laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (12/13/85)
Hope some of you will share your experiences with the Imagen 8/300. Our CS dept, and the university computing center bought two of these printers about an year ago. They have started giving trouble after a couple of months. Our black-box (controller) overheats and hangs up. Does not boot until several attempts are made, etc. The printing engine of the computing center produces wholly unacceptable print-outs. We do not have maintenance; Imagen has been unhelpful and extremely slow in responding to our phone calls.
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (12/16/85)
I believe we have 3 imagen printers, the 8/300 with the canon engine,
the 24/300 with the xerox engine, and the 12/300 with the ricoh engine.
First, the canon seems to have the best quality output of all engines.
Second, the controllers for the machines SUCK! We have lost 3 power
supplies in the past 4 months. One lossage caused the cpu to go bad.
Each time Imagen gave us a hard time claiming it is not their problem.
After much duress Imagen gave us one free power supply but the other 2
cost a few hundred bucks a piece and the cpu $900+. They don't seem to
understand that we were in the process of ordering 10 more of the
printers. Not anymore.
The controllers are turkeys. They have one fan blowing hot power supply
air over the multibus circuit cards. The power supply is an undersized
switcher which seems to die routinely. The machine crashes on occasion
requiring someone to power cycle the machine. While printing the
controller needs to access the floppy drive which slows the throughput
since spinning up the drive and loading the head takes time.
My opinion is that Imagen doesn't have it's act together. It is too bad,
since they potentially have a good product. If they offered some support
I would be satisfied with the occasional problem, but they don't. Unless
they have changed I would look at QMS.
Of course, these are just my opinions, not that of my employer.
Doug Robinow
Doug Robinow MIT LCS 545 Tech Sq. Cambridge, MA 02139
rob@mit-vax.arpa {harvard, ihnp4!mit-eddie}!mitvax!rob 617-253-8573SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (Christopher Schmidt) (12/18/85)
I'm surprised you've had so much trouble with two 8/300's. We have 7 Imagen laser printers and so far, the 8/300's have greatly outperformed the design life of the LBP-CX. We have had two overheating problems. (1) On a brand-new unit, we had a "personality board" that was overly sensitive to heat. Imagen replaced it under warranty and it's worked ever since. (2) Just the other day an 8/300 was flaking out (shrinking the image in the Y axis on random jobs) and cleaning the grossly clogged filter seems to have cleared things right up. Do you keep the filter clean? --Christopher -------