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> "to breathe much needed new energy and ideas into the industry" Much needed indeed. The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation, everybod

• makomk 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure one big printer company buying another big printer company is the exact opposite of "disruption" and reduces the amount of "new ideas and energy" in the industry. Indeed, the press release says something slighthy different: "Today, HP is investing to disrupt this category by replacing copiers with superior multifunction printer (MFP) technology." Basically, they want to replace the copier industry with printers, bringing the exact same crap you complain about to a whole new market segment. (Most photocopiers are already just digital scanners coupled to printers internally. They just want to replace them with cheaper, worse ones.)
  • mseebach 10y ago
    Hasn't pretty much every copier sold in the past 20 years essentially been an MFP anyway? And isn't it fairly obvious that once you're bringing in a scanner and a printer anyway, you might as well expose them on the network as separate devices? (I use the scan-to-email function of the office "copier" fairly frequently myself, I print a bit too, but I practically never copy anything directly)
    • SixSigma 10y ago
      your email system might thank you if you used scan-to-SMB instead :)
      • cptskippy 10y ago
        I've never seen that work, the I've manages was to save to USB and I was surprised it allowed that at all. Email works flawlessly every time.
        • brazzledazzle 10y ago
          What? It's really simple. First figure out what version of SMB/CIFS you're using and if that's compatible. Then figure out if you have packet encryption enabled and if that's compatible. Then figure out if the compatibility issue you're still experiencing is due to the volume being served by a non-Windows appliance or server. If it's Windows dig through group policy settings applied and start toggling them on and off desperately until you're ready to explode. Then after days or weeks of packet captures and support calls find out it was a known issue and get a firmware patch from the MFP manufacturer. Easy.
          • discreditable 10y ago
            I just went through all of that when upgrading our file server to 2012 R2. Would not recommend. SMTP is easier but has its own problems (such as file size limits).
          • vetinari 10y ago
            Works like charm - put in server ip address, share, username, password and it nicely puts every scan there. (We used Konica-Minolta machine and Synology NAS - i.e. Samba 4).
            • brazzledazzle 10y ago
              I've had it go both ways. I've found it easier in the past if someone already compromised security by disabling signing. But that was a long time ago in another life. Things have probably changed a lot since.
      • discreditable 10y ago
        Scan to SMB is a pain. We had to have our copier company come out to upgrade the firmware on all of the devices when we moved to Server 2012. Even then, we have to enable SMB 1.0 for the feature to work.
    • dv_dt 10y ago
      What drives me crazy is why are there always new drivers for printers? At this point isn't there more than enough compute power in the devices to supply a consistent abstract interface?
      • i80and 10y ago
        That "consistent abstract interface" is called PostScript. The last printer I bought was a Xerox PostScript printer, and with a few minor caveats, it's been lovely not having to putz with drivers.
        • dv_dt 10y ago
          I've shopped for too many printers where all PostScript support means is you can shove PS into their front end driver.
          • wmf 10y ago
            Were those Ethernet or USB? AFAIK PostScript + Ethernet has always meant an internal RIP with no driver needed.
            • dv_dt 10y ago
              At this point, I don't recall - I've gone over to only buying network capable printers as they do tend to be better about their drivers (still need somthing usually) - but the ones I've been looking at lately seem to speak some dialect of PCL.
          • _JamesA_ 10y ago
            The same is true with "PCL3 GUI". It's like the "Win-modem" fiasco all over again.
            • rahimnathwani 10y ago
              You mean like winprinters (aka GDI printers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface#GDI_printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface#GDI_...
  • scarface74 10y ago
    I actually had to look up how traditional copiers worked based on your statement "Most photocopiers are already just digital scanners coupled with printers". I was so use to think of a copier being scanner + printer in the modern era, I had to take a step back and realize that wouldn't have been feasible 30 years ago.
  • sly010 10y ago
    My mom worked in the printing industry with a company doing refills. She told me newer printers are hardwired to unrecoverably die after a fixed number of pages. Depending on the model you can even query how many pages you have left in the machine (not talking about ink here). Also my vet once told me he replaces his home printer every time it runs out of ink, because replacing the cartridge costs the same order of magnitude as a new printer and this he can always have the latest and greatest.
    • 72deluxe 10y ago
      Laser printers: The imaging drums have a chip on them which counts how many pages they have processed, and will refuse to work after a certain number of pages even if the drum itself is fine. They do this to stop potential damage to the drum. You can buy cheap chips to put into the printer if you want to risk it - search for "drum reset refill chip".
      • Yxven 10y ago
        Is damaging the drum dangerous, or is it a profit scheme?
      • bonzini 10y ago
        That's not to stop potential damage to the drum. It's because on average the drum starts showing damage around 30.000 pages (a damaged drum it leaves lighter or darker bands on the paper, same as on old badly-maintained photocopiers). But because _sometimes_ it starts shows damage earlier, and they don't want you to confuse a damaged drum and an empty toner cartridge, they just force you to change it around 20.000 pages. The drum reset refill chip is not even a chip, it's a 56 ohm resistor that acts like a fuse. The drum has two resistors in parallel, one with very low resistance and one that's like 200 000 ohm. If the printer sees a high current when you turn on the printer, the firmware thinks it's a new drum and resets the page counter. After a short while the 100 ohm resistor burns (quite literally), and from that point on the firmware will only see a low current when you turn on the printer, and it will not reset the page counter. So the drum reset refill chip lets you connect the two pads where the printer applies the current with a resistor like the one on a new drum. You can buy a 56 ohm resistor yourself to achieve the same effect. It's literally a resistor and some plastic, only usable once, and they sell it to you for $10, which makes it much more of a scam than anything printer manufacturers do.
  • otaviokz 10y ago
    Indeed. I for one fail to see how "disruption" through competition acquisition can live up to anything more than just marketing buzz wording.
• monatron 10y ago
  I think the printing industry is just inherently difficult to serve. Manufacturers can barely deliver quality products and support on the printers they make now. I can't imagine them also having to support all of these "custom" setups. I imagine a future where these custom printers you describe might exist, but in a centralized "kinkos" type store, or better yet a makerspace. There's a big difference marketing and selling to a consumer vs. specialized industry.
  • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    There are a ton of specialist printer manufacturers out there including point of sale, barcoding, wide format printing, etc. My guess is if the printer manufacturers thought there was a market for it they would do it.
• unclebucknasty 10y ago
  Funny. The idea of need for innovation in printing strikes me as anachronistic. Printing itself should be on the decline and increasingly outmoded. If anything, we need to focus on killing faxing and paper as a medium once and for all. Sure, there may always (or at least long) be a need for hard-copy for some applications, but it hardly strikes me as sufficient to drive need for innovation in printers.
  • ebiester 10y ago
    Our screens are still not good enough to avoid eye strain and still do not provide the tactile arrangement paper does. I have been typing as long as I have been reading, and I will still go to hard copy if I have to edit a manuscript of any length. We still need printers.
    • unclebucknasty 10y ago
      I agree, and that makes my point. The need for innovation is in technologies that can adequately replace paper; not in better printers.
    • copperx 10y ago
      Apple's retina screens take care of the resolution aspect. However, the software side needs a new paradigm to deal with digital paper. PDF files are not the solution.
      • ebiester 10y ago
        I need to look at four pieces of paper and write on them and draw arrows on them at once without breaking my flow. That's four ipads at this point, and there's still no great way of flipping between pages. There is something about the 3Dness of a stack of papers that makes moving to digital difficult.
  • unclebucknasty 10y ago
    Down votes. Makes sense. Sure, one might be tempted to think that advocating a paperless world would be non-controversial here. But, yes, let's rush headlong into the world of driverless cars, while holding on to a relatively minor update to 15th century technology at all costs. I wonder if HN know how much it parodies itself at times.
• ittekimasu 10y ago
  I can only wonder how they much they'll charge for precious soldermask and silkscreen inks.
  • jwr 10y ago
    Let them. I'd happily pay if it meant I could manufacture PCBs locally in a matter of hours, rather than wait weeks (right now if you want a cheap PCB, you wait 2-3 weeks).
  • ethagknight 10y ago
    Anything less than the cost of the current process would be a win for the industry, right? Even if it's more expensive, isn't there benefit to having it available on demand?
• avian 10y ago
  > The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation I agree with you that printers are still terrible and a pain to work with from the user's perspective. However, I don't think it's true that there has been no innovation. It's just that it has been mostly on the side of reducing per-unit manufacturing costs. I recently took apart a modern HP inkjet and was surprised to find for instance that stepper motors have been replaced with DC motors and optical encoders.
  • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Absolutely, I remember selling the first colour PostScript printer in the UK to an advertising agency, they paid £25,000 for something much worse than I can get for £50 in my local Staples. However they have been absolutely terrible at the software side of things. This is a shame as it's as visible as the rest of the package to the consumer.
    • scarface74 10y ago
      The software side of printers have gotten worse. Back in the day, when all high end printers support PostScript, you didn't have to worry about drivers. Now, especially with Windows, your printer can become obsolete with the next OS upgrade. At least on the Mac/iOS side, most consumer printers support AirPrint and you don't need drivers to support basic operations. I have a perfectly functional (cheap) color laser printer that doesn't work pass Windows 7. But works fine with my iOS devices thanks to AirPrint. It also supports Google's Cloud Print so I guess that's one way I could make it work with Windows 10 if I were so inclined.
      • sjwright 10y ago
        AirPrint is, when compared to what came before it, mind-numbingly simple. Printer announces itself with Bonjour, provides basic configuration (like choice of paper tray) with IPP, then accepts documents in PDF format. The end. Put simply, it upends the retarded mess of printer drivers and replaces it with something that does the job perfectly well 99 percent of the time. All it requires is for the printer to have sufficient MIPS to raster PDF files.
• technion 10y ago
  The irony is that it would just about be a massive disruption if someone could take that same old printer and create a highly reliable set of drivers, that could be completely trusted to with multiple OSes and services like RDS.
  • hrktb 10y ago
    Wouldn't work with a separate print server ? I know there's some at Office depot for instance, but for a more flexible solution a raspberry pi works wonder as well.
• 7952 10y ago
  I think the main problem for buisness printers is the inclusion of proprietary software on the device. This means that it is very difficult for third parties to innovate. I would prefer printers to be a dumb IO device that connects to a full computer than can provide a good UI. Instead they have evolved to have an onboard computer of appalling quality.
  • petra 10y ago
    This is a general problem of the embedded industry, where products could greatly benefit from openness. But how do you align the incentives for the hardware manufacturer ,to commodify itself(to a large extent, unless there's some sort of app ecosystem or some other network effect setup) ?
    • zanny 10y ago
      In theory, consumer outreach to only support good actors, but there are two issues there: * It is chicken and egg. You don't get the better UX until you have quality open products to market, and manufacturing the devices may not be that expensive for a new line (at least compared to silicon) but you still need the resources of a billion dollar company. * Consumers buying devices like this will not research quality much before buying. To my knowledge, the vast majority of muggle printer buyers are just picking up something based off a feature list at Best Buy. So you need to persuade a company to invest in innovation in a market without any, and then you need to persuade consumers to actually care about quality. It is the exact same issue with less horribly insecure mobile devices without rootkit backdoor class modems, or more open motherboards, or open hard drive firmware, etc. We would see much higher quality with open development drivers for almost everything, but to see attitudes change you need to present financial incentives, and its really hard to promote something when no product at market exists yet.
• deleted 10y ago
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• drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Sysadmin here. I think HP's quality has gone way up in the past decade or so on the enterprise level. I remember the early 2000s as having a lot of lemons on their officejet line and now we have printers that run with hundreds of thousands of pages and only needing a new fuser now and again. Their enterprise drivers are usually okay but its a crapshoot between using the dedicated driver or the universal driver. Common wisdom is to never use the universal driver in production, which is a shame, because it was supposed to solve all the driver woes HP had with its dozens of different models. That said, the consumer line is a complete nightmare, especially the all-in-ones. HP and the rest need to stop what they're doing and just re-do all the drivers and helper software from scratch. Its also inexcusable that anyone is still selling ink-based printers. The industry really needs to move to a laser-only strategy. Everything about ink printers is terrible. Currently, I have a $199 5+ year old brother b&w laser printer at home. Its a little tank. When I need to print photos I just send them to Walgreens. Win-win in my book. > Why can't I print ink on a copper PCB, so that I can etch it later? Why can't I print soldermasks or silkscreens? Well, to be fair, HP isn't in that industry. You're asking for 3D printing solutions from a paper printing company. When those things happen, they'll be from other companies. There's not a lot in common with circuit or 3D printing and traditional laser printing. Also considering HP is trying to re-do itself as a software company and always trying to find a buyer for its hardware lines, I suspect they have zero incentive to enter risky new markets. I'm guessing this acquisition is to make them more attractive to a hypothetical future buyer. This acquisition gives HP access to a robust copier line and mobile printing technology that works pretty well (samsungs copiers are android based so there are some mobile benefits and 'not reinventing the wheel' aspects here).
  • Decade 10y ago
    Ink is very expensive per page, but the ink printing process takes much less electricity, generates much less ozone, than xerographic printers. And the printers are substantially lighter. Depending on your situation, an inkjet printer could fit your purposes better. Just not my situation nor my purposes.
• hkmurakami 10y ago
  Imo the Fujitsu Scansnap has been an excellent innovation.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    My workplace has a ScanSnap ix500 multi-document scanner. It's an utterly amazing, high-quality piece of hardware. However, the software needed to use it is some of the absolutely worst software I've ever seen. My advice: purchase a copy of VueScan to go with it. As a bonus, VueScan even has a Linux version that works quite well. (Not a shill, and I haven't purchased a copy, I just used the trialware but I was impressed.)
    • fifteenforty 10y ago
      I concur! I have one at home. It's the single best tech purchase I've made in years. What advantage do you get with VueScan?
      • Grishnakh 10y ago
        I'm not a customer, and haven't used it in a while (I haven't had to do a scan in a while and don't work in that office much), but here's the main things: 1) It works in Linux. Other, simpler scanners (non-ADF) can frequently work OK in Linux, but the Linux scanning software is a bit of a mess. I use gscan2pdf at home which works well enough, but looks pretty rough and hasn't seen any updates in years. But ADF scanners are different because of their nature; I'm not sure it'd be easy to get existing software to work with them, and I don't think the SANE interface works with them. With VueScan, you just install it, plug in the scanner, and it works, at least that was my experience. It has its own built-in drivers for ADF scanners like the ix500. 2) On Windows, it's just better. The Fujitsu software was a complete nightmare; it's horribly bloated (I seem to remember it being a 500MB download!) and very difficult to get working. I'm not sure it even works in Windows 10. VueScan is not a big download, and like on Linux is simple and easy. I haven't done much with it there because it puts big ugly watermarks all over your scans with the trialware version. But if I had an ix500 of my own, I'd be buying a copy of VueScan; I think it's only $20. Luckily I don't have to do much scanning, so I get by OK with gscan2pdf on Linux and my now-older CanoScan LiDE 50 (I think that's the model number, or is it 25? I forget now). It's slow, and a bit of a pain as I have to haul it out and plug it in, but it works reliably and decently. But if I were doing any volume scanning on a regular basis, I'd break down and buy an ix500. They're very expensive ($500 new I think, and used ones on Ebay usually fetch over $300), but I've never seen anything like them: they don't take up much desk space (they unfold out when you need to use them), they have excellent scan quality, and they're ridiculously fast, while also doing duplex scanning just as fast (using sensors on both sides). They also don't seem to have any trouble with misfeeding pages.
• js2 10y ago
  > Where is my printer that prints on fabric? My father does this with large-format inkjets[1]. He uses a water-based ink and fabric that comes on a roll with a peel-off backing, but the printer itself is not special other than being large format. [1] http://www.kuchikuu.com/ http://www.kuchikuu.com/
  • jwr 10y ago
    Oh, sure, you can do it, if you try things out, fiddle with settings, experiment and find a combination that works. But that's not what I meant.
  • jcrawfordor 10y ago
    Printing on fabric would generally be referred to as "Direct-on-Garment" or DOG printing and is a common method for making small-run clothing items like custom T-shirts a la CafePress. The quality is generally (but not very noticeably these days) worse than screen printing but there are no setup costs involved. The main issue with DOG printing is that poor adjustment of the heads can result in some overspray (as they must sit some small distance from the fabric to avoid smearing). This can be avoided by competent operators, the big internet companies just don't always bother.
• guest2143 10y ago
  Why can't I print an image on my fingernail? :/ We had that working on the assembly line in 1998 at HP. Never really got off the ground. Tatoos? Even temporary ones? Not to mention the medical devices HP could have had.
  • kalleboo 10y ago
    You can get inkjet transfer paper for temporary tattoos
  • JoelBennett 10y ago
    That makes me wonder if there's potential there for the medical industry: print a temporary barcode on a person, rather than tracking them with charts. I suppose an RFID bracelet could serve the same purpose, though.
• CPAhem 10y ago
  The market is a mature one, which is why there is so little innovation. Also there is a huge barrier to entry in the form of patent roadblocks for anyone trying to enter. This deal included 6500 patents!