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?
In: 6143
Money.
Home printers are built cheap, designed to self-setup, and never be serviced or calibrated beyond perhaps a test file and a scan.
They are also used infrequently meaning parts can dry up, clog and generally fail.
We generally expect to press print once and get the page ready to go – nobody plans to do half a dozen test prints to get it right, sign off a proof and then pbint the final version.
Professional level printers cost anything up to millions, require constant servicing and calibration, and will be used almost constantly, while being maintained. They also require frequent test prints, proofs and repeated calibration to get them right.
If you wanted to spend £75,000 on a home printer and have it serviced once a month it would probably work perfectly too. If you want to spend £50 and never service it, you get a cheap, probably shitty InkJet that will frequently cause issues.
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