These products were great from design and maintenance perspective.

Sometimes, field support team would encounter some funny situations.

As you might know the laser printers work on the principle of applying charge to the plain paper.

This charge will attract toner particles to paper surface when the paper is pushed by rollers.

The areas which are charged on paper collect plastic balls of micron size ( black in color ) to form a printed image. At the end of this cycle, the paper passes through the pair of rollers where the 150 degree heat is applied and the plastic dust of toner gets immersed and pressed to form a neat and final image on paper. ( Heated rollers do fixing of image to make it permanent ).

Worldwide these products are sold and we sold one to a publisher of Chennai.

The owner was having a small unit ( shop) where he has DTP unit, laser and printing press.  Typically you would not expect him to operate from Air conditioned office. 

His designers would generate first print using laser on a butter paper, then it will go to block making, where printing press machine can produce 1000+ prints.

This was an escalated issue, in which his complaint was my printer image has rain or water type of washedout images after the print.

We have had printer replaced, toner replaced, image fixing rollers replaced, before I visited this place.

6-10 calls made by our service engineers and still the problem was un-resolved.

Finally, I landed up in Chennai. The sales manager Hari Menon ( ex Wipro  and I think one of theco-founder of Fab Mall with Vaidy ( one of the partners , now) joined me. Customer was very angry with the quality of prints.

We searched for this shanty ( small lane leading to his place ). Found its locked , due to some function at his home. We discovered his home address from neighbours, got him to open the press and I saw the issue first hand.

Printer will sweat like humans in the Chennai's humid weather. The Toner glass based roller will get cold in the night . The morning first 6- 10 prints are washed due to moisture collected on glass surface of toner.

The 11th print will be good.We can not inform the customer, that please waste first 10 prints.

You would observe these drops (dew drops ) on railings while doing morning walk, anywhere.

Solution part was bit tricky..

a. Keep the printer ON ( the whole night ) , but printer has auto power cut off when not in use ( 'hp' also added  this feature later when big corporates realised the power wasted in US - by idle machines -GO Green ).

This was not practical and would not solve his issue.

b. Add air conditioning to the place ( This is typical of service guys response ). Owner could not be convinced about the same ).

Finally, the amicable solution accepted by him was to keep a lightbulb of  60/100W (incandescent bulb)  nearby printer ( atleast 1 hr ), so the condensation evaporates before he takes the first print.Wipe the toner roller with a swab of cotton.

I am sure my Support team would be laughing while reading this piece.

This reminded me of one of the talk by Dr Sridhar Mitta , in which he mentioned that products needs to be designed for Indian Road Conditions.

He said, " In most of the imported "C" class vehicles Sedans , the driver of the vehicle is more powerful than the owner seating in reasseat.

Driver can decide the car AC temparature. He would virtually decide the volume and channel which is being played, since all controls are in dashboard .

Why ? Abroad, when the same car is used, its not an issue, since there are very few folks who have priviledge to have drivers. "...

Sometimes, complex problems can have simpler solutions.

Sometimes, best products can fail the test of users.