Why do printers still suck?
wired.com
wired.com
Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing.
We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky.
There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time.
But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation....
So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape.
The virtual equivalent of chaff I suppose
There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.
It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.
LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.
One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.
The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.
So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.
This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.
My first job out of college in the late 90s was up in SV at a startup. We used to play Duke Nukem in our bullpen (maybe 6 or so engineers) on the LAN. It was a blast. No internet required. Blazing fast game, decent enough graphics, etc. Early Pentium era as I recall.
I was new, and I remember that my PC that I had inherited from an outgoing engineer didn’t have a sound card. That was considered a special feature not everyone deserved. I remember me and a colleague sneaking into some random cube late in the evening with a Philips head screwdriver, prone on our stomach under the desk, to take the sound card out of an unsuspecting colleagues tower. Must have been someone in finance or HR. Fun times :)
Anywho I hope that helps to set the scene of this era.
As I recall the experience was enhanced by a goth nightclub that had opened downstairs from the office we were in and was playing the latest releases by the likes of Sisters of Mercy, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and their ilk. Hmmm, wonder if I can dig out my old Mac from the museum in my garage, throw on some tunes and some all-black clothing, and recreate my misspent young adulthood....
I was introduced to Counterstrike after-hours by my colleagues in the year 2001, and we were “just” devs in a large telecom company. The sysadmins (HP on-site outsourcers...), holed up in their windowless cupboard of an office, were on all sorts of FPSs most of the day, and hence basically unbeatable.
Based on these stories, the tech companies from 1990s and before seemed much more fun than career-focused environments of FAANGs today...
And then I export the display and start playing the slowest game of Tetris, probably ever. Punchline: I was sitting at the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time, a machine not known for slow graphics... my lab-mates couldn't help but stare and ask "why on earth is xtetris slow on the SGI?", "oh, no that's just a Navy Cray" <grin>.
//EDIT// We also used to connect to a Lotus FTP server in the US so we could download new WADs that people had built.
FWIW, that's where I left.
When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.
Ah, the good 'ol days. I picked up a cheap fax switch so I could share my dorm line with my BBS. Very cheesy british lady answered the phone "This is the Fax Boss answering your call. To send a fax remain silent, otherwise press 2 to connect" or something like that. I only really remember up to "...to send a fax...". Wish I still had that thing, it was awesome at the time. Of course instead of faxes I was receiving BBS callers but it worked perfectly. Confused my parents constantly.
http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz
> This flight simulator seems to origin with Ed Falk at Sun
Edit: No networking code in this one though, so maybe it's not the one.
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
I adore (and have always adored) my Brother B+W lasers and am thinking about one of the color lasers one of these days, especially now that I am living at home instead of having access to a Xerox network copier at work (we are allowed reasonable personal usage of office supplies, no worries).
The Brother fan club is loud and for very good reason.
In contrast (I had a brother B+W at home) I owned an HP color laser for my office at school, and nope, never again, the driver package was fucking terrible and while I could usually get it to work after some finangling, it was constantly a pain. Literally threw it in the trash and got a B+W brother MFC instead even though that was a "step down".
My summary is that Brother is the way to go, period. The HP printers are constantly fighting me by, e.g., demanding internet access to print, failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down, putting up baffling errors, etc. The Brother printers just work.
The fact that Wirecutter recommended HP when Brother is so clearly superior has forever lowered my faith in their recommendations.
I suspect that they might also be a strange factor that inkjet managed to corner the market by being crap, and not despite of it. People now effectively expect two things about personal printers:
- They're cheap
- They're crap
TFA is an example of this mindset. But then if you go to the store expecting to get a piece of shit printer, you're clearly going for the cheapest available option. Which means that you get a crap inkjet that you'll have to replace in two years, and then you'll buy an other crap cheap inkjet.
But I agree with both of you: after a few iterations of this cycle I finally decided to know better and bought the cheapest Brother B&W laser printer and it's been a joy. It just works.
(Source: Switched from laser to inkjet)
Now I'll admit that from a strict dollars-and-cents perspective, it's probably still more expensive per picture than using a photo service, but it's way more convenient. And it does a fine job with B&W printing too.
Probably because retailers try their best to steer customers to them because of higher profit margins on ink.
Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.
Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.
Yeah, the toner transfer method[1] produces superior results, but when it's gear for my own use, I cant be bothered with the faffing around.
Sometimes I print photos too, just to have them around. With me it's "out of sight, out of mind", so I like to have the physical object as a reminder of something. Using your own printer on site has much less friction than using an upload-and-wait service.
All that said: yes it's getting to be a niche thing these days.
1. Laser print a reversed image in heavy lines onto an overhead transparency sheet, then use a hot clothes iron to melt the toner onto your shiny aluminium front panel. Three layers, tea towel, OHP, front panel. Then spray your panel with satin or semi-matte clear lacquer--once you've scrubbed off the metal front panel and repeated the printing and ironing often enough to get something that looks OK.
It has a super low-power standby and is always ready.
Ended up replacing it with an HP Office Jet that's worked fine for years. I participate in the HP ink hostage program but you know what, it's worth it to me for the hassle it saves.
After 4 minutes, with me not touching anything printer decided it'll print and spew out few pieces of neatly arranged printed papers. Looks like it lost wi-fi connectivity but was able to reconnect and do the printout.
Of course I took the praises.
Used about 6 reams of paper (I don't print that much really) and haven't replaced the ink cartridge once! Still works great.
Here's the printer: https://www.fujixerox.com.mm/en/Products/MM-Printers/DocuPri...
One thing I have been surprised by is the quality of photo prints from my colour laser (Brother dcp-l8410cdw). Admittedly, my expectations were very low, and it's certainly a long way off high-quality professional printing.
But for something temporary like a photo to pin to the fridge for a few weeks, it's actually good enough.
I think this is relevant for quite a bit of the market. Most people getting photo prints online don't seem to care much about quality - the results vary a lot between companies and many cheap ones are really bad.
I'd say the colour laser get fairly close to bad ones ordered online, and is significantly better in quality to some other photo products (custom birthday cards, that sort of thing).
So I think for many causal users/uses it's pretty viable
I've currently got a Brother HL-2132 I paid $AU30 for sitting on my desk in a dusty metal fabrication workshop. When the printer tells me the toner is low I start looking for another same or similar model just for the toner cartridge. When the drum goes I just switch over to the next second hand one.
The current one has only had two paper jams that needed the printer blowing out with compressed air, despite the dust in the workshop being full of metal particles and grinding disk particles.
I've also been using a Lexmark printer for several years now, from the "workgroup" class. These are more expensive, but generally better built and if you print a lot, you can use larger toner cartridges which come out fairly cheap per page. But Lexmark software has weird quirks and you inevitably end up having to reset your printer, because it isn't on WiFi for some reason (have you tried turning it off and on again?).
None of that with Brother. You plug it in, set it up, and you're done, works with all of your devices (including iOS).
An inkjet which can do justice to a photo is also usually not as cheap, its inks cost like French perfume (and sometimes there are 6 of them, not 4), and you also need to use expensive photo-quality paper. This allows you to have really great photos. Using such a device for printing business documents or school handouts is wasting it.
So yes, go with a laser, a color laser if you need, and just take your photo printing to a good lab, they usually have one of these inkjet beasts anyway.
Before that, I'd been very happy with the Canon Pixma inkjets, and so I upgraded to the Pixma all-in-one (MX860, and later MX870), and I've sworn by this line. Reasonable ink/printing prices, great performance, fantastic network support.
Two years ago, we moved temporarily, so I bought a bargain basement Pixma TR4550 that checked off all of the boxes, but it was terrible. The first time my wife used it, she thought it was garbage. We made do, but I knew I wanted to change.
A year ago (after moving again), I had to add a requirement to the list. My new daily computer was a chromebook, which doesn't have scanning support, so I wanted a printer with some sort of scan-to-cloud solution. I was also eyeing color laser printers, which are now at reasonable prices, since I used to prefer laser printers before color became a requirement.
Enter the Brother MFC-L3750CDW, which I bought for $340. It's a color laser all-in-one with everything I wanted (including ethernet)... and it supports both scan-to-Google Drive and scan-to-email! This printer is nothing short of amazing. I've never printed from my phone before, but my wife and I both do this regularly now. I have two shortcut buttons in the interface, one for scanning directly to my email, one for my wife's. I have never installed a printer driver, every OS I've tried just prints directly to the thing (it's autodiscovered when adding).
In short, Brother laser printers for the win!
Worth it, though. Most will replace it every few months if they are using them to print a lot.
Has anyone else run into this with their Macs in one of the older generation model Brothers and found a later Brother model that permanently fixes this behavior?
Other than that I agree, Brother all the way.
I have a 5 year old basic consumer grade Canon color inkjet with a scanner built in. It's wireless, I can quickly print a photo on photo paper (no waiting multiple days for a printing service), any BW document I'm likely to print in 2020 (and let's be honest...how many documents do you really need to print in 2020?) come out at 10 pages per minute or so. It prints in duplex. Ink is about €50-€75 per year. I've had one paper jam in 5 years, solved by pulling one handle and removing a crumpled piece of paper.
I have way more issues with my €1500 laptop or my €800 phone than with my €100 inkjet printer.
If you're in the need (like me right now) to print +300 photos in several formats, even shopping at best prices around me, that's something like 150€ for them. For that kind of price I could get a nice home printer, supplies, and afterwards just keep the printer for the future.
I bought color printer for much less then 100$.
Inkjets suck. You don't need color. Buy a Brother.
A credit must be given when it's due. They're reliable, reasonably priced and have Linux drivers.
... although I was disappointed recently by my usual go-to of the Brother brand. Their Linux/CUPS drivers are some sort of bizarre concoction of Perl scripts and x32 binaries... and still cannot print in duplex :/.
(I believe the duplex problem is probably a typo somewhere in the PPD or Perl script, but I don't know enough about PPDs and/or Perl scripts to be sure. I do know programming, hence my suspicion.)
Lesson is: Research if the EXACT printer you're purchasing is supported by the usual Gutenprint or whatever.
I have one of their all-in-one office machines. It prints pretty well. The wireless scan is complete garbage. A known issue with their drivers, apparently.
In dry climates, inkjet heads will clog.
In wet climates, laser toner will clump.
HP CP1525nw
Screw. Inkjets.
Modern printers are much better in this context, however what you pointed is true. To avoid heads clogging, when I moved from Laser to Inkjet, I planned a way to save the printer from inactivity by preparing a directory of family photos I already planned to print, but instead of printing lots of them in a single take, I print each of them every two weeks, so the printer heads never get dried. The printer is a Epson WP4515, and of course I use refilled consumables (€3.50 per cartridge). Admittedly from time to time I forgot about printing my photos, nothing that one or two heads cleaning passes couldn't solve. In short, it is definitely possible to have an Inkjet printer, make it print no more than a few hundred photos in years, but never clog a head or have to ditch new cartridges or worse, that is, an extremely low cost of operation. It requires some attention though.
And because the same printer hadn't been used in 5 months, I also had to clean the clogged head with a syringe afterwards.
As someone who mainly wants to print some photos now & then, sometimes in large-ish sizes, I'm not sure if there are offerings that will suit me here. Where-as, when they are running well, there are some very nice many color inkjets.
There have been some neat attempts to make economical better inkjet printers. Epson make a L1800 wide format printer with 6 refillable "ecotank" ink tanks, but it was targeted for non-primary markets & vanished with no replacement. Whether it was any more reliable than the other notoriously finnicky inkjets, and what, exactly, it's quality was, are unknown. But I think it's an interesting example of a product that was willing to break product segmentation boundaries that have been long standing, and deliver a lot of great capabilities- tank based rather than cartridges, many colors, wide format, good specs- at a very competitive price point, many times less expensive than what one would normally have to pay for such a printer. To me, it seems like strong evidence that the problem is markets, markets that don't want to compete, & that are reluctant to deliver better capabilities. Companies would rather raise the limbo bar, allow a little more fat; pushing for better is hard, but also, why do it, if you don't have to? Sell & compete at the next tier up.
I also suspect that just about any wireless printer will suck when used with Windows. Windows certainly has a lot of trouble finding mine.
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...
One word of warning: Avoid their inkjets. I had one with permanent heads. Less than 100 sheets in, it jammed (this ream was fine with the printer before and after it).
It failed to put the head back on top of the seal that keeps it from drying out. I didn’t notice the jam, and a few days later it was permanently ruined.
I do recommend the brother ADS line (standalone USB document scanners), with the caveat that the Linux drivers on my old one are x86-only.
Inkjets suck. Don’t even think about it. Dye sublimation is (was?) nice.
We have a Samsung laser, which is great, except there’s a “disable the wifi until you plug me into ethernet” button labeled WPS on the top that the cats like to press.
Also their printer business was acquired by HP, so it’s only a matter of time until HP manages to somehow remote brick it or stop selling consumables.
I have a Brother colour duplex printer for bulk printing (was useful for printing weekly school plans before schools went back a few months ago: https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=... . As noted by others, it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi.
I use this Canon for scanning and photo printing: https://www.canon.co.uk/printers/pixma-ts9150-series/
It seems to be the best of both worlds for the price point and physical space.
One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
I currently have a Brother HL-2140 (also has HL-21 model number) and it has 'manual duplex'. This means if I want to save paper I have to mark a corner of the first page before printing and see what orientation it prints compared to that mark (it is not intuitive). I have been printing one page at a time because of this, although now I have written this down I realise I could do better.
I print some pages about 5 times/year max. The toner that comes with it is nearly running out, but still able to print some greyish image if I want quick physical form of some files. ZERO maintenance.
and it's not even the expensive model, it's the base model, almost the cheapest. Such quality, really.
On another story, I also used to own Brother's multifunction scanner-inkjet printer. It was a nightmare.
I have a Samsung CLP-315W, and kept having problems detecting my first-party replacement toner cartridges because there were DRM chips in them [1]. I think a firmware upgrade even made the DRM worse.
This was almost a decade ago. If I had to get a high-volume home printer now, I'd probably consider one with refillable ink tanks.
Finally wisened up and bought a (Brother) color laser ~9 years ago and it has been flawless.
The replacement toner is 20€. Why would I ever touch anything else?
This time period included going back to school, a technical college, where I printed a ton of reports (and many misprints).
The Brother is a separate fuser that is replaced after some number of toner replacements.
I am not sure if it is still like this for Brothers.
But you can't buy just that. The only printers that have those features also have a feeder on the scanner, a fax machine, all kinds of cloud crap, an "app" system (?!?), access control... which drive the price way up the their own - and that's before they slap on the "enterprise" markup because that is no longer considered a SOHO device.
It periodically, uh, does that printhead thing, was idle for a few months, no new clogs.
Why it is not common practice for other brands?
I freaking hate multifunction printers.
why can't I scan to the SD card inserted, is there no write capability?
why is this wireless printer looking for a wired computer to scan to?
why can I only scan to Google Drive or Dropbox?
why is it app so slow?
why can't I just tap it with NFC or bluetooth to get this data?
Just like really common frustrations which should be default by now in even the cheapest models.
fuck.that.
The rot set in with printers when the technology got good enough for there not to be any easy improvements and the mindset changed from building a tool to help people create, to seeing customers as a resource to be exploited.
Every user-hostile bit of nonsense from shoddy software to region-locked, staggeringly overpriced ink stems from there.
Four toner cartridges inside, 70% filled or higher, and after the update I see "supply error" on the screen. Turns out my aftermarket toner cartridges, which have worked for several hundred prints without problem – and I'm on the fourth purchase of these same aftermarket cartridges – are now DRM locked and will not print.
block out all from inet 10.10.10.5 to any
Sounds exactly like my experience with a low/mid-tier HP laptop a few years ago. Full of bloatwear, constantly overheating, gave up after a couple of years of light use.
I took a risk with an ultra-budget Canon more recently and was pleasantly surprised with their linux support (via generic wireless printing and scanning)
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
- failure rate: 50% per year to ensure sales
what's next ?
- > 300MB driver install with at least 5 annoying 3rd party crap
Now I can be wrong ..
I now have a multifunction Officejet Laser, so scanning multiple pages over wifi is an added bonus.
The last printer I purchased was a Brother. Some people criticize them for the quality, but they seem to be fine for home and small office use. They don't play games with toner and are reasonably compatible with whatever you throw them on to.
Yet you do have to be careful when choosing lasers. Some vendors seem to use the same approach as inkjet printers when it comes to supplies, and it affects both consumer and corporate models. I also recall doing a fair bit of research on Brother printers to ensure I ended up with a good (but inexpensive) model. That being said, at least there are options.
EDIT: negation in the wrong place.
I bought a multi-function HP Laser printer a couple of years ago and haven't looked back (although we started having to print more and more frequently as our kids have got older). It's one of those devices that "just works" now. Even Linux automatically detects it on the network and configures itself for printing.
For photos. It’s a pretty crap document printer.
If I need colour, I'll go for a Brother colour laser.
Have a Canon inkjet, it's ok but expensive.
The built in brother webconnect capability is nice to scan an OCR’d pdf directly to your dropbox/drive/box/one drive account. Too bad it doesn’t work with iCloud.
Edit: for documents and such, not photos.
You cannot reproduce photo-quality prints with just 4 colors (cmyk). Your high-end photo-level printers use 10 or 12 inks, with far higher resolution than a typical $200 Brother printer.
But if you're only doing office work / text / etc. etc., laser is great. Even mild graphics (diagrams mainly) work out fine with laser prints.
--------
The typical $200 ink printer however, is complete garbage.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
When I worked with old Xerox form printers, even the brand of paper made a difference. One brand would work well for multi-thousand page jobs while another would get occasionally stuck in the rollers.
While I'd think that things have improved since the era of tag/bus printing, I'd also think that the concern is still there.
If you're focused on inkjets, if what you're saying is true, it's overshadowed by the predatory practices employed by printer manufacturers. Practices that make it easy to conclude that printer issues are more about planned obsolescence and selling more ink than they are about difficult engineering problems.
LABEL PRINTING
I realized a few years ago that, if my clients fired me, I’d have to go get a “real job.” My expertise has been Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), and I became pretty good with hardware integration UI/UX. That’s when I asked myself the question above.
I learned React/Electron and built a solution named Label LIVE. Check it out at https://label.live.
This side-hustle has been a HUGE challenge and helps augment my consulting income.
Do you have to print Avery sheets with dynamic data? Don’t want to mail merge? Copy/paste got you down? Want to use your Zebra printer on a Mac? These simple things were incredibly difficult a few years ago...
My app has tons of fun features powered by the JavaScript ecosystem: USB, Fonts, Barcodes, Excel/CSV integration, dithering via WASM, PDF generation, etc.
It may not be the most memory efficient app, but it lets you get your printing done so you can focus on something else.
Label printing was a dumpster fire. Users expect a high-stress stinky mess. If I can make it 50% better I’ve succeeded in my goal. There’s still a ton of work to do... I just need to make time for it.
p.s. Do you know another hardware industry that needs better software? Get in touch!
(Business licneses cost ${PRICEBUSINESSMONTHLY} per month (or ${PRICE_BUSINESS} one time) and support printing barcodes for business use.)
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
Oh my god. I bought that model years ago after reading reviews that all agreed it was a great machine. And it printed well.
The reviews also mentioned a persistent clicking noise from the power supply. I dismissed that, I'm not terribly sensitive to things like that.
Was I wrong! It was maddening. I always pulled the plug the instant my printing was done.
I have an HP inkjet now, that I bought for my son's school work during lockdown. We had no choice. He was actually expected to print out work, stick it in his book, then send in a photo of the work. FFS.
It came with a three month free subscription service, to their automatic ink cartridge resupply.
So we had some cartridges arrive in the post, just as the ink was running out, and I changed cartridges.
A month later, the free subscription ended, and the printer refused to print, using the cartridges, unless I renewed my subscription, which I had to do through their mobile app.
How can you make such a simple technology, so ridiculously complex?
I was fired for “installing unsanctioned software”. Yet a friend’s brother was a muckity there and heard what happened and wanted to hire me full time - this was a summer part time job. I said nope. Had fun being the right hand for a chemical engineer at one of the local refineries and learned a lot more.
Which of the many printer manufacturers has a monopoly?
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14501894)
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
Being the family tech support, I'm slowly but surely migrating all family members away from inkjets to laser printers. This is easy because the inkjets invariably die within a couple of years. I make the beloved relatives think really hard about needing color or not. Let's be fair, we don't need it for printing ticket QR codes.
Unless I inherently misunderstand something about this industry, it seems like the perfect opportunity for a new startup to swoop in with a new quality printer with affordable toner cartridges. My only conclusion for why this hasn't been done is that it must not be profitable.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams...
I very rarely print nowadays but I'd certainly never buy an HP printer based on what I've read. The amount of e-waste they're responsible for as a result of their crappy semi-disposible printers must be shocking.
But one should also notice that HP seems to have a lead in the cheap ink printer market, so a lot of testimonies mention HP. I think the lesson is: don't buy cheap ink printers.
Bromides are cool. feeding them the tape of the fonts, super cool: adjusting the hex for minor positioning, extra merit points (I never did that but I know a guy who did)
The Early canon laser was half good, but the size of a fridge. The Benson Varian stuff was ok, but the paper felt slimy.
I think using the pen plotter to write cursive was my favourite, but the operators hated me when I did that.
Why would they hate you for writing cursive on it? Other than it possibly taking a long time.
When the wet process laser came along, we got a lot of love using it at first, but then it went to the same place. it was a continuous roll feed (bit like a fax in some ways) and consumed some kind of chemical. I can relate to them rationing it. (it also had NROFF/TBL cut marks to show where to slice it to make the effective page size)
The colour printers they got on trial from textronix we got to keep the demo sheets doing various DECUS tape 3D graphic drawings, but it was way too expensive to buy. I have no idea who bought those things then. probably big physics, not compsci schools.
The giant LPT up front which took 132 column papper? go for your life, but you had to be in the freemasons to break the feed sheet, and if you printed the 'Star Trek' overhit ascii art you were banned for months. (it burned through the ribbon)
Ops duty cycle included walking out front, breaking the feed, tearing various peoples printouts into discrete chunks, putting it into the pigeon hole.
Those stories about accidental form-feed shooting paper ribbons across the room? They are true.
Or you can get a laser made by a company that got its start making sewing machines and still does, or a company that got its start making test and measurement equipment and spun off that bit of the company (i. e. The good bit) to focus on making crap printers.
I make do with a little wi-fi thermal sticky label printer, for the few times I need an address label, because I am vehemently opposed to the concept of handwriting. I have a letter laser printer, which I have successfully avoided needing to use.
The only time I've used it in recent memory (2 years?) is to print off updated car insurance documents, current copies of which must be kept in the car by law (and of course they change every six months). My insurance company will mail them to me, but it's faster to just print them than to order them in the app and wait for them to arrive by post. I technically don't need to print them myself.
You just have to be a little bit stubborn in refusing to use paper, and it's possible now.
That said, I've seen IT professional break down in frustration of not getting their printers to work as intended.
Also, it seems cheaper and easier to just replace the printer than it is to replace toner. I am ashamed.
Exactly. Try to print every other month, and very different tasks - scanned images of cashier's receipts, color pictures a toddler drew in MS Paint, pages 87-112 from SICP, Bing Maps directions, an ASCII text from from a flash drive and the likes.
Sometimes you have to reset printer (with a button). Sometimes to cycle power off-on. Sometimes to download whatever's needed from a browser in a form of a PDF. Sometimes nothing works, and only by pure luck you can do something - not always - when completely misremembering steps which led to the printing.
And that's without ink problems.
For photos, go to a print shop.
It's on the end of a USB cable and driven from Linux, so it doesn't phone home or require an Epson account. Prints fine. It's also a scanner, using the terrible SANE software for Linux, but it scans fine once.
So I find it hard to believe that printers really suck. Even the worst case was actually quite wonderful.
Yea, inks can run out. When they do I just use a syringe and refill them all in 20 min. However, laser cartridge can run out as well, what are you going to do with it? Buy new? Refill at the shop? Meh, I don't want to go to the shop. (If it works during these times)
People hate them, however, for tech savvy folks they're cheap and easy to maintain.
There are really two use cases for printers: Heavy, frequent use, and infrequent use. Laser printers excel at the latter because they use dry supplies. I've had laser printers that sat idle for a decade, toner and all, simply power up and print.
I couldn't get these Brother printers to work except by using Brother's Linux printer installer, which works perfectly, but alarmingly, is still 32-bit software which makes me wonder how much longer it'll work. Similarly, the scan feature of the multifunction machine will only work after Brother's installer is run (but then it works great - sheet feed duplex scanning (stack flip and second pass) with gscan2pdf).
Anyway so slight software concern aside, very happy with these printers. I don't think either of them has ever jammed in my use.
It had a built in PostScript interpreter and was great for printing from our Sun and HP workstations.
That said, while it worked great and the pigments were reasonably priced, the unit experienced hardware failures every 6-12 months. Kodak support was above and beyond, and they must have shipped me 4 printers as replacements.
It's a shame consumer pigment printers didn't take off but I guess once Kodak realized the price wasn't going to move the needle on consumer habits, they might as well get their slice of the ink cartel pie.
My current HP is maybe the worse printer I've ever owned. It is constantly inaccessible on the network despite being connected and the only solution is to power cycle it. If I hold the power button to power it off, it sits and spins "Preparing to shut down" literally forever. I've left it overnight just so see. So I have to pull the plug every time just to turn it off. It's insane.
Dye-sub is downright magical. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I just want to own one.
I currently use HP InkAdvantage 2135. Everyone at home uses Linux and it works flawlessly. Didn't have to particularly install anything for printing.
After reading the comments here, I'm starting to believe that we got lucky.
Here are the downsides of my HP:
1. You cannot print a lot of pages on a single cartridge. They claim just 480, but I would put the realistic number to below 400 pages. And the cartridges are NOT cheap.
2. No auto-duplex
3. No wireless connectivity option for this particular printer.
But I knew about 2 and 3 while making the purchase, so it's not really a downside.
However, considering that Brother printers are cheaper and paper yield is substantially higher, I feel that I should've bought that instead.
I'm secretly hoping my existing printer goes kaput :)
I once had a HP colour laser printer. It was so bad (particularly the software) that I vowed never to buy HP kit again.
As for ink expense, yeah that's been an issue for decades though it is not due to lack of technical advances, but to vendor lock in. However, most brands now offer printer options slightly more expensive than an entry level ink jet that have ink tanks instead of cartridges. I recently replaced my 6 year old work horse with one: It came with the equivalent of 10 cartridges of ink, and each replacement color is $15, again for the equivalent of 10 cartridges.
The real world is also messy and so many variables can lead to a failure. It's astonishing that we can print so easily most of the time, let alone send someone in space unharmed.
My HP OfficeJet 9015 is fantastic. It’s fast, automatic duplex printing, automatic duplex scanning. Recognized by every wireless device I own (Windows 10, macOS, iOS) automatically with zero software installs. AirPrint is fantastic.
Yes, that’s a $200+ printer. Probably most people are going out and buying $50 all-in-one printers and complaining about how they suck. No shit!
And IMO the ink cartridges are priced reasonably enough. I could swear they didn’t used to be this cheap but I don’t have any kind of ink price index or anything.
I still have it and it still impresses me with how robust it is - the fact it's a good document scanner and a fax is gravy. On its strength I bought a PRO-100 and the European analog of the MX870 whose model number I forget.
The PRO-100 sat unused for several years, and when I tried it again, it picked up and worked as though for the first time.
The assertion that inkjet is garbage sure isn't borne out by my three Canon inkjets.
Go out and buy yourself a Canon laser, one of the current LBP models.
Set an admin PIN/password.
Forget the password and try to recover it.
You'll find there is no recovery function. You'll find there is no factory-reset function. Your ONLY option is to call out a Canon service engineer at your own expense (or 'carry-in' the device to a Canon service centre and still be charged for the pleasure).
No, I'm not joking. I have this both verbally and in writing from Canon that they have no factory-reset because of "security reasons".
I think the issue is that Inkjet printers suck.
Typically I only need to do so for banks of government agencies so that my signature counts.
Though I successfully signed a government document on an iPad and argued that their instructions didn't say I couldn't use a digital pen to sign it. (Still had to print it off though)
The only real use case I can think of (I'm sure there are others) for truly personal printing is photography - even then, I think I'd probably send it off to a specialist printers.
Part of me is nostalgic for the days when printers were built to last, but when I realize it cost the equivalent of $2000 today, I'm content with the cheap "disposable" printers they make now. $2000 would be enough for me to buy enough printers, paper, and ink to last my lifetime.
My favorite part? The software. It was very Japanese. Very ugly and very functional. Little jingles for everything. A ton of useful functions out of the box. First rate mobile support. It was so easy to use I'm honestly sad the POS printing part stopped working.
I have three printers right now, two inkjets for photo printing and one monochrome laser for documents - lately, mostly research papers about wasps.
All three printers work beautifully. They all print perfectly from all my devices, never give me trouble, and thanks to the economics of HP's Instant Ink program, low and medium quality photo prints up to letter size only cost me as much as one sheet of whatever paper I'm using.
Maybe I'm just lucky?
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018. It's killer feature is third party ink support - cartridges can be reset and refilled and inks that are good enough can be bought in bulk.
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
I have an HP inkjet printer from ~2010 that works great.
When I want to print from my phone or PC, it seems to just work. I can email a magic address from any other device and it also starts printing.
I order ink a few times a year (we print a lot) and it takes just moments to install. Maybe I'll buy a new laser printer at some point, but I haven't really seen the need.
Gods, that makes me happy!
In this new era of social distancing and everything online, I can't see printers making a comeback (knocks on wood). Good riddance.
Note: I'm obviously not talking about industrial printers or alike. Then again, neither is the article.
My experience with printers is keeping me from it. It feels like a market for lemons, the cheap ones are obviously crap, but who is to say that an expensive printer will be any better, especially with all the silly strategies the bean counters are using to squeeze the last bit of revenue out of the consumer. Reading the other comments, HP seems to be the company to avoid (My last cheap laser printer from them, P1006, was reasonably good though, it just doesn't support duplex and I won't run around with double the paper that's needed)
On the distance learning bit: My old iPad I used in college and grad school was great. When I had a bunch of readings to go through, I did prefer it to printing for the lower cost, synced notes, less to carry, better for the environment bits.
Now that I don't have any class notes and assignments, I would really like a printer for the once a month 30-50 pages duplex prints. Especially since my iPad is essentially a brick now that it can't access my Safari saved pages or iCloud Drive and can't install Firefox – yes it's old, but it would work fine except for software, so I'm not getting a new one.
Does anyone know a project building that?
Did worry about the drying but so far so good. Do keep a Hp laser portable mono in case of trouble.
Step up your budget to $1500 and a new world opens up. The reason it’s not cheaper is because there’s no market for it, people just don’t value good prints enough to make the scale bring down the price enough.
I hate pay walls.
It seems like they’re out of business: https://www.yesdelft.com/startups/tocano/
The problems start when you want to print color and photos.
I’d say we’ve come quite far. My Brother printer doesn’t suck. I can print from phone while I’m taking a dookie. The future is here.
Anyone got any tips/tricks that can help me out? Some way to query the printer, watch the traffic (and know what to look for), anything?
I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
So between today and the end of your life, you will never sell anything online? Or never for the rest of your life send something you already own to someone else? You need a printer to print shipping labels, unless you take the item somewhere to be professionally packed and shipped.
I moved recently, and printed out the USPS form to change my address so that I didn't have to pay the fee to do it online.
I also had to print and mail a form to get a ballot mailed to me for today's election. In my state, this can only be done with a signed document, not online.
I don't limit my life experience to things that are online, so about once a month I use a printer to print envelopes to send checks for things that I buy over the phone. Sent one out today to a store in Seattle that deals in a specialty good my wife likes, but has no online presence.
According to the New York Times, there are top-end restaurants that only take reservations by letter. Not via an app. Not online. Not even via telephone.
I know interesting people who live in places beyond the reach of the internet. I write letters to them a couple of times a year.
Four of the last six property purchases I've made in the last few years involved printing and mailing forms. Not every government office in every county in every state is online. And very often legal forms have to be notarized. You can't do that online.
If you choose to live a simple life, you may never need a printer. If you choose to do more, then it's good to have one stashed away for when you need it.
Last year I bought an HP OfficeJet 8720 and it's a pretty amazing bit of hardware for $300. Yes, ink is expensive but I don't have to print that often so it's not a big deal.
I'm not educated in printers at all, but anecdotally it seems most problems arise with ink printers.
And we've been doing plenty of full color photo prints on it.
Local model with large refillable ink tanks builtin, though.
In my household, the printer gets used for a couple of things. The first is sheet music. Musicians are starting to use a big tablet screen, with a foot pedal to turn the pages, but adoption will be slow. Musicians seem innately impatient with technologies that don't just work instantly when you pull them out of the box.
The other thing is documents to read for school, which is still more ergonomic when done with paper.
At the office, I suspect nobody needs to print any more, because nobody reads any more. I can't count the number of times I've hit "send" on a report that I was supposed to write, and a manager will be in my cube a few minutes later asking me if I could just summarize it for them. The first paragraph in the report is a summary.
It's usually stuff like an insurance card or temporary registration for my car.
Inkjets need near constant use or the ink dries up. OP has described a constraint that points towards a laser.
- only buy a laser printer, no ink-jet, etc.
- avoid all-in-one units that have scanners, fax, etc.
- choose one that supports internet printing and wifi, but also has an ethernet connection
Are there any startups out there working on an AI babysitter? There must be.
In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for 14 years of convenient printing at home.
Cheap inkjets, or in fact all inkjet printers suck.
Bigger budget get one of the new Epson/canon inkjets with refillable tanks. Even the quality official ink is dirt cheap!
Laser would be nice but finding a cheap one with cheap good toner availability is hard. Colour copying on a multifunction inkjet is nice too.