[Info-vax] OT: HP Poised to merge PC and printer divisions

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 3/24/2012 4:17 PM, David Froble wrote:
> Paul Sture wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:05:26 -0700, mathog wrote:
>>
>>> Paul Sture wrote:
>>>>> Rich Jordan wrote:
>>>>> Well, this one is simple to answer. Use Brother printers. They don't
>>>>> charge you anything to talk to you, before or after the sale. Even
>>>>> after the printer is out of warranty.
>>>> I've been very happy with the Brother printer I have. It just works, no
>>>> fuss.
>>> +1 for the Brother printers. We have a 5250DN (a little double sided
>>> laser, the current version of it is the 5370DW) at home and that thing
>>> has been fast and reliable since day one. I'm probably asking for it
>>> just by saying this, but in the 5 years we have had it we have never
>>> had a page that didn't print correctly. Mechanically it is great - so
>>> far not even a single paper jam.
>>
>> Mine's a cheaper USB only version. No double sided, but it's easy to
>> print even pages, flip the paper and then do the odd pages. Not that I
>> do anything like the amount of manual printing I used to.
>>
>> No paper jams here either.
>>
>>> The one and only thing I don't like about that printer is that peak
>>> current draw can top 10A, so it does not play nicely on a shared circuit
>>> with anything else that uses a lot of current. Average current use is
>>> much lower, and when it goes into sleep mode it only uses about 9W of
>>> power.
>>
>> Ah, the "delights" of circuit breakers which trip at lowish levels...
>> It took me a while to get used to that. Fortunately my printer doesn't
>> use so much.
>>
>
> My point about Brother is that they have good customer support, and will
> talk to you without asking for a credit card #. I had a Panasonic dot
> matrix printer, which quit. I called with the error code / message I was
> getting, just wanting to know if it was broke, or whatever, and they
> just wouldn't talk to me without something like $40 up front.
>
> My current technique is before I purchase something, I check out their
> support. The Brother support was willing to talk about problems, no charge.
>
> I prefer to support those who will stand behind their products, and who
> will support their customers. I definitely do not support vendors who
> place date timeouts on their ink cartridges.

Keep in mind that "support" costs money.  That may mean "charge by the 
hour" or it may be included in retail price of the device or software.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!  If you are getting support
you can be sure that you are paying for it somehow.

The best companies analyze the support requests and try to improve
the user documentation!  As we know, there are always some people who 
can't or won't read the instructions!