OT: Older Color Laser Printer Repair or replacement.

[Roger Merchberger]

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Anyone here know boatloads about older color laser printers? Well, it's 
almost ontopic - the printer's 7 or 8 years old, IIRC, and it's got plusses 
for 'kewl-factor'. ;-) Well, it *used* to... see below.

I have a QMS MagiColor 2 (CX engine) with lots of extra goodies: 112Meg 
RAM, 2G SCSI hard drive, *serial port*, Ethernut... and the thing just 
started going to Hades in a handbasket.

It's always been a little flaky with paper handling, but otherwise has been 
ultra-reliable if you knew it's paper quirks. Now it's durned near 
impossible to deal with... but that's not the *big* problem.

The nearly new black toner cart (less than 1000 sheets of it's 10000 sheet 
life) is now 'low', the nearly new magenta toner cart ( less than 500 
sheets) is *out*, and I had to hack up a cyan cart with the magenta 'code 
insert thingy' to fool it into printing again (if any toner goes 'emtpy' 
the printer refuses to print) and the nearly new OPC belt ( less than 2000 
of a 30000+ page lifespan) has developed several bad spots.

All this seemed to happen within 100 pages or so. :-O

Is the printer worth saving, or should I just drop it off my deck (10 foot 
drop - would be quite satisfying to see, after I strip the HD and memory 
out of it...)? Or does anyone want it for parts for cost of shipping? 
(Warning: it's a 110+ pound beastie; it would *not* be cheap to ship.)

If it's not worth saving, anyone have experience with a good color laser 
printer? Preferably < $1000, and I want *bitchin* paper handling (read: no 
paper jams).  Please don't say HP. ;-) The best I've found during my 
research so far is the Ricoh Aficio CL2000N - about $560 street price, and 
has oodles of options available (most of which I don't need), affordable 
consumables, and supposedly really good paper handling, according to the 
reviews I've found. Oh, and about 1/2 the weight of my current printer.

Sorry for the offtopicness, but I don't know where else to turn, and I'm 
looking for advice from people I trust. ;-)

Thanks,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

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