GOEKE@mit-mc.arpa (02/04/83)
From: Robert F. Goeke <GOEKE@mit-mc.arpa> It 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?
CSTROM@mit-mc.arpa (02/05/83)
From: Charlie Strom <CSTROM@mit-mc.arpa> If it makes you feel any better, you are not alone! I had an Okidata 82A die on me - it ended up to be akin to a lightening strike (though the sun was shining) and required change of the microprocessor, a driver and the buffer in-between the two as well as the printhead. All but the latter were available locally (though at ridiculous prices - the Big Apple is small potatoes when it comes to electronic parts.) The printhead (as well as an excellent technical manual) had to come from Okidata in N.J. The hitch was that they will not accept purchase orders unless a check accompanies it; also nixx on C.O.D.'s. In a similar vein, we had a Televideo 912 (ughh) dies and traced it to the microprocessor. Televideo has a $50 min., and will not accept C.O.D.'s or P.O.'s either. So, we tried to get the chip through a TI distributor. To make an aggravating story short, we are still waiting for the chip after about a month and expect another month of thumb-twiddling. Info like this is most valuable BEFORE one makes the next purchase, isn't it?!
Cory.cc-treas@ucb-vax.arpa (02/06/83)
Does "Big Blue" (i.e. IBM) market a serial printer? If they do, its
probably better servicewise than some of these other flakey companies.
Steve Wolff
cc-treas@ucbcorybernie (02/11/83)
"Big Blue" is marketing the Epson MX-80 with a different case color and an IBM label on the front. Any Computerland store should be able to service it, but they may require that you prove you bought the printer from a store in the Computerland chain. I've been running an MX-82 for about a year and a half now, and have had no problems whatsoever. --Bernie Roehl ...decvax!utzoo!watmath!watarts!bernie