3 ms·

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 devi

by 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.

brudgers 6y ago
Paper jams are also related to use. Paper is dimensionally unstable. It swells and shrinks with changes in humidity. In a stack of paper the exposed top sheet will change more than the sheet below it. The edges of each sheet will change more than the center. Additionally paper has a grain structure and expands more in one axis than the others. Humidity also changes the thickness of paper. That’s the nature of paper. Most people, and for a long time I was one of them don’t have a good working model of paper as a material. In part because mechanical printing was not common until thirty years ago. In part because in the first part of the PC revolution printing was more an everyday thing since online publishing was rarely a viable alternative. After I wrote my previous comment, I fleshed out an idea it touches on tangentially. Printers are not computational artifacts. Little more so than a dishwasher with a microprocessor. Though we tend to think of them as part of a computer, they act directly in meat space. Directly on paper with ink or toner. Laser printers are less reliable because we print less. The old workhorse printers were workhorse printers because they were used so heavily that paper didn’t have much time to swell in bad ways. There are printing methods that are good for infrequent use. Fanfold paper tractor fed through an impact printer is nearly bulletproof and dies gracefully as the ribbon ink depletes. But they are noisy, bulky, slow, feature poor, and inflexible. However most understand ESC2 and writing control software is accessible from any language that can send bytes to a port.
- gregmac 6y ago
  I took a tour of HP's Boise test lab [1] a few years ago, and the biggest take-away from that for me was that (in their opinion) paper quality is one of the biggest factors in printer reliablity. The test lab includes lots of neat things: an RF chamber, acoustic chamber (in a dedicated separate vibration-isolated building), a couple climate simuation rooms (humid, cold), a bunch of robot arms that open/close drawers or use touchscreens/keypads. (Here's a 5-min video tour [2] of it if you're interested.) Despite all that they were quite proud of their a massive inventory of paper from all over the world and testing they did with it. This included environmental (humidity/temp) testing after acclimatizing the paper for several days. They even went out of their way to get paper mills to custom create some of the crappiest papers they'd run across. I think the explanation was basically poor quality, rough paper leaves particles all over everything and causes rollers, drums etc to wear out faster. Depending on your usage, it's at least worth considering when you're buying paper and looking at saving a few dollars on the cheaper stuff. [1] https://garage.hp.com/us/en/business/boise-test-lab-hp-printers.html https://garage.hp.com/us/en/business/boise-test-lab-hp-print... [2] https://vimeo.com/242827801/8322d83960 https://vimeo.com/242827801/8322d83960
  - brudgers 6y ago
    In 1992 I bought an HP Inkjet 550c. In 1994 HP sent me a roller cleaning kit and a floppy to run it. Basically a scotch pad scrubby for the paper pickup rollers. It was the last great HP product I bought. The sound it made was magical. It was still well working after ten years when I gave it to a non profit administrator who lacked a printer. The 600 series printers I specked and bought for the office in 1995 banshee howled by comparison...though nothing like a dot matrix.
  - harha 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing, this looks like an interesting place. I understand that it's challenging, I just don't think it's unsolvable given there is sufficient of a market for people to complain. You won't get the same up to spec paper and humidity around the world, the printer should handle that and I think there are people willing to pay a premium on the hardware if they now it's going to play nice for the rare use in many years.

by harha 6y ago

brudgers 6y ago

Paper jams are also related to use. Paper is dimensionally unstable. It swells and shrinks with changes in humidity. In a stack of paper the exposed top sheet will change more than the sheet below it. The edges of each sheet will change more than the center. Additionally paper has a grain structure and expands more in one axis than the others. Humidity also changes the thickness of paper. That’s the nature of paper. Most people, and for a long time I was one of them don’t have a good working model of paper as a material. In part because mechanical printing was not common until thirty years ago. In part because in the first part of the PC revolution printing was more an everyday thing since online publishing was rarely a viable alternative. After I wrote my previous comment, I fleshed out an idea it touches on tangentially. Printers are not computational artifacts. Little more so than a dishwasher with a microprocessor. Though we tend to think of them as part of a computer, they act directly in meat space. Directly on paper with ink or toner. Laser printers are less reliable because we print less. The old workhorse printers were workhorse printers because they were used so heavily that paper didn’t have much time to swell in bad ways. There are printing methods that are good for infrequent use. Fanfold paper tractor fed through an impact printer is nearly bulletproof and dies gracefully as the ribbon ink depletes. But they are noisy, bulky, slow, feature poor, and inflexible. However most understand ESC2 and writing control software is accessible from any language that can send bytes to a port.

gregmac 6y ago
I took a tour of HP's Boise test lab [1] a few years ago, and the biggest take-away from that for me was that (in their opinion) paper quality is one of the biggest factors in printer reliablity. The test lab includes lots of neat things: an RF chamber, acoustic chamber (in a dedicated separate vibration-isolated building), a couple climate simuation rooms (humid, cold), a bunch of robot arms that open/close drawers or use touchscreens/keypads. (Here's a 5-min video tour [2] of it if you're interested.) Despite all that they were quite proud of their a massive inventory of paper from all over the world and testing they did with it. This included environmental (humidity/temp) testing after acclimatizing the paper for several days. They even went out of their way to get paper mills to custom create some of the crappiest papers they'd run across. I think the explanation was basically poor quality, rough paper leaves particles all over everything and causes rollers, drums etc to wear out faster. Depending on your usage, it's at least worth considering when you're buying paper and looking at saving a few dollars on the cheaper stuff. [1] https://garage.hp.com/us/en/business/boise-test-lab-hp-printers.html https://garage.hp.com/us/en/business/boise-test-lab-hp-print... [2] https://vimeo.com/242827801/8322d83960 https://vimeo.com/242827801/8322d83960
- brudgers 6y ago
  In 1992 I bought an HP Inkjet 550c. In 1994 HP sent me a roller cleaning kit and a floppy to run it. Basically a scotch pad scrubby for the paper pickup rollers. It was the last great HP product I bought. The sound it made was magical. It was still well working after ten years when I gave it to a non profit administrator who lacked a printer. The 600 series printers I specked and bought for the office in 1995 banshee howled by comparison...though nothing like a dot matrix.
- harha 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing, this looks like an interesting place. I understand that it's challenging, I just don't think it's unsolvable given there is sufficient of a market for people to complain. You won't get the same up to spec paper and humidity around the world, the printer should handle that and I think there are people willing to pay a premium on the hardware if they now it's going to play nice for the rare use in many years.