Re: USB cables and inket printer
- From: Arthur Entlich <e-printerhelp@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 03:24:14 GMT
Ever wonder why cables, which used to be part of the peripheral purchase disappeared in most cases, especially in things like printers?
It's really pretty simple. Although it saves the printer manufacturers something under a buck, and that probably adds up, and it relieves them of responsibility to warrant the cable, which I suppose has some small advantage, in the end, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the peripheral manufacturers to do it, because it annoys clients, and may even encourage people to use potentially old or damaged cables to save money, which may lead to more calls and false warranty returns, etc.
So, why have they done it? This is my theory, but it seems logical...
The retailers, as it is, make no money on selling printers, per se, and probably true of many peripherals. The money comes from the money the companies pay for shelf space and advertising, ink sales, extended warranty sales, and... yep... cable sales.
In fact, it is likely the retailer makes more profit (real profit, not just by percentage) on the sale of a cable than they do on a printer, especially low cost printers.
While a USB cable often will sell for $10-15 at a electronics store the retailer typically might pay $2-4 for a gold plated warranted one, and literally under $1 for a more generic type.
So, what's my suggestion if you want to save money? Go to your neighborhood dollar store. Here in Canada, they cost between $1.50 and $2 for a 6' USB '2.0' unit with a 5 year warranty, so I imagine they cost about $1 in the US. Even gold plated ones (if you feel that is required) are about $3-4 in the dollar stores here.
Now, one caveat. Some scanners require more specialized USB cables. Scanners can require better shielding and require iron cored toroids to prevent either interference to other peripherals or external appliances, or to reduce noise to maintain integrity of the data to the computer, due to the speed it is delivered at. In these cases, a higher quality cable may be required, but often in this case, the cable will be included with the peripheral.
Bottom line, try a $1 cable first, if it doesn't do the job, consider something better. Look for the cable being described as USB 2.0 high speed... even the cheap ones often are.
The actual spec for the USB cables did not change between USB v1.1 and v2.0, however, ones that were good enough for the relatively slow speed USB 1.1 data transfer may not be adequate for error-free high speed USB 2.0 transfers.
Art
Impmon wrote:
On Sun, 6 Aug 2006 12:22:10 -0400, "History Fan".
<UnknownplacesonEarth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The USB cables I see at retail stores have gold connectors. Will using the one I have result in diminished performance with this printer? I certainly don't want to spend an extra $30 if I don't have to.
Those "gold" connector are probably painted on and its packaging with
extra fancy name to make it sound like its worth $30. At most they
probably cost $3 to make in china and ship to USA.
As long as you observe the cable length restriction, any cables you
got will work fine.
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