z3200 lifespan?

[philh2o]

Related to another post on old z3200s today my overarching query is about how long I can expect a z3200 to be useful vs. dumping money into repairs and increasingly costly inks and printheads. In my case the printer, purchased in Sept, 2009, is lightly used and, if anything, suffers from infrequent use, expired heads and inks.

Today, after manually cleaning the printheads, the printer interrupted the head-alignment cycle with a request to restart the printer. After pressing the green power button some very wispy smoke started coming out of the right side where the head carriage parks. I unplugged the printer, moved the carriage away and discovered a messy pool of mostly black ink—or the result of all inks blowing out together.

Before I contact the local service person I'm wondering just how far down this path I should go before reaching a point of diminishing return.

Thanks, Phil

[mfrohman]

At this point, I feel like if it's not something you can fix yourself, a service call is likely too expensive. The inks and printheads are quite expensive now and a machine of that age is likely to keep cropping up problems. That said, this may just need a new printhead, a cleaning, or a new service station which you can buy from LPS and install yourself. Just guessing at the issue as an example. I've never seen smoke from any of my Zs!

[glyph]

IMO, almost everything is repairable, and many if not most are cost effective compared to printer replacement. A few parts are ridiculously overpriced if you don't shop around. The bugaboo is diagnosis, when the culprit is not clearcut. Over the years I've replaced the service station, carriage belts, carriage mechanism, color sensor, formatter, paper sensor, drive gears, supply tubes, and some other miscellaneous failed bits. Some replacements are tedious to make, but all are well documented and generally require no special skills beyond following directions.

[plasakow]

A printer is just a bunch of parts, and i'll keep replacing them in my two Z3200s until they are no longer available. I agree with mfrohman that if you're not mechanically inclined or lack the will or time to fix it yourself, a service call will be crazy expensive compared to the value of the printer itself. I disagree with him about the longevity and personally think they're a good gamble to keep repairing. Luckily there's a huge Z3200 community to rely upon regarding diagnostic help, including the Z3200 whisperers at LPS Computer.

I've gone through more tanks of ink than I can recall and nearly every one of them I purchased on eBay for a fraction of the going price as they were past the expiration dates. Same for printheads, and I never had a problem with any of them. I don't think the expiry dates mean a damn thing.

[mfrohman]

I didn't mean to suggest the Zs weren't built to last - I've been running two of them very hard for nearly 8 years! But you will have parts that wear out that need to be replaced (belts, service station, fans, PSU, ...), as well as aging software. That said, I'm trying to keep mine going as long as possible. I do have an issue on one of them that neither HP, the fine folks at LPS, or the generous people on this forum have been able to resolve so I don't know if it that one will ever run again. The other one is waiting for me to set aside an afternoon to replace the belt and PSU. I don't think expired inks are a big deal either but I imagine they will become increasingly scarce over time, who knows. But in pondering a service call, I'm not sure that is the best use of resources. If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty, I'm all for it!

[philh2o]

Thanks all for the suggestions. I just successfully repaired a Jura F7 coffeemaker and saved over $1500 by not having to replace/upgrade it so I'm feeling manly. Ok, maybe not. The key, as stated above, is the diagnosis. I'll have to get into the weeds on that after a few more tests.

[Ernst Dinkla]

Related to this; what is the expiration date of recently bought HP70 cartridges? Any beyond January 2024?

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

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