James bought a Samsung color laser printer at a Really Good Price awhile back. I was interested in having one anyway to print out photos once in a while, as well as do things like printing out color Christmas labels, and he had bought laser printer decal paper to print decals with it.

Well, so far it's been a dead loss for any of those things. Before Christmas I tried to print out return address labels on it and it failed miserably; the ink did not fuse to the paper. I thought it was because the labels were cheap (I had bought them in the dollar bin at Michaels), so used some Avery labels that specifically stated they were for laser printers. Still no luck. We tried printing out a dust jacket for a vintage book we were giving a friend as a Christmas gift on cardstock. The black didn't fuse properly and flaked off, so we had to use regular printer paper.

Tonight was the worst. James is making a special model for the April model meeting and wanted to print out the decals for it. First the thing stuck, then the design printed off the paper, then the final time he tried to print the paper wound its way around the print roller and stuck fast. He had to dismantle part of the print roller assembly and eventually the job needed four hands so I ended up on the floor with him. No wonder they charge so much to repair these damn things! Finally we got the print roller to turn, and began peeling the paper off it inch by inch, only to discover that the final layer had fused to itself and was stuck fast. We had to score it very lightly with an Exacto knife and then get a fingernail under it to tear it apart bit by bit.

Then we had to put all the screws back in, using a forceps to hold them so they wouldn't fall inside the unit. Gah.

It still prints, but all it will print is plain old 20-pound paper. So much for my buying photo paper. I expect I would experience similar "success." Probably better to take a memory stick to Walgreens and have them print it out.

Labels: computers, electronics

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:41:00 PM

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