🤔 Curious why printers are still so inconvenient in this modern age? 🖨️
#Printers #Technology #Frustration #Innovation
Are you tired of dealing with outdated printer technology?
It’s no secret that printers can be a major headache when it comes to convenience and ease of use. From paper jams to mysterious error messages, it’s enough to make anyone want to pull their hair out. So why is it that this one piece of technology seems to have been left in the dust while everything else has improved over time?
What’s the deal with printers?
When you think about it, printers haven’t changed all that much over the years. Sure, they may have gotten a bit faster or have better quality printing capabilities, but at the end of the day, they still seem to be stuck in the past. So why haven’t printers evolved like everything else?
Reasons printers seem stuck in the past:
– Lack of innovation in the printer industry
– Inherent complexities of printing technology
– Focus on cost-cutting rather than user experience
– Resistance to change from established brands
Can printers ever catch up?
It’s hard to say whether printers will ever catch up to the rest of the technological world. But one thing’s for sure – until they do, we’ll just have to deal with the frustrations that come along with using them. Here’s hoping that someday we’ll be able to print without a second thought!
Because you buy the cheap ones.
At some point, certain technologies get to a place where they can only get so much better. Add that to the fact that people print less and things will change more slowly as there is less interest in improvement.
The current printers are light years ahead of the printers from the ’80s and 90’s. (Think dot matrix, daisy wheel, etc.) Back then, if a printer did anything special like graphics, you had to have a driver for that printer or your software had to support that specific printer.
People undervalue the cost of personal digital printing because we live around printed things (which does cost up to 1000x cheaper, because it uses ultra efficient mass production method called process/CMYK printing).
What I’m trying to say is people should allocate more on printing budget. Buy a nice one.
Printers are actually really good if you pay good money for them. The ones we have at work churn stuff out and never go wrong.
Even the one I used at home for years is basically fine.
But if you buy the $49.99 one, then you get what you pay for.
Are you sure technology has not improved? The home laser printers are infinitely better than the inkjet printers even from 15 years ago. I got one recently for a reasonable price and it is super fast which I didn’t think was possible outside of a commercial office printer.
Ink jet print heads get ruined if you don’t print on a regular basis. With HP this means buying new cartridges, with other brands it means buying a new printer.
Cheap laser printers are worlds better than cheap ink jets for everything but photo printing.
My Brother Laser printer was like $150, took two minutes to setup, and never is a problem until it needs a new toner cartridge, which is also at least easy to swap.
I flee “all in one” printers and color printers like the plague, but yeah, black and white laser is solved and cheap.
Printers have improved so much in my lifetime, there truly amazing. Now stay away from the cheap ones, and you need to run them once in a while or they start to gum up.
My advice is to not buy a “home” model but instead get a “work” model. Think officejet over deskjet. The work models cost a bit more but are many times faster and have much larger consumables, so they cost less in the long run.
Oh, and for some reason HPs drivers are the absolute worst. There printers are fine, but there drivers leave me sobbing in the corner.
Because you have shit printers. I never had a problem with those things since 1997-ish.
what seems to be the problem? My Brother laser printer that i got 10 years is still working fine. i ctrl+p to print. it auto wakes up and within 5 secs later, a page comes out. can it be improved to print faster? im sure it can but i honestly dont need it to be faster.
Just don’t buy HP. Never again
This is such a spot on observation and good question.
I absolutely HATE what HP is doing now. I bought one of their printers, and was dumb enough to get an ink and paper subscription. These assholes MONITOR every page you print and constantly remind you how many more pages you’re allowed to print that month before you get charged MORE. You know what the limit is? 50 pages. FIFTY! I bought a pack of paper with 200 sheets or whatever it is, I already paid for it, I already paid for the printer, I already paid for the ink, and now you’re gonna MONITOR me and tell me how many pages I can print?!?!
When you cancel, the ink cartridges you ALREADY PAID FOR no longer work! They actually disable them!
So they are FULLY capable of innovating, but guess how many times my printer would lose connection with the network or some other error would happen and I couldn’t print when I needed? Like every other day. So they can take the time to figure out how to monitor every page you print, disable cartridges you’ve already paid for, but they can’t keep the fucking thing connected to the network. FUCK HP.
My Brother laser printers have rocked along rock solid for decades.
If you stay far, far away from inkjets in general and especially ones from HP, you will be a happier person.
I think it boils down to “you get what you pay for.”
I swear it’s shit drivers. I’ve had two printers that were a nightmare everytime I wanted to print. But in ubuntu they worked fine.
You just need to stop buying HP. 90% of what people think of as “printer problems” is just HP bullshit.
Loaded question. You never tried to print anything in the early 2000s
Because there’s a monopoly on printer ink
Get a laser printer! I picked up one for less than $100 and the “small” toner cartridge it came from lasted two years. I got a two-pack for $15 5 years ago and just put the second one in.
Cheap printers are not designed to print well for a long time. They are designed to sell ink. Every possible corner is cut on a $100 printer. In fact, the ink/toner that comes with the printer is almost always a small ‘starter’ cartridge that has way less volume of ink/toner in it even the cartridge is the same physical physical size as a normal cartridge. They want to get a few pages printed and then get you buying ink or toner as absolutely quick as possible.
There are brand that are just out to screw you over. From my experience it’s HP and Canon. Probably more than that.
I have been recommending Brother brand Laser Printers ever since I got one. That thing is a dang beast. Been with us for over five years now and no trouble. Nobody uses it for 3 months, then I hit the print button on my phone and guess what. Printer goes beep boop brrrr zzz and out comes my document. No fuzz. Nothing.
Ask yourself when was the last time you printed a high quality picture. Ask yourself when was the last time you printed anything colored. Then go and get a black and white laser printer. Seriously.
The refills are like $60 and I have replaced it exactly twice in five years. Went through maybe 3 reams of paper in that time.
It’s an order of operations problem. Paper was invented 6th century China and modern printers were invented 1960’s USA.
I agree with OP. I get it, printer technology has improved, but they still have this relatively long warm up period, and for some reason sound like two robots fucking every time you print something.
High end laser printers are pretty good. I used to work IT and one place I worked at had printers with millions of print jobs done and still working.
Other people are talking about general printing and how it’s still much better than it was 30-40 years ago.
But, I’m also going to bring in the fact that printing technology is also getting much better in a different way. Only a handful of years ago 3D printing was invented, and we are already making more and more headway on improving the technology – like resin printers over filament, much more detailed prints, etc.
I have two fancy printers in my office that I can’t figure out how to work. I fucking hate it.
I don’t understand why a printer is such an amazing and special thing and i should pay real money for it. Like yeah I’ll pay 50 bucks for it because its… a printer. It’s not a computer.
Today’s network printers are pretty good and certainly are a lot better than say 20 years ago.
Don’t have an issue.
We buy Brother, Kyocera, and Epson if we need an inkjet. Buy the right sized model or a step up and it’s pain-free.
I find wifi and Bluetooth printers to be a royal pain in the ass. They’re supposed to make everything easier by pairing it to your phone or enabled in your wifi network but I had nothing but bad experiences with them. I rarely used it but when I did there were unrecognize errors and I had to troubleshoot via computer which defeats the purpose of wifi and Bluetooth.
I threw away that pos and my Uncle happened to have a cannon old school printer which he let me have and I’m yet to have a problem with it after 2 years. The only thing that it does is clean the tips which take about a minute but I’ll take a minute over an hour of troubleshoot with no fix and having to drive to a place to have my shit printed.
They’re not. You’ve just used poor quality printers. They’re inherently analogue. There are only so many modifications you can make to the physical you’re operating in. Other tech that is truly tech based doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics
There’s moving parts. You might notice cars today aren’t much better than they were in the 90s, 00s etc. They have more features, but they still have problems, break down, etc, they don’t last that much longer. New printers usually work pretty well. Even old printers that don’t get used do pretty decently.
My black and white brother laser printer is 13 years old and still works great. It even works over the local network and I can print to it from any device, including my phone. All other printer brands suck because they want you to buy a new printer and their overpriced ink. Brother just wants your love and just works.
They’re not just electronic, they’re also precision mechanical devices that inherently malfunction and wear over time. It’s difficult to make the technology better without it getting much more expensive.
Lots of moving parts, many points of failure. Difficult to do cheaply, but the market (you) demands cheap products.
Technology wise they are fantastic just not consumer friendly
I spent $100 on a laser printer from Amazon 6 years ago and it still works perfectly every time. Original ink.
My xerox monochrome has been going for years now with no issues. Best 110 i could have spent for a printer.
My complaint is always wireless capabilities. If I can get any computer to pair with any printer once, I’d consider it a win.
There are only so many ways of putting in on paper and current ink jet and laser printers are about as good as it gets unless you want to move up into high-dollar commercial printers. That’s why HP has given up on innovation with their printers and started innovating new ways to screw their customers.
You’re right.
Modern lasers are not much better than lasers from 25 years ago. There hasn’t been much innovation since the 1440 dpi Epson inkjets.
Printing is such an archaic medium. I wouldn’t have one around me.
Consumers are generally unwilling to pay for the actually good products, so the cheap end gets cheaper and cheaper. Somewhere, there is an engineer at HP who has an idea for a great printer and who goes to bed crying every night because they don’t work for Brother.
Bro, back in the days we had the dot matrix swiss roll issue and I sure do not miss that.
Cheap, stale paper.
Nothing fills me with rage like a printer that won’t print..
Try and use a printer from the 90s, then go buy yourself either a canon image class or an eco tank. Then tell me they’re still primitive and a pain to use. I just printed a 7 part book series that exists only as a fan translation PDF because the original is Japanese only, with the printer automatically numbering the pages for me and printing on both sides, at a rate of about 1 page per second. Try and accomplish that with a common household inkjet printer from the 90s.
Primitive printers exist still because they are cost effective for those who only need a primitive printer. But they are far from the only choice out there. You get what you pay for.
If you read thru the responses here, you can see that it’s mostly a HP problem, especially for the ink based printers. And those tend to be cheaper crap printers.
Spend a bit more up front, get a laser or colour laser if you need colour, and you generally can print for years and years without problems.
I got a colour laser printer from canon myself, about 4 years old only so far, still on the first set of toners. Can’t recall the model off hand, but it’s made for offices. Cost me about 400-500 bucks. I may print 50 pages one day and not print anything for a couple of months. With occasional couple of pages a month sometimes. Sometimes I just need to scan stuff, like yesterday. It has double sided printing, double sided colour scanning, network printing and even a fax(which I don’t use). I fully expect this to last me at least another 5 years (meaning it would have cost me less then 50 bucks per year for trouble free use).
And if I ever need to replace toners, there are cheap third party toners available.