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
Two answers to this, really.
Firstly: Printers have a lot to do, and much of it is rooted in mechanical things. Drawing in paper, moving it through rollers, clamping it while the internals squirt an image onto it. That kind of thing. That part of printing hasn’t really evolved much since the early days, and in practical terms it never will. When that aspect of printing fails, you’re looking at partial disassembly of a complex mechanical device. The manufacturer may make that easy, with flaps and hatches in the right place, but it still involves an inexperienced human opening things up and delving around.
Secondly: print software, networks, and convenience. It’s perfectly possible to build a basic smallish ‘driver’ that will speak to the operating system and let the user print a page. But users very rarely plug a printer into the computer directly these days, and many users aren’t sure how to find the print options in their OS and applications. How then can we offer convenience to these users to let them site the printer somewhere that works for their environment, and print easily?
So this means that we need to find some reliable way to let the computer ‘find’ the printer and manage printing to it. There are ways to do this using newish standardised networking protocols, but these rely on everything on the path from computer to printer and back supporting these protocols correctly. And thats not always the case. To get around this, manufacturers tend to want the user to install a large set of drivers, applications and plugins that can handle this kind of discovery and management, reducing the headaches for the user. These simplify printing when they work. When they don’t: you’re relying on the manufacturer having built in sufficient diagnosis to let you troubleshoot and get printing again. Hopefully.
(I’m not even going to mention supply management and auto-resupply contracts)
TL;DR: printers are electromechanical dinosaurs that have limped into the 21st C and still suffer from the same hardware challenges they always did, and are complicated by users trying to cut the direct cable approach and fire traffic over an uncaring local network.
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