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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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.
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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In addition to other comments: Software plays a big role too. Windows and MacOS have terrible printer implementations. Linux is a pain in the ass to setup, but usually works flawlessly.
Inkjets dry up unless used a lot. Even then they leak and cause allsorts of problems. They are manufactured cheaply. Get a laser printer.
>Books, newspapers, and magazines are printed perfectly all the time,
Those products have people whose entire job is making certain they are perfectly printed. They use specialized software and often have people with decades of experience just in printing. They use hugely expensive machines to do the printing.
Comparatively we are a bunch of printing pre-schoolers trying to print using a box of broken classroom Crayolas.
I’ve got a Brother (the printer), hopefully I’m not tempting fate here but I’ve had it for about 6 years and at most have had a couple of paper jams.
Gave up trying WiFi printing on it mind.
Brother. The only printer I’ve ever had that works all the time. I’ve been buying their printers now for twenty years because of the reliability.
edit: Sorry forgot what subreddit I was in. I don’t have a good eli5, just 37 years buying printers.
I’m an I.T. director, my team probably supports around 200 printers. We have fully switched to using “universal” print drivers, which in my experience are vastly more stable than the native drivers for specific printers. If a brand doesn’t offer a UPD we don’t buy that brand.
Most printers on the market are capable of PCL6 emulation, so in theory the [HP UPD](https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-universal-print-driver-series-for-windows/503548) version 7.0.1.24923 should work for most printers.
The “HP Smart” software that HP is currently pushing is trash.
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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