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
Because every home printer you’ve ever purchased was a “loss leader”.
It was a machine priced *way* under the cost to manufacture it, but also manufactured to be as cheap as possible, because quality printers cost more than any average consumer would ever be willing to pay.
Would you pay $2000 for a printer?
No, you wouldn’t.
And that’s why the printers you buy are garbage.
Printer makers are incentivized to screw you over as much as possible. That’s why they just refuse to print a black and white page when the cyan is low.
Stop buying home printers. Stop falling for the grift. Just pay 20¢ a page to print at Staples (or cheaper, maybe free, at your local library, which is what I do).
If you think you’re saving money buying a home printer for $120, you’re not. You’re paying out the ass for ink/toner.
If you’re not printing at home enough that the cost of a *good* industrial printer makes financial sense, you’ll save money printing at Staples.
I haven’t owned a printer in about 20 years. I print… more than the average person needs to (I’m a private music teacher) and I’ve probably spent less than $20 a year on printing.
[removed]
4 years ago I spent 250 on a proper color laser and never looked back.
Toner lasts for an ungodly number of pages and never dries up. It never needs any magic “cleaning cycle” that delays my printing for 5 minutes and consumes half the cartridge. It’s up and running in seconds. And the only problem I’ve ever had with it is the occasional beeping in the night and some stacks of paper in the output in the morning because my cat likes to walk around on the keypad.
The problem is most consumer level devices need to be as cheap and small as possible so quality is as low as humanly possible while lasting just long enough to rope you into ink purchases which you can then throw away because they’re not compatible with whatever you buy when this one craps out.
I work for a print software manufacturer. And no, not HP and not a home inkjet system. I work in QA and can honestly tell you it is extremely frustrating trying to get these commercial grade print drivers to work with such a wide band of printers, operating systems, and devices. The variables alone are astounding. That being said, companies that make home print systems simply don’t invest the time, engineering, and QA that is required to make a print driver “good.” They get it close enough and release it, hoping to fix any bugs that will never be reported in a future release of newer printer compatibility. There’s a lot that goes into developing print technology so if you wish to jump down that rabbit hole, I’m your guy. Feel free to DM me anytime
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.
Because printers are a mix of mechanical and electronic components that have to work together to put something very small and physical on another random physical surface and do this with very small movements.
There is nothing in your house that does the same It is a miracle they work as well as they do. It takes tiny liquid dots and puts them with microscopic precision exactly in the right spot on a surface you give them.
And it almost always works. Even without using vendor approved paper, in a relatively dusty environment they continue to work their magic. And they are so well build and easy to maintain that you don’t even need years to learn how to use them, you just buy them and plug them in.
We are quite good at making things small, but printers still need to print on an A4 surface, so they will always be relatively large. But the biggest issue is all the moving parts, from feeding the paper through the machine to positioning the nozzle where the ink comes out.
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).
Even a good printer like a Brother, which I swear by, is still a mechanical device with many more things that can go wrong compared to more electronic devices, speaking as someone who has delved into the internals of office laser printers far too often.
Electronic devices tend to have simpler single points of failure.
Because people tend to buy cheap junk printers without doing their research, and cheap junk is always going to be cheap junk.
If people were to buy a basic office-level laser printer, it would be years of effort free printing.
The printers are built with the cheapest possible components as they are generally sold at a loss.
They make their money back on the consumables.
They know printers will sometimes get junked as it is sometimes cheaper to replace than replace the consumables.
Latest Answers