening
If it makes you feel any better, there are some printers that do actually burn their paper. (More or less.) They use a thermal paper that reacts to heat. Not sure why anyone does this, but there you go. Side note: one huge disadvantage of using a printout from thermal paper is that you can't use a pencil eraser on one because the friction of a rubber eraser generates heat and thus makes black smear marks on thermal paper. Oops. Of course that was many many years ago that I last used one. Maybe they changed?
Text in the quick scroll at 0:18
Ink dries out, meaning that the printer has to either constantly be performing a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather regularly which, in this paperless age fewer and fewer people are doing.
The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer.
Ink cartridges are usually priced at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into buying generic ink which often clogs the inkjects so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Because the ink is a liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink has dried.
Water-based inks are likely to completely wash away if the paper they are printed onto becomes wet, meaning shipping labels printed with some inkjet printers can be rendered completely unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain.
None of these issues plague laser printers, so despite their higher upfront cost (and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance modes", the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to dry, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the suspect of this video and you'll soon see.
That said, Techmoan recently reviewed[0] an inkjet printer that was actually pretty decent in terms of the ink cost, so even if a "maintenance mode" were to waste ink, it's not like it's wasting super expensive ink.
Perhaps one day I'll rejoin Team Inkjet. Particularly for photo printing (and images in general) inkjet remains supreme. But for now, I'm planted in the realm of toner so that, when I have to do my taxes, I don't have to waste time, energy, and money fighting a stupid inkjet with clogged heads.
[0] th-cam.com/video/sMIl4TA7wYU/w-d-xo.html
You missed the last two paragraphs.
Thank you!
Oops. I read those paragraphs at first but somehow missed them when transcribing them. I've added them and then a link to the Techmoan video I think it's referring to.
Inkjets are commonly used for direct to garment printers. Especially their 60+ inch wide variety. As well as direct to canvas as a Giclee substitute, used for on-demand printing of optical discs and case art, pigmented inks with 100 or more years of fade resistance can be found in Epson's home printers with their DuraBright CMYK inks.
Thanks
It's nice to see people who actually think and use their brains for something good or at least useful for some people.
When I heard the word "printer" I flew into a blind rage and automated most of my day via Excel spreadsheets.
😂
You, my good Sir, have just helped me solve a Problem that has haunted me for at least the last year! After many toner cartridge and toner drum swaps, my printer still printed either very thin or extremely blurry around fine details. I cleaned the toner drum and fixing unit with rubbing alcohol but nothing helped. After watching this fine example of audio-visual excellence, I went to look for this fine row of LEDs and after a quick cleanup with rubbing alcohol, the prints are crisp, sharp and as new! You have just saved me from buying a new printer. Consider me as a part of your notification squad!
lol good for you!
i thought about doing that too
I am going to try this to my Brother 3070CW asap.
The toner cartridge boxes for my old 1990s era Okidata LED printer used to come with an alcohol swab pad and instructions to do that as part of inserting the new cartridge.
Wow, I made those laser printer images ages ago when I was learning Inkscape. It's nice to see them used ten or so years later!
Yzmo Ah, I see your artwork well-credited at 1:44. Nice job!
And you just happened to find this video by chance? Lol
That's pretty amazing!
Yzmo that’s amazing haha really useful diagrams
@@Network126 before you go all r/thathappened
Think about the fact that way way WAY weirder things have happened.
I found this channel by chance and so did you. That's pretty much how most people find new content. They may have interests that are similar and watch channels that are similar to this one and all it takes is for the TH-cam algorithm to say hey this person should see this video and boom.
Your channel is perfect. No bullshit and all really cool information. I never fully appreciated how complex some old technologies were (like cathode ray tubes), before watching your channel.
Divine Moments of Truth!
The Gnomes have learned a new way to say HooOoOOooOooraayyy!
SAME
Couldn’t have said it better myself
Seriously, the way he tells the information is perfect. Thats how Linus started, but now with all that garbage banter and shit we dont care about it became like reality tv. This is perfect
I love warm prints.
I'll never know why, but it's just so nice to grab a freshly printed image or story and feel it warm my hands.
Corona wires everybody run!
lol
nice 420 likes
@@hubertfarnsworth3622 LOL I read that in your voice! It's over 420 likes now but I'm baked so who cares!? :D
Yay! 666 likes!
Seeing this in 2020, I knew someone would comment the fact that "corona" was used, and you didn't disappoint. Thank you, haha! XD
I actually work on printers and copy machines, more often than not, a lot of the newer printers that are manufactured seem to be using LEDs over laser, I even work on some machines that use a hybrid of both laser and led. Laser is generally about as reliable as LED from my experience, the "spinny thing" you referred to in the laser unit is called a polygon mirror motor, after a certain time these will get stuck or not spin as fast causing failure. I've yet to have an actual laser or led die on machines I work on and some of them push over 1 million copies/prints in months. The only real advantage to a laser only setup I could see is the resolution and the lack of toner getting on the laser blocking portions of the print. LED only printers have the downside of toner generally will spill on the LEDs and block light. Also it's worth mentioning not a lot of newer machines and depending on the manufacturer don't use corona wire anymore, they use something called a charge/development/magnetic roller, terminology varies per manufacturer and there's normally an upper and lower looks like the one in your video have a roller from what I saw.
Hope my knowledge helps! Great video!
fellow print wizard here and can concur that laser and led have about the same level of reliability. So many other parts are going to wear out so much sooner than the laser mirror that outside of a print-shop or heavier environment, its pretty much a non issue.
what i want to bring up is that samsung that was used in the video and the reason it is that much slower to print color. now the reason is not that it is laser vs led, its that the machine appears to not use a primary/secondary (belt) transfer system but transfer directly from the developer roller to a single large photo conducting drum. from the look of it, it must do a pass for each of the colors waiting for the 4th pass to run the paper past for transfer and then clean the pc drum. not necessarily a bad system, its just trading speed for less expensive consumables.
but enough about drums and charging, lets talk about the real hot topic. the move away from heating fusers via incandescence to sexy sexy induction heating.
Unreliable thing in laser printers is bazillion of plastic wheels in paper transport that requires PhD in mechanics, not laser with a mirror or LED strip and thing that heats paper ;) It's easier to grasp a gearbox in a motorcycle than paper transport in laser printer that has duplex and few trays.
Spot on, Noshi!
Have yet to have an actual laser or led die on machines you work on?? What magic fairy dust are you sprinkling on them? The polygon mirror is the most common failure, but I had a couple of LED arrays with a partial failure leaving blank lines. Some laser diode failures also, normally a code for no beam detect when the polygon mirror spins freely.
Shall I bring up the time in the 1980s when I had a copier with both a thermistor failure and a thermal fuse failure so that the halogen lamp stayed on until the aluminum heat roller melted to a puddle into the silicon oil pan under the press roller? It was a Mita DC-312RE as I recall. The customer phoned it in as "smelled hot". There was fire extinguisher residue all over the machine.
One minor footnote: Usually (if not always) in laser and LED printers, the polarity of the toner is reversed from my explanation. Parts of the drum that receive light attract toner, and dark portions do not. Rather frustratingly, I can't find where I had read this (pretty sure it was just on everyone's favorite source of knowledge, but visiting my recent pages and some Ctrl-effing hasn't helped). If my unreliable memory is correct, this reduced wasted toner because it allowed for stronger repelling of toner in the unexposed parts of the drum. Or something like that.
I have a similar printer (3150CDN) and all I can say is the most reliable printer I ever had. It never jams, never out of ink mid-job, it can print in long batches or be left unused for months to come back and print perfectly. The quality still is not on par with an inkjet, but for documents you can't beat it.
I noticed your toner holders and cartridges are kinda messy, are you rechargin yours or using alternative ones? if so, how's your print quality and does it damage the imaging unit?
Well, I've inherited this printer from my parents who wanted an all-in-one for copying and scanning. From day one it's been using generic toner replacements, and some years ago there was a bad batch of cartridges that leaked everywhere. In recent years the availability of decent generics has much improved, in fact a good full set (plus an extra K cartridge) runs around $60 on Amazon.
And indeed, this printer has been very very reliable. The only bummers are that this model doesn't do duplexing, and that it takes a while to warm up. Recent laser printers can warm up in something like 6 seconds which is awesome! I have a newer basic B+W printer (also a Brother, though I think it actually is a laser printer) that does auto-duplex and warms up much faster, so the HL-3040CN stays idle unless I need color. Which is quite rare.
Honestly it's pretty much a spare at this point. But a very good spare!
The new printers use a different method of fixing the toner. The good old ones used a large halogen bulb inside a teflon-coated aluminum tube. The paper was squeezed against this tube and a soft, flexible silicone-roller. In the new printers the heating is done by a thick-film heater - a ceramic substrate made from Alumina (Aluminum oxide) has a deposited track of resistive material on it. Over this heating element there is a spinning loop (tube) of what seems identical to the reusable teflon cooking sheets we use in our oven. The paper is squeezed against this loop and a soft, flexible silicone-roller. There is almost no thermal mass to heat up, so the fixer is ready in an instant!
My flawed memory seem to recall different polarity for OPC vs Selenium drum. Of course, this is probably before you were born.
LED printers are still laser cause of the led being used if you look in to fibre optic communications most modern fibre optic communications uses a LED laser for the light component and not a traditional laser, even in CD players you will find it is an LED laser as it’s light source, so still a laser. So the LED printer uses an LED lasers have a look at the Bluray laser diode that is also still an LED as it’s a diode. Pays to look into things a bit more closer Alec.
I like the way he says "I don't know" when he doesn't know.
Yes, instead of making up some crap comment. Honesty is always appreciated.
But does not get green slime poured on his head when he does.
@@denelson83 I guess only 9 people got this reference.... sad
Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof: "You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you… I don't know."
@@djduke316 For me - British children's television (Mallet's Mallet, or similar somesuch nonsense)!
Is it an American thing too?
Another advantage to the Brother-style setup is that you can have a fully straight paper path using the manual input tray and the back door that bypasses the roller that flips the page over and out the top, letting you print on thicker paper that would otherwise jam or curl too much, or on labels that would otherwise have the possibility of peeling off inside the mechanism.
you misspelled OKI
It finally hit me, your pace and cadence is just like the old Andy Rooney bits on 60 minutes!
Printers. Every business tech support person's least favorite, but most common call/repair.
Printers are evil and should all burn in the hottest places in hell.
Previous support person
Companies make to much money on printers, otherwise you'd think they'd make them plug and play (like literally every other device for your computer) with affordable refills. I beg, borrow and steal when it comes to me needing to print something.
Turn it on and off?
Sitting at home. Watching this vid. Recieved yet another MFD call. Have to go now. Thanks for the Laugh
I actually loved working on printers, especially laser/ LED printers, as the lion's share of the problems were mechanical in nature, not electronic, or even software in nature. They were frequently easy to correct, but you had to have parts on hand to fix them. HP's being the most popular when I was doing computer work, were the most popular lasers, and Okidata was the most popular dot matix. Keeping some denatured alcohol, a couple of fusers, pickup rollers and a printhead or two on hand, and I could bang out several easy, high-profit printer service calls in a day!
I've got a variant of that Brother printer. Despite me being an engineer and curious about anything technology related, it never occurred to me that it was an LED printer rather than a Laser printer! Thank you for enlightening me! A favourite thing about these vs. inkjets: You can go a month between prints and it comes out perfect the first time. Downside: It repeatedly warns that toner is low months before it actually quits working due to low toner.
Amen, my Brother does that exact same thing. Bugs me to death!
I just shake the toner and put it back in and it prints happily for months
Look up how to fool these into thinking they have a fresh toner cartridge installed. If I recall correctly, it involves pushing some buttons with the lid open.
I've been fooling mine for around five years and it's done over 10k pages on the stock sampler cartridges with no picture quality issues whatsoever. Maybe I just got lucky and they ran out of sampler carts at the factory, reprogrammed the EEPROM in some regular ones to report only 1k page capacities, sold them as samplers, and called it a day. Or maybe all sampler cartridges are like this. Who knows.
I have a Brother color "all in one" that is an LED printer. The "Toner Low" warning it TOTALLY BOGUS! In addition to coming on far too early, it counts copies ONLY without regard to whether they are color. As a result, it will start demanding replacement color cartridges even if you never run color copies. Fortunately, the counters can be reset from the printer control panel. Google the model number of your printer and "toner reset" or something similar to get directions.
I was very confused the first time I opened my new "Laser Printer" and found the line of LED bars and drums. It didn't take too long to figure out what it was, but it totally blew my mind that I had never heard of the technology.
I'm seeing several comments that the print quality of LED printers is sub par and can only say I find the quality just fine! It's definitely better than my eyesight! LOL
I have a HP Colour Laser CP1515n sitting next to me, which I've had since the late 2000s. I only occasionally print, and am still on the original starter colour toners. Needless to say, I've been using the override for several years now, and there's still toner left in them (probably getting a little low by now!)
I was a color copier technician for 28 years and mostly worked on the Canon line. The very first model I worked on was the Canon CLC 200 series.
I also repaired typewriters, fax machines, shredders, electric printing calculators and almost every other kind of office equipment commonly used in the mid 1980's.
Of course, this included several makes and models of printers. Ink plotters, ink jet as well as toner types, both black and white and full color.
One of the most unique printers I have worked on was the full color thermal printer.
They had 4 colors of plastic film with a multi-element thermal print head for each color (C, Y, M, Bk). They then, "burned" each one in layers to reproduce the image. So there was no need for a drum, no led array nor any laser assemblies of any kind. Another advantage these machines had was not needing a fusing unit.
These machines were considerably more quiet to operate than the others. The lack of a fusing unit meant it would not heat up the room. No corona wires meant there would be no unpleasant ozone scent would be filling up a room.
Unfortunately, this type was quite a bit slower and the films frequently jammed or tore. The yield of how many pages could be printed per roll was also, quite low. This made the cost per page considerably higher when compared to other methods. Also, the rolls of film were rather large, making the "footprint" or the copier larger than most.
These issues, in my opinion, spelled their doom when compared to the other methods and full color thermal printers fell by the way side, disappearing altogether rather fast.
I am not even certain if they are still available at all today but I'd love to see you do a video on these!
*One curious quirk to laser printers/copiers that stood out to me was when trying to create a picture frame that hugged the outer edges of the paper. Instead of a nice squared set of corners and straight horizontal lines, it would be crooked.
This occurred because it was impossible for the spinning mirror to guide a laser beam from one side of the drum, across its entire length, to reach the other side before the drum made some rotation.
Basically, a straight, full length horizontal line, is impossible to create using a laser and spinning mirror. Optical, Ink, LED and thermal methods did not have this problem.
I also was a copier/fax/network service tech for Canon, Toshiba, and Ricoh but I worked in Canada. Do you remember the very first Canon colour (Canadian spelling) copier. I believe it was called the CLC 1? I was one of the first to be trained on it in Canada. The drum diameter was the size of a basketball and had no black toner. The blacks were a combo of yellow, cyan, and magenta and would result in blacks that looked more like dark brown. This first colour copier was also the only one that was totally analog. This beast was larger than a household freezer! I remember the CLC 200 and the CLC 500/550. Very nice machines.
Not mentioned in the video is the reason the Laser printers are much slower with colour than black and white printing. With LED printing the paper passes the LEDs/drums/developers once, no diference with the paper path for either. In a Laser printer, the paper has to pass the optic section once for each colour or 4 times around the drum/charging/developing area. Now-a-days a copier is nothing more than a printer with a built-in scanner unit. Do you remember when copiers used liquid toner?
Led printers work basically the same as a fax machine.
@@mclancer currently im a copier tech for canon and ricoh also for about 7 years now in middle east and im leaving this company going back to my home country pretty soon. imo canon is so much better than ricoh. ricoh is such a pain in the ass to troubleshoot and replace some consumable parts and the build quality does not really look durable. looks like a piece of plastic toy made in china.
The printers for plastic ID cards still use films. Had to use a Zebra for a while that would throw a sulk in the middle of a print run, and spit out a card that only had yellow applied. It seems that for other uses, dye sublimation printers now use liquid instead of film.
Hello sir, which brands are the most reliable and which new Printers do you recommend? Need a Laser/LED Printer with ADF and Paper Tray, Medium use
I think canon still sells a film printer that being their "selphy" printer line.
I'm assuming this was in my recommendations because of the word corona, subbed regardless.
People love to see patterns in noise, don't they?
I didn't know about him until a few months ago. This channel is underrated.
Kismet, my friend. Welcome to the world of consistently long videos about things you've never considered that you will always enjoy.
Just watch, people are going to start blaming moon aliens for the virus, because a total eclipse exposes the Sun's _coronasphere_ to our view.
@@Raison_d-etre well we are patern seeking creatures
Even though I worked in a printing room, I never knew LED printers were a thing. I just checked my printer (also a brother) and it's advertised as a LED Laser printer. Thanks for another intriguing episode.
just realized you add credit even to the memes. That is dedication to quality
Many LED printers actually still have a mechanical scan system, where the LED assembly vibrates left and right to increase the resolution.
:o
Haha I was just wondering about a mechanic like that! It's like how CPU manufacturers have managed to get features smaller than the wavelength of light by offsetting the masks (I think)!
@@Norsilca I believe that's called multi-patterning. Not often you find someone causality chatting about silicon manufacturing.
@@Norsilca The wavelength of light?
Which wavelength?
@@D-Vinko Whichever one they use, I forget. I think it's visible or near-UV.
When I was a kid and saw my first laser printer I thought it burned the paper :) I thought it had to be true because the paper was warm and smelled unique.
Always thought fresh laser prints smell like pancakes fresh off the griddle. :P
Thats what thermal printers do, well not exactly, they heat up a paper coated with some material that turns black when heated.
Same!!
Same, and with Dot Matrix printers, I thought it poked little holes into the paper (which is why I thought it made so much noise).
@@over00lordunknown12 Some would do just that if the head to paper gap was too tight.
I used to have an Oki LED printer. It was shockingly small, for its time. It wasn't as wide as an inkjet. There was just a bit more depth to it. It was much smaller & lighter than laser printers. I thought for sure that there was some "gimmick" to it, but it actually had decent resolution and quality. It was also reasonably fast.
I actually repair copiers for my job, you did an awesome job showing everyone how printers work.
I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find an LED printhead instead of a LSU. Especially when I discovered that a printing press sized 136ppm production printer (about the size of a large credenza) had an LED printhead in the process unit and that a small table top printer had a laser write unit that was a third the size of the machine.
Always enjoy your videos!
You know what I love about this channel? No jarring SFX of pointless (and such a waste of effort!) animations and music. It just reminds of the good old days when there were genuine good knowledge programs on TV rather than today's animation frenzy.
We had a LED printer where I worked about 30 years ago - I think it was made by NEC - ISTR they actively promoted the LED method as a feature.
The Wife used to use an OKIPage LED A4 printer almost 20 years ago when she used to own a Pharmacy. Completely reliable and more than fast enough for a busy Dispensary. Running (consumables) costs were not that bad either.
th-cam.com/video/gI4c7G7SVHs/w-d-xo.htmlm36s
Sorry to jump in two weeks late... I used to work for OKI in the early 90s, their page printers (as they called them) used an LED array in place of a laser + spinning mirror. Came with a life time warranty, so yeah, actively promoted as a feature...
an* LED printer
NJOHN1970 OKI printers are damn near indestructible. They're the Nokia 3310 of the printer world- nothing fancy, they just keep working day in, day out, often in harsh environments. Their dot matrix printers are the standard for warehouses and shipping depots, often in dusty places without climate control.
0:44 I swear I heard "along with corona virus"
(I was watching it at 1.75x btw, that's probably why I heard it wrong).
I was like "what, is he making a joke about how it transfer toner along with the virus? Oh wait, this video is older than Corona", then I skipped back a few seconds and listened "wires" correctly this time :)
I think that’s the reason why youtube thought this video is relevant now. The algorithm probably also thought, he said corona virus
@@kendedetar that makes sense
I was like "Hey, corona virus pun." and then "Wait a minute, this video was shot in 2018" lol
I had to turn on the subtitles to make sure that I had misheard it 😂
So my family is finally replacing our ancient inkjet printer, and I was asked for suggestions on what to get. Imagine my joy when I searched "Technology Connections printer" and you did in fact have a video on printers! You are my go to source for informing myself about these sorts of things. Heat pumps, can openers, printers, portable AC units, dishwashers, etc., I look to you to get informed. Thank you so much for all your time and hard work making these videos. I personally find them an invaluable resource.
I thought LED printing was when you put your monitor face down on a Xerox machine.
LOL, I like that one.
this is LCD printing
@@cantorgauss where did you get LCD from.
@@podgee7507 thats the technical name for a monitor
@@kikicat123 do know that. thx U, this about but led printer, but I never herd LCD printer, like LCD (Liquid crystal display), and I don't think LCD emitting any Type of light, I not sure how the printer read LCD, as for LED does emit light, but just as I said, I have never seen an LCD printer (Have seen ink, laser, pin & matrix Printer, but first for me about LCD printer. (hard to keep up with computer change technology)
Think for your Help.
damn you - that picture of the cat covered in packing peanuts made me spit out my coffee!
Me too, such a great little embellishment to this video :)
I was seriously about to report this video for animal cruelty because I felt SO BAD for that cat... before I realised how stupid I was and that it was only placed there for humour in the first place.
Ok somebody get the timestamp
@@OhWaker 2:06
@@TakTakSub Thank you
I worked on the control circuitry for an LED printer. The control pulses for the printhead were nearly identical to the Laser version, and we used identical controller boards for both laser and LED models.
Everyone watching this in 2020 jumps every time he says "corona wires"
*2021
@@JZ0ver 2120
What do you call a nation infected with coronavirus?
A coronation 👑. Get it? Corona + nation? I make dumb pun...
That's where you're wrong kiddo
I had to go back and listen again cause the first time it sound to me, coronavirus.
Im a Field Service Tech for Fuji Xerox. Laser Printers have Transfer Belts, just like LED printers, that mean a paper path is NOT impacted greatly by the technology of the write side of Dry Toner based printing (in fact you basically completely forewent the Transfer Belt side of all color printing with Dry Toner). We have both LED and Laser printers in service, the laser devices are usually in the larger, more color accurate machines, whereas office machines use LED's. Both technologies have mechanical and quality ups and downs, however i do appreciate your "laymans explanation" on the dry toner process. Most people do not understand how light based Dry toner printing works! Good video!
I remember having an office with laser and LED printers in the printer pool (separate, obviously) decades ago and the B&W LED printers were notoriously slow compared to their laser sister printers. When I asked IT why we had the LED printers at all, they told me, "Price." Apparently they were much cheaper. But they gave similar results (for documents anyway) and I thought, "Hey, nifty." Now today we have much better LEDs. And it would seem, at least in color printers, they have an advantage. Neat!
Just an FYI from someone who worked listing products on Amazon for 3 or so years: Amazon is definitely not the ones saying those are lasers. All that info is put in by the listing creator and Amazon provides little to no information or categorization on a listing.
Not a big deal, just something to be aware of
In the case of printers, who would be the listing creator? Manufacturers?
@@wallykramer7566 could be the manufacturer or a middle-man depending on the company I assume.
They're probably just listing it as laser because nobody searches for "led printer". The technologies are similar enough so nobody really cares.
EDIT: Not to say it's not a distinction worth making, it's certainly interesting to know. Just to say that as far as buying a printer, most people won't care about it.
The listing creator is the first person who makes the product available for sale on Amazon dot com. It could be anybody working for anybody who has one or more with interest to sell there. It could have been a direct employee, since they also sell that brand of printers. Some even have a feature to instantly order a resupply of toner with supposedly the convenience of their instant order buttons that you can link to any product available through them.
@@jasonlisonbee while this is true in a general sense, HP definitely has brand registry set up to prevent this sort of thing. Given brand registry, they are the only ones able to create product listings under the "HP" brand name
I have one of those Brother color LED printers. It’s very accurate, very easy to maintain and works like a dream. Great Video. Thanks!
LED printers, no thanks I'm waiting for OLED printers lol.
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
Cause the black spots are so much blacker on OLED printers and not grayish like on LED printers due to uneven light distribution and backlighting
@@SebastianHaban what? Led not LCD. Oled would arguably be worse than actual micro led because of burn in
Probably not OLED due to short lifespan, but I can imagine Quantum dots will be used for printing some day.
@@DVSProductions I can't tell if you're being serious or not...
I’m a packaging engineer and my company used to have some LED label printers. They were basically the setup shown here, but scaled up a bit and set up for roll-fed label stock. It probably has more to do with the specific manufacturer and model of our printers, but they were a maintenance nightmare. VERY sensitive to humidity levels, and I spent a lot of time breaking the image drums loose when they’d jam with bits of label or clumped toner. We also had all sorts of firmware problems, but that’s on the manufacturer. Oh, and the toner mishaps were a constant issue. We had to clean that printer regularly throughout each shift.
I used OKi color printers for more than 20 years and never had a problem with the output. So much quicker than color laser - and seriously cheaper to boot. Great presentation as ever. thank you.
You have no Idea how much I love my printer. As a student living on his own, my printer is somehow one of the most important things that I have.
Which printer do you have?
You are just wrong about paper path.. Your LED printer uses a transfer belt (as seen around 6:47 mark black shiny thing), paper never actually touches any of the CMYK photoconductors... Rest of the printer works as you describe, but toner is transferred to the intermediary transfer belt below them not to the paper... Paper itself just makes a L turn at bottom, touches the transfer belt while going up, then it passes through the fuser and gets out on the top... How do I know?? Its the exact same proven setup for any *proper* home/office laser printer including what I own (CS-310DN)... As such, those printers have exactly the same color and grayscale print speeds... Today, only the cheap (read: garbage) color lasers actually have longer and more complex paper paths for color printing...
From experience (with few printers I've owned in the past) transfer belt provides several advanages; a) on my older printer without transfer belt, any tiny little problem with paper feed on such a long&curved path will make colors all mixed up so it was not only slow but also highly unreliable as printer ages... b) the transfer belt also prevents dust/dirt stuck on paper from damaging the photoconductors, as belt is continuously cleaned by a rubber blade before touching the photoconductors... c) belt also speeds up the printing by seperating paper feed and rasterization processes, printer can start drawing image to the transfer belt well before moving the paper.
Hadn't realized that was a transfer belt! Oh well. Still, the linear arrangement of this printer is an advantage compared to a carousel of some lasers. I think the intermediate intricacies are more or less trivial but I appreciate the correction!
Technology Connections Thanks, and I appreciate all your videos... Its quite rare for me to watch a video on youtube a few times over only to make sure I haven't missed any technical detail; and all your videos fall into that category. Keep up the good work!
Yepp, as Printer Service technician I can 2nd that.
One and the same mechanical layout can also be LED or Laser.
Technology Connections as my comment above, i still have and use a carousel based transfer belt laser, slowest dinosaur i have but it just wont die.....
HPs 2500 series had the toners on a drum. Each one rotated into position to transfer its color to the belt in 4 passes. Then the paper would be run through. Four times as long as black. But if you didn't specify to print in greyscale so it'd rotate to black only it would cycle all 4 and increment their page counters while taking as long as a full color page. What was the first color laser to put the toners in a row to do simultaneous overlapping transfer to the belt or directly to the paper?
I find myself endlessly fascinated and indeed shocked that simple concepts like this in tech always seem to manage to scale down, or up, to such small sizes, efficiencies, and volume. The idea that you can electrically charge a region of paper, transfer toner to it and melt it to create SOMETHING in the way of an image doesn’t seem surprising. The fact that these regions of charge can be scaled down to 600dpi at the speeds of modern printing is really quite astounding. I find myself likewise continually amazed that we have managed to scale down so many other simple concepts to mind blowing levels of detail and efficiency. Reminds me of the late Richard Feynman quote “there’s plenty of room at the bottom”. Of course he was speaking of the subatomic but the metaphor holds that our simple human intuition breaks down beyond anything smaller than we can easily visually perceive.
It can only go so far then Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will kick in and limit our messing around with things.
I have an old HP laserjet that can print at 1200 dpi. Rarely use that resolution since it makes no difference for text, which is what I mostly print.
@@stevenlein4772 that's true, and in fact that we are reaching that limit now with out photolithography processes in the making of microchips. Individual transistors on chips are getting down to a handful of atoms across. Quantum tunneling starts to become a problem beyond this point.
Locut0s Actually, Feynman's speech by that title listed many of the benefits available as (future) tech is scaled down from what was common then all the way to a tunneling electron microscope seeing individual atoms of chemical and biological substances.
Ricoh printer tech here, just wanted to say that it was cool to see someone actually appreciate how complex and interesting printers can be.
We had an OKI LED mono printer back in the day. The most amusing thing about it was the driver was set up to have a voice. You'd be printing away and it would loudly announce "PLEASE LOAD PAPER INTO THE AUTO SHEET FEEDER!"
Then you'd load more paper and it would respond with "THANK YOU!"
Always made me giggle.
our photocopier at work is crazy.
it scans a sheet of paper in like 0.1 seconds and prints just as fast.
the paper just flies in and out of the machine
Its probably a good ol'cannon imagerunners
5:03 _"These bars [dramatic pause] are the key."_
I seriously choked laughing when you said that.
0:18
I Had to go to 0.25 speed, and pulse-pause to read that rant...
You can frame step with comma and full-stop.
@@K-o-R O_O THANK YOU!
Not to mention he is 100 times more sassy on 0.25 times speed. There must be a negative correlation formula for this.
0:19
Why not use the frame-by-frame buttons?
Great printer. Have the same exact print bought 13 years ago. Bought it as it was cheaper than replacing all 4 toners in my Oki C5150n printer I bought in 2005.
Also "laser" printers that do color at 1/4 the b&w speed (or less) usually do so because they are actually printing 4 times, rotating which color is currently printed. The reason I bought the Oki back in the day was it was one of the few non commercial color ones that printed in a straight pass, allowing you to print much thicker stock though it.
Our data center evaluated a couple of Xerox printers in the early 90s, laser and LED. My bosses went with the laser units since it would print at a resolution of 300 spots per inch. The LED printers were only 240 SPI available at that time. Got two duplex page printers rated at 600,000 images/month, which we abused at nearly a million images each.
And that cost you a billion dollars in maintenance from Xerox
Wow. I had no knowledge of LED printers. My next printer just might be LED.
My next one will be dot matrix
Maybe it already is
Dot matrix printers are incredibly expensive. For example, this Oki (www.staples.com/OKI-ML420-OKI-62418701-Black-and-White-Dot-Matrix-Printer/product_505246) runs nearly $500, which is not cheap for a very basic mono printer.
Well, it's the case of "if you really need a new one, you'll pay whatever we decide to charge you". Mainly for maintaining legacy stuff.
Whats a dot matrix used for, triplicates? I surprised anyone need carbon copies these days
I love your videos man, you're amazing for doing this
It's not really on topic, but as you mentioned in your gigantic scrolling text, there are now some inkjets with reasonable ink cost. Because they are fitted from the factory with a continuous ink supply system, where you fill ink tanks and the heads are fixed (or somewhat fixed, HPs still can have the heads replaced).
Those models are sold at a higher upfront price because the ink is sold at a cheaper price and seem to me a better fit for home use and small office use than a laser printer, but your mileage may vary
I have one of them the Epson ET-4550.
Yes, the ink is dirt cheap.
The problem is the heads dry up and clog if you go too long between prints. You gotta keep the spice flowing.
I have seen two of those printers that were "dead" because the ink in the hoses connecting the tanks to the print heads clogged with gooey ink. So instead of just dried shut nozzles in the print head there's also the additional problem of piping to fail. Their per print cost is lower than the "payed by ink" printers, but I guess you have to print a lot to keep them going. Personally for me there's no way I'll ever go back to ink jets again after having a laser printer.
Clogging is probably going to be a worse issue than with regular cartridge inkjets. And to make matters worse, I think some of the mechanisms are based on regular inkjets with some tubing and a tank slapped on the side. At least the first Epson EcoTanks and HP GT series looks like that: an existing model that they slapped the CISS onto.
But for people with regular printing, that require color or photo prints, they may make sense. And around here they are cheaper than a color laser.
At least in Europe you can buy old HP LaserJets with 2000-3000 pages toner/drum left for less than the cost of a new 5000 page toner cartridge. For home use it's just wonderful:)
@@shana_dmr HP has cheapened some of their LaserJet line. In the time of the original LaserJet through the III series, they were all built to a high standard, able to last through at least a million pages. I've seen one IIId with over three million pages on its counter. The 4 series continued that trend. Just saw one last week in use at a funeral parlor. But HP introduced the L line same time as the 4. The 4L has nothing in common with the 4 aside from the LaserJet name. It and the 5L and 6L are tiny and slow. Their toner capacity is tiny and price per page high. There have been more cheap laser printers like those while the more durable "tanks" are rarer and not built for millions of pages.
I am watching you for quite some time now and just now it hit me: You are the MKBHD of the ordinary. But luckily your videos are also highly educational at the same time. Thanks for coming to my ted talk, I hope this comment boosts your engagement!
17 seconds in and a frame by frame advance is already needed haha! I enjoy this way of keeping the viewer on their toes.
Early Xerox machines looked like enormous bellows cameras. Back then xerography was a manual process more akin to photography, with the toner being dusted by hand onto a flat surface instead of an motorized drum. This type of Xerox machine was a staple of the animation industry for many years. By replacing the tedious process of hand tracing pencil drawings with ink it speeded up and reduced the cost of traditional cel animation. That's why Hanna-Barbera cartoons from 1968's onward list a Xerographer in the credits.
Where I work we used to have some huge old Xerox copiers which took a photo of the document to copy it -- instead of a green scanner thing going back and forth across the page, you just saw a single strobe flash. Those were the last "analog" copiers we had, before everything was replaced with digital copiers which are really just a scanner permanently attached to a laser printer.
One of the Xerox service techs told us that back in the 1960s, Xerox copiers came with a fire extinguisher because the temperature in the fuser was so high that there was a risk of a paper jam catching on fire.
Some versions of linux contain an error code that can be called to indicate that a printer is currently on fire, though no proof of whether or not it's ever been used in seriousness exists.
The "printer on fire" error actually dates back to UNIX: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
I found an old photo of a manual Xerox machine at www.ssa.gov/history/photocopy.html It's installed in an overhead configuation (note the prism shape near the operator's hand. Early animation xerox machines were mounted on a long table and pencil drawings were imaged vertically. The only image I could find was from an old Hanna Barbera cartoon. www.flickr.com/photos/93980414@N08/8580249436/in/photostream/
Hearing "corona wires" upon watching in July 2020...
th-cam.com/video/sMG1nlQi5bg/w-d-xo.html .
I rewatched that part to ensure that what I was hearing war right.
So *that's* where it came from!
@@junoguten I knew it was not 5G. It was laser printers.
Please, stop. I can't contain my excitement when people talk about printers.
What an enjoyable presentation!
I am sick to the teeeth of researching printers - then I found YOU! So eloquent in your technical knowledge, then there's the 'spinning thing'...so hi-tech! You had me chuckling more than once and I really enjoyed it!
Anyhoo, back to the grind. Been researching printers for 3 days now. My quest? To find a decent, small or compact, reasonably priced, colour, laser printer.
Print speed is not an issue for me nor do I expect to produce hi-quality limited editions or works of art. I want it for mainly for arty-farty stuff including printing on a variety of papers and surfaces for use in mixed media art projects. The techniques I want to try all require a laser printer, hence my quest.
I already have a Brother print/scan/copy inkjet which I will keep, but it's no good for what I want to do. Has to be laser. I've always used Brother so I am familiar with their printers & they have never let me down.
Then this LED thing kept cropping up. Brother have a few that peaked my interest but before I commit to a purchase, I really must know this: is the end result, the finished print, exactly the same as a laser print? I mean. does the difference between Laser and LED lie only in how the toner is 'transferred' onto a surface?
I know, I know. You probably already explained but it would mean so much and make me very happy if you would confirm this! I'd really appreciate your input and expert advice.
On saying that, I don't really expect a reply coz it's been a few years since you uploaded this but I had to reach out. I had to try.
Thanks for an excellent video. x
watched this video years ago when it showed up in my sub box, now legit just watching this on repeat because the CompTIA A+ exam is for some reason OBSESSED with laser printing and the process just does not stick in my head. who knew this would actually be relevant someday.
Reasons that he doesn't like ink-jet printers:
-Ink dries out, meaning that the printer needs to either constantly be preforming a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather frequently which, in this paperless age, fewer people are doing.
The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer.
-ink cartridges are usually priced at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into bbuying generic ink which often clogs the inkjets so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't
-Because the ink is liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink is dried.
-Water-based inks are likley to completely wash away if the paper they are printed on becomes wet meaning shipping labels printed on some inkjet printers can be rendered completly unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain.
I accidentally hit enter xD There's one more bit
- None of these issues plague laser printers, so despite their higher upfront cost(and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance" modes, the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to try, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on, but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the subject of the video as you'll soon see.
The main issue for me with inkjets is the drying out. I have a printer at my mom's location that I only come by once every year to visit. No fears wit a laser/led.
*performing
*buying
*likely
*completely unreadable
Canon inkjets don't have most of those issues, especially not "maintenance" pissing away the ink. Canon printheads are easily removable so in the very rare event they clog they can be soaked in rubbing alcohol overnight. A cleaning cycle or two has them working again. It takes a long time idle for a Canon head to dry up when unused, more than a year if tanks with ink are left in.
@pmailkeey cleaning does waste ink in every inkjet, but only when initiated by the user. My HP Photosmart 3310 did "maintenance" almost every time it was turned on. HP claimed the ink was "recycled" but that was BS. More than once when a tank was almost out when I'd turned it off suddenly was conveniently empty the next time I turned it on and it just had to do "maintenance" again.
3:40, heh, I was thinking about a CRT this entire description. Nice to know I wasn't off in left field :P
It's also basically how the Nintendo Virtual Boy worked.
0:19 Nice rant delivery. I read the whole thing, and it was great!
LOL! I got that EXACT model of printer too(HL-3040CDN) It's been running with off-brand toner carts for over a decade and it's still going strong 😄
Protip: It can take a 144pin SO-DIMM ram module up to 512MB, I got one on fleabay back in the day for like $10 incl. shipping. That speeded up print processing by like a factor of 3-5X, especially in 'fine' print mode.
Honestly this is one of the best purchases I've ever made: a networked, upgradeable, 2400dpi color 'laser' printer that can take $25 toner carts and it only cost like $120 back in the day(early 2010s).
At 0:18 (sorry if this has already been posted, I didn't see it):
Ink dries out, meaning that printer has to either constantly be performing a "maintenance mode" which wastes ink, or you need to print rather regularly which, in this paperless age fewer and fewer people are doing.
The herky-jerky nature of the print heads as they travel back and forth is very unpleasant compared to the smooth print of pretty much any laser printer.
Ink cartridges are usually pried at stupid levels, meaning that you're forced into buying generic ink which often clogs the inkjets so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Because the ink is a liquid, freshly printed documents have a tendency to smear if touched until the ink has dried.
Water-based inks are likely to completely wash away if the paper they are printed on becomes wet, meaning shipping labels printed with some inkjet printers can be rendered completely unreadable if they get wet from something like, oh I don't know, rain.
None of these issues plague laser printers so despite their higher upfront cost (and arguably more expensive toner) you can pretty much count on them to work perfectly even if they've been idle for over a year, they don't waste toner on "maintenance modes", the toner is bonded to the paper so water doesn't smear it, the toner is never wet so you don't have to wait for it to dry, plus spills can easily be cleaned up as the toner is a powder. I could go on, but if you read this entire thing, now you know why I generally dislike inkjet printers and why I will forever use laser printers. Or LED printers, which are the subject of this video as you'll soon see.
That said, Techmoan recently reviewed an inkjet printer that was actually pretty decent in terms of the ink cost, so even if a "maintenance mode" were to waste ink, it's not like it's wasting super expensive ink.
Perhaps one day I'll rejoin Team Inkjet. Particularly for photo printing (and images in general) inkjet reigns supreme. But for now, I'm planted in the realm of toner so that, when I have to do my taxes, I don't have to waste time, energy, and money fighting the stupid inkjet with clogged heads.
Me: why has this video be recommended now, 2 years after its release?
The video: corona wire
I bought a laser printer, which I guess is really an LED printer, a couple of weeks ago, my phone camera must have told Google.
|-O-| Corona wire
I ordered an HP Laser Jet and all that showed up was a stupid printer
7:17 ..."I want you in my room"
A song. th-cam.com/video/llyiQ4I-mcQ/w-d-xo.html
from now until forever
OMG can´t unsee that now haha
Warning - Vengaboys viral marketing of their virulent meme songs has reached a new level of sophistication.
HAHA I thought of that too!
I enjoy your technical talks. This one hit home. I worked for Xerox and a couple of other mom & pop shops as a Copier repair technician. So allow me to point out some trivial things. I say trivial because they really don't matter to the end user, but make a big deal to us techs that troubleshoot and repair them.
The first, in your description of how the image is formed on the drum, is missing a little bit of info. Again, this only really matters if you need to troubleshoot the image quality. Some of the imaging systems will use the laser to erase the charge for the toner to get attracted to the drum. We refer to this as 'write black' as in writing black to the drum. Which was the method you described. The other method is 'Write White'. In this method the laser clears away the charge on all of the area where the toner will not stick. So basically the laser is writing to the drum as if it were a negative of the actual image.
The other thing was how the color image is transferred. On the machine you had, when you pull out a drum, you will see a conveyor belt below all the drums. This is called a 'image transfer belt' or 'ITB' (often we just called it the ITB or transfer belt). This is used to transfer the complete image at once before getting to the paper. The paper never touches the drums. The drums transfer the image to the ITB, which once completed can be transferred to the paper.
Some color machines do not use the ITB method, but instead send the paper around the machine up to four times, to get the image on the paper. Sending it once around the machine for each drum to be used. The drums on some of these machines would be on a carousel, and be rotated after its image is transferred to the paper, and the the next one gets a go at it, before it then gets sent on to the fuser.
Again, this stuff doesn't matter to the end user. But to us techs, it means a lot. Especially when you need to fix things. (especially when the customer breaks these things by using the wrong kind of paper, or paper that is stale. Yep, paper past its shelf life).
these videos are so nice when i’m sneaking out my house, informative videos like these calm me the fuck down when i HATE the silence of walking alone at night
0:01 from your channel, yes, i am excited at the mention of printers
Yes the warming hug of a fresh laser/led print is nice. But nothing beats the warmth and smell of a Ditto.
Is that after you turn it into your girlfriend?
I remember those from kindergarten. I think that was the last year my school used them. They were a nice shade of purple, too.
(For those googling, its a Mimeograph.)
Matthew Ghali not a Spirit Duplicator?
All the same thing, I just remember from school it being called a ditto machine. Nice shade of blueish purple and alot of smudges around the edges.
One major advantage that Color LED has over color laser you forgot to mention is that color laser printers pass the page through the same fuser 4 times. You need buy thicker paper so that the 4x heat doesn’t curl up the pages.
I am a copier/printer technician (and have worked for a company you mentioned), so this isn't exactly anything new to me. But I keep seeing it come up in my suggested videos so finally clicked. I don't use the term LED printer with anyone outside the trade, because they wouldn't know what I was talking about. To the layman they are all "laser printers". One interesting thing between the old analog copiers and the modern digital (laser/LED) printers is that the polarity is backwards between them. Had a customer once with an old analog copier and a newer digital one where the toner cartridge wasn't quite different enough. They put the analog toner into the digital machine and made a huge mess.
I work for Fuji Xerox in Australia working mainly on office printers and I've never really thought about it much since I'm not the one using the printers, I'm the one fixing them, but every single colour printer I've worked on has had an intermediate transfer belt between the drums and page.
Basically all four drums write their image onto the transfer belt as the belt rotates (if you stop the printer mid operation and look at the belt you can see the fully formed image) and then the page runs up against the belt where a magnetic transfer roller pulls the full image onto the page all at once.
Whether the image is in colour or black and white the process should be exactly the same, I've looked through a manual for one of the models I work on and it seems to be saying that the transfer belt does a single pass of all four drums and the image is drawn all at once. This would mean there should be no difference between black and white vs colour printing, the colour drums simply have no image drawn to them at the start.
Where you do see a difference is in the colour vs black and white models of the same printer, a black and white printer only has one drum so no transfer belt is needed, just pull the image from the drum to the page.
You can see the LED printer in the video has this same setup or at least very similar, you can see the black transfer belt underneath where the drums sit at 6:45 or a close up at 5:44
One thing I will say is that reliability aside these LED strips would probably be a lot easier to replace than a laser unit and be much less likely to be damaged in transit. The laser is pretty bulky and fragile and is buried deep inside the printer so they are a pain to replace on most models, though it is far from the hardest repair.
the samsung color laser printer i got uses a belt as a transfer medium between paper and drum. the drum collects the toner of one color, moves it to the black belt and repeats that 4 times in color mode and then the belt transfers it to the paper.
never heard about these led printers, but a quick amazon look revealed, they are really affordable... as long as the toner is affordable too
There is also a transfer belt in this printer in the video.
the toners for LED printers is rarely that affordable as the cartridge usually contains both the drum and the toner cartridge. just like the cheapest ink jet printers. It is all a scam!
this guy is amazing, he's like an encyclopedia of rare antequated technology.
This is an excellent video, and concerns a prescient topic, given that this is still perfectly relevant in an area that changes so much - so frequently. I have a nerdy fondness for topics like this, so I have to ask: Have you considered doing a similar presentation on other printing technologies? My favorite example: Something that discusses...solid ink? Most people aren't familiar with these things. These printers appear to use ....crayons, rather than tonor. The claimed print speed is surprisingly competitive, compared with laser printers. The cost is (almost) on par with color lasers, and the output is just ....(invariably glossy) cool. The inner-workings, along with the history of the tech is potentially a cool story. No complaints - at ALL, just...sayin (giving unsolicited advice), so of course - ignore without concern. But darnit - these are basically printing with crayons, which is funny and cool: (one example) The ColorQube 8580.
I stumbled upon this channel searching how lava lamps were made/work, and stayed to watch how a printer works. I’m in love
bought an old hp 2420dn from a college's surplus store for $20. had toner (no idea how much is left) and a full tray of paper. it's got ~54,000 pages of use according to the service menu and is working great for me. plugged the ethernet port into my router and I can even print to it from any device on my network. what a sweet deal. it feels modern in its plug-and-play usability today. also it's crazy fast compared to my parent's inkjet printer. this does 30-some-odd pages per minute while my parent's does like 2
Have you done videos about bubble jet, solid ink wax printers, color ribbon photography printers (commercial grade), Alps ribbon printers that print white, metallic gold, metallic silver, metallic magenta, metallic cyan, clear glossy overcoat, and LightJet drum printers that use RGB lasers to develop commercial photography?
Are solid ink printers still sold? I know someone who got one, useless thing it is.
Bubble jet is more or less inkjet, but is Cannons way of putting ink on the paper. Maybe why I like Cannon bubble jet printers.
I miss color wax printers. They smell like melting crayons.
I really liked the Alps' printers. I'm not sure what the binder was, but I liked the way the ink looked.
Inkjet uses piezoelectric to heat a tiny bit of ink which flash creates a small bubble inside the jet which makes a single droplet fly out.
Some of the early inkjet printers in the '80s were called "spark-jet" because they used an electrical spark to form the ink into characters. Reviewers said the printing quality was poor and you could smell the ozone from the spark discharge!
"Spinning Thing". I have died.
1:25 Whoa, whoa, whoa. Excuse me. What kind of wire???
0:44
C O R O N A
back in the 90's I had a Okidata (i don't know when they shortened it to OKI) LED printer, it was fantastic for a couple reasons, back then I was in the Navy and I was in charge of my ships news letter which I printed on my Okidata, they were usually 7 to 8 pages and I was making 70 copies every month. My unit came with 2 meg ram, I added 16 meg for 18 meg total so no matter how complex the image it printed just fine with no errors. Best of all the toner cartridge was separate from the image drum, and the toner was about 10 or 15 dollars, and I might replace 5 or 8 of them before there was any issue with the drum and replace it. this made the operation cost so much cheaper the say a comparable HP laser printer at the time which I think was either the model II or the III. Added bonus I had a page scanner that had a parallel port pass through and connected to the printer I could make copies without the computer even connected. As time went on eventually I got newer printers and scanners and such and gave the Okidata and scanner to my dad who used it until he retired in 2006, sadly after that it went to goodwill i believe.
fan.tastic. .. this channel simply s increasing my quality of life . no questions
Hold on, there's such thing as an LED printer?
yes, they are usually cheaper than laser printers, but often produce prints of lower quality, and the fact that the toner and drum are usually put into the same cartridge means toner cartridges are more expensive than printers with separate toners, drums and fusers. You usually don't need to replace the drum with every toner cartridge replacement. The same thing can be said for those cheap-ass inkjet printers like that +-50 $ hp printers. they are cheap because they don't have print heads. In those printers the printhead is a part of every ink cartridge (making those cartridges even more expensive)
I intend to buy a mid level Epson inkjet with EcoTank to test it out. But I believe the ink for ecotank printer's isn't that higher quality pigment-based ink, but rather dye-based. Also those new HP laser jet pro color printers intrigue me.
I noticed you say this in another comment--the drum and toner cartridges are separate on the printer featured here. Whether or not a manufacturer integrates the drum into the toner cartridge has nothing to do with it being LED vs. laser. In fact both of the printers that I have experience with which used a combined toner and drum replacement cartridge were - you guessed it - laser.
HP has always bundled the drum with the toner cartridge, even on the original black and white LaserJet.
Many low cost "lasers" are actually LED. The Dell c1760nw, which often goes for as little as $70, is a popular color "laser" that uses LEDs. Quality is not as good, but for a second or third printer, it does not matter.
I remember selling Oki printers that were "laser" printers when I worked at Staples in the late 2000's that were LED printers labeled as laser...
As someone who sells prints currently they still label led printers as lasers
It's the year 2020. People are flinching as they hear the word "corona" (wire).
A rule of thumb is that LED printers are in the range below 24ppm. This is limit is created by the time the LED requires to get dim again, while a laser is just manouvered by the prism and has shorter on-off response.
Transfer belt unit, used in color printing process. Paper does not come in contact with the drums in these units. Instead the color is created on the transfer belt first and then applied to the paper. My research on your LED printer shows that your printer, also has a transfer belt.
The laser printer uses a polygon mirror which allows the smooth transition of the laser from left to right, This does add a bit more size to the laser component but the LED strip for each color could result in failed LEDs in the strip, requiring the entire strip to be replaced to correct it. LED strips are also used in scanning, but they are also measured for intensity across the array. To guarantee that there are no areas brighter or darker.
I do like the LED printers, and I believe that in the future, they will become part of a tonerless system. That also utilizes UV instead of a fusing unit.
Thank you for clearing up why when I've stripped some printers in the past I never managed to find a laser diode anywhere inside a 'laser' printer.
There never was one to find!
Or...it was houses in the PH, which tends to be sealed.
Speaking of laser printers I recently realized that I worked on the worlds first laser printer. Xerox of course held the patents on the xerographic process used in copiers but strangely IBM beat Xerox to the market on the laser printer by several months. The first such printer installed in a customer environment, there were naturally some engineering models before then, but the first laser printer in the real world was installed at the F.W. Woolworth data center in Milwaukee in 1976. I worked on that printer many, many times but it wasn't till just a couple years ago that I realized that was the first laser printer ever installed in a customer environment.
that "corona wire" scared the shit out of me
They also make Covid beer.
I swear when I rewatch all the techcon videos in 50 years for the 15th time, I'm gonna get flashbacks at this point, every time.
@@robertjenkins6132 Broke: Boicotting Corona beer
Woke: Astroterfing boicotts of Corona beer on facebook while secretly buying up tons and tons of it in hopes that they'll go out of business and become a piece of history collector's item
Good
Because you're uneducated and have never heard the word "corona" before this pandemic?
I had an Okidata LED printer in my home office back in the late 1990s. It worked great. Inexpensive and the results looked absolutely just as good as on the multi-user network laser printers at client sites.
I working for a Japanese trading company. OKI is our customer! Thank you for the video, I always interested in how it works!
Brother has to be the best printer brand out there. I owned a lot of brother products. I can say one thing for that Samsung printer. It’s pretty damn quick, but one flaw I’ve seen in it is photo printing. I’ve always had to lighten the photos up almost drastically when I print or the photos come out dark.
techcon: a coronavir-
youtube bots: a what?
techcon: e
bots: oh okay. Move along, citizen!
Oh, I've been wondering what they meant when listing them as a "digital printer"!
You're correct, I've never heard of LED printers, love your channel!
"but please remain calm" was absolutely beautiful 😂