die@cpoint.UUCP (David I. Emery) (03/12/89)
I have been personally bequethed a broken Data Products LZR-1230 laser
printer by the corporate MIS department which decided to junk the thing
rather than pay $700 to have it fixed (they hated it because it wasn't
a DEC LN03 and they couldn't get their VMS software to run it right). The
LZR-1230 is the 12 pages per minute Toshiba engine with a Data Products
68000 and gate array based rasterizer board (but unfortunately without the
Postscript ROMs).
I have called Data Products up in an attempt to obtain
a schematic and was told "we don't release schematics to our distributors
or field service people any more and won't even consider selling them to you...
a mere customer. If you want the printer fixed you'd better pay us to
fix it ..." ( They do offer a board-changers-troubleshooting guide for $125
with no schematics or detailed technical information)
Does anybody on the net know of any channel though which I could
obtain schematics and other repair documentation ? The printer seems to
have a problem with its laser driver board that causes drive to the laser
diode to drop out after a few minutes of warm up (gives Hsync errors and
stops printing anything other than black after warmup).
I am a hardware/software architect with nearly 30 years of experiance
at fixing things electronic and do not consider troubleshooting a laser printer
laser diode driver circuit beyond my capabilities if I had any reasonable
documentation. And spending $700 to have Data Products replace a transistor
seems outragous beyond belief, particularly for a freebie broken junk printer
that I rescued from the dumpster.
Does anyone know where documentation on the Toshiba engine might
be obtained ? Perhaps that would supply enough info to help me fix the thing.
Is there a Toshiba America office I could contact ?
I suppose that assuming that one could actually repair high
tech junk oneself is rather silly. I am sure that if I have Data Products
fix it they will merely have someone change a board which will no doubt be
actually fixed on some automated test setup or simply thrown out. The
things we create have probably gone past the stage where an intelligent,
experianced, and knowlagable design engineer can simply open the unit up, make
some measurements, draw some conclusions and replace the bad part.
And if a few of us aged techno-hippies still think we can fix things, of
course there is no economic incentive for the manufacturer to support
such anachronistic nonsense by supplying the required information
since only a lunatic fringe minority would ever try such foolishness.
No, better that they protect their proprietary secrets (after all
what do they add to the basically Japanese engine anyway) from people
who might be intent on depriving them of their rightful revenue.
We have passed into an age where even those of us with the
interest, training and talent to understand the mysteries of the technology
around us have to treat it as the same sort of black box that all the
rest of the rubes have had to from the beginning. Alas we have reached the
great leveling, everything is proprietary and even trying to understand
it (as in decompiling code) is illegal. We grant you a right to use this
magic on the explicit understanding that you regard it as magic and do not
attempt to plumb its mysteries ... you may not understand it, you must use
it exactly as we intended...
Maybe we need the free hardware foundation ....
--
David I. Emery Clearpoint Research Corp.
99 South Street, Hopkinton Ma. 01748 1-508-435-2000
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