Printers are a bit of a sore subject from a tech standpoint. Anything that's mechanical in a predominantly software / circuit world is a pain in the ass. It just doesn't jive with the way...
Exemplary
Printers are a bit of a sore subject from a tech standpoint. Anything that's mechanical in a predominantly software / circuit world is a pain in the ass. It just doesn't jive with the way everything is going.
There's a lot of reasons why printers suck and sins have been committed on both sides of the aisle. The consumer, as always, loses.
The never ending battle between the manufacturer and the operating system is one of the chief sources of pain. The manufacturer will create a driver one way to accommodate the new bells and whistles the printer has to compete with other brands. They will create it with the barebones, outdated, requirements to have it work in windows. Windows moves at a fast pace and Microsoft is constantly changing things. That and they have a whole lot of hardware combinations to test for and they miss things all the time because it's hard to keep up with so many niche manufacturers doing things in irregular ways.
So the driver breaks. The OS and the printer company don't agree on the best way to develop a driver because they have different goals. Microsoft wants uniformity and they want all printers to install one way for their end user. The printer manufacturer doesn't want that because they want brand loyalty and they want to stand out or provide their own support or their features demand the driver be built one way especially when it comes to networking capabilities which opens up a few more can of worms.
Networking is easy on paper but difficult in practice especially when you add wifi to the mix.
ISPs have fucked up Wi-Fi so hard and disrupted the home router market which was already a fucked up field to begin with built on a very finicky technology that has issues with physical materials. In fact, the same point I just got done making about OS needs versus proprietary manufacturer needs is happening with Wi-Fi as well twice over.
The ISP wants their customers to stop complaining. The customer complains about Wi-Fi all the time without understanding how it works, or what the limitations are, or what their expectations should be. So they take the thinking away from baby and "fix it" by tuning settings in the ISP provided router that's only good in a vacuum. They can't test for all building materials or all distances or all markets so they just turn the router on full blast which a bunch of settings geared towards maximum compatibility so your fridge and eleven year old printer can all get on the Wi-Fi just fine while sacrificing speed because their goal is to say you connected from your yard, can play Spotify, or load Facebook, not that you have full performance on your wifi device.
Naturally, printer manufacturers try to "fix" people's misconfigured and poorly thought out Wi-Fi by, you guessed it, messing with their driver and using none standard methods in an attempt to accommodate their printer. They give the printer shit wifi components that slow the entire network down, make the ISP accommodate them, and then tweak and tell the OS the printer has special needs.
The world could be so simple. So so simple. But no. Printers don't want that for you.
Notice how I haven't even gotten to the physical problems printers have or the capitalistic schemes they employ to stay relevant? Cheap parts, proprietary and expensive parts with expensive repairs giving the consumer incentive to just waste plastic to buy a new printer instead. All to print that Google maps, or that funny cat email.
Even Apple's solution to this madness, Airprint which uses Bonjour, a service that cleverly bypasses that whole nonsense to talk to printers in a pretty uniform way still relies on the damn router playing nice with it. It relies on a properly configured network and because of ISPs meddling with settings so baby doesn't have to think, it's hit or miss and while it's out of the box for apple products for printers that support the service (which you may still have to manually enable or set up because that's not how the printer manufacturer intended for you to print) it's not configured on Windows at all.
Just absolute madness dudes and dudettes. Madness.
And that's just for personal consumer grade printers. The business sized ones? Also knows as MFPs or multi functional printers? They also interact poorly with networks and OSes. Why? Because an MFP will easily last five plus years and in that time windows will have upgraded multiple times, so will your wifi, so will your network, so will your laptop, and the damn thing will be stuck on ancient and insecure protocols relying on firmware updates that come out every other year to keep them relevant because they're a complicated and very expensive piece of mechanical machinery.
Between the two, business printers at least try to be nice and there's a subindustry built just for mfps, experts that deal with them, but consumer grade printers? They're a scam, they're all profit, they disrupt tech at every level, they're built to break, and are all around awful things to work with. You need to know what a network is, what wifi is, what a firewall is, how an operating system functions, all just to install and maintain the thing to get all the features you paid for.
Some brands, like Brother, are awesome. They are one of the ones that make decent long lasting products and they play well with Microsoft and networks.
Other brands, like HP, are literally the devil's above ground shell company and every time you purchase something from them you're giving Satan money so he can go destabilize a government somewhere in order to collect souls. Think about that. Just think about it before you go out there and make a poor financial decision. Satan is at the end of that road. Just keep that in the forefront.
Edit: this was obviously a rant to both vent and to shed some light on why they suck.
If you're asking for solutions? Well...unfortunately it's too late in the game for printer companies. They're kind of set in stone. Microsoft and apple have both tried and failed to tame and add uniformity to the entire mess. Printer companies just will not. One company could come out with a nexgen sexy iPrint something or other, or maybe a rebellious green FOSS "the people's printer" that utilizes OS / ISP friendly tech and it would disrupt the entire industry and maybe force it to change, but the printer companies have you there too because they'll just drop the price from 90% profit to 80% profit and undercut you. Also unless you have the infrastructure of ink or toner built, you can't even enter the market because that's where the money actually is. It's not just build a printer and sell it, it's make the infrastructure for the ink or toner and the printer and then sell it.
I think your rant is a little bit outdated now, actually. Everyone is basically doing things Apple’s way now (there is an official standard I’m too lazy to look up right now, but It’s something...
I think your rant is a little bit outdated now, actually. Everyone is basically doing things Apple’s way now (there is an official standard I’m too lazy to look up right now, but It’s something stupid sounding like “Internet Printing”). It means that as long as it is on the network, it’s just a server that computers send print jobs to in a uniform way. You don’t even need to dig up drivers because the OS just looks up the printer definition.
Networking problems still exist, of course, but it feels as if most printer companies have put more effort into making their firmware less crappy. Not a solved issue in the least, but it’s a little better, at least some times.
Most of the problems I have had with printers have been with Windows’ notoriously shitty printing software, but since these changes in the industry I have seen considerably less problems on Windows systems.
I deploy, maintain, purchase, and fix printers from all brands across multiple environments, business and home, and across multiple operating systems, wired and wireless. I rant from the heart.
I deploy, maintain, purchase, and fix printers from all brands across multiple environments, business and home, and across multiple operating systems, wired and wireless.
I haven't installed printer software for years now. Hell, even printing from the phone has gotten super easy. Of all the things I hate about printers, they're definitely moving the right direction...
I haven't installed printer software for years now. Hell, even printing from the phone has gotten super easy.
Of all the things I hate about printers, they're definitely moving the right direction on the software front for people who just want to print something out.
Setting quality, calibrating, scanning, etc is still a huge pain, but for your basic "put this on 8.5x11 paper" print job, it's never been easier.
Internet Printing Protocol, which is a godsend, but doesn't fix most of the issues with printers especially on Windows. In my house, my parents use Windows, I use Linux. I never have issues...
Internet Printing Protocol, which is a godsend, but doesn't fix most of the issues with printers especially on Windows. In my house, my parents use Windows, I use Linux. I never have issues sending something to the printer and getting it printed anymore since I gave the printer a static IP in my network (before that... well. Hit or miss.). Meanwhile, print jobs from Windows constantly get lost in the ether, the printer stops being recognized, or just refuses to print and I suspect that is not the printer (or its driver's) fault. The printer is a Brother MFC which is pretty old and honestly Windows should have no issue talking to it.
Why does everyone hate HP? I'm not trying to defend them, I'm sure they suck, but I don't understand why they are so much worse than Canon or Epson or any of the other manufacturers. At least HP...
HP is still the devil though, certainly.
Why does everyone hate HP? I'm not trying to defend them, I'm sure they suck, but I don't understand why they are so much worse than Canon or Epson or any of the other manufacturers.
At least HP has been providing official Linux drivers for many years, and I've always respected them for that. This isn't really relevant today for printing, as you explained, but my parents have an Epson with a scanner that doesn't work because you have to download the drivers from the Epson website and they probably only work on Ubuntu LTS 16.04 or something. I refuse to do that because this isn't the 90s anymore. The old HP scanner just worked because the drivers came with the OS.
I think this might be one of the cases where your experience will be more reliable on Linux than Windows because of the nature of how they work and receive updates. Microsoft has a large incentive...
I think this might be one of the cases where your experience will be more reliable on Linux than Windows because of the nature of how they work and receive updates. Microsoft has a large incentive to stay ahead of the curve and make their one-size-fits-most drivers for compatibility, whereas Linux driver compatibility tends towards the KISS model of being more modular and interoperable, though there might be tweaks required if you've got a highly customized setup.
I can say at my workplace that HP printers are, on the whole, rather unreliable at times, often because either a driver update or a Windows update broke something. My personal gripe is that HP makes you download their telemetry-gathering HP Smart app that you pretty much need if you want to actually use the scanner. Of course, you need to make an HP account and login to use HP Smart. I recall the app periodically advertising sales via the same desktop popup mechanism that lets you know when the ink is low or something failed, which was very annoying but I think I found a way to turn it off.
We have a PageWide that about 6 people including myself use concurrently, and one coworker specifically has an odd issue where it takes 30 seconds instead of 3-4 seconds to print a page. Nobody has been able to figure it out, including the IT guy, and that's not for lack of trying. At this point I'm pretty convinced it would require a system wipe and reinstall to work (though in this case it's probably a Windows thing with that person's computer). The whole office uses HP at the behest of our purchasing manager and we have several dozen total in use (most are just for individual offices for those important enough to have one) and there are frequent issues. There's probably at least a dozen that have either completely broken or had weird, unresolvable issues that are just sitting in a back supply closet right now for some reason.
I also had to do a bunch of manual setup on my work computer to get double sided printing and the multiple trays with different size paper to work; the correct driver wouldn't automatically select or download when the printer was 'installed', and even the driver HP provides on their website for the specific model didn't fix the Windows Print dialog. I also had issues connecting my MacBook to that same printer for the odd form that I needed for personal printouts, I think I had to remove and re-add the printer like 3-4 times using different settings before it worked acceptably and didn't print out gibberish when I queued up documents.
I had basically none of these issues when I used my dad's Brother laser printer. Though that printer did also have its suite of printing and scanning tools, they didn't require an account and more or less worked without hours of troubleshooting.
Like Ashelyn mentioned, their windows software packages have always been garbage. As has their support. The HP website used to be a complete joke. I assume it probably still is, but I don't go...
Like Ashelyn mentioned, their windows software packages have always been garbage. As has their support. The HP website used to be a complete joke. I assume it probably still is, but I don't go there because I long learned not to buy HP consumer products.
They're pretty much the poster child for anti-consumer business practices. There are a number of bad practices that all of the manufacturers do, but HP originated nearly all of them. Right now most people are upset about their Instant Ink program. I personally thought that it was overblown because of people simply not reading how the program worked, until I learned that their new printers don't come with a starter cartridge, they come with an instant ink cartridge and a free trial instead, hoping that you'll buy into their subscription service.
It should also be noted that on most Unix systems, printers haven't needed drivers for quite a long time. At least not the same kind they used to. Pretty much every printer out there supports some variation on postscript, so the manufacturers don't even need to provide a driver to get them running. Someone just needs to write a PPD for them. Most manufacturers provide the PPD anyways because they need to support OSX. Apple actually bought CUPS, and uses it in OSX (and presumably iOS as well). So HP's support is less of them supporting Linux and more of supporting Apple and getting Linux compatibility as a bonus.
Beyond that, they're also the largest printer manufacturer so they get the bulk of the blame.
Every time people would come up with stories about how printers sucked on Reddit, I would always present the same advice: you almost certainly don't need a printer. If you need to print something,...
Every time people would come up with stories about how printers sucked on Reddit, I would always present the same advice: you almost certainly don't need a printer.
If you need to print something, you can do so at your local library or hundreds of local businesses that offer the service.
If you print a lot, get a laser printer. By all means, avoid inkjet like the plague. They literally eject ink regularly in an attempt to keep the print head from clogging, and I can guarantee you that it will clog eventually, at which point the print head will be discontinued. Or it will be so expensive that you are better off buying a new printer. Or worse, it'll be integrated into the ink cartridges which will make them even more expensive. That last one seems to be a lot less common nowadays, though.
Even if you print a little, I’d say also consider a laser printer. A basic Brother. Cheap, fast, and robust printer with a very cheap per-page toner drum that won’t dry out or clog after long...
Even if you print a little, I’d say also consider a laser printer. A basic Brother. Cheap, fast, and robust printer with a very cheap per-page toner drum that won’t dry out or clog after long periods of inactivity. It’s nice being able to print out the odd form right at home.
My wife and I have had our Brother color laser printer for almost 20 yrs now. We don't use it that often, but when we need it it's always ready to go - the only trouble it gives us is moving it,...
My wife and I have had our Brother color laser printer for almost 20 yrs now. We don't use it that often, but when we need it it's always ready to go - the only trouble it gives us is moving it, b/c it's a bit of a beast.
This. If you've got kids, having a home printer (especially during covid) was kinda a life saver for me. So many worksheets, but also just weekend crafts too. But like, I still print boarding...
This. If you've got kids, having a home printer (especially during covid) was kinda a life saver for me. So many worksheets, but also just weekend crafts too.
But like, I still print boarding passes and stuff too. My phone is always out of battery for some reason or another so hard copies are generally the thing I trust. I got no problem with the phone people (but you're fucking slow as hell at the grocery store) but I think my inability to keep things charged is just the hill my old ass self will probably die stuck on.
For the charging issue, get yourself a Qi charger and set it up at your bedside. Set your phone on it and it will be fully charged in the morning. I have a Galaxy S23 with a somewhat thirsty...
For the charging issue, get yourself a Qi charger and set it up at your bedside. Set your phone on it and it will be fully charged in the morning. I have a Galaxy S23 with a somewhat thirsty battery and this is the best go to I've found. Been using this system for my last few phones. Plus, they are fairly cheap, around $20US.
They're great for homemade cards for the grandparents, too. We save all of the kids' drawings and paintings and when we need a card, we find just the right one, cut it down to fit the printer,...
They're great for homemade cards for the grandparents, too. We save all of the kids' drawings and paintings and when we need a card, we find just the right one, cut it down to fit the printer, then print off premade cards we find online and have the kids "sign" them. They're 4 though, so that mostly just means drawing little people with arms coming out of their heads.
I always go to the airport kiosk to print a boarding pass because even though I work in tech I’m a Luddite. One time at LGA the TSA scanners were all down so people were waiting in security line...
I always go to the airport kiosk to print a boarding pass because even though I work in tech I’m a Luddite. One time at LGA the TSA scanners were all down so people were waiting in security line for an hour to be turned away and told to go get paper boarding passes that they can manually check and get back in line again, people were losing their fucking minds but not me!
And not paying for gas... I'd say it's better to keep a few more cars off the road by having people who need printing every now and then just get a laser printer at home.
And not paying for gas...
I'd say it's better to keep a few more cars off the road by having people who need printing every now and then just get a laser printer at home.
How far away is your library? How much gas does your car consume? Those numbers would have to be insane to overcome the environmental impact of producing a printer. They're e-waste.
How far away is your library? How much gas does your car consume?
Those numbers would have to be insane to overcome the environmental impact of producing a printer. They're e-waste.
E-waste is e-waste. It doesn’t matter how much it was used. You probably use your phone a lot but when you replace it it will become e-waste. Use helps to justify e-waste, but this whole...
E-waste is e-waste. It doesn’t matter how much it was used. You probably use your phone a lot but when you replace it it will become e-waste.
Use helps to justify e-waste, but this whole conversation is about people who don’t need to print much. If you’ve printed 15 pages in the 15 years you have owned a printer, that is still very wasteful.
Yes... I haven't thought twice about my printer for years -- everything in this article is ancient history in my mind because I bought an inexpensive multi-function Brother printer years ago (the...
Yes... I haven't thought twice about my printer for years -- everything in this article is ancient history in my mind because I bought an inexpensive multi-function Brother printer years ago (the first of which I gave to a teacher to use as a photocopier 4 or 5 years ago after many years of use because I wanted to upgrade to one w/ wireless printing), which works perfectly and without any configuration in Linux and macos (I have no idea nor care about Windows). I use it to scan all of my mail and sort it for longevity and shred the originals, and then when I need to print something I have it easily available. @Akir's advice also doesn't make any sense if you live somewhere rural, like I do, it would take me over an hour to get a printout -- I need them often enough that that would quickly become a huge hassle.
...which reminds me, it was complaining about low toner last week. I should think about ordering a replacement cartridge some time in the next month. :)
I still use an HP LaserJet 4 from like 1992. It's got about 600k pages on the clock and only just this year started missing feeds sometimes. Went on ebay and bought a refresh pack of new belts,...
I still use an HP LaserJet 4 from like 1992. It's got about 600k pages on the clock and only just this year started missing feeds sometimes. Went on ebay and bought a refresh pack of new belts, rollers, and other rubber bits and just need to get around to swapping them now. Sure it's slow compared to modern printers but in the event I need to print 10 pages who really cares if I'm waiting 3 minutes versus 30 seconds. Toner is still readily available, print quality is indistinguishable to me from stuff 30 years newer for the stuff I print, it's got wired networking, and my new computers still print to it with zero complaint.
Yeah, unless you love photography, there should be no reason to have an inkjet form of printer in your house. Post pandemic, secondhand laser printers have dropped precipitously. I also second...
Yeah, unless you love photography, there should be no reason to have an inkjet form of printer in your house. Post pandemic, secondhand laser printers have dropped precipitously. I also second using Brother for its compatibility with multiple OSes, cheap 3rd party toner that works, and generally being ok with DRM.
Inkjets, I wish I got the Ecotank ET8550, but my Canon PRO10 has a great output and its DRM cartridges can be defeated.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that a company like Kodak or Polaroid hasn't taken up this niche. I've seen some Polaroid instant-film printers that work with smartphones that seems nice enough as...
Yeah, unless you love photography, there should be no reason to have an inkjet form of printer in your house.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that a company like Kodak or Polaroid hasn't taken up this niche. I've seen some Polaroid instant-film printers that work with smartphones that seems nice enough as a novelty. But I've never seen bigger, prosumer models where I can feed them something akin to photo-paper and have them "develop" it. Obviously the chemistry would end up being different, depositing ink/dye rather than developing film or maybe something like dye sublimation they use to print t-shirts en masse. They could just sell packs of photo paper and not worry about all this inkjet hassle.
Exactly. I do need to print stuff regularly. I have a cheap mono laser, which has been running flawlessly for many years. I spend £20 or so every couple of years (or few thousand prints) on a new,...
Exactly. I do need to print stuff regularly. I have a cheap mono laser, which has been running flawlessly for many years. I spend £20 or so every couple of years (or few thousand prints) on a new, unbranded, toner cartridge and that is all.
If I want photos printing I use an online service who have much higher quality printers than I could ever afford, and charge me a few pence per print.
Same, and it's one of the few purchases that unequivocally changed my life for the better.
I have a cheap mono laser, which has been running flawlessly for many years. I spend £20 or so every couple of years (or few thousand prints) on a new, unbranded, toner cartridge and that is all.
Same, and it's one of the few purchases that unequivocally changed my life for the better.
Laser* printers aren’t even expensive anymore unless you want one for colour printing. You can even buy third party toner* on Amazon that work just as well as the oem ones. The last time I bought...
Laser* printers aren’t even expensive anymore unless you want one for colour printing. You can even buy third party toner* on Amazon that work just as well as the oem ones. The last time I bought toner* for my printer in…2020? I paid ~ $23 for two third party cartridges.
If not color, laser printers are much cheaper in the long run, especially for infrequent use as there's no risk of the ink drying out or clogging. EDIT: I notice that you're saying "laser jet",...
If not color, laser printers are much cheaper in the long run, especially for infrequent use as there's no risk of the ink drying out or clogging.
EDIT: I notice that you're saying "laser jet", "laserjet" is what HP calls their inkjet printers, maybe you did mean laser by the way that you separated the words, but you did say ink... so, I'm not actually sure.
Well, TIL that laser jet isn’t what all laser printers are called. It must be some weird regional thing because everyone I know calls laser printers “laser jet” printers. Also, are the refills for...
Well, TIL that laser jet isn’t what all laser printers are called. It must be some weird regional thing because everyone I know calls laser printers “laser jet” printers.
“jet” in “laserjet” (trademarked name) or “inkjet” (the generic term) generally refers to the fine nozzles that shoot the liquid ink at the paper to create the resulting printout — a laser printer...
“jet” in “laserjet” (trademarked name) or “inkjet” (the generic term) generally refers to the fine nozzles that shoot the liquid ink at the paper to create the resulting printout — a laser printer uses an electrostatic charge on the drum to first attract the toner (not ink, it’s a dry powder) to the paper and then heat fuses it in place and makes it stay in place. It’s a very different process, no ink involved.
I'm currently looking at getting an Epson 8550 (that's an A3 inkjet photo printer). I'm aware that this is no longer quite in the consumer segment these articles target, and more importantly it...
I'm currently looking at getting an Epson 8550 (that's an A3 inkjet photo printer).
I'm aware that this is no longer quite in the consumer segment these articles target, and more importantly it has ink tanks. Per-page cost is higher than on laser, but actually far less so than I thought it would.
I'm still considering whether to save the money and get an A4 Brother color laser printer instead but eh. Part of the reason I want the Epson is to be able to print oversized cheat sheets for board games and my own little posters. And there's really not that many options in this regard. In fact it's rare to find inktank printers in the first place, most of them are A4.
I have two Epson EcoTanks, one is consumer and one a business. You need to print fairly regularly to stop inkjet heads from blocking. As long as you do a page every so often they're great....
I have two Epson EcoTanks, one is consumer and one a business.
You need to print fairly regularly to stop inkjet heads from blocking. As long as you do a page every so often they're great. Ecosolvant ink works really well too.
I'd say go with the business models over consumer as they're built better and accept up to 300gsm card.
Got one. I think it is great. If you are printing mainly B & W the laser still comes out ahead but if you are doing color work like photos and art reproductions it is worth it.
Got one. I think it is great.
If you are printing mainly B & W the laser still comes out ahead but if you are doing color work like photos and art reproductions it is worth it.
Im quite happy with Canon Pixma, ink printer/scanner with refillable tanks. Using it for 2 years, I print full color A4 page everyday, usually one page, sometime a book. Spent 15$ on 4 bottles of...
Im quite happy with Canon Pixma, ink printer/scanner with refillable tanks. Using it for 2 years, I print full color A4 page everyday, usually one page, sometime a book. Spent 15$ on 4 bottles of ink, already refilled tank 2 or 3 times, so far so good.
Upd: of course I buy cheap not-original ink.
As somebody who just never, ever needs to print anything, until I do, library printers are the bomb. Every time I look at the cost of a new printer I cackle. The racket was one thing before DRM...
As somebody who just never, ever needs to print anything, until I do, library printers are the bomb. Every time I look at the cost of a new printer I cackle. The racket was one thing before DRM ink; now? Forget it.
Having worked at HP 20 years ago where I both saw the exorbitant cost of owning a printer and always having access to one at work, I vowed to never have a printer at home. I held the line for a...
Having worked at HP 20 years ago where I both saw the exorbitant cost of owning a printer and always having access to one at work, I vowed to never have a printer at home. I held the line for a long time, any time we needed something either my wife or I would print at work or we’d go to the staples down the block if it was urgent.
Then covid hit and we started having to print stuff from the kids’ schools every day when offices, libraries, and staples were all closed. Now I own a printer and it sucks.
Printers are necessary for my clinic and business. Most patients have low health literacy, and they need physical copies of what's been done for them, and for me to write on them about their...
Printers are necessary for my clinic and business. Most patients have low health literacy, and they need physical copies of what's been done for them, and for me to write on them about their medications
I have a an inkjet printing hobby and when I see articles like this I think “I don’t get mad, I get even” I got a “free” inkjet printer which I quickly learned is free as in “puppy” in that if you...
I have a an inkjet printing hobby and when I see articles like this I think “I don’t get mad, I get even”
I got a “free” inkjet printer which I quickly learned is free as in “puppy” in that if you don’t use it regularly the ink dries up and the few prints you make are astronomically expensive.
So I challenged myself to print something every day, sometimes it is anime art, sometimes it is art reproductions, sometimes it is photos I took or information graphics I made. Every card has a back side that documents the front and a QR code that links to a web page (currently the weak link in the chain.). Frequently I print something from 3 to 40 cards and put them up on the wall together.
This has been a process of overcoming limitations and has involved things like figuring out how to avoid problems caused by water making prints curl (print the back side first), how to keep color management from messing up red-cyan anaglyph stereograms (do the color management in my Python code before combining the left and right channels) and what to do about prints that faded noticeably in just 3 months (get a different printer).
All in all I see inkjet printers as a miracle that produce very low cost and high quality output if you use quality materials. Ink and coated paper prices are not quite the scam people think they are: when I was researching the fading problem I found documentation of OEM ink permanence was poor and of third-party ink was nonexistent. I mean, people whose main criterion is “cheep cheep cheep” just don’t care if the ink last five minutes or if VOC from the ink contaminates your workspace. I am always reading on forums about people attempting borderless printing and having inksplosions, people usually ask “are you using third-party ink?” and the OP says “Yes” and blames the responders. Looking at the price per print inkjet printers are a bargain particularly if you value your time. (I never could understand why the typical yarn store has 2000 skeins of bad smelling acrylic yarn and 1 of wool…. If you’re going to spend 20 hours making a scarf you’re valuing your time at pennies an hour using acrylic.)
(If you don’t like cartridges get an Epson ET-8550 which is a tank printer that takes the high quality and relatively permanent, for a dye ink, Claria ink. Don’t waste time with the ET-3000 line which fades terribly)
Now it’s true a bottom of the line printer will have more jams and be picky about what kind of paper you use. If owning a printer is not for you can sent jobs out to Kinko’s or Walmart or Rite-aid, if you want to send baby photos to relatives in another state that is how you do it…. Even though I’d never trust a drugstore to get borderless photos as good as I can get them it doesn’t matter much if your leave a lot of room around your subjects.
Eh, sure, I could go without a printer. Just like I could go without a car, but I don't want to walk 12 miles to work when it's 16 degrees outside. Same with printers. Yeah, I could drop this...
Eh, sure, I could go without a printer. Just like I could go without a car, but I don't want to walk 12 miles to work when it's 16 degrees outside.
Same with printers. Yeah, I could drop this package off at Kohl's or whatever other store doesn't require return labels, but I'd much rather print a return label and just have the mailman pick up the package later today since he has to drop off other mail anyway.
Haven’t you heard? Europe is living in The Future where people psychically transmit documents directly to eachother’s positronic brains, and the rest of the world just doesn’t exist.
Haven’t you heard? Europe is living in The Future where people psychically transmit documents directly to eachother’s positronic brains, and the rest of the world just doesn’t exist.
Well, in the defense of the person who wrote the article, have you ever come across a comment where an American mentions writing a check or driving to the grocery store? All of Europe jumps and...
Well, in the defense of the person who wrote the article, have you ever come across a comment where an American mentions writing a check or driving to the grocery store? All of Europe jumps and wants to start a war because an American somewhere in the middle of nowhere Virginia still writes checks.
Seriously, this is a non-issue, people just buy super shitty printers. Do some research, get a decent printer with a scan/copy function. Preferably Brother, but some of the other companies have a...
Seriously, this is a non-issue, people just buy super shitty printers. Do some research, get a decent printer with a scan/copy function. Preferably Brother, but some of the other companies have a golden nugget in their lineup as well. Avoid InkJet like the plague.
(I have an HP LaserJet MFP M29w that was less than ~$150 if I remember correctly. I had to have a little bit of technical know how and googling to avoid installing their shitware package, HP’s software really is the worst but you can work around it. NAPS2 as the scanning software. Boom, functional compact home office printer/scanner that’s been going for a few years now without any issues. And it’s certainly not like the gold standard or anything.)
I don’t know, I understand that the printer industry is horrible (HP, the company that made my printer, might honestly be the worst of them all). But some of it comes down to us, as the consumer. The writer recommends avoiding printing at all costs. Which, sure, plenty of situations I don’t need a printer. But sometimes you have to print something. And in those cases, just do some research, and avoid the truly shitty products.
I guess I feel like I could say the same thing about a lot of products. Plenty of very shitty washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc. out there. Don’t hear people talking about ending their tyranny. Just don’t be a dumb consumer.
"We must end the tyranny of printers in American life" is one of the dumbest things I've ever read, but what else would you expect from the Washington Post? If you want a good printer, don't...
"We must end the tyranny of printers in American life" is one of the dumbest things I've ever read, but what else would you expect from the Washington Post?
If you want a good printer, don't listen to that drivel, get a Brother printer! Our circa 2017 HL-4150CDN has printed 23,977 pages, has had one paper jam (it was easy to fix), sips toner, accepts PostScript, and works with Linux. One suggestion: if you have the option, get the larger, more expensive toner cartridges; they last forever.
So is my lack of problem with printers simply the fact that I could care less about color? I have purchased three printers in more than 30 years. Each time I chose blocky models advertised for...
So is my lack of problem with printers simply the fact that I could care less about color? I have purchased three printers in more than 30 years. Each time I chose blocky models advertised for small business use. I looked for claims from the manufacturer about print speed and about multiple thousands of page capacity per year. The first time I looked for this kind of printer, I thought I would be writing a book, but since then I look for those specs because I think it ensures a good product. My actual printer use is small these days, but when I need it, I need it.
I had an ML-25xx series laser printer from 2010-2021, which I had to get rid of because it wouldn't work in Europe (it only supported 120V power). That thing was the most reliable workhorse of a...
I had an ML-25xx series laser printer from 2010-2021, which I had to get rid of because it wouldn't work in Europe (it only supported 120V power). That thing was the most reliable workhorse of a printer I've ever owned. I only ever went thru 3 toner carts in the decade I owned it, it never dried out or got plugged up, it supported Linux well.
Every inkjet or bubblejet type printer I've had eventually dries out and needs a bunch of cleaning to get it working again, not counting the absurd pricing of the ink carts. Absolute garbage.
Printers are a bit of a sore subject from a tech standpoint. Anything that's mechanical in a predominantly software / circuit world is a pain in the ass. It just doesn't jive with the way everything is going.
There's a lot of reasons why printers suck and sins have been committed on both sides of the aisle. The consumer, as always, loses.
The never ending battle between the manufacturer and the operating system is one of the chief sources of pain. The manufacturer will create a driver one way to accommodate the new bells and whistles the printer has to compete with other brands. They will create it with the barebones, outdated, requirements to have it work in windows. Windows moves at a fast pace and Microsoft is constantly changing things. That and they have a whole lot of hardware combinations to test for and they miss things all the time because it's hard to keep up with so many niche manufacturers doing things in irregular ways.
So the driver breaks. The OS and the printer company don't agree on the best way to develop a driver because they have different goals. Microsoft wants uniformity and they want all printers to install one way for their end user. The printer manufacturer doesn't want that because they want brand loyalty and they want to stand out or provide their own support or their features demand the driver be built one way especially when it comes to networking capabilities which opens up a few more can of worms.
Networking is easy on paper but difficult in practice especially when you add wifi to the mix.
ISPs have fucked up Wi-Fi so hard and disrupted the home router market which was already a fucked up field to begin with built on a very finicky technology that has issues with physical materials. In fact, the same point I just got done making about OS needs versus proprietary manufacturer needs is happening with Wi-Fi as well twice over.
The ISP wants their customers to stop complaining. The customer complains about Wi-Fi all the time without understanding how it works, or what the limitations are, or what their expectations should be. So they take the thinking away from baby and "fix it" by tuning settings in the ISP provided router that's only good in a vacuum. They can't test for all building materials or all distances or all markets so they just turn the router on full blast which a bunch of settings geared towards maximum compatibility so your fridge and eleven year old printer can all get on the Wi-Fi just fine while sacrificing speed because their goal is to say you connected from your yard, can play Spotify, or load Facebook, not that you have full performance on your wifi device.
Naturally, printer manufacturers try to "fix" people's misconfigured and poorly thought out Wi-Fi by, you guessed it, messing with their driver and using none standard methods in an attempt to accommodate their printer. They give the printer shit wifi components that slow the entire network down, make the ISP accommodate them, and then tweak and tell the OS the printer has special needs.
The world could be so simple. So so simple. But no. Printers don't want that for you.
Notice how I haven't even gotten to the physical problems printers have or the capitalistic schemes they employ to stay relevant? Cheap parts, proprietary and expensive parts with expensive repairs giving the consumer incentive to just waste plastic to buy a new printer instead. All to print that Google maps, or that funny cat email.
Even Apple's solution to this madness, Airprint which uses Bonjour, a service that cleverly bypasses that whole nonsense to talk to printers in a pretty uniform way still relies on the damn router playing nice with it. It relies on a properly configured network and because of ISPs meddling with settings so baby doesn't have to think, it's hit or miss and while it's out of the box for apple products for printers that support the service (which you may still have to manually enable or set up because that's not how the printer manufacturer intended for you to print) it's not configured on Windows at all.
Just absolute madness dudes and dudettes. Madness.
And that's just for personal consumer grade printers. The business sized ones? Also knows as MFPs or multi functional printers? They also interact poorly with networks and OSes. Why? Because an MFP will easily last five plus years and in that time windows will have upgraded multiple times, so will your wifi, so will your network, so will your laptop, and the damn thing will be stuck on ancient and insecure protocols relying on firmware updates that come out every other year to keep them relevant because they're a complicated and very expensive piece of mechanical machinery.
Between the two, business printers at least try to be nice and there's a subindustry built just for mfps, experts that deal with them, but consumer grade printers? They're a scam, they're all profit, they disrupt tech at every level, they're built to break, and are all around awful things to work with. You need to know what a network is, what wifi is, what a firewall is, how an operating system functions, all just to install and maintain the thing to get all the features you paid for.
Some brands, like Brother, are awesome. They are one of the ones that make decent long lasting products and they play well with Microsoft and networks.
Other brands, like HP, are literally the devil's above ground shell company and every time you purchase something from them you're giving Satan money so he can go destabilize a government somewhere in order to collect souls. Think about that. Just think about it before you go out there and make a poor financial decision. Satan is at the end of that road. Just keep that in the forefront.
Edit: this was obviously a rant to both vent and to shed some light on why they suck.
If you're asking for solutions? Well...unfortunately it's too late in the game for printer companies. They're kind of set in stone. Microsoft and apple have both tried and failed to tame and add uniformity to the entire mess. Printer companies just will not. One company could come out with a nexgen sexy iPrint something or other, or maybe a rebellious green FOSS "the people's printer" that utilizes OS / ISP friendly tech and it would disrupt the entire industry and maybe force it to change, but the printer companies have you there too because they'll just drop the price from 90% profit to 80% profit and undercut you. Also unless you have the infrastructure of ink or toner built, you can't even enter the market because that's where the money actually is. It's not just build a printer and sell it, it's make the infrastructure for the ink or toner and the printer and then sell it.
I think your rant is a little bit outdated now, actually. Everyone is basically doing things Apple’s way now (there is an official standard I’m too lazy to look up right now, but It’s something stupid sounding like “Internet Printing”). It means that as long as it is on the network, it’s just a server that computers send print jobs to in a uniform way. You don’t even need to dig up drivers because the OS just looks up the printer definition.
Networking problems still exist, of course, but it feels as if most printer companies have put more effort into making their firmware less crappy. Not a solved issue in the least, but it’s a little better, at least some times.
Most of the problems I have had with printers have been with Windows’ notoriously shitty printing software, but since these changes in the industry I have seen considerably less problems on Windows systems.
HP is still the devil though, certainly.
I deploy, maintain, purchase, and fix printers from all brands across multiple environments, business and home, and across multiple operating systems, wired and wireless.
I rant from the heart.
I haven't installed printer software for years now. Hell, even printing from the phone has gotten super easy.
Of all the things I hate about printers, they're definitely moving the right direction on the software front for people who just want to print something out.
Setting quality, calibrating, scanning, etc is still a huge pain, but for your basic "put this on 8.5x11 paper" print job, it's never been easier.
Internet Printing Protocol, which is a godsend, but doesn't fix most of the issues with printers especially on Windows. In my house, my parents use Windows, I use Linux. I never have issues sending something to the printer and getting it printed anymore since I gave the printer a static IP in my network (before that... well. Hit or miss.). Meanwhile, print jobs from Windows constantly get lost in the ether, the printer stops being recognized, or just refuses to print and I suspect that is not the printer (or its driver's) fault. The printer is a Brother MFC which is pretty old and honestly Windows should have no issue talking to it.
Why does everyone hate HP? I'm not trying to defend them, I'm sure they suck, but I don't understand why they are so much worse than Canon or Epson or any of the other manufacturers.
At least HP has been providing official Linux drivers for many years, and I've always respected them for that. This isn't really relevant today for printing, as you explained, but my parents have an Epson with a scanner that doesn't work because you have to download the drivers from the Epson website and they probably only work on Ubuntu LTS 16.04 or something. I refuse to do that because this isn't the 90s anymore. The old HP scanner just worked because the drivers came with the OS.
I think this might be one of the cases where your experience will be more reliable on Linux than Windows because of the nature of how they work and receive updates. Microsoft has a large incentive to stay ahead of the curve and make their one-size-fits-most drivers for compatibility, whereas Linux driver compatibility tends towards the KISS model of being more modular and interoperable, though there might be tweaks required if you've got a highly customized setup.
I can say at my workplace that HP printers are, on the whole, rather unreliable at times, often because either a driver update or a Windows update broke something. My personal gripe is that HP makes you download their telemetry-gathering HP Smart app that you pretty much need if you want to actually use the scanner. Of course, you need to make an HP account and login to use HP Smart. I recall the app periodically advertising sales via the same desktop popup mechanism that lets you know when the ink is low or something failed, which was very annoying but I think I found a way to turn it off.
We have a PageWide that about 6 people including myself use concurrently, and one coworker specifically has an odd issue where it takes 30 seconds instead of 3-4 seconds to print a page. Nobody has been able to figure it out, including the IT guy, and that's not for lack of trying. At this point I'm pretty convinced it would require a system wipe and reinstall to work (though in this case it's probably a Windows thing with that person's computer). The whole office uses HP at the behest of our purchasing manager and we have several dozen total in use (most are just for individual offices for those important enough to have one) and there are frequent issues. There's probably at least a dozen that have either completely broken or had weird, unresolvable issues that are just sitting in a back supply closet right now for some reason.
I also had to do a bunch of manual setup on my work computer to get double sided printing and the multiple trays with different size paper to work; the correct driver wouldn't automatically select or download when the printer was 'installed', and even the driver HP provides on their website for the specific model didn't fix the Windows Print dialog. I also had issues connecting my MacBook to that same printer for the odd form that I needed for personal printouts, I think I had to remove and re-add the printer like 3-4 times using different settings before it worked acceptably and didn't print out gibberish when I queued up documents.
I had basically none of these issues when I used my dad's Brother laser printer. Though that printer did also have its suite of printing and scanning tools, they didn't require an account and more or less worked without hours of troubleshooting.
Like Ashelyn mentioned, their windows software packages have always been garbage. As has their support. The HP website used to be a complete joke. I assume it probably still is, but I don't go there because I long learned not to buy HP consumer products.
They're pretty much the poster child for anti-consumer business practices. There are a number of bad practices that all of the manufacturers do, but HP originated nearly all of them. Right now most people are upset about their Instant Ink program. I personally thought that it was overblown because of people simply not reading how the program worked, until I learned that their new printers don't come with a starter cartridge, they come with an instant ink cartridge and a free trial instead, hoping that you'll buy into their subscription service.
It should also be noted that on most Unix systems, printers haven't needed drivers for quite a long time. At least not the same kind they used to. Pretty much every printer out there supports some variation on postscript, so the manufacturers don't even need to provide a driver to get them running. Someone just needs to write a PPD for them. Most manufacturers provide the PPD anyways because they need to support OSX. Apple actually bought CUPS, and uses it in OSX (and presumably iOS as well). So HP's support is less of them supporting Linux and more of supporting Apple and getting Linux compatibility as a bonus.
Beyond that, they're also the largest printer manufacturer so they get the bulk of the blame.
Every time people would come up with stories about how printers sucked on Reddit, I would always present the same advice: you almost certainly don't need a printer.
If you need to print something, you can do so at your local library or hundreds of local businesses that offer the service.
If you print a lot, get a laser printer. By all means, avoid inkjet like the plague. They literally eject ink regularly in an attempt to keep the print head from clogging, and I can guarantee you that it will clog eventually, at which point the print head will be discontinued. Or it will be so expensive that you are better off buying a new printer. Or worse, it'll be integrated into the ink cartridges which will make them even more expensive. That last one seems to be a lot less common nowadays, though.
Even if you print a little, I’d say also consider a laser printer. A basic Brother. Cheap, fast, and robust printer with a very cheap per-page toner drum that won’t dry out or clog after long periods of inactivity. It’s nice being able to print out the odd form right at home.
My family has had the same Brother printer for around 13 years now and it’s still going strong! Glad brother allows for third party inks and toner.
My wife and I have had our Brother color laser printer for almost 20 yrs now. We don't use it that often, but when we need it it's always ready to go - the only trouble it gives us is moving it, b/c it's a bit of a beast.
This. If you've got kids, having a home printer (especially during covid) was kinda a life saver for me. So many worksheets, but also just weekend crafts too.
But like, I still print boarding passes and stuff too. My phone is always out of battery for some reason or another so hard copies are generally the thing I trust. I got no problem with the phone people (but you're fucking slow as hell at the grocery store) but I think my inability to keep things charged is just the hill my old ass self will probably die stuck on.
For the charging issue, get yourself a Qi charger and set it up at your bedside. Set your phone on it and it will be fully charged in the morning. I have a Galaxy S23 with a somewhat thirsty battery and this is the best go to I've found. Been using this system for my last few phones. Plus, they are fairly cheap, around $20US.
They're great for homemade cards for the grandparents, too. We save all of the kids' drawings and paintings and when we need a card, we find just the right one, cut it down to fit the printer, then print off premade cards we find online and have the kids "sign" them. They're 4 though, so that mostly just means drawing little people with arms coming out of their heads.
I always go to the airport kiosk to print a boarding pass because even though I work in tech I’m a Luddite. One time at LGA the TSA scanners were all down so people were waiting in security line for an hour to be turned away and told to go get paper boarding passes that they can manually check and get back in line again, people were losing their fucking minds but not me!
The thing is that many libraries offer a certain number of pages per week/month for free.
The only thing you get for the home printer is convenience.
And not paying for gas...
I'd say it's better to keep a few more cars off the road by having people who need printing every now and then just get a laser printer at home.
How far away is your library? How much gas does your car consume?
Those numbers would have to be insane to overcome the environmental impact of producing a printer. They're e-waste.
They’re ewaste if they’re thrown away, but look at the other commenters here saying how they’ve had the same printer for 15+ years.
E-waste is e-waste. It doesn’t matter how much it was used. You probably use your phone a lot but when you replace it it will become e-waste.
Use helps to justify e-waste, but this whole conversation is about people who don’t need to print much. If you’ve printed 15 pages in the 15 years you have owned a printer, that is still very wasteful.
Yes... I haven't thought twice about my printer for years -- everything in this article is ancient history in my mind because I bought an inexpensive multi-function Brother printer years ago (the first of which I gave to a teacher to use as a photocopier 4 or 5 years ago after many years of use because I wanted to upgrade to one w/ wireless printing), which works perfectly and without any configuration in Linux and macos (I have no idea nor care about Windows). I use it to scan all of my mail and sort it for longevity and shred the originals, and then when I need to print something I have it easily available. @Akir's advice also doesn't make any sense if you live somewhere rural, like I do, it would take me over an hour to get a printout -- I need them often enough that that would quickly become a huge hassle.
...which reminds me, it was complaining about low toner last week. I should think about ordering a replacement cartridge some time in the next month. :)
I've had my brother MFD since 2012. Got me through undergrad and grad school. I recently checked and it's printed over 10,000 pages for me.
I still use an HP LaserJet 4 from like 1992. It's got about 600k pages on the clock and only just this year started missing feeds sometimes. Went on ebay and bought a refresh pack of new belts, rollers, and other rubber bits and just need to get around to swapping them now. Sure it's slow compared to modern printers but in the event I need to print 10 pages who really cares if I'm waiting 3 minutes versus 30 seconds. Toner is still readily available, print quality is indistinguishable to me from stuff 30 years newer for the stuff I print, it's got wired networking, and my new computers still print to it with zero complaint.
Yeah, unless you love photography, there should be no reason to have an inkjet form of printer in your house. Post pandemic, secondhand laser printers have dropped precipitously. I also second using Brother for its compatibility with multiple OSes, cheap 3rd party toner that works, and generally being ok with DRM.
Inkjets, I wish I got the Ecotank ET8550, but my Canon PRO10 has a great output and its DRM cartridges can be defeated.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that a company like Kodak or Polaroid hasn't taken up this niche. I've seen some Polaroid instant-film printers that work with smartphones that seems nice enough as a novelty. But I've never seen bigger, prosumer models where I can feed them something akin to photo-paper and have them "develop" it. Obviously the chemistry would end up being different, depositing ink/dye rather than developing film or maybe something like dye sublimation they use to print t-shirts en masse. They could just sell packs of photo paper and not worry about all this inkjet hassle.
The latter seems to have done that.
https://www.polaroid.com/en_us/products/hi-print-paper-bundle
Exactly. I do need to print stuff regularly. I have a cheap mono laser, which has been running flawlessly for many years. I spend £20 or so every couple of years (or few thousand prints) on a new, unbranded, toner cartridge and that is all.
If I want photos printing I use an online service who have much higher quality printers than I could ever afford, and charge me a few pence per print.
Same, and it's one of the few purchases that unequivocally changed my life for the better.
Laser* printers aren’t even expensive anymore unless you want one for colour printing. You can even buy third party toner* on Amazon that work just as well as the oem ones. The last time I bought toner* for my printer in…2020? I paid ~ $23 for two third party cartridges.
If not color, laser printers are much cheaper in the long run, especially for infrequent use as there's no risk of the ink drying out or clogging.
EDIT: I notice that you're saying "laser jet", "laserjet" is what HP calls their inkjet printers, maybe you did mean laser by the way that you separated the words, but you did say ink... so, I'm not actually sure.
Well, TIL that laser jet isn’t what all laser printers are called. It must be some weird regional thing because everyone I know calls laser printers “laser jet” printers.
Also, are the refills for laser printers not ink?
“jet” in “laserjet” (trademarked name) or “inkjet” (the generic term) generally refers to the fine nozzles that shoot the liquid ink at the paper to create the resulting printout — a laser printer uses an electrostatic charge on the drum to first attract the toner (not ink, it’s a dry powder) to the paper and then heat fuses it in place and makes it stay in place. It’s a very different process, no ink involved.
Huh, good to know!
I'm currently looking at getting an Epson 8550 (that's an A3 inkjet photo printer).
I'm aware that this is no longer quite in the consumer segment these articles target, and more importantly it has ink tanks. Per-page cost is higher than on laser, but actually far less so than I thought it would.
I'm still considering whether to save the money and get an A4 Brother color laser printer instead but eh. Part of the reason I want the Epson is to be able to print oversized cheat sheets for board games and my own little posters. And there's really not that many options in this regard. In fact it's rare to find inktank printers in the first place, most of them are A4.
I have two Epson EcoTanks, one is consumer and one a business.
You need to print fairly regularly to stop inkjet heads from blocking. As long as you do a page every so often they're great. Ecosolvant ink works really well too.
I'd say go with the business models over consumer as they're built better and accept up to 300gsm card.
Got one. I think it is great.
If you are printing mainly B & W the laser still comes out ahead but if you are doing color work like photos and art reproductions it is worth it.
Im quite happy with Canon Pixma, ink printer/scanner with refillable tanks. Using it for 2 years, I print full color A4 page everyday, usually one page, sometime a book. Spent 15$ on 4 bottles of ink, already refilled tank 2 or 3 times, so far so good.
Upd: of course I buy cheap not-original ink.
As somebody who just never, ever needs to print anything, until I do, library printers are the bomb. Every time I look at the cost of a new printer I cackle. The racket was one thing before DRM ink; now? Forget it.
Having worked at HP 20 years ago where I both saw the exorbitant cost of owning a printer and always having access to one at work, I vowed to never have a printer at home. I held the line for a long time, any time we needed something either my wife or I would print at work or we’d go to the staples down the block if it was urgent.
Then covid hit and we started having to print stuff from the kids’ schools every day when offices, libraries, and staples were all closed. Now I own a printer and it sucks.
Printers are necessary for my clinic and business. Most patients have low health literacy, and they need physical copies of what's been done for them, and for me to write on them about their medications
I have a an inkjet printing hobby and when I see articles like this I think “I don’t get mad, I get even”
I got a “free” inkjet printer which I quickly learned is free as in “puppy” in that if you don’t use it regularly the ink dries up and the few prints you make are astronomically expensive.
So I challenged myself to print something every day, sometimes it is anime art, sometimes it is art reproductions, sometimes it is photos I took or information graphics I made. Every card has a back side that documents the front and a QR code that links to a web page (currently the weak link in the chain.). Frequently I print something from 3 to 40 cards and put them up on the wall together.
This has been a process of overcoming limitations and has involved things like figuring out how to avoid problems caused by water making prints curl (print the back side first), how to keep color management from messing up red-cyan anaglyph stereograms (do the color management in my Python code before combining the left and right channels) and what to do about prints that faded noticeably in just 3 months (get a different printer).
All in all I see inkjet printers as a miracle that produce very low cost and high quality output if you use quality materials. Ink and coated paper prices are not quite the scam people think they are: when I was researching the fading problem I found documentation of OEM ink permanence was poor and of third-party ink was nonexistent. I mean, people whose main criterion is “cheep cheep cheep” just don’t care if the ink last five minutes or if VOC from the ink contaminates your workspace. I am always reading on forums about people attempting borderless printing and having inksplosions, people usually ask “are you using third-party ink?” and the OP says “Yes” and blames the responders. Looking at the price per print inkjet printers are a bargain particularly if you value your time. (I never could understand why the typical yarn store has 2000 skeins of bad smelling acrylic yarn and 1 of wool…. If you’re going to spend 20 hours making a scarf you’re valuing your time at pennies an hour using acrylic.)
(If you don’t like cartridges get an Epson ET-8550 which is a tank printer that takes the high quality and relatively permanent, for a dye ink, Claria ink. Don’t waste time with the ET-3000 line which fades terribly)
Now it’s true a bottom of the line printer will have more jams and be picky about what kind of paper you use. If owning a printer is not for you can sent jobs out to Kinko’s or Walmart or Rite-aid, if you want to send baby photos to relatives in another state that is how you do it…. Even though I’d never trust a drugstore to get borderless photos as good as I can get them it doesn’t matter much if your leave a lot of room around your subjects.
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Eh, sure, I could go without a printer. Just like I could go without a car, but I don't want to walk 12 miles to work when it's 16 degrees outside.
Same with printers. Yeah, I could drop this package off at Kohl's or whatever other store doesn't require return labels, but I'd much rather print a return label and just have the mailman pick up the package later today since he has to drop off other mail anyway.
Really?
Haven’t you heard? Europe is living in The Future where people psychically transmit documents directly to eachother’s positronic brains, and the rest of the world just doesn’t exist.
Well, in the defense of the person who wrote the article, have you ever come across a comment where an American mentions writing a check or driving to the grocery store? All of Europe jumps and wants to start a war because an American somewhere in the middle of nowhere Virginia still writes checks.
Seriously, this is a non-issue, people just buy super shitty printers. Do some research, get a decent printer with a scan/copy function. Preferably Brother, but some of the other companies have a golden nugget in their lineup as well. Avoid InkJet like the plague.
(I have an HP LaserJet MFP M29w that was less than ~$150 if I remember correctly. I had to have a little bit of technical know how and googling to avoid installing their shitware package, HP’s software really is the worst but you can work around it. NAPS2 as the scanning software. Boom, functional compact home office printer/scanner that’s been going for a few years now without any issues. And it’s certainly not like the gold standard or anything.)
I don’t know, I understand that the printer industry is horrible (HP, the company that made my printer, might honestly be the worst of them all). But some of it comes down to us, as the consumer. The writer recommends avoiding printing at all costs. Which, sure, plenty of situations I don’t need a printer. But sometimes you have to print something. And in those cases, just do some research, and avoid the truly shitty products.
I guess I feel like I could say the same thing about a lot of products. Plenty of very shitty washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc. out there. Don’t hear people talking about ending their tyranny. Just don’t be a dumb consumer.
"We must end the tyranny of printers in American life" is one of the dumbest things I've ever read, but what else would you expect from the Washington Post?
If you want a good printer, don't listen to that drivel, get a Brother printer! Our circa 2017 HL-4150CDN has printed 23,977 pages, has had one paper jam (it was easy to fix), sips toner, accepts PostScript, and works with Linux. One suggestion: if you have the option, get the larger, more expensive toner cartridges; they last forever.
So is my lack of problem with printers simply the fact that I could care less about color? I have purchased three printers in more than 30 years. Each time I chose blocky models advertised for small business use. I looked for claims from the manufacturer about print speed and about multiple thousands of page capacity per year. The first time I looked for this kind of printer, I thought I would be writing a book, but since then I look for those specs because I think it ensures a good product. My actual printer use is small these days, but when I need it, I need it.
I had an ML-25xx series laser printer from 2010-2021, which I had to get rid of because it wouldn't work in Europe (it only supported 120V power). That thing was the most reliable workhorse of a printer I've ever owned. I only ever went thru 3 toner carts in the decade I owned it, it never dried out or got plugged up, it supported Linux well.
Every inkjet or bubblejet type printer I've had eventually dries out and needs a bunch of cleaning to get it working again, not counting the absurd pricing of the ink carts. Absolute garbage.