Ask HN: Printing at home blows. What's your pitch for a better alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Printing at home blows. What's your pitch for a better alternative?

2 pointsgravitxyz11 comments

Printing at home blows. - Hidden Costs: Those tiny cartridges hold liquid gold, seemingly designed to deplete at the most inopportune moment. The ink itself often outlasts the printer, a cruel reminder of planned obsolescence.

- Subscription Scams: Ink "subscriptions" lure you in with convenience, but often lock you into overpriced ink and wasteful deliveries.

- Third-Party Roulette: Alternative cartridges can be cheaper, but quality and reliability are a gamble.

- Paper Jam Jenga: Every printer owner knows the ritualistic dance of coaxing stubborn sheets through the path of least resistance. Paper jams are the gremlins of the machine world. Image of person pulling on a piece of paper stuck in a printer Driver Delusions: Printer drivers, those enigmatic programs, seem to exist in a parallel universe where logic defies explanation. Updates rarely bring peace, often introducing new quirks.

-Connectivity Chaos: Wi-Fi connections drop, cables mysteriously disconnect, and printing from your phone often feels like navigating a labyrinth blindfolded.

What's your pitch for a better alternative?

We have 2 Brother printers at home and two in the office - they are a few years old. Never had an issue. The toner cartridges last an unbelievably long time, they have not once jammed. They are network printers, wired to a switch (router) - so any computer on our network can print to it. Any iOS device finds it and we can print to the with iOS too. iOS and Windows just finds them - no special drivers or software. We never installed the printer software with some bells and whistles - no need to. Windows just works with them. We would never buy any other brand. They weren't even very expensive. (The cartridges' hold toner - not ink) and yeah .. we can print on both sides of the paper.

If you want to technically peak at them - we just enter their IP address into a web browser and we can name them, see how many pages were printed, see how much toner emails, etc

When Brother printers falsely report toner low (like other brands), there is a software hack you can execute to reset that. No chips.

The market is saturated with cheap (typically loss-leader) printers because the vast majority of people do not give any serious consideration to the printer(s) they buy; they go to a store or to Amazon and buy something that's cheap, looks decent, and (on Amazon) has decent reviews. You will not be able to build a better printer than the unreliable garbage on the consumer market without finding some way to get people to pay significantly more than they presently are, and if reliability and ink prices could drive that decision I don't think we'd have arrived at this situation in the first place.

The other fundamental option seems to be abandoning consumer printers altogether in favor of Printing-as-a-Service; but people often need to print things on short notice and often need to print paperwork that may contain very private/sensitive information. I don't think fast (not just same-day but within say 1hr) delivery is feasible without driving the price so high that a consumer inkjet is financially the better choice for most people. As for privacy concerns, they seem pretty fundamentally unavoidable as far as I can see.

I wish you luck; the market as it is sucks. Like others here have already commented I just settled for a Brother B&W laser printer for on-demand document printing needs and Printing-as-a-Service for photos.

I have this

https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Inkjet/EcoTank-Photo-ET-...

which I use for photo and art reproductions. I could send the work out to an almost unlimited number of places like Staples, Kinkos, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Shutterfly, SmugMug, etc. I don’t because (i) I like to pick out my paper and (ii) like precise control of the border, if you make borderless prints at the drugstore you will get things close to the edge cut off and can do better if you print yourself. (I make a lot fewer borderless prints now that I have a rotary cutter.)

I use that printer to make an occasional ‘office’ print on cheap paper and it is adequate for that but if that was what I needed a printer for I would get a laser.

I learned to enjoy the software that comes with the printer, which I did not expect. Printing labels on an oprtical disc is easy and the built-in software gives me precise control of margins and paper geometry I could not get in Photoshop.

I found the cheaper ET-3850 used ink that faded noticeably in 6 months, lightfastness of the ET-8550 is a lot better.

Somebody already mentioned it, but I got a decent laser printer with an ethernet port and have been happy ever since.

To support my laziness, I wired it up to SMTP and added myself as a contact, and added a share on my NAS, both of which are nice for scanning docs without having to mess around w/ flash drives.

I checked my purchase history, and I bought my M479fdn in early 2020. I've printed probably an average of a couple pages a month since then. I've never thought about ink, the paper hasn't jammed, I've never gone to print and find that it's wandered off.

Get a laser printer. None of the things you mentioned apply to my Brother laser printer, it works beautifully, over WiFi, and with 3rd party toners and I never had a paper jam or signed up for a subscription.

Maybe I should figure out a way to offer my laser printer as an addition to my front yard "little public library". For the couple times a month I print, that wouldn't be bad for me, and if my neighbors could use it easily that'd be a win for everyone.

I made a script that sends an image i snip from my work compter to google photos where it is on my phone when I'm away from my cptr. I use it to replace handwritten notes on scraps of paper though, not documents.

Ask why you need so much paper in the first place. I rarely need anything printed, haven’t owned a printer for years. When I do I use a print shop or hotel business center.

1. Forget ink jets.

2. Forget printing photos at home; only documents.

3. Brother LED/Laser printer.

4. Make sure your printer has a static IP, whether wired or Wi-Fi. Or statically assigned, unchanging DHCP.

My better alternative is: don’t own a printer.

And… don’t print.

But if I really have to print, I do most of my printing at work and let my employer foot the bill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com