Every home printer I’ve owned, regardless of the brand, has been difficult to set up in the first place and then will stop working from time to time without an obvious reason until it eventually craps out. Even when consistently using the maintenance functions.
In: Technology
In the big scheme of things printers is where the digital and analogue worlds meet.
Other than a few specialized situations, we live in a digital world. Our computers, headphones, monitor, keyboards and mouse are doing a little bit of “analogue” (move the mouse, touch the keyboard, move a speaker, light the screen) but are mostly converting a digital input into a digital output.
A printer is one of the few devices that have to get a digital thing and create a real thing and the real thing is substantial. Even if the more substantial part is premade the bit that we need to convert – putting little squiggles (some colours) onto that part – seems to be hard when you want to do it cheaply.
For some reason the real world kinda sucks when you need to get the squiggles right and make them stick.
Now add the whole industry that in the end wants you to pay through the nose for **every single piece of paper** that goes through their printer you get a perfect storm of a box of non-working shit sitting in the corner of your room that you dread using because that 10 second print job takes a few hours debugging (on the digital side) or trying to work out why everything comes out yellow and skewed (analogue side).
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