Sometimes we find the deal of the decade sometimes we don't

A while back, actually last week I made a nuisance bid on Hewitt Packard 500 Designjet 500 wide format printer.
What did I pay for it well a family of 4 would spend more on a meal @ McDonalds
But does it work? The answer to that is, It powers up initializes and runs a diagnostic on itself then it tells me there is a fault in the ink carriages 2 are empty one has a clogged nozzle and the magenta feeder hose has a kink in it so I am pretty sure it will work just fine after I spend $200.00 for new ink carriages clean the nozzles and massage the kink out of the magenta line. Woo Hoo a $3500.00 printer for lass than 2 big mac meals and a couple of happy meals
I anyone is wondering just how big the thing is
Attachment 19214

And I've saved one of the garbage. Only the synchronous belt was defective.

I no longer need one to print off stacks of construction drawings for engineering projects since retiring 4 years ago, but I've always wanted one for my home office. If nothing else I could use it to print banners for the local high school

Do industrial printers employ the same "out of ink" or "low toner" tactics as the common household ones, by which they prematurely claim that the consumables are low? This is the controversial Razors and blades business model. I know for the household ones, there's often some trick involving a piece of tape or pressing a series of buttons to get the printer to work again.

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Originally Posted by Jon

Do industrial printers employ the same "out of ink" or "low toner" tactics as the common household ones, by which they prematurely claim that the consumables are low? This is the controversial Razors and blades business model. I know for the household ones, there's often some trick involving a piece of tape or pressing a series of buttons to get the printer to work again.

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I don't know Jon the ones we had in our engineering department were under service contract, they were behemoths compared to the one I have now.
Whereas mine has 4 standard 69 or 82 milliliter cartridges those had half liter bottles on them. The service company never let them get below half full.it was not at all unusual for a full set of prints to use up an entire 50 meter roll of paper and sometimes depending on how many contractors were involved on a given project it could take more than 10 full sets of prints. but those were mostly run off of the Amonia machine which spit out E sized drawings like it was publishing the NY. Times newspaper.