Are the memes about setting up and troubleshooting printers overblown nowadays?
I haven't really messed with printers in probably 15 years or more, but it felt like any time they were brought up, there were two flavors:
- Older printers, which decided if they wanted to work or not based on absolutely nothing at all
- Newer printers, which are covered in DRM and mostly a nickel-and-diming scam
Now, for the former I remember having some issues, but generally just clearing the printer's cache (or whatever it was called) would fix most of the problems. I think the bigger issue is that I always helped people set up cheap Walmart-sold inkjet printers that had more hardware issues than software, along with ink that would go to shit instantly.
But I was out today at a thrift store and they had a Brother for $25, with an entire extra unopened toner cartridge (I think that's what it's called?). I asked them if it worked, they said it did, but if it didn't I could return it by tomorrow.
So I brought it home, assuming something would be wrong with it, but in about 10 minutes I had it plugged in, connected to my wifi network, and connected to my computer. I tried scanning-- it worked fine. I tried copying-- it does that no problem. It took longer to install the drivers on my PC than set up the printer itself.
So are printers really as straight-forward as I experienced with this cheap used one, or am I just lucky?
When your question is are printers still terrible and your interaction is with a Brother let me just go ahead and stop you there then. They’ve long been the exception when it comes to printers.
I've always heard they were the recommended brand, but I guess I was still expecting... some level of resistance?
The idea that a used printer from like 8 years ago just worksTM seems pretty crazy. Guess I should just be happy that it does.
I used to run a print shop for local activists. Before I upgraded to a completely unreliable commercial office printer, I put several pallets of paper through an old HL-1440 Brother laser printer by running it almost continuously for over a month. I think it jammed once? That was after I had it for almost a decade.
I did IT for small offices for a while. I still have no idea why people can still be suckered into terrrible printers. There are so many crappy HP inkjets out there. It's like people go to office supply stores, pause in the printer aisle, look past the Brother laser printers and go for smallpox instead.
I've admittedly given up on several printers on jobs. I developed a parallelized pi generation algorithm in assembly when I was 15. I have a fridge full of nanoparticles that self-assemble into artificial neurons. I had two grad students in my first quarter of university. I have completely rebuilt giant commercial office printers. The reason I can't get your $60 inkjet printer working is because--well, let's back up a bit.
The universe requires entropy sinks for all of creation. All order in the universe requires the transfer and concentration of disorder. Beyond the edge of the universe, the creative and destructive processes are at equilibrium. In the universe as we know it, the destruction is pushed away, revealing order and all that we know. In some religions, there is a great battle or conflict between good and evil. This is that conflict.
The decay, the disorder, and all the horrors that go along with it, are concentrated and moved somewhere to make way for all that we know and love. But where does it go?
Slaps crappy plastic panel Inkjets! Also in the 300MB driver that keeps asking you to subscribe to ink cartridges.
Brother is one of the better brands, bless them, so you've lucked out.
I've had to use other brands over the past couple of years, and I've had mixed experiences. Generally, larger, "office size" printers are pretty easy to set up, but smaller "home" printers gave me trouble, and sometimes I could not get them to work at all, even after downloading and installing large software packages.
I consider myself rather well-read and I have never seen this word - so thank you!
Even Merriam-Webster doesn't know what it means =D https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/furtle
I think the quality of the "Random Cheapo Inkjet" has improved in some ways, and deteriorated in others.
a big improvement is that they almost all use wifi, or if they don't they run over USB. you certainly don't need to deal with parallel ports anymore. and meanwhile, Windows has gained much better support for installing drivers automatically than it did in the days of the Found New Hardware Wizard. so it's very likely to "just work" without needing to load the CD with drivers on it (lol) and tell Windows to look there to find the drivers it needs.
however...the wifi is very much a double-edged sword. printers, besides being printers, have now become Internet of Things devices.
Brother, Canon, Epson, and HP all offer services that deliver ink or toner straight to your door, potentially saving you money. Here's what to know before you sign up.
they've taken the "razors and razor blades" business model a step further - these printers will now phone home and report their ink levels, and they will "helpfully" automatically send you a new ink cartridge whenever you're running low. most of these charge a flat monthly fee rather than per-cartridge, which helps to avoid the sticker shock of buying new cartridges. but of course, this comes with a limit on how many pages per month you can print before you're charged extra.
and because it's a connected device, they can do shit like this: HP has found an exciting new way to DRM your printer!
you got a used Brother laser - you definitely lucked out. those are rock-solid. there's one on a shelf next to my desk, and my mom has standing orders that when her shitty HP inkjet kicks the bucket to call me and I'll order her another Brother (or give her mine and buy myself a new one)
I think it's really just because we're using printers exponentially less in our regular lives than 20 years ago. I think I maybe printed 100 pages in the last year. And at least half of those were just for kids to color on. I buy more reams of paper for my kids to draw on than I actually use in my printer.
Much like Linux, the more you stray from "accept default print settings on standard letter paper", the nastier it gets. I think the printers becoming primarily networked helped tremendously, along with the dominance of mobile which helped incentivize using less-proprietary systems (though they still lurk).
Even then, I've got 3 ancient 1TB 7200 RPM hard drives still in use that have outlived 3 printers.
Brother is pretty good.
I haven't use many other brands, but it seems these days the driver situation is better. The printer has a built-in computer that has all the drivers etc, and your computer just sends it a PDF (or another well-supported format) to print over standard HTTP:
Printers are still the most failure prone devices in most businesses, mostly due to all the moving parts. For home users they're not great either, as the quality of printers for home use has been steadily decreasing every time a new printer gets released. Modern printers contain the cheapest parts you can imagine (you'd be hard-pressed to find any actual metal gears or metal sliders in there) and they're not designed to last long.
In my experience with printers, it's hit or miss. A printer might work fine for a while and then start having problems that will never go away. At home, I have an old Samsung laser printer which used to work flawlessly but then suddenly it started having paper feed issues. First I cleaned the rollers, but that didn't help so replaced them for brand-new ones, but the issues remained. I ended up throwing the damn thing in the bin because I didn't have the patience to troubleshoot it anymore.
Personally I would say you got lucky, enjoy it while it lasts :). Fortunately it's just a cheap used printer, which is great because you won't feel guilty when you throw it out. Just replace it with another cheap used printer in the future because you can find loads of them online, buying a new one is never needed.
The last time I bought a printer, I knew I wanted reliability. I shopped for a machine marketed to home office/small business use that claimed high print speed and tens of thousands of page per year capacity. I ended up buying a block shaped/ cube shaped sturdy machine that takes some space but is just as reliable as I wanted it to be.
Now that most paperwork is done online, I wonder how available such workhorse printers will be in future.
Anecdotally, the printers I've encountered that still work have been one of two things: either a 15+ year old dinosaur that is somehow still kicking (but is well past the end of support and parts aren't being made for it anymore) OR a simple black and white laser printer. The former are much easier to troubleshoot than anything newer, and the latter are pretty hard for the home user to mess up.
Anything with a touch screen makes me wary. Sometimes they're straightforward. Other times, you can't tell how to start it again when it jams or how to switch to double-sided.
Currently we have a Canon printer. My mother's Windows laptop she got from her work can't connect to it for some reason. Possibly due to the VPN used by her office, or some other setting placed by the IT team blocking it. (Fun fact, I couldn't even change the screen brightness settings! And I had to add a screen saver because it never goes into sleep mode unless the lid closes! Woo!) I vaguely recall it maybe having to do with our wifi password having "weird characters" that her office's VPN or whatever settings didn't like (it used to have an = and #, which I guess count as too weird). But I just realized she's retired now, so maybe it will finally work!
In the meantime, our setup is she would email either my dad or me whatever documents she needed to print. And whenever I print from my Macbook, there's 50/50 chance it will bring up the queue and then be unable to connect to the printer, forcing me to go to settings to delete and re-add the printer. Which in turn clears the print queue and forces me to press print again, which is minor but still annoying if I closed out of the thing she wanted me to print. I think there's now a (5) next to the printer's name on the settings, or maybe a (6).
And upon checking, there IS a (5) at the end, and ALSO a (2) in the middle for some reason! And also two and 9/10ths strings saying "(d7:3c:e5)", with one before the (2) and then repeating directly after, with the "5)" cut out of the first one. So I'm going to assume that string is part of the name for some reason, and somehow got broken up after the constant deletion and re-adding. So I think that means I've had to re-add my printer at least 7 times?
So to summarize: yes, printers can still be a massive pain to set up and use.
If she frequently used a VPN and the printer is a networked printer (ie. not directly connected with a USB cable) then I would assume that's the issue. Depending on how the VPN was set up, it may be pushing all traffic out through the VPN via a static route and bypassing your local network altogether. I've run into this problem a few times, especially if the company stays on the 192.168.1.X or 10.0.0.X subnets that home networks typically use.
That series of numbers/letters with the colons looks like the MAC (media access control) address. I don't have much experience troubleshooting Apple computers, so I couldn't tell you why it's doing that though. Sounds like it recognizes the printer as some kind of device on the network, but doesn't know what kind of device it is. Just a guess.
Helped an aunt set one up just last week. It was hellish. I knew it was a driver problem, but the manufacturer made it as hard as possible to get the drivers. Eventually through advanced options in windows update I did it, but God. It recommended 4 programs, and none of them worked.
FYI: in the printer space, you have inkjet and laser.
Inkjet uses ink cartridges. It's ink, i.e. some pigment suspended in a water (I think?) solution.
Laser uses toner. It's powdered plastic on which you apply laser to melt it on your page.
Ink can dry in the printer tube or nozzle; toner less so.
My print needs are light (something like 20 pages / year), but at some point 2 years ago I decides to bite the bullet, throw away my wife ever-drying HP inkjet printer, and buy a proper laser printer.
I ended up buying a second-hand a Canon i-SENSYS MF8580Cdw, and had no major problem since.
It's a printer aimed at small businesses (and is heavy as f), and I think it's a factor in it's reliability. The last think you want with your business is being unable to print an invoice.
Googling a bit I saw that it was quite expensive at launch (around 1900 USD), but luckily for me I got it for at 1/10th of this price. It is, after all, a 10 years old printer.
So an anecdote from my somewhat weird setup where I use a 30-year old HP LaserJet 4 behemoth still: It's never been easier to set up old, common printers. On Linux I didn't even set it up. I just plugged in the power and ethernet and by the time I walked back over to my computer it was already good to go. On Windows I just had to tell it "Hey I got a printer" and it handled the rest no sweat. There's no dumb software, no DRM, no intentionally sabotaged ink situation--just a printer so old and so standard that everything immediately knows how to use it.
Amazingly it still works and prints great with 300k+ sheets on the clock. You can still get full refurbishing kits for them (which I did for when the time comes), and toner is cheap and easy to find.
I guess if I wanted super fast color or photo printing I'd be out of luck, but just to have a basic workhorse I found printer setup in this century to be exceedingly simple.
I have a hobby printing anime art, art reproductions and photos and from my viewpoint today's inkjet printers are nothing short of a miracle. I am always reading on forums about people attempting borderless printing and having terrible inksplosions and when people ask invariably they are using third party ink. Quality paper and ink seems expensive but it is downright cheap compared to any other technology that produces high quality images in single print runs.
(If you are printing mostly documents and not art and photos, get a laser.)
Having only had a very cheap Samsung laser b/w printer for 15 years (which had no issues) and now owning an Epson ET-8550 poster/photo printer, I will say that setting the letter up is a huge chore.
But, importantly, that printer is no longer a pure consumer printer, it's more semiprofessional area. It's clearly not the type of device meant to be setup-less as you need to get into paper and ink selections and image preprocessing to use it well. So that's fine with me, and in the context, I will again say it was smooth sailing.
I have 2 Epson EcoTanks (I converted one for use with sublimation ink) and I've had zero issues setting them up multiple times (reset the network, moved, etc).
I have an ET-8550 now which I am 100% happy with, particularly I am printing a lot of 19"x13" prints on it. Prior to that I had an ET-3850 which was pretty good (if smaller) but I found out that, in a bright room of my house at least, prints would fade badly in just three months. I usually print a bunch of prints and stick them to the wall with Blu Tack and expect to replace them often but three months is a little ridiculous, prints from the ET-8550 hold up a lot better. I also like the rear feeder on the ET-8550 which gives less trouble than most front feeders.
IMO usually the older black and white cubish desktop laser printers are pretty reliable.
InkJets or variations of tend to be shit.
Floorstanding laser printers are good....Until they aren't, then you need a technician to come in and fiddle with it for a day to get it working for 1-2 weeks until it starts jamming again.
My suspicion is simply that the less moving parts they have, the better.