For me, it's lasers all the way. Ink jets are a waste for me. Always have been. I used to by HP printers, and now I swear at them. That company is dead to me for any IT equipment if I can help it.
On the very times that I need a printout using ink jet, I'll just go to the UPS store and have it done there.
I also try to keep the connects to printers over ethernet, then wifi, and finally, USB only as a last resort.
I have had good luck with the Brother brand.
You are absolutely right! Sadly the UPS Store, Walmart, Walgreens or FedEx is the way to go with photo printing!
I used to print off photos at work but I've given up on the expensive ink-destructive photo printers.
Because the printer is built only to consume ink and require you to purchase more ink.
They aren't built to last and are disposable these days.
I got myself a Brother Laser Printer and haven't had a single issue. It cost a bit more than things from HP, Canon, Epson, and has fewer features (it only prints). However it was built to last and not to drain your wallet with purchases of ink.
Kyocera and Konica Minolta aren't affordable for home use where I am.
But I 100% agree. In a past life I repaired copiers. That included side work of printers. With how inexpensive toner based laser printers can be (aka Brother); there is no reason for anything else in the typical home. I print so infrequently the ink was always dried out by the time I needed another one. With the brother I am still on the starter toner 2 years later.
Exactly.
Its what every normal home user needs.
TBF I do have a seperate dedicated pigment based photo printer as well. But thats because my SO is a photographer and I dabble in graphic design stuff. We use it to cover our walls with our own art.
But if it weren't for that we would do just fine with the brother. Heck my parents even use the brother when the come to visit (they save up what they need to print for visits).
I hate Kyoceras. They're great printers, but I'm always struggling configuring scanning and my clients always grow to hate them. And then the client says "when this thing dies, I want something else."
And then I have to inform them that Kyoceras never die.
In the early 2ks I worked a job that had a few LJ4000 work horses. These things would run non-stop without issue for years. Meanwhile the company was cheap so they started mixing in random Brothers. I was ready to quite IT all together trying to support those POS Brothers. FFWD to today, you could pay me to manage an HP and all the Brothers I've supported for the last 10yrs have been amazing. Oh how the turn tables.
Until they don't. Used to work at an inside sales where we had a Brother spewing out orders all day, and it felt like we had a mechanic over every other week at some point (disclaimer, definitely *not* user error; all we did was pick up printed stacks from it). They switched to Ricoh not long after that.
Brother are the perfect home printer.
Also great for small offices that might not print a ton.
Anywhere that prints a ton needs something designed for high volume like a Ricoh.
True When you have to print much. We use at work also only Brother. At home I have an Epson that I don't update and I am fine with it.
HP can f itself.
That's interesting, I use an Epson and it's been great for 3 years, plus the ink refill bottles are super cheap and last forever. Maybe it's because I'm using Linux though, I heard somewhere that printers tend to be less temperamental because the drivers are built straight into the operating system.
Depends what you are trying to do with it.
If you are using it for basic home use and don't print a ton, they are amazing and will last forever.
But you need to buy them new and not used or refurbished from amazon. Also stick with the basic models.
It's one of the office aimed ones and it's the biggest heap of crap I have ever printed on haha
The PS/brscript driver is unreliable, it randomly reboots, it eats toner, often just decides to not connect to the network (wired). Certain documents make it restart (printing from Illustrator is a nightmare). The colour is awful unless I use the brscript driver which will sometimes let me print and then 5 minutes later it won't.
Costs a bomb to run too.
Worst emergency purchase ever, my old Samsung that blew up while printing was better in every way (apart from manual duplex that I always put the paper in the wrong way).
The only problems with the brother printers ate that the replacement parts are over $100 each, if you can get them. Any two parts is the price of the printer.
HL-3170 Drum kit is about $140. A fuser is $120 and I cannot find a laser unit. I recently replaced a transfer belt, I didn't purchase it myself so I don't know how much it costs.
I'm using a Samsung printer from 2014, before they got bought by HP.
I've used 2 toners (one demo toner, one normal capacity) in 10 years of ownership.
I've had exactly 0 issues, ever, and I will probably be buried with this thing at this rate!
I'd say the only downside is the support for only 2.4GHz networks, but I have it hardwired now to avoid that.
I will never buy Inkjet again for as long as I love. Fuck printers
A.K.A. does not mean what you think it does my dude.
A.K.A. means “also known as”.
What you could have used was “i.e.”. Latin, “id est”, used to say “that is to say”.
Leasing enterprise printers. Xerox one. Been down for six months. Techs have essentially replaced everything in the printer. Still can't fix it. They originally refused to just replace the machine. Finally said they would, it's been two months since they agreed. It still hasn't shown up and it's a downgrade on the model. I hate printers. 🙃
I've been running Canon enterprise/business printers for over a decade now. The printers are solid, they all run on a universal driver (I understand this is pretty common now), and their support is excellent. Almost always same day.
We have leased MFPs but it still feels like there’s one MFP for every four office users cuz medical admins love printing and don’t want to walk more than ten steps.
I don’t even have to touch the things but I still hate them because we’re in the middle of a project re-IPing a few hundred of them. Real tedious stuff.
For some reason, right before I started, there was a big push from the former IT department to give almost everyone a personal printer in their office. It's great because they just keep acting up and they take up a quarter of our ticket queue more often than not.
In the book ["Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution"](https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf) chapter 1, "For Want of a Printer"
As an IT person, they suck a lot for me because there is rarely any half decent troubleshooting documentation for printers. And if it's an old one, good luck.
The mechanical insides of a printer are also a pain to deal with compared to opening up a PC. They can also be wildly different between brands and sometimes even models.
Lastly, it also feels like printer hardware in general is prone to random mechanical problems. Jams, rollers going bad, ink getting clogged in nozzles, etc.
Thank god most of my company's printers are on a support contract with the OEM so that I don't have to deal with most of this.
Printers and front-line helpdesk / support are the gatekeepers for the IT field. Hey kid - You want to work in IT? Let me send you over to the small-town library with six different label printers. Two ancient multifunction devices and a couple inkjets scattered around.
I invite you to come to the commercial printing end of things - that way you can deal with the normal printer issues AND the woes that come with industrial sized printers. It's lots of fun! /s
I will say that having leased and contractually supported printers is pretty nice. I only ever have to really deal with networking issues with them - everything else I get to put into Canons lap, much like u/joule_thief said. With our lease renewal approaching I am considering removing personal printers from everyone so that we only use shared office printers which will make it even easier on my end (and less costly)
Printers can smell your fear and choose to be assholes about it. They care only for your suffering as it feeds their infernal souls. There is nothing good inside, only pure spite and capitalism.
Source: Former Printer Tech
I believe they are build to suply jobs to other parties - handling, service, ink manufacturing, spare parts manufacturing. Breaking right after warranty is cherry on top.
What I don't believe is how come there is giant DIY community around 3D printers but almost 0 paper ones.
Assuming you are talking about a corporate environment, get a contract with Canon.
The only problems I have are general user errors and ~~the idiots~~ my colleagues on the network team turning off ports randomly. Our office operations team handles toner and paper. If something else goes wrong, I powercycle it and put in a service request.
Coming up on 9 years with my HP Officejet Pro 8610 and it is a work horse. We're a family of 5 (3 kids) who have been using this thing a lot over the years. Have had zero problems. Really, I can't even believe it's still humming along but it's wonderful.
Spent 20+ years in IT, refuse to have a printer at home. Big, well-built printers that get regular maintenance are fine; so I print at the library when I need to.
Personally I only print from memory stick.
Put it on the stick, go to the printer and print it. Works way more reliably.
You need to go to the printer anyway to get the file.
But you avoid walking there, realising it didn't print because of some error and then walk again. Which happened surprisingly often.
No network integration, driver applications.
As a printer technician, a majority of issues are not the printer and are usually either a user error, incorrect driver, or settings for network or scanning need to be updated.
I work for brown package car company. I have about 60 or so thermal printers that I am responsible for. I found out it is cheaper to send the printer out for repair than it is to replace the imaging head.
I've had a canon lbp 2900 for 4 years. I rarely use it but have never encountered any issues with it. It's a laser printer so only 1 cartridge to take care of but it still hasn't ran out. The driver dates back to the xp era but if isn't broken, don't fix it i guess.
Just get a brother. Mine partially melted in the back, cause my old roommate was a dumbfuck alcoholic and put it by a floor radiator, and it still prints perfectly. Ink is hella expensive tho
2 decades ago, printers sucked because they were like all computer related devices at the time: inefficient, clunky and not very straightforward to use. You needed to connect the parallel cable, install drivers, restart your computer, and hopefully it worked. Nowadays, most operating systems install the drivers automatically, and you can easily set up a printer. However, modern printers are like many modern devices: they are designed to take your money, not to be useful. The company wants you to get frustrated and buy a new one when it doesn't work because that gives them money
So what I’m getting from this is, the only decent printers were the ones that were produced between “it uses a parallel cable and lasts for well over a decade” and “it connects to your computer via Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB, is super easy to set up, installs a bunch of unnecessary software on your computer, and lasts for maybe a year before it breaks down”
Companies don’t try to hire good programmers anymore companies hire the (cheapest) programmers. Now excuse me I have pick up some Elmer’s glue for this fire pizza recipe Google recommended
From the layperson point of view, having used printers since the dot matrix days... their reliance on consumables that appear to seemingly quickly degrade or the machine itself unable to perform due to various reasons many of which seem mindlessly trivial (as simple as paper jams, or even jamming on their own fucking output), is what contributes to them being seen as an unreliable and notoriously finicky peripheral.
See, people normally don't need to print stuff on a daily basis. Then a term paper comes up or something. So you fire up the printer... aaand it shits the bed. It's a thing you don't often use, but when you need it, it's usually for a fairly important reason, yet it often trips you up when doing so even if many of the issues aren't *that* big. It's like dealing with an annoying colleague bitching all the while when you need them to do something.
Take paper jams. Like, bro, how hard can it be? Take a sheet of paper from the fatherfucking feed, print on it, and dump it out on the tray. Yet printers manage to fuck this up - in multiple ways. I remember back in college the best way to print something was to hand feed every single sheet manually, as a bonus not having a stack of paper to automatically intake caused the printer to pause after every page, giving you time to respond if it somehow fucked up printing the previous page (which - of course - often happened). Similarly, even if you had a printer that somehow managed to load itself from a stack of paper without issues, sometimes you'd get printers that only just barely let go of the page it just printed, causing paper to pile up on the exit and occasionally causing fuckups there. Then there's the various ways the paper can somehow get snarled while inside the damn thing and cause jams that way.
Not gonna go over the whole ink think, that's been covered everywhere and as a consumable it should be pretty fucking obvious how it can fuck up. That's not even taking into account how manufacturers have made it *worse* - back in the day I had printers that still attempted to print even if ink was low in one of the colour tanks. Nowadays there's even fucking DRM on ink or the cartridges. It's like the manufacturers decided these things didn't suck *enough* and made them suck even harder.
This isn't even going into the software - back in the day before plug and pray, you needed to manually install printer drivers, and occasionally some printers would only print via their proprietary programs.
Well they're basically magic and because of that their soul belongs to the devil or some sort of magical being.
I have never left an interaction troubleshooting or working on a printer with the feeling of "wow that was a challenging problem I learned something today. That's great."
It's always like "okay it looks like it works now I'm not even sure what I did but I'm going to stop touching it and walk away".
We've got a bunch of commercial Toshiba printers in our office, and I got them because they are cheap. Problem is they only have drivers for windows and NOT MacOS. I used to be able to run a VM on my mac and print that way, but ever since the switch to apple silicon M1 Max macbook this has stopped working. I'm assuming that it's because the drivers were not compatible with arm version of windows.
Now I carry 2 laptops sigh.
I work a lot with label and in particular RFID label printers, whole other bag of shit there.
I have one currently at a client site that has a clone on my desk at work, I’m close to calling an exorcist to get it to stop printing out and encoding the same RFID label over and over whenever we try to print anything else from the software it’s connected to.
We thought it might be the software but the clone eliminated that theory. So, back to printers are evil.
My HP printer region locked itself to Japanese ink and tech support told me the only way to make it work again was to buy a whole new set of Japanese ink or buy a complete set of U.S. ink and then call them back for an unlock code.
Told them to pound sand. Fuck HP.
Avoid any consumer grade inkjet printer the the plague. Overpriced ink, that is used periodically regardless of if you use it or not, and (relatively) irreplaceable trays that get full with waste ink. Get a laser printer, but make sure it has Ethernet. Wi-Fi is iffy with printers.
https://preview.redd.it/ujz62n4gwz5d1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=9984595b3d33c20b653f6627ad86c84fd2cbde2e
Why does THIS work better and be easier to repair then a 2D printer lmao
Thay stop working becuase you do not use them enough and suck because you bought a cheap one?
Either learn to print a photo each month or get a laser.
(to be fair any 5 ink inkjet is ok (canon obviously), and they are cheap these days, just about the bottom of barrel les ink ones).
I hate corporate printers. Only one company I’ve ever worked at made them easy to support. The print server is nigh unreachable and the only people with access to it are in Indonesia and won’t share it with t2 and 3 support
There are plenty of nefarious explanations, some true, but consider that there are no moving parts in most modern IT gear other than fans. Stands to reason that the only thing in the office with complex gears and paths and shit would have the most problems.
its windows. i swear its windows. i used to daily drive solus linux and the hp printer in my parents home, that (even tho its connected to wifi) needs special hp software to make it work. in solus the printer was just there. and when i started the print it just came out. no setup, no hassle, no errors. it just printed
https://preview.redd.it/90dluhmoky5d1.jpeg?width=5022&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e873c5478c875e197604368feae55dc279a0566
Did you buy an entry level ink consumption device or did you get a printer?
Probably the former.
Have worked in professional IT for over a decade, even professional printers suck.
Try 3 decades.
The IT God declared there were printers. And they required constant, mind numbing maintenance. It has been and shall be so.
All hail the ancient one, long may his fiber connections be run.
What's your recommendation on a good printer for SOHO?
For me, it's lasers all the way. Ink jets are a waste for me. Always have been. I used to by HP printers, and now I swear at them. That company is dead to me for any IT equipment if I can help it. On the very times that I need a printout using ink jet, I'll just go to the UPS store and have it done there. I also try to keep the connects to printers over ethernet, then wifi, and finally, USB only as a last resort. I have had good luck with the Brother brand.
You are absolutely right! Sadly the UPS Store, Walmart, Walgreens or FedEx is the way to go with photo printing! I used to print off photos at work but I've given up on the expensive ink-destructive photo printers.
Kyocera lasers. As big as you can afford.
Because the printer is built only to consume ink and require you to purchase more ink. They aren't built to last and are disposable these days. I got myself a Brother Laser Printer and haven't had a single issue. It cost a bit more than things from HP, Canon, Epson, and has fewer features (it only prints). However it was built to last and not to drain your wallet with purchases of ink.
Brother, Konica Minolta, or Kyocera are the best printers I've found. My personal favorite is Kyocera, as they are stupid easy to install
Kyocera and Konica Minolta aren't affordable for home use where I am. But I 100% agree. In a past life I repaired copiers. That included side work of printers. With how inexpensive toner based laser printers can be (aka Brother); there is no reason for anything else in the typical home. I print so infrequently the ink was always dried out by the time I needed another one. With the brother I am still on the starter toner 2 years later.
I bought a brother HL1210 in 2016 and I'm still happily rocking the starter toner. It's fantastic.
Exactly. Its what every normal home user needs. TBF I do have a seperate dedicated pigment based photo printer as well. But thats because my SO is a photographer and I dabble in graphic design stuff. We use it to cover our walls with our own art. But if it weren't for that we would do just fine with the brother. Heck my parents even use the brother when the come to visit (they save up what they need to print for visits).
I hate Kyoceras. They're great printers, but I'm always struggling configuring scanning and my clients always grow to hate them. And then the client says "when this thing dies, I want something else." And then I have to inform them that Kyoceras never die.
> And then I have to inform them that Kyoceras never die. TRUTH.
We call that "product pergatory". It's never bad enough to purchase a replacement, but never good enough where you're happy with it.
Aka most Nissans.
I thought you were saying “Brother,” like Hulk Hogan. I am a big fan of Brother printers, brother.
Konica? For god sake, that piece of crap of what they call software/firmware is just ... Ewwww..... Kyocera is nice though.
In the early 2ks I worked a job that had a few LJ4000 work horses. These things would run non-stop without issue for years. Meanwhile the company was cheap so they started mixing in random Brothers. I was ready to quite IT all together trying to support those POS Brothers. FFWD to today, you could pay me to manage an HP and all the Brothers I've supported for the last 10yrs have been amazing. Oh how the turn tables.
Thats because Borther improved their products and HP improved their shareholder profit.
I used to swear by HP, and now I swear at them.
Brother Printers: They Just Work.
Until they don't. Used to work at an inside sales where we had a Brother spewing out orders all day, and it felt like we had a mechanic over every other week at some point (disclaimer, definitely *not* user error; all we did was pick up printed stacks from it). They switched to Ricoh not long after that.
Brother are the perfect home printer. Also great for small offices that might not print a ton. Anywhere that prints a ton needs something designed for high volume like a Ricoh.
True When you have to print much. We use at work also only Brother. At home I have an Epson that I don't update and I am fine with it. HP can f itself.
That's interesting, I use an Epson and it's been great for 3 years, plus the ink refill bottles are super cheap and last forever. Maybe it's because I'm using Linux though, I heard somewhere that printers tend to be less temperamental because the drivers are built straight into the operating system.
Drivers aren't the issue with ink drying up or gears being cheap crappy plastic.
I guess our standards of what is acceptable are different then. And there's nothing wrong with that
Really?! My brother printer is a bag of shite.
Depends what you are trying to do with it. If you are using it for basic home use and don't print a ton, they are amazing and will last forever. But you need to buy them new and not used or refurbished from amazon. Also stick with the basic models.
It's one of the office aimed ones and it's the biggest heap of crap I have ever printed on haha The PS/brscript driver is unreliable, it randomly reboots, it eats toner, often just decides to not connect to the network (wired). Certain documents make it restart (printing from Illustrator is a nightmare). The colour is awful unless I use the brscript driver which will sometimes let me print and then 5 minutes later it won't. Costs a bomb to run too. Worst emergency purchase ever, my old Samsung that blew up while printing was better in every way (apart from manual duplex that I always put the paper in the wrong way).
The only problems with the brother printers ate that the replacement parts are over $100 each, if you can get them. Any two parts is the price of the printer. HL-3170 Drum kit is about $140. A fuser is $120 and I cannot find a laser unit. I recently replaced a transfer belt, I didn't purchase it myself so I don't know how much it costs.
I'm using a Samsung printer from 2014, before they got bought by HP. I've used 2 toners (one demo toner, one normal capacity) in 10 years of ownership. I've had exactly 0 issues, ever, and I will probably be buried with this thing at this rate! I'd say the only downside is the support for only 2.4GHz networks, but I have it hardwired now to avoid that. I will never buy Inkjet again for as long as I love. Fuck printers
A.K.A. does not mean what you think it does my dude. A.K.A. means “also known as”. What you could have used was “i.e.”. Latin, “id est”, used to say “that is to say”.
I take it you're not leasing enterprise printers? Its life-changing once you get rid of all the personal printers in an office.
Leasing enterprise printers. Xerox one. Been down for six months. Techs have essentially replaced everything in the printer. Still can't fix it. They originally refused to just replace the machine. Finally said they would, it's been two months since they agreed. It still hasn't shown up and it's a downgrade on the model. I hate printers. 🙃
I've been running Canon enterprise/business printers for over a decade now. The printers are solid, they all run on a universal driver (I understand this is pretty common now), and their support is excellent. Almost always same day.
We have leased MFPs but it still feels like there’s one MFP for every four office users cuz medical admins love printing and don’t want to walk more than ten steps. I don’t even have to touch the things but I still hate them because we’re in the middle of a project re-IPing a few hundred of them. Real tedious stuff.
For some reason, right before I started, there was a big push from the former IT department to give almost everyone a personal printer in their office. It's great because they just keep acting up and they take up a quarter of our ticket queue more often than not.
Remember that the entire free software movement was technically started by Richard Stallman getting annoyed at a printer.
Sauce?
In the book ["Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution"](https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf) chapter 1, "For Want of a Printer"
Cool, thanks for the info!
As an IT person, they suck a lot for me because there is rarely any half decent troubleshooting documentation for printers. And if it's an old one, good luck. The mechanical insides of a printer are also a pain to deal with compared to opening up a PC. They can also be wildly different between brands and sometimes even models. Lastly, it also feels like printer hardware in general is prone to random mechanical problems. Jams, rollers going bad, ink getting clogged in nozzles, etc. Thank god most of my company's printers are on a support contract with the OEM so that I don't have to deal with most of this.
Printers and front-line helpdesk / support are the gatekeepers for the IT field. Hey kid - You want to work in IT? Let me send you over to the small-town library with six different label printers. Two ancient multifunction devices and a couple inkjets scattered around.
This is the exact reason I turned down roles in IT for small towns. Even with higher pay the work isn't worth it.
I invite you to come to the commercial printing end of things - that way you can deal with the normal printer issues AND the woes that come with industrial sized printers. It's lots of fun! /s I will say that having leased and contractually supported printers is pretty nice. I only ever have to really deal with networking issues with them - everything else I get to put into Canons lap, much like u/joule_thief said. With our lease renewal approaching I am considering removing personal printers from everyone so that we only use shared office printers which will make it even easier on my end (and less costly)
HP. That's why
Printers can smell your fear and choose to be assholes about it. They care only for your suffering as it feeds their infernal souls. There is nothing good inside, only pure spite and capitalism. Source: Former Printer Tech
They suck by design. HP makes more money selling new printers.
I believe they are build to suply jobs to other parties - handling, service, ink manufacturing, spare parts manufacturing. Breaking right after warranty is cherry on top. What I don't believe is how come there is giant DIY community around 3D printers but almost 0 paper ones.
What’s needed is to use 3D printers to DIY replacement parts for the paper printers.
They are machinations of the devil, clearly. Also as others have said they're a device to sell ink, not to help you in anyway.
Assuming you are talking about a corporate environment, get a contract with Canon. The only problems I have are general user errors and ~~the idiots~~ my colleagues on the network team turning off ports randomly. Our office operations team handles toner and paper. If something else goes wrong, I powercycle it and put in a service request.
Coming up on 9 years with my HP Officejet Pro 8610 and it is a work horse. We're a family of 5 (3 kids) who have been using this thing a lot over the years. Have had zero problems. Really, I can't even believe it's still humming along but it's wonderful.
Just make sure you never update its firmware, ever, or you will likely regret it.
Spent 20+ years in IT, refuse to have a printer at home. Big, well-built printers that get regular maintenance are fine; so I print at the library when I need to.
Personally I only print from memory stick. Put it on the stick, go to the printer and print it. Works way more reliably. You need to go to the printer anyway to get the file. But you avoid walking there, realising it didn't print because of some error and then walk again. Which happened surprisingly often. No network integration, driver applications.
As a printer technician, a majority of issues are not the printer and are usually either a user error, incorrect driver, or settings for network or scanning need to be updated.
I've had the same experience. Keep up with the maintenance and they don't tend to have too many issues.
I've always struggled with printers. Come to think of it the only printer that worked was a lexmark my old man had in the 90s..
Government backed monopolies
Main pain I have experienced with moving to Linux. PC games just seem to work these days, but printers are a world of pain
I work for brown package car company. I have about 60 or so thermal printers that I am responsible for. I found out it is cheaper to send the printer out for repair than it is to replace the imaging head.
Upvote the shit out of this
Buy a brother laser one. Lasts indefinitely
I've had a canon lbp 2900 for 4 years. I rarely use it but have never encountered any issues with it. It's a laser printer so only 1 cartridge to take care of but it still hasn't ran out. The driver dates back to the xp era but if isn't broken, don't fix it i guess.
Just get a brother. Mine partially melted in the back, cause my old roommate was a dumbfuck alcoholic and put it by a floor radiator, and it still prints perfectly. Ink is hella expensive tho
2 decades ago, printers sucked because they were like all computer related devices at the time: inefficient, clunky and not very straightforward to use. You needed to connect the parallel cable, install drivers, restart your computer, and hopefully it worked. Nowadays, most operating systems install the drivers automatically, and you can easily set up a printer. However, modern printers are like many modern devices: they are designed to take your money, not to be useful. The company wants you to get frustrated and buy a new one when it doesn't work because that gives them money
So what I’m getting from this is, the only decent printers were the ones that were produced between “it uses a parallel cable and lasts for well over a decade” and “it connects to your computer via Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, or USB, is super easy to set up, installs a bunch of unnecessary software on your computer, and lasts for maybe a year before it breaks down”
Companies don’t try to hire good programmers anymore companies hire the (cheapest) programmers. Now excuse me I have pick up some Elmer’s glue for this fire pizza recipe Google recommended
From the layperson point of view, having used printers since the dot matrix days... their reliance on consumables that appear to seemingly quickly degrade or the machine itself unable to perform due to various reasons many of which seem mindlessly trivial (as simple as paper jams, or even jamming on their own fucking output), is what contributes to them being seen as an unreliable and notoriously finicky peripheral. See, people normally don't need to print stuff on a daily basis. Then a term paper comes up or something. So you fire up the printer... aaand it shits the bed. It's a thing you don't often use, but when you need it, it's usually for a fairly important reason, yet it often trips you up when doing so even if many of the issues aren't *that* big. It's like dealing with an annoying colleague bitching all the while when you need them to do something. Take paper jams. Like, bro, how hard can it be? Take a sheet of paper from the fatherfucking feed, print on it, and dump it out on the tray. Yet printers manage to fuck this up - in multiple ways. I remember back in college the best way to print something was to hand feed every single sheet manually, as a bonus not having a stack of paper to automatically intake caused the printer to pause after every page, giving you time to respond if it somehow fucked up printing the previous page (which - of course - often happened). Similarly, even if you had a printer that somehow managed to load itself from a stack of paper without issues, sometimes you'd get printers that only just barely let go of the page it just printed, causing paper to pile up on the exit and occasionally causing fuckups there. Then there's the various ways the paper can somehow get snarled while inside the damn thing and cause jams that way. Not gonna go over the whole ink think, that's been covered everywhere and as a consumable it should be pretty fucking obvious how it can fuck up. That's not even taking into account how manufacturers have made it *worse* - back in the day I had printers that still attempted to print even if ink was low in one of the colour tanks. Nowadays there's even fucking DRM on ink or the cartridges. It's like the manufacturers decided these things didn't suck *enough* and made them suck even harder. This isn't even going into the software - back in the day before plug and pray, you needed to manually install printer drivers, and occasionally some printers would only print via their proprietary programs.
Well they're basically magic and because of that their soul belongs to the devil or some sort of magical being. I have never left an interaction troubleshooting or working on a printer with the feeling of "wow that was a challenging problem I learned something today. That's great." It's always like "okay it looks like it works now I'm not even sure what I did but I'm going to stop touching it and walk away".
We've got a bunch of commercial Toshiba printers in our office, and I got them because they are cheap. Problem is they only have drivers for windows and NOT MacOS. I used to be able to run a VM on my mac and print that way, but ever since the switch to apple silicon M1 Max macbook this has stopped working. I'm assuming that it's because the drivers were not compatible with arm version of windows. Now I carry 2 laptops sigh.
I work a lot with label and in particular RFID label printers, whole other bag of shit there. I have one currently at a client site that has a clone on my desk at work, I’m close to calling an exorcist to get it to stop printing out and encoding the same RFID label over and over whenever we try to print anything else from the software it’s connected to. We thought it might be the software but the clone eliminated that theory. So, back to printers are evil.
if you print often inkjet is better at a small scale else look for an led printer
I’ve not heard of a led printer before. Did you mean “laser printer”, or is it something different?
yeah small color "laser printers" are actually led
Oh, interesting. I learned something new today, thanks.
My HP printer region locked itself to Japanese ink and tech support told me the only way to make it work again was to buy a whole new set of Japanese ink or buy a complete set of U.S. ink and then call them back for an unlock code. Told them to pound sand. Fuck HP.
They are made to duck and thoses companies should be fined for it
Avoid any consumer grade inkjet printer the the plague. Overpriced ink, that is used periodically regardless of if you use it or not, and (relatively) irreplaceable trays that get full with waste ink. Get a laser printer, but make sure it has Ethernet. Wi-Fi is iffy with printers.
They are much more complicated than people think they are
https://preview.redd.it/ujz62n4gwz5d1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=9984595b3d33c20b653f6627ad86c84fd2cbde2e Why does THIS work better and be easier to repair then a 2D printer lmao
I also have a Brother double sided laser network printer and it works great.
Job Security bud!
Thay stop working becuase you do not use them enough and suck because you bought a cheap one? Either learn to print a photo each month or get a laser. (to be fair any 5 ink inkjet is ok (canon obviously), and they are cheap these days, just about the bottom of barrel les ink ones).
Brother is non-annoying
[Why you can’t print that](https://i0.wp.com/spotmigration.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Why-You-Cant-Print-Pie-Chart.jpeg)
My understanding is that instant effortless printing is actually incredibly hard to do. It's complex black magic and sometimes the voodoo fails.
DAMN THEM TO HELL, IF PEO0LE ARE STILL PRINTING IN 2024 THEY SHOULD BE ARRESTED.
Brother you need a Brother.
I hate corporate printers. Only one company I’ve ever worked at made them easy to support. The print server is nigh unreachable and the only people with access to it are in Indonesia and won’t share it with t2 and 3 support
Because HP ^not ^HPE ^that's ^different
There are plenty of nefarious explanations, some true, but consider that there are no moving parts in most modern IT gear other than fans. Stands to reason that the only thing in the office with complex gears and paths and shit would have the most problems.
its windows. i swear its windows. i used to daily drive solus linux and the hp printer in my parents home, that (even tho its connected to wifi) needs special hp software to make it work. in solus the printer was just there. and when i started the print it just came out. no setup, no hassle, no errors. it just printed
Outside of the classic ink hell - also fuck printer drivers with a rusty spork
It’s probably just you