Death of a HP LaserJet 5L

A few years after I purchased this printer I noticed that while printing, the printer would grab gobs of paper sheets and would jam. I thought that it was the cheapo paper I was using so I purchased LASER printer paper. It helped, but not by much. After another few years, the printer now about 7 years old, I learned from HP that the printer was defective and if I sent in the bar code and a copy of the sales slip, I would get a $10 break on a new HP printer! Like I kept the paperwork after all these years!

I purchased the HP printer due to the then excellent reputation of HP's products. I also purchased several inkjet printers for the kids in college and for my color prints. Even my office provided me a HP laser printer. Then my issued HP printer started to eat sheets of paper, but this time, HP had a repair kit to solve that problem. Meanwhile I was still using that HP 5L printer for personal use.

Now, my printer has finally died. Attempting to cycle paper for printing, all it does is hic cup a lot and the paper feeder doesn't feed. So with great pleasure, I will take this printer to the recycle dump (can't dump it in the trash anymore) and toss it!

My next printer WON'T be a HP product. I suspect that HP went the way of GM and FORD with cost cutting and profit margins. The product looks good and performs well, initially, but in the long run, when you don't trade it in for a new model every 3 years, it develops problems and reliability issues. I guess the engineers at HP lost out to the business profiteers and the products lost their reliability.

Well, off to COSTCO to check on (cheap) printers!