I have wanted a large-format printer for a long time and set up a search to monitor the local craigslist for them. They retail for $thousands and can last for decades, but they need regular use and maintenance or the ink dries up and nothing works. So after a company’s needs change and the printer sits for months or years it is often easier to buy a new printer than get the old one working again, and the old one is sold locally because it costs $hundreds to ship it by truck somewhere.
Besides the price, older printers also have the advantage that the supplies are readily available for less than retail – 3rd party inks as well as OEM inks and printheads that have been sitting in someone’s supply closet. Everything I read says that you don’t have to worry about buying expired ink or heads, you just don’t get a warranty on them from HP. Expired HP supplies are often as cheap as new 3rd party so I’m better off getting the genuine stuff, especially when I’m trying to get a printer working again.
Hewlett Packard created the market as they did for pen plotters, and there have been many generations of older HP DesignJet printers that I see for sale:
- Designjet 230, 250, 430, 450 – 300dpi, some monochrome, pretty old at this point
- Designjet 750c and 755cm – 300dpi in color, 600 dpi black
- Designjet 1050c and 1055cm – a workhorse, many are still in use but parts are getting harder to find
- Designjet 500 and 800 and 510
At some point HP split their line into the T series for CAD plotting and the Z series for imaging. The current T series have four ink colors (CMKY) but the Z series can have 12 – that’s a lot of ink and printheads to buy to get and keep them running. I wanted to be able to print generative art and images so I thought a six-color printer would be right – usually CMYK plus a gray and a second black for photos. The first printers in the T series were the T610 and T1100 and had six inks, but more recent T series like the T630 are back to four.
After being tempted by many listings for older models, I found a 24″ wide T610 that was being sold for $400 by a defense contractor near the Dulles airport. I offered them $300 and didn’t hear back, and the ad disappeared, so I figured I missed it. Then a month later the same printer shows up for $300 and I jumped on it.
They claimed it was working fine but hadn’t been used in a couple months. I tried doing tests on it but it said multiple colors of ink were out even though it seemed like there was some left in the cartridges. Nothing will print without all the ink being present so I couldn’t do any more testing. In hindsight not recognizing the cartridges could have been a bad sign and I maybe should have passed or offered them less, but with help from the nice guys at the company it was in two pieces and loaded in the back of my car.
With the help of a neighbor we managed to get it out of the car and up into the attic lab. I ordered a new set of inks for it (about $90 each retail but I got an expired set for $100 on ebay) and replaced all the cartridges. Still had out of ink errors with new full carts! No matter how many times I reseated the cartridges and reset the printer they wouldn’t go away, but the empty colors changed so it seemed like there were other problems. Frustrated, I switched to other projects and let it sit for a while.