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.
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.
A newspaper printer can cost a million bucks and is a big industrial sized machine. A home inkjet printer cost a hundred bucks and is a cheaply made and designed to fit on a desktop. It’s like comparing a tricycle and a bus.
As others have said, they are made cheap, and the ink dries out due top inactivity. Get a laser printer, and most of your problems go away.
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If you’ve ever been inside a print shop, you’d know books, magazines, and newspapers do not, in fact, print perfectly all the time. There is a lot of waste/recycling.
They often need to print multiple proofs which have to be approved before a run can move forward. Even then, colors shift, and machines need to be recalibrated.
As another comment pounted out, printers are made cheaply. To the point where they’re often sold at a loss.
This is in general because the manufacturers make most of their money in ink. A cartridge of ink costs cents to produce, including the fancy kind. They’re marked up ridiculously because they’re the subscription fee. Printer ink is literally a scam.
So, in their minds, they basically give you a printer and then milk you for the ink. This leads to huge amounts of terrible printers, because they try to cut costs as much as possible, because the printers are less financially important.
Edit: to those replying with pedantry, I’m aware of the error in the first line. This is what happens when you comment on stuff at 3 AM. While both statements are true, one does not lead to the other as implied.
In addition to what has been mentioned already, the printer subsystem in Windows has been a tangled mess since forever. I used to work in printer tech support and when Windows 10 came out I really hoped they had made some improvements, but no. Even the simple act of canceling a print job depends on the goodwill of the driver, but the reason for wanting to cancel it is often that the driver pooped its pants and the job got stuck. Windows should be able to detect this and enforce action, but you still have to fix it by hand.
Printer “ports” is also a concept dating back to Windows 95 or maybe even earlier, and they frequently get messed up for no good reason, or because the driver tries to be helpful and work around the archaic system, with another system which is completely opaque to users and thus a mess to troubleshoot.
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