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. GoekeIt 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?