I bought a 25-year-old printer & regret EVERYTHING 

Yes I used a different cable. Three of them, across the three different printers, all bidirectional. It did not make a difference. These printers are simply _pain._

Fun Fact: I've been buying printers for 30 years, and I've regretted every single one of them.

I’m 37 and we had this printer in the 90s. The first time my little brother heard my father say “Fuck” was directly because of this infernal device.

Seeing you whisper "I hate you so much" to your printer really sealed the deal of an authentic 90s printer experience. My mother making growling noises from her room when having to print stuff for my schoolwork in the late 90s suddenly makes a lot more sense..

Former Canon service tech here: The difference between a bubblejet & an inkjet is the method used to eject the drops of ink from the print head. Canon's patented technique is to use a tiny resistive heater to vapourise the ink, creating an expanding bubble that throws a drop of ink at the paper, whereas a regular ink jet uses a piezo-electric element to squeeze out a drop of ink at the paper. Because resistive elements can be made smaller than piezo elements, a bubblejet can do a resolution of 360 DPI, while a piezo inkjet can 'only' do 300 DPI resolution. You would think that bubblejet tech would be more reliable because the ejection system is simpler & has no moving parts, but at least in my years of experience, BJ printers were very prone to clogged jets.

What is wrong with us? We all watched this poor man fighting with an old printer. We've all been there. We all know how maddening this is. Yet here we are, watching someone else go through this for entertainment.

I was certified to work on Cannon Bubblejet printers back in the late 90s. The training video was a technician field stripping a printer then putting it back together. They were an absolute nightmare. Much more complicated than the HP Inkjet printers. The hilarious part was that at the end of the training video there are a few extra screws sitting on the bench. The tech picks them up, puts them in his pocket and says "Those are what we call Pocket Screws". The video ended at that. Mind you, this was the official Cannon supplied training video.

I love that the chapter names for the video are called; Betrayal, denial, anger, suffering and finally, acceptance

Age has nothing to do with it. "I bought a printer [ . . . ] & regret EVERYTHING" is a valid statement in any era.

Man said "25 years" then "1999" and then I fell on the floor, sobbing in agony

This is genuinely the most accurate inkjet printer experience you could ask for.

17:25 - I don't care what anyone says, this is an authenticate 90s home printer setup. It truly is. Great job! You perfectly captured the reason why movies like Office Space exist. Thanks.

Hey Clint, I worked at the Canon call center in Chesapeake, VA back in the late 90s for a couple of years. Watching this video was a gleefully painful trip to the past. You dealt with so many issues that I walked people thru over the phone. Lots of memories were brought back of long boring shifts. Lots of knowledge that I was quite disappointed to realize I remember and yet my brain still allowed it happen. I really enjoyed this one, thanks a ton!

You actually had a authentic 90's printer experience. We all swore like sailors, banged our heads, yelled, and screamed out loud. Thank you for bringing out my printer PTSD

I’ve seen this man rebuild motherboards from the 80’s and bring them back to life. No man is a match for a 90’s era Inkjet printer.

"Never buy an old ink jet printer." Isn't that just a more specific version of the "never buy an inkjet printer" standard.

The fact that NIB machines don't work and all that has happened is time has passed, convinces me these heaps were designed to crap out after a year or two. Modern inkjets really aren't much better. The best thing I've found is to print one page a week to keep the ink moving. If you let it sit and don't use it, it's going to be a battle to get it working again, every time.

Every printer needs to have a "Yes, I installed the ink cartridges and paper correctly and there is no jam, your sensors are just wrong" button.

When I worked I.T. as a student at college in 2006, there was an older guy there (who was full time staff) who was a printer WIZARD. He was able to pull them apart, replace individual gears and springs, and get everything moving again. Never had any issues getting them setup on a machine, either. He saved the college tons of money every year by being able to do repairs that manufacturers or other shops wouldn't or couldn't do. Miss ya, Gary.

I have a 25-year-old HP Deskjet 710C. Still use it to print every now and then. Almost gave up on it when Windows 10 rolled around with no driver support for the old beast. Greatly insprired by you, got stubborn and installed Orache VM Virtual Machine, created a Windows XP machine on it and managed to get the printer running again. For a few years now it only prints in black and magenta, so it's not perfect, but I'm still proud of myself for prolonging its life. Thank you for all your videos, I'm around your age and had noone to share my love for computers with as a kid so it is nice to have that in a virtual way as a grown up. ❤

i've never heard clint have to "beep" himself before.. positively tickling

I love that the largest video sections are entitled "betrayal", "denial", "anger" and "suffering"

This piece of garbage wasn't good even 25 years ago, imagine today...

THAT is a absolute, perfect 90s PC experience. This how we learned to troubleshoot und to fight and to not give up until the thingy was working.

This is one thing where nostalgia is never rose colored: installing via all those disketettes, cost of ink, needing to buy adapters and needed wires. No wifi printing from the phone. Many times, nostalgia is overrated.

Bubblejets were literally the worst, bubbles are supposed to be fun and this WASN’T

For lazerprinters from the 90's I'd look for a HP Laserjet 5 - Peak lazerprinters that usually only die because the brass cogs wear out (seriously. I worked in a company that shipped PC parts and we had a few of them in a dusty warehouse around 2010 that had printed over 2 million pages and only got replaced because parts where getting really hard to find).

Ah nice, a Printer Simulator video experience! Now I can sit back, relax while I feel my heartrate rise, my logical thinking going out the window all the while my body is starting to shiver and tears run down my face. Thanks LGR!

Look forward to the "I smashed all the 90's printer with a baseball bat video"

Yep, someone broke the cartridge slot and boxed it back up. We had customers do that alot on that model.

Only from LGR would I lie in my bed, drowsy from sleep medication, and watch 30 minutes of a man mostly struggling with a damn printer. 😂 We appreciate it, Clint.

I worked at Best Buy when these were a major seller. I remember them in particular because they were what we called "Devo Yes" meaning when they'd come in for repair, we'd hand the customer a brand new one in box, mark down the return, and throw the broke printer in the garbage. Apparently cheaper for the manufacturer as trash than to ship and/or repair it. I remember the BJ2000 specifically due to the volume that we threw away. I'd say at least multiple units (1-5) per WEEK.

I used to work for an office supply company that sold TONS of HP product. A representative for the company came to give us a lecture on new product. When we grilled the rep on why their products were shoddy, why the ink costs so much, why they make it so difficult to find the product number for the cartridges, even asked them why they manufacture ink to fail...the ultimate response in the end was , "Look! I'm here to help you sell MORE HP product, not address problems with production!" All of these machines are GARBAGE! And i live for the day there's real crowd funding for an actually working computer printer with metal gears and parts!

Why's the vintage scene harshing on old inkjets? This is the most authentic 90's computer experience I've ever seen on youtube.

This is a gem of a video, captured something we've all gone through at one point. Thank you for sharing!

This is the funniest video you have ever made 😂😂 I couldn’t stop laughing when the pages kept coming out blank, you captured the unique frustration of dealing with printers of the 90s lol😂🎉

I look forward to watching the LGR Birds livestream one day and seeing Clint re-enacting the printer scene from "Office Space" in the background.

I like how there's smooth jazz playing in the background while he's slowly losing his mind.

What did we learn children? That Canon printers have not changed. This is perhaps my favorite of all your videos.

I remember those times. I was working as a service agent, Canon printers were the worst, they only had problems. HP were strong, they had robust models with minor problems, and the cartridges were infinitely refillable. Good luck man, I appreciate what you are doing!!!

In the last decade of watching LGR, I have not heard Clint use foul language until now. This printer must be the mother of all junk technology. And I thought HP was bad!

1999: A problem occurred. 2024: Something went wrong. How the heck are we still having the exact same problems twenty-five years later?

7:00 that is one unfortunate serial number. I've had customers call and complain about how we are harassing them over things like that. Finally got rid of them by giving them the number for the manufacturer.

Try a HP deskJet 660C I have an old one and it uses standard HP 49 ink with no weird holder assembly, it prints directly from the cartridge with no weird nozzle in between it and the paper like yours has. It’s a serial port printer and It’s a beautiful old beast. Mine was made in November of 95 and is an “SE” edition but it seems identical to the regular 600C other than using a SCSI cabe to interface with the printer for some reason.

"i wanted 90s printer experience" I think it's quite accurate. You got it.

If anyone wonders what printing was like in the late 90's, just show them this video. Such a genuine experience. With the small exeption that back then you could take it back to the store.

I had one of these; what a fantastic reminder of the era! Loved the lever install feel and sound and the cartridge containers with their film covers. The printer used to get hot and you could smell the ink, the paper and the plastic. The top buttons were fantastic to use.

One of the reasons I really enjoy Clint's videos is because he doesn't shy away from showing failure or major problems during his setup videos. As someone who also enjoys tinkering with old PC's and tech it can be very frustrating to run into a problem and struggle for hours to negotiate or fix said problem, but I never find it discouraging or give up because LGR's videos often show that I'm not alone in that frustration or just unskilled or inept with old tech, they can simply be a pain in the ass a lot of the time but that's part of their charm.

This is the real video. What being a retro tech youtuber is really like. Not the glamor of what the edited good videos usually are. This one is usually deleted and never seeing the light of day. I applaud you letting us see the frustration of realistically working with retro tech.

As someone who works in IT, if it involves a printer, it's *always* going to be a nightmare. "Wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the bubble jets."

Hi LGR, large format printer technician here, I highly doubt that thing has a piezo electric head, but when an epson piezo head gets clogged up like this due to lack of maintenance and idling for weeks on end, we can often break the gunk up with a head soak. That being letting the print head rest on a lint free wipe that has been saturated with the recommended cleaning solution for the ink type and hardware for an hour or so to an overnight or over the weekend. Most desktop inkjets run an aqueous ink, so if you cannot find a recommended cleaning solution for this golden age artifact, a mixture of 1 part 70% iso and 2 parts distilled water should do the trick fine. The worst that could happen is that you, STILL have a non functional print head. Since it started firing a few nozzles at the end, we can almost rule out a head cable, CR board, or brain box issue. What may have happened is that ink being past it's life time. My experience is much the same, but also different since the printers I work on primarily use a solvent based ink. What happens over time is that the pigment starts to separate from the ink base. In printers that are fed by backpressure from their ink lines, this leads to the ink base flowing out, and leaving pigments behind in the cartridge. In printers that are gravity fed like the 64" and better Mutoh machines I work on from time to time, and like yours appears to be, we see the opposite problem where we are getting a higher ratio of pigment to the ink, leading to chowdered dampers and clogged nozzles. Most solvent inks start to dangerously separate after a year or so, which is why some manufacturers build a expiration date cutoff into the firmware of the machine. Assuming your machine is running an aqueous ink giving the cartridges a REAL GOOD shake should do the trick, then again they are a couple decades past their likely expiry so it may not. Cheers!

I've always hated inkjet printers. Sitting unused for a few months means replacing cartridges which would cost as much as a new printer. I switched to a laser printer about 10 years ago and never looked back.

My two most frustrating things of the 90's - Getting a printer to print - Installing a modem driver

I worked at Office Depot in 1999 and I can tell you that your video is a success. You have recreated the late-90s inkjet experience! We got more returns on Canon inkjet printers than any other brand for the same reasons that you are experiencing now. In fact, Canon inkjet printers took up more space in our 'returns cage' than any other item, short of Emachines computers. They were number one, but Canon inkjet printers was easily number two.

Don’t be sad, Clint. You still managed to provide the true experience of owning one of these.

This is my life servicing HP Envys today... btw LOVE your chapter headings! The stages of dispair...

2 Things: 1. There was a comedienne back in the early 00s that had a nice bit about printers. "People keep telling me I should have kids. What do I need kids for? I've got a printer!" "Print." "No." "Print!" "No!" "PRINT!!!" "NO!!!" 2. You should see if you can find an HP DeskJet 720C. My family had one, and it still worked when we finally tossed it just a few years ago. Thing was built like a tank and worked for 20 years. I think the cartridges in it at the end were at least 10 years old, but somehow still printed just fine. That thing was a beast and I kinda wish we'd kept it.

a WHOLE 1999 experience out of the box..

This video relived every nightmare I ever had with my 90s inkjet printer (actually bought in January 2000, but whatever) that I bought during my postgrad course. I used it pretty extensively whilst I was still studying and, for as long as I was doing that, it was basically OK. Had separate black and colour cartridges so didn't run into the issues with, "Ha! You're running out of magenta ink so I'm not going to let you print out black and white text either," nonsense that was so prevalent then. But then it really was only used very intermittently for maybe the next 10 or 12 years. I never replaced it because I didn't need to print things out that often. Maybe once or twice a month for a few years in the mid noughties, mostly sheet music and chord sheets for church, but then very little when I got out of that for a few years. And of course the cartridges would dry out, and I'd get the little hardened cone of dried ink interfering with the mechanism that I'd need to clean out and... basically it became a real pain in the ass. Whenever I wanted to use it, something would always be wrong or need fixing, or I'd need to buy new cartridges. One day in 2012, when the damn thing refused to print for some confounded reason or other, I completely lost patience and bought a cheap HP Laserjet P1102w black and white laser printer from Amazon, which arrived the next day. This meant that I could still print what I needed to in time for when I needed it. I paid all of £74 for that thing, and it's the printer I've been using ever since. Still works fine. I think it's still only on maybe its third toner cartridge, which shows you how little I print, but those cartridges last so much longer than inkjet cartridges and, for all everybody likes to be rude about HP and their more recent practices, the damn thing just works. I've used it with maybe half a dozen different computers - some mine, some work - both Windows and macOS and the thing has never missed a beat. Basically, fuck 90s inkjet printers. Such a crappy technology in many ways: print quality was definitely better than my prior Panasonic KXP-1123 dot matrix printer (that I wish I'd kept), but in so many ways the inkjet printer was worse. The dot matrix printer, like my more recent laser printer, always just worked for me. The only thing I ever had to do with it was periodically replace the ribbon. Thank you for the video though, I did enjoy it, even though your increasing frustration was absolutely palpable. I reckon if you could find a 90s laser printer that you could still buy toner cartridges for you'd have much better luck. I suspect the challenge is less the printer and more the toner though.

I had the exact same one in 2001! It came free with our indigo blue G3 iMac. I felt bad for tearing it down, thanks for preserving this... engaging experience

I owned a computershop in the 90s. Canon BubbleJets were the worst. Also Epson Styles printers had clogging issues. I always tried changing customers’ minds when they came in and asked for a Canon or Epson. If these things clogged or broke, I had to deal with the RMA issues (and that happened a lot!). Just get yourself an HP Deskjet 600, 895 or any other model from that era. Cartridges are still available and no clogging issues because you replace the printhead with each change of cartridge.

Ink jet printers took many of us through the 5 stages of grief over the years, thanks for documenting this journey.

I know these videos probably frustrate you but man its funny hearing your comments and frustrations. Reminds me soooo much of dealing with many tech purchases in the 90s.

As someone who is poor, I feel your pain. Especially with the error messages that don’t tell you what the errors are. And that you’re supposed to just contact a service center that doesn’t exist anymore (or never existed in the first place in my country) and that you’re just supposed to buy a new one. Which also is built just the same way, not meant to last more than a year or two. Planned obsolescence.

7:59 - LGR's love for smelling old stuff backfires for the first time hahaha

“I feel like I’m taking the plutonium out of the DeLorean.” Thank you for that one. 😂

Clint you’ve got no one to blame but yourself! You wanted an authentic experience and you got it! Love you bro!

I had a Canon BJC-4400 printer and it worked great. I never used it as a color printer, but instead use the large black cartridge (BC-01) for it and would last a long time. Every time you bought a new black cartridge (BC-01) you got a new print-head as well. It was also an easy cartridge to refill and reuse. You could print on both sides of page too. Today, I'm using a HP LaserJet 1320 printer and it's been going strong for about 10 years. It doesn't care I use HP branded cartridges or not. But my printing needs are modest at best.

I had this exact model of printer back in the 90s. In my experience, it had two operating modes: 1, it would grab multiple sheets at random, cruch them up, and block the printer, requiring a time-consuming process to untangle everything; or 2, it would grab a sheet, spit some random bits of ink on it, shake my desk violently as the printer head moved back and forth, and spit the paper out across the room. And always when you had to print a paper for school the next day.

Clint accidentally huffing off gassed bubble jet ink was the highlight of this video.

I laughed at that "Y2K OK!" sticker on the box, what a silly thing in retrospective. Also a nice job on translating the unboxing at 7:01: [bubble wrap unwrapping all bubbly-like], sums it up pretty good.

This was a throw back but also solved something I've been trying to figure out for years., I had one of these in the 90s, been trying to rebuild the 90's home setup and have been trying to work out what was missing...

wow... so many pristine examples of 90's printers performing exactly as they did out of the box in the 90's. that's craftsmanship.

I HAD THIS THING BACK THEN IT SUCKED EVEN THEN. I saw the photo of the box and hours and hours of fighting this thing when a paper was due flooded back into my mind...

I love how Clint started this video so bright and hopeful, expecting to be about to take a stroll through memory lane with a childhood printer but came out on the other side with what almost felt like a failed video project. But the thing is that this was incredible to watch because of the constant disappointments. I appreciate that you allowed us to experience your infuriation with the printer. Not every video should be a positive outcome with technology. Thank you, Clint.

This was the most cathartic video I've seen in ages. Ten year old me trying to troubleshoot prints for my parents, and there is always one color messing up, and you know you got limited tries before a color that is working runs dry. I can finally close this chapter, it wasn't my fault. There needs to be AA meetings for these kinds of trauma.

Gonna embrace my inner Canon and be an absolute bitch to deal with

I remember there was a time in the 2000s that it was basically the same price to buy a new printer with ink cartridge rather than buy a replacement ink cartridge

Wow, thanks for the video! Reminded me of my early experiences with computing in late 90s, early 2000s 😅 I also think it is important to have such videos on the channel… at least as a warning to anyone thinking about getting into retro devices of any kind 😄

I love videos like these. So nostalgic. There's a reason I hate printers. I hate working on them and printing on them. This video let me revisit that pain without being the one doing all the leg work. You're the best!

"I was making my parents' printer work in the '90s" got me through every IT job interview in my life.

As much as we love old tech, we also love watching people suffer from said old tech not working as it should.

That sound you made in response to the smell of the cartridge was gold. 7:53

This feels almost exactly like every single experience I have had with printers. I found that if I was just printing dumb stuff, no problems, printing no issue.. but as soon as I desperately needed to print for example some tickets or something... nope! Nothing, nada, either empty paper or just garbled nonsense. There is a reason my last printer ended up in a million pieces and I never bought one since. If I needed anything printed after that I just used internet cafes or libraries, let them deal with the printer issues. So glad this era is something we ever really need again. Home printers are garbage. Great video though, its like reliving a long lost nightmare :D

Back in the late 90s we followed what is still the best printer advice and bought a Brother mono laser. It was perfection. The only reason we replaced it was that a new Brother mono laser was cheaper than a new toner and drum for the old one.

I remember that stupid BJC-4300 that dried within a week of not using it and wasted a fifth of the super expensive colors with each self cleaning cycle and it still made stripes. This video is the most accurate late 90s experience you could have asked for. Back then I only didn't know that I wasn't the only one suffering... but obviously the whole world did. Thank you for bringing peace to this part of my memories.

So talking one grognard to another, back in the day we used to keep on hand some really fine syringes to use with cleaning up machines like this. The isopropyl can only work so well by itself, it either needs massive time or considerable force when dealing with truly stuck dry-out. I'd expect, at least with the black, you also may have a clog in the head or arm itself instead of just in the carriage. The scanner issue seemed to either be a result of 1: your machine having communication issues meaning a card or port was suffering, most likely from inconsistent power delivery or 2: the scan module itself may have a contact pad that contacts and communicates inside the printer, meaning there's an inconsistent link in that chain somewhere. In regards to the laser printers, honestly there were no home-dedicated color lasers outside of apple until the mid/late 90's, so I'm not even sure what to recommend here. Buying some old and giant business class machine like a Ricoh or Xerox seems insane, but Toner holds up much better over long periods of no or little use, and ANY inkjet you get is going to have the same issues these ones did

My parents owned an early Bubble Jet model, the sounds of that print engine (and the enraging issues) instantly brought back plenty of memories...

I gave up on having a printer decades ago. With the ink nonsense & the other ways they try to "monetize" you nowadays its just not worth it to own a printer. If i need a hard copy of something i put it on a thumb drive & go to the library & use their printers. Who wouldve thought that the best argument for the "paperless office" would come from printer manufacturers?

Don't feel bad. It works exactly like every printer my family had back in the 90s!

Really the only part you're missing is being on hold for hours just to get someone to go through the process described in the manual again! I still enjoyed this even though it is was pain, thank you for archiving our collective experience of this timeperiod!

I have my old Canon ip-5000 in the garage from 2005. Hasnt been used in 15 years. Same ink it was stored with and its first test page after all that time in my dusty garage was perfect. Loved your video tho, we've all been there and done that, be it a printer or some other cool old tech.

5:48 Seeing a 24-year-old review of anything on Amazon feels kind of like a time capsule in itself!

At least you got the authentic 90's printer experience.

I am 49 and my first memory of a computer was my Dad's Model I Tandy. I remember being 4 or 5 years old and sitting on his lap watching him do payroll for our business on it. He would always have to fiddle with the cassette tape volume in order to get the software to load properly. Then a few years later he got me a Tandy CoCo 2 and then a CoCo 3. After that in the 80s, when I was a teenager, I would come home from school and handle setting up and troubleshooting computer problems at our work. I reached my limit trying to get our Apple Laserwriter to work with our PCs. We had to hire someone to get it printing with either Windows 386 or 3.0, I can't recall. Then I remember Windows 95 came out and it just worked. I also remember the nightmare of trying to get programs to run on the PC with only 640k of available memory, we had expanded and extended memory and had to have drivers, such as the mouse driver, loaded into that in order for PageMaker to have enough conventional RAM to load. Quarterdesk memory manager is what we used. All of our Macs in the 80s just worked, but I was always trying to get a PC in the mix.

Didn't notice the chapter titles before now. Pure genius!

I saw the title and thumbnail and thought "Wow, this is a bit clickbait-y for LGR.". ... Then I watched the video, and I take every thought I had about this being clickbait back. You earned that video title ten times over.

in 1999 my dad came back home with one of these thinking he wouldn't have to give me more "print at stationary store" money. From then on he had to give me "fix the printer" money. fuck you canon

I'm happy to know that someone out there is also facing the same issues as me as someone who has suffered a LOT of pain in the ass printers in the printer repair business.

Yeah.. I feel you, bro.. I had a similar Canon printer like you as well. Dealing with Canon printers has been frustrating. My dad used to buy new printers every 3 years due to ink clogs. However, I made a different choice, I purchased an HP LaserJet MFP printer that has been working great for 16 years now. My printer journey started with the BubbleJet BJC-210SP, then the BubbleJet BJC-2000, followed by the BubbleJet S200SPx. Eventually, I switched to the Canon PIXMA IP1000 because they said it has "improved" and "better". But let me tell you, that’s the last Canon printer I’ll ever buy! Never again!