why do home printers fail to work as intended so often?

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Books, newspapers, and magazines are printed perfectly all the time, why is it such a hassle to get home printers set up? Software is buggy and hard to work with even for professionals, and the hardware is always having issues. Home printers have been around for a long time and in general modern software is quite sophisticated. This seems like something we would have figured out by now. Even in offices, it’s hard for IT to set up printers. Why haven’t we gotten printers that just always work? Is there some fundamental problem we can’t solve?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Happy Brother owner here. The printer does fail sometimes.

Model Name Brother DCP-J4120DW
Page Counter – 16434

Over 7 years. 4 or 5 page jams per year. That’s it

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> why is it such a hassle to get home printers set up?

My Brother printer worked straight out of the box once a I used the onboard UI to enter the wife password etc.

I have unix, windows and chromebooks in the house. They all worked fine.

> Software is buggy and hard to work with even for professionals

My nephew who’s an idiot and son who’s an idiot too, they had a problem with the default printing where it would by default print 2 pages per sheet. It was a bug in the drivers that windows provided. Went to the brother website downloaded the correct drivers for the machine and problem is gone. The root of that problem is probably some communications issue with Microsoft.

If your interested in understanding just how complex a printer can be I recommend this article from the [New Yorker Why Paper Jams Persist](https://archive.ph/SJlAS#selection-1425.254-1425.807)

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