Transcript
A piece of paper on an old printer (a laserjet 4050 to be specific. It says: "Hello, My name is LaserJet 4050 and I was made in 1999. I’ve been doing my job printing your documents for many many years, however I think the motor that powers my paper feeder is bad. This makes me sad because I’m not able to do my job very reliably. As such, I am formally presenting this document as a letter of resignation. IT is working on finding a replacement for me, but for the time being, I apologize if I tell you I have a paper jam. Please allow me to refer you to my coworker, LaserJet 3390. 3390 resides outside of Ray’s office and can be reached at: <some redacted text> Please accept my sincerest apologies for failing. Thank you for replacing my toner and restocking my paper tray. It’s been a wonderful 14 years of working together. Much love, LaserJet 4050
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We need open source laser printers, to avoid the inkjet mafia as far as possible.
Printers are complicated and patent encumbered. Framework took a look at making one, and they noped right out.
Lots of tech more than 20 years old and thus free from patents available to use. Lots of office printers are older than that, still!
But yeah, making them reliable is haaaard
Another resignation due to burnout.
Laserjet is a good, modern androgynous name for any child
I’d consider it for myself if I was still in the market for a new name.
If I remember correctly, this model had an easy hackable display. I changed ours to say “Insert Coin” but no one in our IT group mentioned it so I eventually switched it back. It was supposed to have been decommissioned but someone kept it around to print out short log files.
On April Fools Day many many years ago, I set the office printer (a sister model to this one) to say “Out of cheese”, which got one person very confused. I thought about making it say insert coin, but if anyone actually did it, it would be me having to fix that printer, and it was our most beloved printer in the office, so I decided on just the clearly absurd
I mean, electric motors are pretty standard. If the problem with the printer is a bad motor then you could probably just replace that part. The main question would be how easy it is to disassemble the printer to get at the motor.
Disassembly of these are pretty easy, when I did tech support for HP, I could tear one down to where I could access those motors in a few minutes. Newer ones were progressively more difficult, but the “business class” printers were always relatively easy to repair.
The difficult part would indeed be sourcing the correct motor, fortunately the 4050 only has one motor, and from a quick google search it can be bought for about $20.
That being said, I doubt it’s the motor - I never encountered a failed motor on a 4000-series laserjet. It’s more likely a worn roller, paper sensor, or the solenoid that handles the paper pickup that has failed.
This is what the internet should be all about, randomly encountering a guru who can troubleshoot and give you pointers to repair your 25 year old printer.
Much respect, sir. Have an amazing day!
The real issues are the pinch rollers.
These printers are getting so old that Windows doesn’t ship drivers anymore. I had a LaserJet 5si, and I took that as a sign that it was time to go. Yes, I could have done some tricks to extend that out, but if Windows doesn’t have drivers, then spare parts are going to be increasingly difficult to come by.
I wouldn’t be surprised if OP’s IT department is making a similar judgement.
I can recommend trying to connect your old printer to a raspberry Pi and seeing if linux printer drivers can prolong the life of your printer. Worth a shot keeping these beauties out of the landfill.
It’s long gone now. I did consider that option, but the spare parts issue is why I didn’t.
oh that’s a shame
Time to take out a second mortgage and pour out a tiny thimble of printer ink.
$10,000/gallon. If someone made a car than ran on ink, they could bankrupt themselves very efficiently.
Back when every HP printer worked on the LaserJet 4P driver that was less than 1MB.
I have a 4000 that still chooches great. I just have to be careful replacing toner because there’s a broken arm that has to seat in the right spot to print properly.
It will be the last HP I buy, because I’ll be fucked if I buy anything that HP produces today.
Wholesome IT department
Is this Nicole?
Is this loss?
🫡
F
I had a LaserJet 4M until just a few years ago. It still had a BNC port on the back.
Damn that printer was the goat.
o7
My good, old LaserJet p2015n has been up and running for I really can’t remember how long. I might even have been longer than it’s predecessor, an HP InkJet 500. OTOH the ij500 was already old when I got it and it didn’t really break. We just put our last PC that had a parallel port out of service.
I had a 1996 IBM laser that finally gave up in 2024. That’s nearly 30 years.
And it’s probably fixable, most likely just a sensor that thinks it sees paper.
Lucky you. I had a 1996 beast of a SUN laser printer that usually tried to set the house on fire after it was finished throwing fuses. Did not keep that monster for long.
