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
The printshop I worked in was not designed for quality but volume. Our printers were multiple millions of pounds each and went through ink by the barrel rather than the cartridge.
We used print management software that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in support to drive the things. They were very much not plug and play.
Colour calibration was a continuous annoyance. When they jammed, which they did a couple of times a day (which isn’t bad given the amount of use they got) we wasted around 50m of paper to reweb them. When the print heads failed, they were over 50k each to replace (I think we got them free as long as we returned the old ones).
They could print dual-sided 100m a minute, 23 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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