LED Printers: The Common Printing Tech You Haven't Heard Of
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ค. 2024
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If you’re among the 85%* of people who don’t know what an LED printer is, then prepare to have your mind mildly blown as I tell you about the common printer tech that may in fact by lurking in your home or office, but which you’ve been mistakenly referring to as a laser printer. gasp
* This percentage was gathered via Twitter poll. If anything, I’d say the general population is even less likely to know what an LED printer is, as my followers on Twitter would, I should think, be a little more interested in technology than the average individual. Hey, did you know you can follow me on Twitter? Here’s a link! / techconnectify
Various links to stuff:
I used a couple of animations from a website called “printermalls.com”. It seems kind of like a time capsule these days, but apparently it’s run by a computer store in Myrtle Beach. Maybe check them out? Or don’t, it’s up to you.
www.printermalls.com/
The Engineer Guy has a good video on photocopiers. Worth a watch, and if you’re somehow not subscribed to his channel, you should be!
• how works a photoCopie...
Now, strangely, this version isn’t on his channel, and I can’t find the original. I don’t know if he removed it or what, but here’s a link to his actual channel:
/ @engineerguyvideo
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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?
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
When I heard the word "printer" I flew into a blind rage and automated most of my day via Excel spreadsheets.
😂
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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
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.
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."
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!
It finally hit me, your pace and cadence is just like the old Andy Rooney bits on 60 minutes!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
just realized you add credit even to the memes. That is dedication to quality
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.
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 😂
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.
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 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!
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
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.
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
@@ETERNlTUS Thank you
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 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.
17 seconds in and a frame by frame advance is already needed haha! I enjoy this way of keeping the viewer on their toes.
I love this, thank you for taking the time with the diagrams and all the graphical explanation !, I finally understand how a laser printer works
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!)
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
You're correct, I've never heard of LED printers, love your channel!
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?
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
5:03 _"These bars [dramatic pause] are the key."_
I seriously choked laughing when you said that.
Thank you for explaining in detail. I've used Oki LED printers originally over two decades ago and they were great even then
There is always a reason for me to come back to these videos. I have a question and remember "oh! He has a video on this."
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...
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?
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
Nicely done and very informative.
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
Just putting this out there, you're my hero. Your videos are my go to when I'm trying to relax and find myself. I know that sounds crazy but learning through the paths you provide seems to do that and I really appreciate both the knowledge and the odd sense of satisfaction I get from watching these videos.
P.S. Viva el laserdisc!
This is a great home office printer. The print-from-phone feature saves so much time. It was super easy to set up.
This channel rules! Thanks for all of your hard work!
Please, stop. I can't contain my excitement when people talk about printers.
Excellent, pure information, well presented and developed. Thank you for publishing your videos.
I don't know how, but you actually made me excited about printers.
What is this wizardry?
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.
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!
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/
Thank you so much! I was teased by you on the preview, having exact the same printer model as I have, and I always thought "Dude, where is the laser in this printer?"!
Just discovered your channel and subscribed a few minutes into this video! Your channel is awesome and I look forward to viewing your other educational technology content! :-D Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience!
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.
Some additional facts: the Samsung printer you mentioned isn't slow because it uses lasers, but due to the fact that it's likely a carousel based printer. It has the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black toners arranged on a circular rotation drum, and it has one imaging unit and and intermediate belt with the length of a letter or legal sized paper.
For black and white printing, the carousel doesn't move the whole system works much like a standard black and white laser printer. To print color, the printer will image each color onto the belt one at a time. So cyan gets imaged, then the carousel rotates to the next color and that gets imaged and so on. The colors are layered onto the belt and when the last color is deposited, the paper gets fed past the belt, picking up the completed image and goes to the fuser.
Your Brother printer looks like it uses a paper transport belt, where the belt just moves the paper along on top of it, and it's doesn't contribute much to the actual imaging process. Some larger color laser printers actually have an imaging belt, where all 4 colors are imaged at the same time onto the belt and then the paper passes by the belt, picking up the image. This can allow for shorter paper paths, and can make things like duplex printing much faster.
Also, you should get your hands on a Xerox solid ink printer. Those things are a technical masterpiece. You can probably save a buck by picking up and older model, like the 8560. You can also probably find the service manual online, which goes into detail on how it works.
It's nice to see people who actually think and use their brains for something good or at least useful for some people.
Nice Lecture on LED Color Laser Printers! I still own an OKI c5150n LED Color Laser and she's the workhorse in my shop! Been web shopping for Laser Heat Transfer Papers & vinyl to run thru this Baby!
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.
I love your videos man, you're amazing for doing this
Best visual aid for how charges work ever!
Yes I'we heard of them... My first really usable printer (for anything but program listings and similar) was a LED printer from OKI. I bought it in 1996 and still use it.
0:19 Nice rant delivery. I read the whole thing, and it was great!
Would you consider adding signal encoding to your list of projects?
Covering AM, FM, QAM and QPSK would be really cool, and I think by explaining the basics of amplitude, frequency, and phase with a visual reference, you could really tie together how it all works and maybe even show how chroma phase shifts the luma signal without affecting the image in a significant way, and how the color burst is necessary to set the initial phase with which to extract the color information in an NTSC/PAL signal to tie it into other projects.
I never knew about LED printers, or how standard laser printers work. Now I know! Thank you.
Top tier info in a timely fashion. 10/10.
I wish there was a companion video that talked about the new tank inkjet printers.
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
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 always love your vids. I feel like I'm hanging out with BBSrs in the late 80s/early 90s
Rock on dude - best tech channel this one is.
It's the year 2020. People are flinching as they hear the word "corona" (wire).
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.
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.
The Epson workforce inkjet series uses a precision core patented head that uses no heat (and therefore, never wears out) and pigment ink that not only dries instantly, but is so durable it's used for those "hazardous material" warning labels on chemical drums - which must endure testing of literally being dumped in the English Channel for weeks and coming out like new (depending of course, on the substrate). Looking forward to your Precision Core inkjet video!
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.
0:51 - "...so a tall stack of freshly printed printouts is nice and warm, just asking you to give it a hug." Please resist the temptation to hug your printouts...kinda similar to "Don't squeeze the Charmin." ;)
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!
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.
0:01 from your channel, yes, i am excited at the mention of printers
Perfect video to watch while I'm cleaning the drums of my own LED printer, as well as sucking up the small toner spills.
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!
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.
I have a dell C1670nw it is a rebadged xerox LED printer, but I still generally refer to it as a laser printer. I got it for $70 from staples and a complete set of off-brand toner (good for 5000 pages) is like $20
only came across this video now, but have brother colour LED printer and couldnt be any happier witrh it, it is just a tad bigger than my previous samsung black&white laser printer.
Agree that little information can eb found about them, as i tried do some research how do they differ from each other.
I still use an HP LaserJet 1018, B&W printer from around 2001 or 2002. It still runs strong and produces very sharp text. It was a hand-me-down from my uncle to use when I was in college, because I didn’t need to print color and just used it to print essays and other texts. You can still get the toner carts and even though they are around $100, you can get nearly 3,000 pages if you alternate between econo mode and regular 600 dpi.
techcon: a coronavir-
youtube bots: a what?
techcon: e
bots: oh okay. Move along, citizen!
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 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 worked on one of the control board chips for a certain LED printer. Custom ASIC design, was great fun.
this guy is amazing, he's like an encyclopedia of rare antequated technology.
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
Learned so much just from watching this video. Thank you.
This edge to edge single row of 'print heads' was used by HP and a startup in an ink-based system that HP still sells today, called Edgline or PageWide, can do up to 70ppm after the first page (which is like 40ppm). Great for home office use.
I would like to point out that most of the issues you listed for ink are fixed by things like pagewide from HP or ecotank by epson (i prefer pagewide by far). Also pigment based inks instead of dye based ones also fix some of your other complaints. The issue is getting the RIGHT printer for you.
On a side note you also have things like hp instant ink that help with ink worries though frankly the cost per page on high end ink printers is equal or even better in some cases to lazer.