Canons unofficial rep? Why it used to me Measekite, wasn't it? ;-)
While Bob Headrick actually worked for HP in their inkjet cartridge
division, I have no affiliation with Epson other than that I use their
printers, and found their customer support wanting so I decided to jump
in and help other owners.
To provide the "other side" of the fence, I also live in Canada. My
dealings with Canon have only been with their digital camera support,
and while not perfect, I have to say the information was there when I
needed it, although the guy I spoke with was arrogant and not very
pleasant. Luckily, the product I bought has been very reliable, and I
haven;t needed a lot of product support.
On the other hand, I bought two HP products which were absolute dogs,
one a slide and print scanner, and one a digital camera. The slide
scanner issue never got resolved although the unit was replaced twice
(by HP US, since they had no presence for that division in Canada at the
time). In the end I went back to my retailer who, even a year later took
the unit back, and got a credit from HP Canada, allowing me to use the
money to buy a Minolta branded product to replace it (which they special
ordered).
The digital camera story is even worse... much worse. The camera had a
known defect (well, I didn't know about it until it happened to mine and
I started researching it on line). It ate batteries for breakfast (I
was using NiMH), due to bad Chinese caps in it which drained the
batteries and didn't hold their charge. It turned out a huge portion of
these cameras were defective, and the problems included the whole line
up in this series. HP refused to admit the problem they repaired my
camera several times unsuccessfully. HP Canada was very unhelpful, and
it was only after I sent them about 1/2" thick of documents from the
internet, plus my own testing and evaluation that they finally agreed to
replacing the camera with one from a different series. Then, the last
minute someone "above" the customer rep who had facilitated the exchange
pulled the plug on the whole deal and dug in his heels, again starting
with "there is not problem with this model of camera" all over again.
It was infuriating. I sent a copy of the whole correspondence,
including the on-line print outs to head office in California to show
them the problems occurring here in Canada. What did they do? They
sent the whole parcel back up to Canada to deal with it, and it ended up
going to the same guy I had the problems with.
I eventually got some inside help from someone I met from HP who helped
me to get a new camera from them which was a new model which replaced
the defective one, but the whole process took nearly a year from the
point where I had begun. After speaking with my retailer about my
experience, they told me they had dozens of bad HP cameras which HP
refused to take back, and that they had a lot of angry customers. That
retailer, a large big box in Western Canada, stopped selling HP cameras
soon after my discussion with them, and have never brought them back to
their stores.
As I understand it from discussions with retailers, HP Canada is still a
mess, be happy you haven't needed them. I would agree they do make some
reasonable priced printers, although their consumables can be very costly.
As to your other question, while I wouldn't go as far Mr. Block to
completely discredit color laser printers for photographic output, I
would agree that inkjet is a better technology for that purpose.
Color laser printers do not have the same gradient values as inkjet, and
it is not just due to toner opacity or the number of ink colors inkjet
printers provide. Laser printers do not have the resolution of most
better inkjet models. The dots are bigger and therefore the blending is
poorer. Also, while inkjet papers can absorb the inks and leave a
smooth surface, laser toners sit on top of the paper surface, and often
look glossier or more matte than the paper surface itself. This gloss
differential doesn't look good. I don;t buy the opaque toner leading to
less mixing. If the dots were the same size and used similar patterns
to distribute the colorant, they would probably look similar. Toner is
not opaque, it is translucent, and so is pigment inkjet ink colorant.
I expect that eventually, if the demand is there, laser output could
come very close to rival inkjet, but for most applications, people
aren't that demanding. I have received some recent color laser samples
that from a foot or so away almost rival photos, and I know of people
who sell laser output as "fine art" prints, and that includes
photographic subjects. Laser isn't quite there, but the right machine
can brink it pretty close. More dots and more sophisticated dithering
patterns can make color laser pretty good. For that photo-like surface
however, you must select a paper with similar reflective qualities to
the toner after fusing, or laminate the surface after printing.
Art
If you are interested in issues surrounding e-waste,
I invite you to enter the discussion at my blog:
http://e-trashtalk.spaces.live.com/
