From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!GOEKE@mit-mc.arpa
Newsgroups: net.micro
Title: Printers and Their Repair
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.370
Posted: Fri Feb  4 06:19:00 1983
Received: Mon Feb  7 01:26:51 1983

From:  Robert F. Goeke 

	It will come as no surprise to most of you on this list that
printers do, on occasion, fail.  What may come as a surprise to you is
the degree of difficulty encountered in getting them fixed!

	Item number 1: a Centronics Model 737, about 1 1/2 years old, 
broke it's plastic cam which loads the print head onto the platen. I'm
in Boston, the company is in southern NH, and the best they could come
up with was for us to send it to a factory service center in Syosset, NY.
We sent it out on January 9, they logged it in on January 24, and one week
later sent it back with the bill: $150 flat rate plus $25 for an invoicing
fee (and then they invoiced the wrong address) plus $3 for shipping.
$178 to fix a cam on a $400 printer!  FOO ! ! !

	Item number 2: an Epson MX-80FT, about 8 months old, started to have
flakey things happen to it's serial interface card.  Well, we have another
Epson, with another flakey card, but since it has different flakes we could
do some intelligent chip swapping.  We now know that a new 8048 (that's a 
CPU plus ROM) would fix things fine.  It should cost $5 plus handling.  One
small ploblem: neither the factory nor a local independent repair store will
sell us the chip!  Just send us the board and we'll look at it!  But my system
is flakey, not dead; and I don't want to be dead (which I will be if
I send the whole card out) until someone, somewhere gets around to 
looking at it, for some unspecified price.

	Question: are there any (in a service sense) reasonable vendors
of printers in this world?