Got myself a barely-used (about 600 pages printed, if I have read the configuration runes rightly) LexMark C500 colour laser printer yesterday evening, complete with an almost-new toner set, for $10 locally. Someone was moving house and just wanted it gone (all 60lbs of it). There is a small fix necessary, involving accessing the cleaning blades in the three colour toner cartridges via modest disassembly (when the cleaning blades are dirty the colour printout is streaked), but that's no big deal and shouldn't take more than thirty or forty minutes to accomplish—I hope.
I know, it's a non-Postscript, base model of not the greatest of printer names, but it has Appletalk—who'd have thought it?—along with USB and LPR, works under MacOS 8.6+, and can be made to work with Snow Leopard if I ever go there. Also, the youngsters have been draining the ink like there's no tomorrow from the family's Canon Pixma off and on for schoolwork, and any one of those inktanks costs well more than $10 to replace. I had been thinking about spending $75 on inks and refillable cartridges for the Pixma, with all the mess that involves — and then I saw this.
I'll get the LexMark set up and running, restrict access to it except for those coloured necessities, and then that $10 will hopefully see them right through school. The Pixma can be reserved for what it's best used to do: print a small number of proper photographs that we want every now and then. Everything else still gets printed on one of the couple of LaserWriter units I have. As long as the old LaserWriters work as well as they do, they're going to keep rolling it out.
I know, it's a non-Postscript, base model of not the greatest of printer names, but it has Appletalk—who'd have thought it?—along with USB and LPR, works under MacOS 8.6+, and can be made to work with Snow Leopard if I ever go there. Also, the youngsters have been draining the ink like there's no tomorrow from the family's Canon Pixma off and on for schoolwork, and any one of those inktanks costs well more than $10 to replace. I had been thinking about spending $75 on inks and refillable cartridges for the Pixma, with all the mess that involves — and then I saw this.
I'll get the LexMark set up and running, restrict access to it except for those coloured necessities, and then that $10 will hopefully see them right through school. The Pixma can be reserved for what it's best used to do: print a small number of proper photographs that we want every now and then. Everything else still gets printed on one of the couple of LaserWriter units I have. As long as the old LaserWriters work as well as they do, they're going to keep rolling it out.
