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Why do printers still suck?

• makach 6y ago
  Printers are amazing technological devices with many moving parts. It equally amazes me every time I see a print complete. 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.
• fsflover 6y ago
  Because of the nonfree software (forcing the monopoly) and complexity of the hardware. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    > forcing the monopoly Which of the many printer manufacturers has a monopoly?
    • fsflover 6y ago
      Maybe it's a wrong word, but they all seem to have some agreement: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14501894 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.
      • chrisseaton 6y ago
        No idea what word you're looking for but it's not 'monopoly'. If your sentence starts 'they all' then it's likely not a monopoly.
        • PicassoCTs 6y ago
          Oligopoly forming a cartel is the right description?
          • chrisseaton 6y ago
            I don't see how - it's a government regulation. Seems the opposite of a cartel?
      • ben509 6y ago
        That would indicate an agreement with the government to print some forensic markings. That is a bad thing, but it is an entirely different thing from an anti-competitive cartel.
        • cardiffspaceman 6y ago
          If the US Secret Service went to printer and copier manufacturers, and convinced them all to make forensic markings, that's not collusion by the manufacturers.
          • tsjq 6y ago
            Looks like your Apr2021 cruise trip might've gotten re-cancelled due to the Corona situation ?
            • cardiffspaceman 6y ago
              I might have mistakenly said that date because plans have been difficult to keep track of. We have a cruise scheduled for May but nothing is written in stone. Our last trip was a short road trip in February.
      • mark-r 6y ago
        I thought it was a federal law, not some secret agreement. There's a reason your color printer always runs out of yellow ink first.
• gjvc 6y ago
  The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created. 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.
  • troydavis 6y ago
    I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU 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_mfc_l2750dw_all_in_one_monochrome_laser.html 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.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      Ooh duplex scanning. I need that.
      • CydeWeys 6y ago
        For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
• m-p-3 6y ago
  Hardware is notoriously hard and there are so many moving parts where something can go wrong. 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.
• brudgers 6y ago
  It's step four. 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.
  • rustyminnow 6y ago
    What printer do you use that supports third party ink?
• brudgers 6y ago
  It's step four. 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.
  • harha 6y ago
    If that is the only problem, wouldn't laser printers have fixed it? There's a ton of other things that don't work, e.g. paper jams. With the multi-function devices this gets even worse. 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.
• rutledge87 6y ago
  Razor-blade economies. It's most consumers who suck because they didn't wise-up to DRM, giveaway printers, ink drying-up, and expensive ink and instead get a used flagship laser printer. Convenience store vs. Costco or Staples Business Advantage.
• Crosseye_Jack 6y ago
  From my own experience (my own history with printers and of those of the people around me who I've done pc clean ups for in the past) I fell that it's all down to the fact that consumer grade printers are built down to a price, often to the point where the profit lies in the ink refills and with inkjet printers consumer printers are not used enough to prevent them from drying out in between prints. 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.
  • Tomte 6y ago
    > Kyocera FS-1010 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.
    • Crosseye_Jack 6y ago
      Yeah it does click when in standby / low power mode. I do the same and just power it down when its not in use. These days its only used once in a blue moon so its not really a bother to me. But yeah if someone was going to have it on 24/7 so its ready to go at a moments notice, I would recommend rigging up some kind of remote power management for the power supply (Not that I recommend any buying a 17 year old printer model).
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• barnabees 6y ago
  Do they really? I can't remember the last time I had a printer problem, and I print a lot. Printer hardware and software have gotten a lot better since 10 years ago.
  • avmich 6y ago
    > and I print a lot 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.
• sharadov 6y ago
  I have a Brother entry level laser printer, first printer in years that I've liked. Will never buy an inkjet again, there is something inherently flawed with that technology.
  • the_unknown 6y ago
    I was about to say the same thing... It is really completely amazing how wide the gap is between standard, cheap ink jet and cheap Brother laser. Seriously do yourself a favour and just switch. Your sanity will thank you.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      It's that Japanese engineering shit... my Brother label makers were a gift from a hackathon and one of them was a used on that had like 30,000 pages run through it. Powered it up, paired it through bluetooth, ran a perfect page through it.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I have used Brother MFC laser printers for over 10 years and I don’t hesitate to recommend them. Cheap enough to throwaway if they break, but otherwise the software stays out of your way. 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.
  • fennecfoxen 6y ago
    I have an Epson P900. Inkjet. 17x22” archival pigment prints at 1440 dpi. Paper feed isn’t the best ever but it’s usually not a problem. Inkjet is sublime and amazing. For photos. It’s a pretty crap document printer.
    • kayodelycaon 6y ago
      I have a Canon Pixma Pro-100. Not quite as fancy but it does an amazing job. I've been using cheap matte photo paper for the few color documents I need and that works pretty well. It uses far less ink than I expected. It's cheaper to run than the terrible Epson photo printer it replaced. Not cheap to acquire though.
• apricot 6y ago
  Home printers suck because home computer buyers will always buy the cheapest printer, so it's a race to the bottom.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    That explains cheap hardware but doesn't explain why the software is as bad as it is. Amortized over any large hardware vendor's product line the per-unit cost of investment in the software has got to be nothing.
    • pixl97 6y ago
      The software can only be explained by attempting to sell printers to, well, idiots. Looks pretty, doesn't work worth a crap. HP, please, just give me an 'enterprise' driver and nothing else, that's all I need.
    • mark-r 6y ago
      My experience is that hardware companies are almost universally bad at software. I can only guess it's because the hardware guys are treated like rockstars and the software guys are treated like a necessary evil.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    This applies to pretty much any other computer-related thing sold to non-tech people. They either don't care or don't have the skills to judge the quality, so a better quality but more expensive product will always lose in favour of the cheapest crap.
• neonate 6y ago
  https://archive.is/gv0SZ https://archive.is/gv0SZ
  • GreenWatermelon 6y ago
    Thank you. I hate pay walls.
• Austin_Conlon 6y ago
  Maybe this satirical article should become real: "New Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I'm Thinking Printers'" https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-1819572893 https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-....
• paxys 6y ago
  There is no incentive to improve printers now simply because it is clear that they are on their way out. I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
  • rxhernandez 6y ago
    You probably will if you need to RMA anything in the US. Just had to RMA to Lenovo and Amazon recently and both required me to print out a shipping label.
    • paxys 6y ago
      The UPS store (where I drop off return packages) prints them for free.
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        If you choose to live near a UPS store for the rest of your life. Or make sure ahead of time to check that the items you buy can be returned via UPS. Apple does RMAs via FedEx.
    • dhritzkiv 6y ago
      The public library is another option for the rare occasion you need to print something.
    • sneak 6y ago
      Amazon RMAs these days can optionally involve carrier pickup, and the carrier brings a premade thermal label with them. You just need to put it back in the box it came in.
  • criddell 6y ago
    Plus, they are mostly good enough. 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.
  • 6y ago
• syshum 6y ago
  Th better questions is "Why do we still have printers"
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    Sometimes I'm taking notes into the field or something and don't have any reliable power and can't carry any extra weight.
  • analog31 6y ago
    While their use is hopefully dwindling, I expect there will be a long tail. 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.
    • ioseph 6y ago
      Tablets are well and good for reading sheet music, but I can't imagine scribbling rehearsal notes / markings on a tablet in a way that's not infuriating.
  • kome 6y ago
    I like to read on paper...
  • ben509 6y ago
    TBH, I don't, on the rare occasions I need to print, I just order a print via Fedex and pick it up in the store. It's usually stuff like an insurance card or temporary registration for my car.
• Tomte 6y ago
  Get a monochrome laser or LED printer, if you can. Brother (my current favorite), Kyocera, whatever. They are generally quite good if you can limit your printing to text and b/w diagrams. The problems start when you want to print color and photos.
  • projektfu 6y ago
    Brother printers always suck in weird ways. I had one that had a thousand settings for things but not one controlled the volume, duration or existence of a loud, long beep when you opened the paper tray. That would be fine but single feed sheets never came up straight, so checks had to go in the tray each time.
    • beervirus 6y ago
      That's a pretty specific and minor gripe...
      • projektfu 6y ago
        It’s one example of hundreds.
        • beervirus 6y ago
          Hundreds?? That seems unlikely.
• askyc12345 6y ago
  Since I bought a laser printer, I don't have any issues anymore. One cartridge is enough to print thousands of pages.
• unixhero 6y ago
  Business laser printers doesn't suck. Cheap inkjets, or in fact all inkjet printers suck.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• jet_32951 6y ago
  Not my experience at all. When my girlfriend's HP 4L died we looked for a replacement and we both wanted to print color images so I bought a Canon MX870 ("multifunction", inkjet) in 2010. 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.
• julienb_sea 6y ago
  The trick is to buy a laser printer. Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time. Laser does not suffer from this problem.
  • roland35 6y ago
    My color laser printer has been working well for years now! Each toner cartridge lasts at least 1000 pages (current winner in my printer is black with 1553 pages). It is a little slow to load big documents but I don't see any need to upgrade any time soon. Wifi was really the latest beneficial technology. HP CP1525nw
    • myself248 6y ago
      Ditto, I picked up a Samsung CLP-620ND in 2010 and it's still going strong. I get about 5000 pages on a black cartridge, about half that on the colors, and it's time for a transfer belt but I think I can probably clean the old one and get a few more years out of it. Screw. Inkjets.
    • mechanicalpulse 6y ago
      I have the same one. Haven’t had any issues with it. I don’t know when I originally bought it, but according to my records, I purchased toner cartridges in 2012, 2015, and 2020. The usage report says I’ve printed 6,111 pages. It has been a fantastic product.
  • White_Wolf 6y ago
    Spot on. Have a laser printer since 2010 and the only thing apart from toner that I had to buy for it was a drum about 2-3 years ago. Not even buying branded toner. Only from Aliexpress. One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
  • Quekid5 6y ago
    Laser all the way, baby! ... 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.
• jsnell 6y ago
  I had to buy the first printer I’d ever owned this year due to switching to wfh indefinitely. Got the Brother HL-1110 just since it was the cheapest laser printer available here. It is a ridiculously austere and brutalist design, it really feels like they were optimizing out every penny on the BOM. It should be utter trash. In practice it prints fast, with good quality, and I have not had any trouble with it. It’s like the Citroen 2CV of printers. So I find it hard to believe that printers really suck. Even the worst case was actually quite wonderful.
• RIMR 6y ago
  I've been using the same Brother MFC laser printer for like 10 years without a single issue, and the cartridges are cheap and last an incredible amount of time. I think the issue is that Inkjet printers suck.
• dnlbtlr 6y ago
  The space station never had this problem https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/nasa-updates-international-space-station-printer/ https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/nasa-updates-international-s... "The International Space Station is getting its first printer upgrade in 17 years"
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I've never had that hateful relationship with printers. Sure, the occasional paper jam etc., and experience with the office printer that is beyond it's useful lifetime in terms of lifetime prints or underspec'ed for its monthly duty cycle, and we replace it. 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.
• TedShiller 6y ago
  The key is to buy a laser printer. Mine still works perfectly, bought it in 2005.
• nickt 6y ago
  A great reminder of the New Yorker article from 2018, "Why Paper Jams Persist" [1] and a good discussion here at the time [2] [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312501
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• hellotomyrars 6y ago
  The only printer I've ever enjoyed was a short-lived Kodak pigment based printer. 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.
  • myself248 6y ago
    Next time I swing by the computer recycling place, I gotta see if they still have that Tektronix Phaser dye-sub printer up front. They've been trying to move it for years, and I think their clientele just doesn't recognize it. Dye-sub is downright magical. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I just want to own one.
• roland35 6y ago
  I think people underestimate just how difficult it is to design and manufacture a printer! Paper isn't easy to work with, especially when it comes with all sorts of thicknesses and finishes. We expect extreme accuracy and reliability, with no maintenance. It is amazing they work as well as they do!
  • cmxch 6y ago
    You aren't kidding. 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.
  • haswell 6y ago
    Are you specifically referring to inkjet printers? Because laser printers are pretty close to "Accurate, reliable, minimal maintenance". 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.
  • amelius 6y ago
    Yes, I'd like to see someone here do a DIY color laser printer project :)
    • mikro2nd 6y ago
      Even an "open source" monochrome laser would be a win.
• sokoloff 6y ago
  OTOH, I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $41/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price). In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for 14 years of convenient printing at home.
• moron4hire 6y ago
  Saw some comments about scanners here. Anyone else just take a photo of the document, then Photoshop it to be flat and monochrome?
• lizknope 6y ago
  My university in the mid 90's had HP LaserJet 5 Si MX printers in the computer labs. When I got a job in 1997 I laughed at how bad the printers were in the office. I convinced my manager to buy the same HP LaserJet 5 Si MX. It was $3500 but everyone loved it. It had a built in PostScript interpreter and was great for printing from our Sun and HP workstations.
• mattkevan 6y ago
  Made a solemn vow years ago to never ever buy another HP product again when I realised that the inkjet printer I bought in the UK from a major UK retailer was region-locked to US ink. No official HP ink cartridge bought in the UK would work with it and there was nothing official I could do to change it. Had to muck about with refills, blank chips and ink systems for years until the happy day when the thing broke and I threw it as hard as I could into the e-waste skip. 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.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    TIL that ink is treated like television shows for the purposes of geography.
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
    Today I replaced a HP Laserjet that ran a firmware update. Shame on me for not keeping it from phoning home. 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 I'll not make this mistake with the Brother I'm unboxing now.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      Brother's firmware doesn't do funky stuff like that... but I do only use USB-based ones.
      • 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
        Thank god – though I'll probably leave that on my router for the near future ;-)
• humaniania 6y ago
  I work in IT. Can confirm that this is a problem for small businesses.
• NegativeLatency 6y ago
  I recently hooked a raspberry pi (as a print server) to my older monochrome laser printer and it's been pretty great.
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  Just buy a decent printer. My brother DCP-9015 colour laser is doing OK, and gets treated a bit rough too!
• BOOSTERHIDROGEN 6y ago
  I've been using for the last 5 years, inkjet with integrated printer cartridge (With this type, the nozzle plate (printhead) is built into the side of the cartridge) no problem so far
• wstrange 6y ago
  I have a printer story for you young whipper-snappers. 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
  • spacemanmatt 6y ago
    This reminds me of the BBS equivalent. 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.
    • zaphirplane 6y ago
      How would you call them without disconnecting yourself ? Presumably you had one phone line
      • maxden 6y ago
        I think they are saying they couldn't connect as all lines were busy, so they would call someone they assumed was connected, causing the other person to drop off and free up a line, and then try and get that free line.
        • wccrawford 6y ago
          I think call waiting "beep beep" would also cause disconnects a lot of the time, if the person had that.
• dangerboysteve 6y ago
  I have an old Samsung scx-4626 multi-function laser and its been problem free ever since I purchased it. rock solid device. I also use good paper that does not have all that paper dust from cheaper brands.
• coleca 6y ago
  Anecdotal evidence of course but I’ve had nothing but success with Brother ink jets. I’ve had my current Brother business class printer for over six years now. It’s huge but it prints on ledger size 11x17 paper (nice for flowcharts). It works great with cheap Amazon generic ink cartridges as well. Even the scanner is reliable. Half the printers I’ve used require all sorts of incantations to get the computer to recognize the scanner but not the Brother.
• b212 6y ago
  When we were young and poor I got my wife HP 2200D for $40. It was in 2010, the printer was already really old and beat. Since then it has printed roughly 200 000 pages for her and God knows how many before we got it. The C4096A toners are roughly $20 where I live and easily print on average 10 000 pages but some we did almost 20 000, it’s technically impossible (most toners are built for 6000 pages) but it happened. In the meantime my parents changed 3 or 4 XXI century printers and some of them were very expensive. The only trouble with 2200D we have is it won’t run on Windows 8/10, worked flawlessly on 7. I spent days trying to figure out the drivers and surrendered. So we’re just printing on Mac. It’s extremely easy to fix (I personally replaced broken duplex mechanism and it was 100 times easier than changing RAM in Mac Mini) and did nothing else excepting feeding it paper and new toners. I hate printers and am really scared what is going to happen once our old timer breaks for good.
• chrysoprace 6y ago
  I read an article years ago about how high the markup is for ink toner. 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.
  • mark-r 6y ago
    Most people wouldn't buy a printer if they charged proportionally to what they cost to build. The manufacturers universally rely on ink profits to make up the difference.
• gandalfian 6y ago
  I'm cheap. Buy most basic £45 canon with seperate ink cartridges and use dollar a cartridge third party ink. Lasts 3-4 years. Brother inkjets were good till they got too clever at chipping ink cartridges. 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.
• mauvehaus 6y ago
  You have your choice: you can get an inkjet, and all of them suck at the consumer price level. 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.
• amelius 6y ago
  Also the interfaces seem stuck in the 90s. We have cheap high resolution touch-screens now. Use them.
• bullen 6y ago
  They don't: https://axidraw.com https://axidraw.com
• ngcc_hk 6y ago
  The two big fujixerox colour laser printer run my kids to its pre-college and my wife home business. But once boys are gone i immediately switch to the ecoprint version (epson l6190). Slower, but so much cheaper for colour print. Did worry about the drying but so far so good. Do keep a Hp laser portable mono in case of trouble.
• gerdesj 6y ago
  "Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again." Inkjets need near constant use or the ink dries up. OP has described a constraint that points towards a laser.
• kaetemi 6y ago
  Brother inkjet is still running fine on the original ink fill from over 2 years ago. And we've been doing plenty of full color photo prints on it. Local model with large refillable ink tanks builtin, though.
• lanius 6y ago
  It took me an embarrassingly long time before I learned I could digitally sign PDFs (literally draw my signature). After this discovery, I've not had any need for a printer.
  • lvturner 6y ago
    Depending on country/jurisdiction this may or may not be 'legal'
  • newhotelowner 6y ago
    I use fox it reader. You can paste a signature PNG file in a PDF. I print that PDF again using Microsoft PDF printer as an image with reduce quality. It looks like a scanned page.
• bfuclusion 6y ago
  I like the Xerox Workcenters. Speaks PCL + Postscript, can netcat a job to it. Automatically shows up in CUPS and Windows, and has a full duplex scanner to boot. I got mine for 400$, which considering it's monthly duty cycle is 10x my yearly output I don't really mind.
• ggm 6y ago
  Until you've used a wet process printer you haven't lived.. 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.
  • Something1234 6y ago
    > 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.
    • ggm 6y ago
      Back in the 80s there was a strong "don't waste it" vibe for devices in general. This one took very specific pens. I was writing a fortran printer driver for it, I had reasons to use it but the overall sense was "stop wasting ink" 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.
      • Something1234 6y ago
• xvilka 6y ago
  Reminds me of not very famous but important project of writing open source driver for Canon CAPT printers - captdriver[1]. [1] https://github.com/agalakhov/captdriver https://github.com/agalakhov/captdriver
• spacemanmatt 6y ago
  HP
• inetknght 6y ago
  Paper printers will stop sucking when you can make your own with a 3d printer, some motors, and maybe an arduino controller.
• lvturner 6y ago
  I'm at the stage now where I get annoyed when I have to print anything. 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.
• hermitcrab 6y ago
  Just to echo the general theme: -I have an Epson inkjet for printing colour photos. It is a pain in the arse. I hate it. -I have a cheap Brother B&W laser for printing documents. It has been great. I once had a HP colour laser printer. It was so bad (particularly the software) that I vowed never to buy HP kit again.
• nojvek 6y ago
  I have a laser printer over wireless. Other than changing paper and changing toner once every 3 years, it just works. 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.
  • jjnoakes 6y ago
    For the life of me I can not print to my Brother HL-2270DW over wifi from linux or android. I've tried all combinations of print services, cups drivers and wrappers (even the ones from the Brother web site), and protocol/port/queue combinations I can find. 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?
    • vectro2 6y ago
      I struggled with exactly this model and use case. Check out the AUR package for the 2270DW, and make sure image quality is set to 600dpi. That was the magic combination for me. Also check out the Arch wiki on Brother printers.
      • jjnoakes 6y ago
        Thanks for the pointers!
• b20000 6y ago
  Making hardware is difficult. It's called HARDware.
• kristianpaul 6y ago
  Is just nostalgia or those dot printers where actually less error prone?
• m0zg 6y ago
  This is relatively recent. My HP printer from 15 years ago is excellent and it's still going strong. Anything I can buy today would be a de-facto downgrade.
• gumby 6y ago
  The real reason is that hardly anyone prints any more so the remaining companies are chopping costs in the hope of continuing to get some revenue from a shrinking market. Quality suffers...so fewer people even buy a printer “just in case”. Death spiral.
• taeric 6y ago
  Printers don't suck. Not even a little bit. They are disappointing for the pricing model. Amazing for how well they work.
• throwanem 6y ago
  They don't! 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?
• baron816 6y ago
  > it turned out my toddler had dropped some coins into it when I wasn’t looking Are there any startups out there working on an AI babysitter? There must be.
• akerr 6y ago
  Another happy Brother user here. Our HL-L2360D is rock solid, crisp, duplex and AirPrint is excellent. Cost AU$150 years ago and AU$15 for toner via eBay.
• sneak 6y ago
  In 2020 it is now possible to simply refuse to use paper or a printer. It's possible to do an all-PDF workflow for most things. 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.
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  My question is more like -- what's the next big thing? We've had laser printers forever, and the under-$100 Brother ones are just awesome for a home printer. But nothing has really changed in years. Color laser has gotten cheaper, I guess. But is that it? Is that the pinnacle of printing?
  • stkdump 6y ago
    I find that my need for printing declines over time. I now have to print one or two times a year.
• semireg 6y ago
  Ask yourself: What is the best hardware on the planet with the worst software? 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 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!
  • severak_cz 6y ago
    I looked at your page and it seems that prices are missing at https://label.live/faq/what-does-label-live-cost https://label.live/faq/what-does-label-live-cost (Business licneses cost ${PRICEBUSINESSMONTHLY} per month (or ${PRICE_BUSINESS} one time) and support printing barcodes for business use.)
    • semireg 6y ago
      Oops! This is embarrassing. Looks like I broke the gatsby. Thanks for the heads up.
• jmspring 6y ago
  Only job I was ever fired from - it was a temp job. Mortgage comps in the early 90s. Printing was the slowest part of the process. I installed a print spooler and was 3x more productive than peers and boss. 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.
• ponker 6y ago
  Lol! I bought a Brother laser printer for $100. Prints automatic full duplex. Joins to my WiFi and hardwired Ethernet. Plugged it in and every computer in the house printed to it immediately. My PHONE prints to it flawlessly. GTFO printer complainer! You have no idea how bad it used to be!
• natex 6y ago
  Because relatively few use them.
• j0057 6y ago
  I have an HP LaserJet MFP M28w, and it's actually somewhat decent! It does B&W prints, and that's actually all we need at home. I can print directly from my phone, scan directly to my phone, and amazingly, I can print from Linux, which I would never have dreamed of in all my 20 years of Linux desktop usage. 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.
• plibither8 6y ago
  A lot of comments here have mentioned that inkjets don't perform well if left idle for a long period of time, but I can't seem to a reason for this. So, why?
  • Ballas 6y ago
    The ink in the nozzles dry up and usually it takes several 'cleaning' sessions to get them all working again.
    • fyfy18 6y ago
      Yes this exactly. My friend has a professional printer like you'd find in printing shops, and when he is on holiday I go to his house every few days to run a test print to make sure the head doesn't dry up. If it does, the only real option is to pay a few hundred Euro for a new one.
  • wingworks 6y ago
    The ink dries out on the ink heads/and then cartridge, where as toner is already dry and can usually sit unused for much longer and still work fine.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Has anyone had luck after buying a used, maybe corporate off-lease, laser printer?
• 60secz 6y ago
  Unless you're printing novels, best bet imo is to buy a canon wifi multifunction with a duplex scanner for ~$100, and get 3rd party ink cartridges on ebay for $1 each.
  • mritun 6y ago
    +1 - Canon MFP are really good. Mine is a joy to use (ha!)
• Vaslo 6y ago
  Also - projectors still suck. When I did my grad school presentations in 2004, I was asked to print 50 copies for 40 slide decks just in case the projector failed. Even in 2020 at work, we run into significant issues that completely derail meetings. And it seems like the most expensive setups (in our executive conference room for example) are the worst.
• Haga 6y ago
  Because the system that builds printer company's has inherent flaws. Taking software as a model, how would a society/ economy have to look like for a tech peak to remain permanent. Socialism does not count as answer
• scoot_718 6y ago
  If you're complaining about ink cartridges I have no sympathy. You bought the cheaper option that is terrible for home use. Meanwhile I've never once had to buy more supplies for my laser printer with 4 years of owning it.
• SergeAx 6y ago
  There was a quick period of inkjet printers reign when everybody wanted to print their digital photos. Now it's gone, so the only thing we should come to terms with is going back to black-and-white for everyday printing and settle with inexpensive laser devices.
• poisonborz 6y ago
  +1 Brother laser printers. Inkjet is a dead end. What pushed me over is that they now have cheap color laser printers as well (LED printers). For photos, go to a print shop.
• emrehan 6y ago
  There was a startup researching printers without ink. They’ll work by burning the paper. It seems like they’re out of business: https://www.yesdelft.com/startups/tocano/ https://www.yesdelft.com/startups/tocano/
• Animats 6y ago
  I've never had much trouble with printers. I owned an original Apple LaserWriter II, which I retired in working condition, an HP LaserJet, which I retired in working condition, and an Epson ET-2650, which works OK. It's cheap to operate; I have to pour in some more ink once a year or so. Doesn't seem to jam. It is subject to nozzle clogging if not used for a week or two, but a few cleaning cycles fixes that. 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.
• brtkdotse 6y ago
  Simple - everybody’s buying bottom-tier garbage while expecting something long-lasting and reliable. 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.
• timonoko 6y ago
  Some are complaining photo quality on laser printer. Try heat laminator: colors melt again and get mixed better and then get diffused into the transparent plastic. No visible plastic layer on top. This would not happen with ink-jet colors.
• MarcScott 6y ago
  Haven't owned a printer in about 10 years. I hated the bloody things. The expense, the jams, and above all the pointlessness of taking an electronic document and printing it on paper, when everyone has email. 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?
  • selfhoster11 6y ago
    Your hate might come from using an inkjet printer. Lasers are much cleaner and not nearly as annoying to deal with.
• WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  Fortunately, the era of printers came and passed, and I managed to survive without ever having to own one. 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.
  • ec109685 6y ago
    With learning at home, we are using the printer 100x more than normal.
    • WhyNotHugo 6y ago
      I'm curious to hear why. I can't think of any reason to use a printer (not implying your usage is invalid, just saying I can't think of what it might be).
      • bluGill 6y ago
        Because paper is such a great medium for some tasks. Every day we print out the list of assignments my kids have, and they can check them off as they do them. They have several writing assignments which we print off and they write by hand. (my kids are in kindergarten and second grade - too young to be good at typing so a pencil is clearly better for writing tasks)
  • harha 6y ago
    I wouldn't mind printing out a paper (as in academic paper) to read and add notes while building things, since I would need to take hand written notes anyway and to avoid having the screen on all the time or to read outside when the weather is nice. 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.
• harg 6y ago
  From reading many of the comments both in the original article and the HN post there is a clear theme: HP printers seem to be the source of many people's frustrations. Perhaps printers wouldn't have such a bad rep if it wasn't for HP. 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.
  • diegocg 6y ago
    HP laser printers are good, their expensive stuff is good. It seems that most people buy the cheap ink ones, that's where most problems seem to come from (mine is certainly frustrating at times) 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.
• brutuscat 6y ago
  I would not want to endorse any company, but we've been using HP Instant Ink quite successfully since we knew the existed and we are really happy with how that resulted. It is actually pretty cheap for us, 3 EUR per month and we get 50 prints per month and these accumulate if you don't use them. They even send you the ink before you run out of it and they take the empty ones for you to recycle. Great value for the customer if u ask me!
• jaimex2 6y ago
  Best advice I can give anyone - buy yourself a used office laser printer. Those things never die. You'll probably never finish the cartridge and they print crazy fast.
• meerita 6y ago
  I remember my first academia study delivered in the best paper, printed with my Inkjet Cannon printer, and later, with my laser Epson... my proffesors where drooling over it and i got the best puntuation because of the quality over the rest of the guys who used typewriters :S
• MarkusWandel 6y ago
  +2 for Brother laser printers. I have a HL2270DW (duplex wifi) and a DCP7040 (multifunction print/scan/copy, USB only). They cost me, respectively, $0 and $5 at garage sales. They have <$20 aftermarket toner cartridges in them and print flawlessly with these. 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.
  • lmz 6y ago
    The HL2270DW should be PCL compatible. Not sure about the DCP7040.
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  I really enjoyed my Epson multifunction inkjet, up until it just stopped printing, even with new ink cartridges. It died after only a couple years of extremely seldom use. 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.
• inshadows 6y ago
  Theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8
• traceroute66 6y ago
  You want a real-life "why do printers still suck story" ? Try this one one for size. 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".
  • taspeotis 6y ago
    Doesn’t Apple get plaudits for Activation Lock that prevents an iPhone being activated? Why is Canon bad for making things secure but not Apple? Do you own your phone any more or less than you own your printer?
• krick 6y ago
  What a terrible article. I clicked to learn why do printers suck, and ended up spending several minutes reading some absolutely non-informative ranting.
• brnt 6y ago
  Wherever you find embedded programmers, you find pain.
• resters 6y ago
  My advice on printers: - 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
• patwolf 6y ago
  As a kid we had an HP DeskJet Plus. It was built like a tank and cost close to $1000 (in 1989). It worked flawlessly for many years, and we only eventually upgraded to get color. 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.
• rejschaap 6y ago
  A HP LaserJet from 2001 is still my main printer. It's a bit slow, but very reliable, cheap to run and has good quality prints. Many InkJets have come and gone in that time.
  • city41 6y ago
    I also have an HP Laserjet and it works reliably. it's hooked up to a Raspberry Pi running CUPS so it even works for my phones and Linux desktop. I'm not educated in printers at all, but anecdotally it seems most problems arise with ink printers.
• bsenftner 6y ago
  I gave up on their entire product category. I stopped buying printers 15 years ago and I urge everyone to stop also. When their fucking wallets are empty they'll fix their fucking shitty printers.
• JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Got the ink subscription plan. Worked for a while. Lost the little bag to send cartridges back, but wait! you can order another on their web site. Got it, sent the spent cartridges back and ..... nothing. No more ink. Still paying, but not getting ink. Sigh. No button on the website to press that says "where the fuck is my ink?!"
• varispeed 6y ago
  I bought a Brother laser printer from a company that was upgrading their office equipment. I paid for it like £30. It is a colour printer. I have been enjoying it for like 6 years now and it still has plenty of toner left and no issues whatsoever. It feels like it can print infinite number of pages without any issue. I am truly amazed. When I compare it to the Canon and HP printers I had where I had to literally swap the ink every few pages and for Canon there was a moment where it was cheaper to buy a printer with ink included, than just the ink.
• exabrial 6y ago
  https://archive.is/gv0SZ https://archive.is/gv0SZ
• dangus 6y ago
  Printers don’t still suck. You just have to spend proper money on one if you want it to be nice. Like every other consumer product. 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.
• 2143 6y ago
  Intrigued by the hugely favorable reviews for Brother printers. I like appliances (printer or otherwise) that just work. If I ever have to buy a printer again, I'll seriously consider Brother. 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 :)
• slezyr 6y ago
  I still have a Canon Pixma iP3600 that I've bought 10 years ago and 3rd party refillable cartridges. It's cheap, plug'n'play setup, compact (relatively to the laser jet printers). 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.
• chkaloon 6y ago
  It's not just printers. Windows' print spooler and drivers are still garbage after 25 years, since W95. Freezes, hard to tell if printing is actually happening, etc., etc., etc.
• es7 6y ago
  Do they still suck? 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.
• chmaynard 6y ago
  I seldom need to print anything, but when I do I email the document to my local Staples. They are cheap, fast, and reliable. I suspect most people could get rid of their printers and do the same thing.
• chovyfu 6y ago
  I switched to Linux 2 years ago. Tried a canon. Garbage. Spent some money and bought a brother color laser. It was around $800 but Brother publishes open source drivers so Ubuntu picked it up right away. The only real problem is it weights like 30 lbs.
• Noxmiles 6y ago
  Why are there no real open source hardware printers? Some parts should be similar to 3d printers, probably the print head (for ink) or toner roll/drum (for laser) will be quite difficult. I saw some tries on hackaday etc, but no real printer with 100% open source & open hardware. Does anyone know a project building that?
• samth 6y ago
  Sadly this article doesn't actually answer the question, but there was a great New Yorker article in 2018 that did: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams...