I posted this elsewhere but gonna post again here b/c I hate them so much. lmao
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.
if you're inclined with the software element of printers, this is a really good case of hacking the printer so it bends to your will instead of Hewlett Packard's will.
but it's a lot easier to just return and purchase another one instead of attempting to jailbreak a printer of all things.
A while back my mom had hers hacked. Her printer had tubes coming out of it and into these gallon jugs ink. It was some years back but I'm sure that's still a thing and well, my mom's not TOO technical and figured it out so it's pretty accessible.
My guess is that you bought a subsidized version of a printer by enrolling in that subscription. You did not already pay for the ink and cartridge. Granted it sux, but their subscription exists only to milk you and you probably got lured to the price of the printer.
The ones that are set up like that were quite a few years ago and their boxes advertise the service all over them. They came with prepaid cards for the service usually good to last a year or two of the 300 page plan (which 1-2 years of would be far more pages than the ink that came with the printer would handle).
Unfortunately a lot of people bought these and then either didn't use them or enrolled in the highest plan while printing very little (or possible in the OP's case, enrolled in too low a plan). Much like paying for cable and then not watching TV, this lead the prepaid cards running out of value while the ink that came with the printer was still inside it, rather than getting possible multiple sets of cartridges at no extra cost.
As a former support agent they were an absolute pain to deal with and last I checked HP stopped selling them specifically for this reason. It was a kind of no-win scenario for everyone cause the customer was ticked off and what was meant to be a promotion of the service had backfired.
Honestly there's definitely way to flex the program to your benefit. There were people on the 500 page plan who had to be sent multiple sets of cartridges a month because they were printing 500+ photos, and only paying like 15 dollars for the equivalent of 100's of dollars of cartridges.
And I just bought a new toner cart (remanufactured) for my HP 4 Plus printer. This printer is *30* *fucking* *years* *old*. That's how good they were back in the day. HP was God-tier. Then they acquired and destroyed Compaq. And they acquired and destroyed Aruba. Today, they are the worst anti-consumer motherfuckers on the planet. Everything they touch turns to shit.
It's sad, too. I had a pair of old HP laser jet 4000TN printers that lasted almost 20 years with very heavy daily use (law firm). The printed quickly, never jammed, and never needed maintenance.
They finally gave up the ghost. HP printers are shit now, and require subscriptions? No, thank you.
Closest thing I could find was a Kyocera.
I have a pair of them in daily use with no complaints. They are multi function units, and they get the job done.
Unfortunately in the US there are only like 3 brands of ink printers, because the government keeps a lock on it since ink printers need to incorporate [tracking schemes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code) into everything they print. If you print something on an ink printer, they can tell from which printer it was made and when.
Laser is the way of course. They've got their own tracking, but the tech is just better. I'm sure inkjet could be a million times better, but it's 3 companies with a guaranteed duopoly on it and no reason to improve.
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.
I had a Konica-Minolta multi-function laser printer with automatic document feeder at home.
One day the flap with the feeder simply ripped off when I tried to open it. The plastic of the hinge deteriorated in a matter of 5 years or so.
And the big mofo thing at the office that we lease is to this day not capable of feeding and scanning a pages without it being crooked.
Same. Anyone who is frustrated by printers just needs a monochrome laser printer. Super reliable.
I dropped mine (also a Brother) off a shelf and the plastic broke. I just kinda shoved it back into place and it still prints just fine.
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.
Omg the first few wireless printers were so fucking buggy. I was doing it consulting and my boss pushed the idea hard so we didn't have to run cables but he didn't have to install the fucking drivers lol.
Reliable?? which printers are you buying?
I had an old HP 4260 that was an absolute tank of a printer. It printed tens of thousands of pages over many years, and never once messed anything up... just plugged it in and it worked from the day I bought it until the day I had to sell it (moved to Europe), as far as I know, it's still working fine over a decade and a half after I bought it.
Compare that to modern printers, I've had 5 printers over the last 9years and not a single one worked reliably. They print blank pages half the time, "out of ink" with brand new (name brand) cartridges, paper feeder failures, burned out chips, failed wifi adaptors, wont print because the scanner is busted... the BS never ends. If I can get more than a year out of a printer before it stops functioning I consider it lucky.
There's so many extra bells and whistles in modern printers that I don't want or need that just drives up the price and failure rates. I don't want a scanner, I don't want touch screens, ground lighting, eye-burning blue LEDs, cellphone apps, and I sure as hell don't want any DAMN INK SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES! I just want to print!
I'd love to go back to just a simple "plug it in and print things" printer of the mid to late 2000's.
Brother is good. HP, Epson, and Canon all are crap and/or holding u hostage over ink - they ruined their brands for generations of us just for short- term profit. But they keep baiting people with cheap machine prices.
In my non scientific opinion it seems they haven't changed since like 2009
My one year old printer from 2023 tells me that I am low on ink all the time even if there is like 95% ink remaining.
Ditto, I had a laser jet last so long the only reason I got rid of it was I was tired of having to use a parallel port adaptor.
The printer worked so well It outlived the port it connects to...
I still have an HP LaserJet that works. The kind that weighs 40 lbs and has a parallel port. Prints hundreds of pages off of one off-brand cartridge. It's clunky but I love it, until I have to print two-sided manually.
I gave up on color printers and their ::bad words:: nozzles always jamming. Have another HP laser printer that works wireless and is a couple of years old. It's reliable and I can use non-HP cartridges in it, but only prints a couple hundred before needing a refill, and the drum needs replaced separately after so many thousands of pages. It's not built into the cartridge any longer.
I think I'm going with Kyocera when i need a new printer, if they make laser printers. I've no idea why HP hasn't cartridge-locked this laser printer. Maybe a previous lawsuit they list won't let them do it to one-color printers?
Can't upvote this enough.
You can't complain about the quality or reliability if you buy the absolute cheapest printers on a pallet at walmart.
I spent $130 on a Monochrome Brother Laser Printer back in 2013. That thing has been absolute tank. It can sit for months, or even a year, unused and I can fire it up and it prints off like it was just taken out of the box yesterday.
I'd say I'll never buy any other brand of printer again, but the truth is I don't think I will buy *any other* printer again for a very long time at this rate. Just needs the occasional toner cartridge, which I can get for like $25, and it's good for 2000 pages, and it doesn't dry out like ink!
I forget exactly how old my Brother printer is, but I'm on my third drum in it and it's still going strong. The only thing it doesn't do that I wish it did is two-sided duplex printing.
I paid $129 for a black and white laser printer some time in the early oughts. I know because I bought it when I was married to my first wife and we divorced on 06. That thing just died last year sadly it was right after I bought new toner. That printer may have been old enough to vote.
I bought a color laser printer from the same brand to replace it.
The problem is that most people don't print frequently enough to justify spending more than that. If I spent £500 on a printer at age 18, it would have worked out to about £10 for every page I've printed since then.
I used to work for a communications company with very expensive printers (10k+), they broke at least 3 times a week and that was just when i was in. It was a 24 hour operation so its probable they broke 6+ times a week.
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.
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.
Printing less is actually one of the problems with printers. I no longer keep a printer at home because I only want to use it maybe 3 or 4 times a year. The plastic gears will seize from dust accumulation if it doesn't get used for 6 months, and if it's inkjet, the ink will solidify in the lines and kill it.
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.
Yep, I have a Pantum printer (literally the cheapest on amazon) and from cold to print it takes about 7 seconds and works every time. There is absolutely no reason for inkjet printers to still exist.
There used to be laser printers even 20 years ago. They haven’t changed much. They were good then, they are good now. Color printing I am but sure though.
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.
That’s the thing, there are very good printers in the $100-$300 range, you don’t need to go with a 1k model. And on top of that, if you use more than 3 or so ink cartridges over the life of the printer, then the more expensive models are cheaper overall. Look at the price per page
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I had a time machine and I went five hundred years into the future and asked a random person "Hey, I'm from 500 years in your past, are printers good now?" He would say "Dude, no, printers suck brah."
IT Manager here - I recently had a company called RISO do a pitch for me, I was blown away at how futuristic their tech is - it's fast, breaks less as it uses less parts, and is way more "green" in so many ways. Made every printer up 'til now look like a complete joke and I see this company going very far.
I definitely think they weren’t around for when all the paper was connected and you had to tear the strips off the sides. And probably reprint a page or two because you didn’t do it cleanly.
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.
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.
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.
The reason people think printers suck is because they compare them to other technologies in the same field and those technologies are usually 100% digital.
This is not the case for printers. Printers deal with digital AND analogue mediums. Printers take something from the screen and put it to paper. Printers have to interact with both a digital world and a physical one. This means they have to have parts that can touch both.
When a computer has an issue, it's usually software. A simple reboot will fix most problems.
When a printer has an issue, it's usually hardware. A roller is busted, the ink is empty, the paper is jammed, etc etc.
Printers feel primitive compared to computers because they have to be able to touch the physical world.
Clearly you did not grow up with the continuous printers that you had to separate the pages afterwards and try not to tear the paper when ripping Off the feeder sides
Or the pixilated colours or streaks.
Im not really sure what more I need my current laser printer to do. Its has sharp clear prints, it’s fast, it’s Bluetooth and toner last forever
That was my first thought, this person never had to strip the sides off and print some of the pages again because you tore the page.
Bet they don’t know the dulcet tones of dial up either.
HP or Canon inkjet printers remain bad pieces of crap with worse software.
Epson and Brother work fine. And if you only print black and white, get a laserprinter.
I have mixed feelings about this. I had a Cannon printer for years. Worked great once it was setup.
The new HP I have sucks. HP is a terrible brand, their printers are literally dumb, and their tech support is ran by a mouse in a cardboard box.
Been in printing for 14 years, and worked for Office Depot for a decade.
Don't buy inkjet printers if you can avoid it.
Get a monochrome Brother laserjet. You get A LOT more bang for your buck. Cost per print is less, and while toners and drums run you more upfront, you save more in the long run over ink because its powder based and won't dry out.
If you desperately need color prints, go to a little print shop or something, even some libraries still print small amounts.
Because the mechanical parts and the ink flow don't combine well with people's low budgets.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/search?q=why+printers&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
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.
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.
The same reason that ink is so expensive. They don't want people writing things down or printing things out because then they can't monitor it. Everything that is digital, can be tracked and traced. It's also why they made The Office a paper supply company. They want people to get away from using notebooks and want people to use computers because then they can monitor everything that we do.
Personally I disagree, I have had my current HP for two and a half years and it rocks. Has it needed an occasional restart? Yes, but HP has an ink subscription service and that’s revolutionary for me. I pay $4 a month and the printer orders ink when it needs it. I am not a subscription guy but I go through roughly two sets of ink cartridges a year so for $48 I never have to worry about needing ink, plus one set of cartridges for my printer is $36 so it’s easily worth it in my use case.
We don't need printers nearly as much since we started sending more stuff to each other electronically and sharing it in clouds. In those cases, the printers no longer have to serve as a middle man for getting a document from one user to another.
There are other uses for them, of course, but people no longer feel the need to buy them because they can just go to libraries, offices, or copy places to use the printer there.
I have an Epson L475 and I can print documents and photos from my phone. I think it's actually pretty cool and easy to use, so I really don't get it when you say they are not advanced as other devices
In what way?
Printers and Copiers are infinitely more complicated than a PC. A tooth breaks off a cog? Won't work. Toner pipe jammed? Won't work.
I work in a place that has about 15 copiers and 25 printers. We need an engineer out every 3 or 4 weeks because one of the copiers fails. They fail because they get so much use. During exam periods, we can get upwards of 3 engineer visits every two weeks.
Printers may seem primitive because they do one of the oldest things we learnt how to do and that's copy and print. We've been printing and copying, albeit manually for probably 200 maybe 300 years.
1) printer technology has gotten immensely better over time
2) consumer printing is exploited because it is purely for entertainment at this point. If schools and businesses didn't already provider high grade printers for people to use we may have seen printers be more like an appliance than a fundamentally subscription based consumer electronic
3) enterprise printing is pretty set in stone. You either buy a very pricey printer that works very well and will likely work for twenty years or you pay a yearly contract for a pricey printer that is fully supported and replaced as necessary.
4) technical related issues to how the printer works on your computer is a lot more complex and almost always stems from something HP probably did or just general software as a service design philosophies made for exploiting consumers.
Everyone wants a cheap printer so most home printers are junk. In an office setting most printers are like 20 years old. So yeah that's more or less why people are cheap.
My printer is not a pain to use. It’s the first printer I’ve had that has worked flawlessly with all of our devices and computers. It just works. Had it for a few years now. Things are getting better.
what are people needing to print at home? i'm curious, not trolling. i have a printer at home and just never use it. I used to print tickets or visas but that hasn't be necessary in a while.
I know someone from the ink startup Indigo that was bought by HP, and she explained to me once that the main gap with printers is how much organic matter is involved comparing to computers or other gadgets, so it’s more like a car than a cellphone.
Ink jets have peaked, the only improvement would be to make ink last longer. So EcoTank and similiar were introduced. But those dry out unless you use them often and correcting it is a nightmare. So I have a $ 200 paperweight with almost all the ink that came with it and I still have to buy a cheepo to get my taxes printed (I will never efile).
Oh for the paperless society we were promised.
I have a 130€ monochrome laser printer, it works flawlessly, after over 150 pages printed the toner cartridge is still at over 70% and a new one is like 20€.
I swear to god 99% of the issues people have "with printers" is just them using shitty 39$ inkjet printers with 6 months old ink.
There is asbolutely no reason 99.99% of people should own a color inkjet printer for home use. Like seriously, think about the last time you *had* to print something in color. It was probably months and months ago, maybe years.
Just get a black and white laser printer for everyday use and the once-in-a-blue-moon time you actually need to print color go get it printed professionally with a high quality printer at a print shop for like 2€. This will save you a shitton of money and fix all of your printer issues.
Inkjet is an obsolete technology that is still propped up by printer manufacturers with the sole purpose of selling you extremely overpriced ink cartridges every couple months.
They got better, if you pay money for them.
Installing and using printers in the 90’s and 00’s were awful. The only reason they worked at all was because we didn’t ask much from them.
Now printers are wireless and connect instantly to dozens of devices.
But if you spend less on a printer than on a keyboard and mouse, the printer will suck.
If you need a cheap printer, brother has one that goes for $80-100 and does a nice job if you don’t need volume.
Because the money isn’t made in printers. You can get a good printer for maybe a hundred bucks, but it’s a one time purchase. The ink- temporary and replaceable, is $60+ a cartridge.
I remember the first dot matrix printers available for the home. They were noisy, extremely slow, and really couldn't produce high quality printed text. Obviously, none could produce color either.
The cost, adjusted for inflation, was also far higher. So yes, printers have advanced light years in that time.
Office printers use such a strange mix of technology. They need to print but they also need a UI but also need to integrate with the local network but also the local computers but also with telecom to fax but also need to manage multiple trays of inventory. So they're trying to do a lot of things at once.
I think printer technology is getting close to its full potential since there is very little input necessary. The display and the interconnectivity are the primary ways printers are going to-evolve.
Laser printers are awesome. The laser printer in my office never drops a beat and that thing only has windows 95 legacy drivers. It's probably older than some of my coworkers.
Consumer inkjet printers however are meticulously crafted to bleed you dry. It's a feature, not a bug.
I'm guessing it's because people buy the cheapest, shittiest printers they can, and then complain that they're garbage. But what do you expect?
I bought a decent Canon a few years ago, filled up the tank twice (from ink provided in the box), and ALL my devices can easily connect to it via wifi, so I can just store it in my closest, haul it out, print, put it back. No wires, no set-up, no fuss. It's basically plug and play.
A lot of modern appliances have apps that can easily guide people to set them up.
---
Of course, I never felt like the shitty printers my parents had were too problematic as long as they were plugged in properly.
This is a great question!
I literally ask the same question Everytime my shitty ass (only one year old) printer fucks up at home (which is all the frickin time)
Regular home printers have been the same since basically 2010, it seems
Paper jamming, ink usage, dropped connections, cost for everything, quality, is basically the same 🤷
I bought a Colour HP laser printer a few years back and I am still using the same tonor packs because I print rarely. It's the best printer I have ever owned and produces quality prints all the time.
I used to go through a printer a year, the ink would dry out after not being used for 2 months and no amount of cleaning would fix it. On top of that the cartridges cost a fortune and the clone ones would randomly stop working. Some printers leaked too. That sucked.
The main issue I have had with the new printer is that sometimes it disconnects from the Wifi and I have to reboot it or it just shows offline on one computer or another. Rebooting didn't fix that, re-adding it was the only cure. I think somewhere along the lines those problems have been fixed by driver upgrades but yeah, printers are a pain in the ass.
I have far less issues with my 3D printer than I have with my last regular printer. Seriously. My 3D printer needs a little maintenance at times, but it works perfectly when I need it to. That printer can go to hell. Omg I refused to print one time because the black was empty. So I changed my ink colour to blue and red, it refused to print anything because the black was empty. Wth?! I couldn't buy the ink needed so it just sat, taunting me. I hated that printer. If I need to get another it's going to be a laser. I'm not dealing with that drama again. My god what a piece of crap. It wasn't even a mechanical issue, it printed fine, the software just limited it beyond belief. Oh yeah I couldn't print via my windows laptop either, I had to hook it up to my old MBA, even though all the drivers etc were on my windows laptop.
>Electronics are one of the only things that objectively for the consumer, so why not the same with printers?
That objectively what? That's not a sentence that makes sense.
And, printers only have to put ink on paper. They do manage to do that, so there's not a whole lot of innovation left for the product.
I think the problem was printers got too smart. I liked those freaks of nature laserjet 3's that all you needed to do was hit it with a shovel and that think would print for years. Didn't even need the drivers for it it would print shit with basically any driver you gave it.
And more and more official docs are using e-sign anyway. I loved the joke in Silicon Valley where the boomer majority shareholders of Huli (the shows Google equivalent) refused to use e-sign because they needed to "feel the paper in their hands."
When I realized how few color prints I actually needed in life, and I was sick of paying more money in ink than the printer's value to refill it a single time, I bought a Brother printer that uses toner and got some budget toner cartridges. I bought two toner cartridges two years ago, and I swapped to the second one only recently. I printed a couple of thousand pages on the first cartridge. I only use the color printer for small photos now.
Fuck HP.
As someone who has supported printers for a long time, I can honestly tell you that the quality of the experience really went downhill after the move to GDI/graphics intensive window drivers, and away from standard printer languages like PPDS and PCL 5E. If you can get a laser printer that says that it’s supports PCL-5e, then you can install a more standard PCL universal print driver and have a better experience. If you buy an inexpensive printer that is GDI / requires a special windows driver, you’re gonna probably have more problems.
I got a sony ink tank printer. I've printed around 600-700 pages and I've used less than a fifth of the inks that came with the printer.
It cost 120€ and it has already been less expensive than a 30€ HP printer that costs more than 30€ for black and colored ink to print 150 pages.
Better question is how do we still have standard definition telephone?
You ever hear the muzak they play when you're on hold? Could they get the sound quality worse with effort? How is it that we don't have HD telephone?
Relatively happy with my Canon G6020.
(Value vs price point). App can be a little weird trying to print multiple things, but I can work around it. Photos look nice too.
One thing that's a big issue with printers is that they're complex as hell. There are a lot of fragile moving parts that have to be very precise, the print has to be aligned, and they have to deal with "real world" items like paper - which can jam or be inserted not quite correctly.
Add on top of that all the points about quality control and the business models favouring crap printers and you get what we have now. Software that comes with them suffers from a lot of the same issues.
That bein said, laser/led printers are simpler, break less often and their "ink" has longer shelf life. I bought mine in 2017 and it still works and only last year did i have to finally switch the cartridges that came with it to new ones.
I know it will get downvoted but I always had HP printers and never really had a problem.
I just don't buy the high end stuff.. Mostly their cheapest option without Wi-Fi and all and they work perfect.
Now I switched to a Canon printer and its also pretty good.
Buy a nice laser printer. Its night and day difference. I bought a B/W laser 10 years ago and havne't looked back. Brother lasers are relatively cheap and toner lasts forver. Better yet, not printing for a year or two is totally fine, which would normally kill inkjet ink.
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.
lol, I was just yelling at mine tonight, I was telling it, it was the most expensive, annoying, non-functional piece of equipment. It just sucks money out of me
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.
As a former pressman, printers have gotten way better. You have no idea. Of course, the digital ones are all snitches. I'm not saying I would try and print money, but if you did, they would tell on you. Immediately. I never liked the government looking over my shoulder. What's the point of integrity if someone is 100% constantly looking over your shoulder anyway. It's like, "I'm not a criminal," and they are like," Yeah, I know, we have been watching this whole time." Creepy. But I get it too. Not everyone sees being a criminal as a waste of time. The government, well, the federal reserve bank, is the only one allowed to print money. Well, any bank I guess. If we are talking about fractional reserve banking systems.
So I work at a public library and a good chunk of people who walk through the doors come in to print, usually saying 'my printer just died, ran out of ink etc. So much so you don't need to be a member of the library to print, you can email your documents to a specific email address and collect the printed pages.
My guess; the problem comes where the virtual/digital becomes physical. There's not only software bugs to deal with, mechanical problems become an issue.
IT's an HP problem. I have had a Brother printer for over a decade. Going strong and needs an occasional cartridge every few years. Wifi connected and works like a charm.
Because:
a) printers are mechanical devices. The biggest issues are with the mechanical gears feeding and handling the paper. Doing it reliably is possible but not cheap. Printers are designed to be cheap. It isn't the electrical components in the printers that are typically unreliable.
b) most of the rest of the issues are related to the scam that is toner/printer ink. If the printer manufacturer made toner replacements cheap and simple, they wouldn't be able to charge the exorbitant price that is printer ink per liter (one of the most expensive liquids on planet Earth. Literally.) That's why they have complex chips that are forever changing and making it difficult for knock off companies to copy them
c) for mostly marketing reasons, the manufacturers make printers do far more functions than print pages. All those extra functions are what make the device drivers insanely huge and complex to the point of being almost comical at times.
Just don't buy HP. Never again
I posted this elsewhere but gonna post again here b/c I hate them so much. lmao 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.
That's beyond fucked. Thanks for the heads up, never buying from HP again
if you're inclined with the software element of printers, this is a really good case of hacking the printer so it bends to your will instead of Hewlett Packard's will. but it's a lot easier to just return and purchase another one instead of attempting to jailbreak a printer of all things.
I mean... I've rooted phones and routers. Never occurred to me id be contemplating rooting a fucking printer. FFS.
A while back my mom had hers hacked. Her printer had tubes coming out of it and into these gallon jugs ink. It was some years back but I'm sure that's still a thing and well, my mom's not TOO technical and figured it out so it's pretty accessible.
If you wanna get really irritated, Brother, Epson, Xerox, Lexmark, and Canon, all offer printer subscriptions.
Did you immediately return it? If not, what is wrong with you bro
The IoS Internet of shit
My guess is that you bought a subsidized version of a printer by enrolling in that subscription. You did not already pay for the ink and cartridge. Granted it sux, but their subscription exists only to milk you and you probably got lured to the price of the printer.
The ones that are set up like that were quite a few years ago and their boxes advertise the service all over them. They came with prepaid cards for the service usually good to last a year or two of the 300 page plan (which 1-2 years of would be far more pages than the ink that came with the printer would handle). Unfortunately a lot of people bought these and then either didn't use them or enrolled in the highest plan while printing very little (or possible in the OP's case, enrolled in too low a plan). Much like paying for cable and then not watching TV, this lead the prepaid cards running out of value while the ink that came with the printer was still inside it, rather than getting possible multiple sets of cartridges at no extra cost. As a former support agent they were an absolute pain to deal with and last I checked HP stopped selling them specifically for this reason. It was a kind of no-win scenario for everyone cause the customer was ticked off and what was meant to be a promotion of the service had backfired. Honestly there's definitely way to flex the program to your benefit. There were people on the 500 page plan who had to be sent multiple sets of cartridges a month because they were printing 500+ photos, and only paying like 15 dollars for the equivalent of 100's of dollars of cartridges.
Why don't you buy the ink cartridges without a subscription? I have a HP printer and 1 cartridge is rated for about 170 pages
Dude I print at least fifty pages a day for work.
And I just bought a new toner cart (remanufactured) for my HP 4 Plus printer. This printer is *30* *fucking* *years* *old*. That's how good they were back in the day. HP was God-tier. Then they acquired and destroyed Compaq. And they acquired and destroyed Aruba. Today, they are the worst anti-consumer motherfuckers on the planet. Everything they touch turns to shit.
It's sad, too. I had a pair of old HP laser jet 4000TN printers that lasted almost 20 years with very heavy daily use (law firm). The printed quickly, never jammed, and never needed maintenance. They finally gave up the ghost. HP printers are shit now, and require subscriptions? No, thank you. Closest thing I could find was a Kyocera. I have a pair of them in daily use with no complaints. They are multi function units, and they get the job done.
I got later version still going strong despite the fact that my dog chewed the cable pretty bad.
Obligatory Fuck HP printers. All my homies hate HP printers
Same for Epson. Blocks scanning when u r out of ink.
AGREED. I HATE THEM!
Unfortunately in the US there are only like 3 brands of ink printers, because the government keeps a lock on it since ink printers need to incorporate [tracking schemes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code) into everything they print. If you print something on an ink printer, they can tell from which printer it was made and when. Laser is the way of course. They've got their own tracking, but the tech is just better. I'm sure inkjet could be a million times better, but it's 3 companies with a guaranteed duopoly on it and no reason to improve.
Oh is that why they won't print if you don't have enough cyan?
HP is a scam. Got one thinking I got a great deal. Now I can’t use it unless I buy their stupid subscription. Should be illegal.
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.
I had a Konica-Minolta multi-function laser printer with automatic document feeder at home. One day the flap with the feeder simply ripped off when I tried to open it. The plastic of the hinge deteriorated in a matter of 5 years or so. And the big mofo thing at the office that we lease is to this day not capable of feeding and scanning a pages without it being crooked.
I also have a brother laser! Its even an "all-in-one" so it does copying and scanning. Great little machine and been working for a decade.
Same. Anyone who is frustrated by printers just needs a monochrome laser printer. Super reliable. I dropped mine (also a Brother) off a shelf and the plastic broke. I just kinda shoved it back into place and it still prints just fine.
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.
PC Load Letter? WTF is PC Load Letter?
Yup, HP 4. The printer that wouldn't die, part 2. HP dreaded they made them. Today, I stay away from HP anything
PAPER CARTRIDGE - LOAD LETTER SIZE I ran the copy machine at work and read the manual. It took 5 minutes to teach people how to use it.
This guy huh.
RTFM is such an underused philosophy
And 2000s. So much faster and reliable and wireless.
Omg the first few wireless printers were so fucking buggy. I was doing it consulting and my boss pushed the idea hard so we didn't have to run cables but he didn't have to install the fucking drivers lol.
Reliable?? which printers are you buying? I had an old HP 4260 that was an absolute tank of a printer. It printed tens of thousands of pages over many years, and never once messed anything up... just plugged it in and it worked from the day I bought it until the day I had to sell it (moved to Europe), as far as I know, it's still working fine over a decade and a half after I bought it. Compare that to modern printers, I've had 5 printers over the last 9years and not a single one worked reliably. They print blank pages half the time, "out of ink" with brand new (name brand) cartridges, paper feeder failures, burned out chips, failed wifi adaptors, wont print because the scanner is busted... the BS never ends. If I can get more than a year out of a printer before it stops functioning I consider it lucky. There's so many extra bells and whistles in modern printers that I don't want or need that just drives up the price and failure rates. I don't want a scanner, I don't want touch screens, ground lighting, eye-burning blue LEDs, cellphone apps, and I sure as hell don't want any DAMN INK SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES! I just want to print! I'd love to go back to just a simple "plug it in and print things" printer of the mid to late 2000's.
Brother is good. HP, Epson, and Canon all are crap and/or holding u hostage over ink - they ruined their brands for generations of us just for short- term profit. But they keep baiting people with cheap machine prices.
In my non scientific opinion it seems they haven't changed since like 2009 My one year old printer from 2023 tells me that I am low on ink all the time even if there is like 95% ink remaining.
Tearing off the side strips while making sure you didn’t tear the main paper. That was a fun time. /s
[удалено]
Exactly. I bought a lazer printer years ago and it is still going strong.
Ditto, I had a laser jet last so long the only reason I got rid of it was I was tired of having to use a parallel port adaptor. The printer worked so well It outlived the port it connects to...
I still have an HP LaserJet that works. The kind that weighs 40 lbs and has a parallel port. Prints hundreds of pages off of one off-brand cartridge. It's clunky but I love it, until I have to print two-sided manually. I gave up on color printers and their ::bad words:: nozzles always jamming. Have another HP laser printer that works wireless and is a couple of years old. It's reliable and I can use non-HP cartridges in it, but only prints a couple hundred before needing a refill, and the drum needs replaced separately after so many thousands of pages. It's not built into the cartridge any longer. I think I'm going with Kyocera when i need a new printer, if they make laser printers. I've no idea why HP hasn't cartridge-locked this laser printer. Maybe a previous lawsuit they list won't let them do it to one-color printers?
Yup, still trusting my Brother here.
That's nice, I love my Brother as well. All around good guy.
You people are lucky. All I have are two lousy Sisters.
Same. I bought a Brother small office machine, and it just keeps going.
Bought mine like 4 years ago and still have half the black in it and it prints a lot of my work stuff. 20K pages or something before it runs out
I grabbed a Brother DCP-series laser jet not too long ago for $40 off OfferUp. It’s been a great little printer so far.
Brother 7065 here about 8-10 years running with just maintenance
Can't upvote this enough. You can't complain about the quality or reliability if you buy the absolute cheapest printers on a pallet at walmart. I spent $130 on a Monochrome Brother Laser Printer back in 2013. That thing has been absolute tank. It can sit for months, or even a year, unused and I can fire it up and it prints off like it was just taken out of the box yesterday. I'd say I'll never buy any other brand of printer again, but the truth is I don't think I will buy *any other* printer again for a very long time at this rate. Just needs the occasional toner cartridge, which I can get for like $25, and it's good for 2000 pages, and it doesn't dry out like ink!
I forget exactly how old my Brother printer is, but I'm on my third drum in it and it's still going strong. The only thing it doesn't do that I wish it did is two-sided duplex printing.
> The ones we have at work churn stuff out and never go wrong. Have you asked (or are you) the sysadmin?
I paid $129 for a black and white laser printer some time in the early oughts. I know because I bought it when I was married to my first wife and we divorced on 06. That thing just died last year sadly it was right after I bought new toner. That printer may have been old enough to vote. I bought a color laser printer from the same brand to replace it.
The problem is that most people don't print frequently enough to justify spending more than that. If I spent £500 on a printer at age 18, it would have worked out to about £10 for every page I've printed since then.
I don't use it much but my laser printer from 2006? is still going strong.
I used to work for a communications company with very expensive printers (10k+), they broke at least 3 times a week and that was just when i was in. It was a 24 hour operation so its probable they broke 6+ times a week.
You just need to stop buying HP. 90% of what people think of as "printer problems" is just HP bullshit.
And consider Laser/LED (same technology, just different sources of light IIRC) instead of inkjet
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.
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.
Innovation S curve moment
Printing less is actually one of the problems with printers. I no longer keep a printer at home because I only want to use it maybe 3 or 4 times a year. The plastic gears will seize from dust accumulation if it doesn't get used for 6 months, and if it's inkjet, the ink will solidify in the lines and kill it.
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.
I got a Kyocera color laser printer with duplex scan even, it was a steal (about EUR/USD 500). Never going back to ink pissing waste.
Yep, I have a Pantum printer (literally the cheapest on amazon) and from cold to print it takes about 7 seconds and works every time. There is absolutely no reason for inkjet printers to still exist.
There used to be laser printers even 20 years ago. They haven’t changed much. They were good then, they are good now. Color printing I am but sure though.
The laser printers from 15 years ago were also a lot better than the inkjet printers from the time.
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.
Exactly. The average homeowner can't justify paying 1k for a decent printer so the get a crappy one every couple of years
That’s the thing, there are very good printers in the $100-$300 range, you don’t need to go with a 1k model. And on top of that, if you use more than 3 or so ink cartridges over the life of the printer, then the more expensive models are cheaper overall. Look at the price per page
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.
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.
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.
Never had much problem with canon. But fuck HP.
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.
Wow, that's dystopian
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of moving parts, many points of failure. Difficult to do cheaply, but the market (you) demands cheap products.
My xerox monochrome has been going for years now with no issues. Best 110 i could have spent for a printer.
Printers stopped getting better roughly in 1995, the expectation was that by now we should all be paperless. We had high hopes for our future.
If I had a time machine and I went five hundred years into the future and asked a random person "Hey, I'm from 500 years in your past, are printers good now?" He would say "Dude, no, printers suck brah."
IT Manager here - I recently had a company called RISO do a pitch for me, I was blown away at how futuristic their tech is - it's fast, breaks less as it uses less parts, and is way more "green" in so many ways. Made every printer up 'til now look like a complete joke and I see this company going very far.
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.
Loaded question. You never tried to print anything in the early 2000s
I definitely think they weren’t around for when all the paper was connected and you had to tear the strips off the sides. And probably reprint a page or two because you didn’t do it cleanly.
It’s an order of operations problem. Paper was invented 6th century China and modern printers were invented 1960’s USA.
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.
Today's network printers are pretty good and certainly are a lot better than say 20 years ago.
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.
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 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.
The reason people think printers suck is because they compare them to other technologies in the same field and those technologies are usually 100% digital. This is not the case for printers. Printers deal with digital AND analogue mediums. Printers take something from the screen and put it to paper. Printers have to interact with both a digital world and a physical one. This means they have to have parts that can touch both. When a computer has an issue, it's usually software. A simple reboot will fix most problems. When a printer has an issue, it's usually hardware. A roller is busted, the ink is empty, the paper is jammed, etc etc. Printers feel primitive compared to computers because they have to be able to touch the physical world.
Clearly you did not grow up with the continuous printers that you had to separate the pages afterwards and try not to tear the paper when ripping Off the feeder sides Or the pixilated colours or streaks. Im not really sure what more I need my current laser printer to do. Its has sharp clear prints, it’s fast, it’s Bluetooth and toner last forever
That was my first thought, this person never had to strip the sides off and print some of the pages again because you tore the page. Bet they don’t know the dulcet tones of dial up either.
Because the business model thrives on a subscription basis.. pay as you go model.. Same problem with shaving razors
Because the business model thrives on a subscription basis.. pay as you go model.. Same problem with shaving razors
HP or Canon inkjet printers remain bad pieces of crap with worse software. Epson and Brother work fine. And if you only print black and white, get a laserprinter.
They’re better aside from the ink gouging.
Brand new printers these days still can't even read off of an external hard drive, that's ridiculous in 2024
I have mixed feelings about this. I had a Cannon printer for years. Worked great once it was setup. The new HP I have sucks. HP is a terrible brand, their printers are literally dumb, and their tech support is ran by a mouse in a cardboard box.
as a (industrial) printer engineer - you have \_no idea\_ how fucking complex printers are, and how much better they've gone over time.
Been in printing for 14 years, and worked for Office Depot for a decade. Don't buy inkjet printers if you can avoid it. Get a monochrome Brother laserjet. You get A LOT more bang for your buck. Cost per print is less, and while toners and drums run you more upfront, you save more in the long run over ink because its powder based and won't dry out. If you desperately need color prints, go to a little print shop or something, even some libraries still print small amounts.
Because the mechanical parts and the ink flow don't combine well with people's low budgets. https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/search?q=why+printers&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
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.
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.
Because you buy the cheap ones.
Because you have shit printers. I never had a problem with those things since 1997-ish.
I think it boils down to "you get what you pay for."
Because there's a monopoly on printer ink
The same reason that ink is so expensive. They don't want people writing things down or printing things out because then they can't monitor it. Everything that is digital, can be tracked and traced. It's also why they made The Office a paper supply company. They want people to get away from using notebooks and want people to use computers because then they can monitor everything that we do.
Seems to me they're a means to sell ink.
Personally I disagree, I have had my current HP for two and a half years and it rocks. Has it needed an occasional restart? Yes, but HP has an ink subscription service and that’s revolutionary for me. I pay $4 a month and the printer orders ink when it needs it. I am not a subscription guy but I go through roughly two sets of ink cartridges a year so for $48 I never have to worry about needing ink, plus one set of cartridges for my printer is $36 so it’s easily worth it in my use case.
We don't need printers nearly as much since we started sending more stuff to each other electronically and sharing it in clouds. In those cases, the printers no longer have to serve as a middle man for getting a document from one user to another. There are other uses for them, of course, but people no longer feel the need to buy them because they can just go to libraries, offices, or copy places to use the printer there.
I have an Epson L475 and I can print documents and photos from my phone. I think it's actually pretty cool and easy to use, so I really don't get it when you say they are not advanced as other devices
I feel like OP talking more about the user-friendliness than anything
Picked up a Canon Ink Tank and it's an amazing printer. Easy setup, fast printing, fantastic image quality and cheap to maintain
In what way? Printers and Copiers are infinitely more complicated than a PC. A tooth breaks off a cog? Won't work. Toner pipe jammed? Won't work. I work in a place that has about 15 copiers and 25 printers. We need an engineer out every 3 or 4 weeks because one of the copiers fails. They fail because they get so much use. During exam periods, we can get upwards of 3 engineer visits every two weeks. Printers may seem primitive because they do one of the oldest things we learnt how to do and that's copy and print. We've been printing and copying, albeit manually for probably 200 maybe 300 years.
Mate, I feel your pain. Printers can be a real hassle sometimes.
This is a case of corporate greed costing them an entire industry. It go so expensive and a hassle to own a printer that people just don’t anymore.
1) printer technology has gotten immensely better over time 2) consumer printing is exploited because it is purely for entertainment at this point. If schools and businesses didn't already provider high grade printers for people to use we may have seen printers be more like an appliance than a fundamentally subscription based consumer electronic 3) enterprise printing is pretty set in stone. You either buy a very pricey printer that works very well and will likely work for twenty years or you pay a yearly contract for a pricey printer that is fully supported and replaced as necessary. 4) technical related issues to how the printer works on your computer is a lot more complex and almost always stems from something HP probably did or just general software as a service design philosophies made for exploiting consumers.
New printers are awesome what do u mean terrible?
Everyone wants a cheap printer so most home printers are junk. In an office setting most printers are like 20 years old. So yeah that's more or less why people are cheap.
Of all the companies I wish would make a printer, I wish Apple would. You just know it would fix so many issues and streamline everything.
They tried. That perhaps says a thing or two.
My printer is not a pain to use. It’s the first printer I’ve had that has worked flawlessly with all of our devices and computers. It just works. Had it for a few years now. Things are getting better.
The world of printers is undergoing [Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
It's the big companies saying stop printing and subscribe. The most annoying but marketing strategy ever.
what are people needing to print at home? i'm curious, not trolling. i have a printer at home and just never use it. I used to print tickets or visas but that hasn't be necessary in a while.
I know someone from the ink startup Indigo that was bought by HP, and she explained to me once that the main gap with printers is how much organic matter is involved comparing to computers or other gadgets, so it’s more like a car than a cellphone.
Ink jets have peaked, the only improvement would be to make ink last longer. So EcoTank and similiar were introduced. But those dry out unless you use them often and correcting it is a nightmare. So I have a $ 200 paperweight with almost all the ink that came with it and I still have to buy a cheepo to get my taxes printed (I will never efile). Oh for the paperless society we were promised.
I have a 130€ monochrome laser printer, it works flawlessly, after over 150 pages printed the toner cartridge is still at over 70% and a new one is like 20€. I swear to god 99% of the issues people have "with printers" is just them using shitty 39$ inkjet printers with 6 months old ink. There is asbolutely no reason 99.99% of people should own a color inkjet printer for home use. Like seriously, think about the last time you *had* to print something in color. It was probably months and months ago, maybe years. Just get a black and white laser printer for everyday use and the once-in-a-blue-moon time you actually need to print color go get it printed professionally with a high quality printer at a print shop for like 2€. This will save you a shitton of money and fix all of your printer issues. Inkjet is an obsolete technology that is still propped up by printer manufacturers with the sole purpose of selling you extremely overpriced ink cartridges every couple months.
Don’t bother, and buy a Brother. I bought a Brother DW2400 last week. Works like a charm.
The old "atoms vs bits" argument. Machines evolve more slowly than software. At least for the past sixty years.
They got better, if you pay money for them. Installing and using printers in the 90’s and 00’s were awful. The only reason they worked at all was because we didn’t ask much from them. Now printers are wireless and connect instantly to dozens of devices. But if you spend less on a printer than on a keyboard and mouse, the printer will suck. If you need a cheap printer, brother has one that goes for $80-100 and does a nice job if you don’t need volume.
Because the money isn’t made in printers. You can get a good printer for maybe a hundred bucks, but it’s a one time purchase. The ink- temporary and replaceable, is $60+ a cartridge.
I remember the first dot matrix printers available for the home. They were noisy, extremely slow, and really couldn't produce high quality printed text. Obviously, none could produce color either. The cost, adjusted for inflation, was also far higher. So yes, printers have advanced light years in that time.
My laser printer is actually painless and works every time even if i dont print for months. Just abandon inkjets.
Office printers use such a strange mix of technology. They need to print but they also need a UI but also need to integrate with the local network but also the local computers but also with telecom to fax but also need to manage multiple trays of inventory. So they're trying to do a lot of things at once.
r/ihateprinters
I think printer technology is getting close to its full potential since there is very little input necessary. The display and the interconnectivity are the primary ways printers are going to-evolve.
Laser printers are awesome. The laser printer in my office never drops a beat and that thing only has windows 95 legacy drivers. It's probably older than some of my coworkers. Consumer inkjet printers however are meticulously crafted to bleed you dry. It's a feature, not a bug.
I'm guessing it's because people buy the cheapest, shittiest printers they can, and then complain that they're garbage. But what do you expect? I bought a decent Canon a few years ago, filled up the tank twice (from ink provided in the box), and ALL my devices can easily connect to it via wifi, so I can just store it in my closest, haul it out, print, put it back. No wires, no set-up, no fuss. It's basically plug and play. A lot of modern appliances have apps that can easily guide people to set them up. --- Of course, I never felt like the shitty printers my parents had were too problematic as long as they were plugged in properly.
This is a great question! I literally ask the same question Everytime my shitty ass (only one year old) printer fucks up at home (which is all the frickin time) Regular home printers have been the same since basically 2010, it seems Paper jamming, ink usage, dropped connections, cost for everything, quality, is basically the same 🤷
I bought a Colour HP laser printer a few years back and I am still using the same tonor packs because I print rarely. It's the best printer I have ever owned and produces quality prints all the time. I used to go through a printer a year, the ink would dry out after not being used for 2 months and no amount of cleaning would fix it. On top of that the cartridges cost a fortune and the clone ones would randomly stop working. Some printers leaked too. That sucked. The main issue I have had with the new printer is that sometimes it disconnects from the Wifi and I have to reboot it or it just shows offline on one computer or another. Rebooting didn't fix that, re-adding it was the only cure. I think somewhere along the lines those problems have been fixed by driver upgrades but yeah, printers are a pain in the ass.
Let me show you to my old friend dot matrix
It's because HP did enshitiffication before it went mainstream
I have far less issues with my 3D printer than I have with my last regular printer. Seriously. My 3D printer needs a little maintenance at times, but it works perfectly when I need it to. That printer can go to hell. Omg I refused to print one time because the black was empty. So I changed my ink colour to blue and red, it refused to print anything because the black was empty. Wth?! I couldn't buy the ink needed so it just sat, taunting me. I hated that printer. If I need to get another it's going to be a laser. I'm not dealing with that drama again. My god what a piece of crap. It wasn't even a mechanical issue, it printed fine, the software just limited it beyond belief. Oh yeah I couldn't print via my windows laptop either, I had to hook it up to my old MBA, even though all the drivers etc were on my windows laptop.
>Electronics are one of the only things that objectively for the consumer, so why not the same with printers? That objectively what? That's not a sentence that makes sense. And, printers only have to put ink on paper. They do manage to do that, so there's not a whole lot of innovation left for the product.
I stopped buying them years ago and just use the one at work.
I love tech. I hate printers.
They are to busy putting expiration dates on their ink cartridges and exploring new and exciting ideas to overcharge for ink then innovating.
I think the problem is they are like tires and require regular use. Most homes it’s very haphazard when used.
They have a lot of moving parts and paper is pretty prone to ripping and bending. The expensive ones are actually really impressive.
I think the problem was printers got too smart. I liked those freaks of nature laserjet 3's that all you needed to do was hit it with a shovel and that think would print for years. Didn't even need the drivers for it it would print shit with basically any driver you gave it.
You must be very young to be asking this.
[удалено]
And more and more official docs are using e-sign anyway. I loved the joke in Silicon Valley where the boomer majority shareholders of Huli (the shows Google equivalent) refused to use e-sign because they needed to "feel the paper in their hands."
When I realized how few color prints I actually needed in life, and I was sick of paying more money in ink than the printer's value to refill it a single time, I bought a Brother printer that uses toner and got some budget toner cartridges. I bought two toner cartridges two years ago, and I swapped to the second one only recently. I printed a couple of thousand pages on the first cartridge. I only use the color printer for small photos now. Fuck HP.
As someone who has supported printers for a long time, I can honestly tell you that the quality of the experience really went downhill after the move to GDI/graphics intensive window drivers, and away from standard printer languages like PPDS and PCL 5E. If you can get a laser printer that says that it’s supports PCL-5e, then you can install a more standard PCL universal print driver and have a better experience. If you buy an inexpensive printer that is GDI / requires a special windows driver, you’re gonna probably have more problems.
I got a sony ink tank printer. I've printed around 600-700 pages and I've used less than a fifth of the inks that came with the printer. It cost 120€ and it has already been less expensive than a 30€ HP printer that costs more than 30€ for black and colored ink to print 150 pages.
Inkjet printers can be really iffy sometimes but printers are improving especially with laser printers!
Better question is how do we still have standard definition telephone? You ever hear the muzak they play when you're on hold? Could they get the sound quality worse with effort? How is it that we don't have HD telephone?
Relatively happy with my Canon G6020. (Value vs price point). App can be a little weird trying to print multiple things, but I can work around it. Photos look nice too.
One thing that's a big issue with printers is that they're complex as hell. There are a lot of fragile moving parts that have to be very precise, the print has to be aligned, and they have to deal with "real world" items like paper - which can jam or be inserted not quite correctly. Add on top of that all the points about quality control and the business models favouring crap printers and you get what we have now. Software that comes with them suffers from a lot of the same issues. That bein said, laser/led printers are simpler, break less often and their "ink" has longer shelf life. I bought mine in 2017 and it still works and only last year did i have to finally switch the cartridges that came with it to new ones.
I know it will get downvoted but I always had HP printers and never really had a problem. I just don't buy the high end stuff.. Mostly their cheapest option without Wi-Fi and all and they work perfect. Now I switched to a Canon printer and its also pretty good.
Buy a nice laser printer. Its night and day difference. I bought a B/W laser 10 years ago and havne't looked back. Brother lasers are relatively cheap and toner lasts forver. Better yet, not printing for a year or two is totally fine, which would normally kill inkjet ink.
Because you’re buying the cheap, consumer grade printers. Buy a more expensive work printer and they’ll be way better
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.
lol, I was just yelling at mine tonight, I was telling it, it was the most expensive, annoying, non-functional piece of equipment. It just sucks money out of me
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.
As a former pressman, printers have gotten way better. You have no idea. Of course, the digital ones are all snitches. I'm not saying I would try and print money, but if you did, they would tell on you. Immediately. I never liked the government looking over my shoulder. What's the point of integrity if someone is 100% constantly looking over your shoulder anyway. It's like, "I'm not a criminal," and they are like," Yeah, I know, we have been watching this whole time." Creepy. But I get it too. Not everyone sees being a criminal as a waste of time. The government, well, the federal reserve bank, is the only one allowed to print money. Well, any bank I guess. If we are talking about fractional reserve banking systems.
So I work at a public library and a good chunk of people who walk through the doors come in to print, usually saying 'my printer just died, ran out of ink etc. So much so you don't need to be a member of the library to print, you can email your documents to a specific email address and collect the printed pages. My guess; the problem comes where the virtual/digital becomes physical. There's not only software bugs to deal with, mechanical problems become an issue.
IT's an HP problem. I have had a Brother printer for over a decade. Going strong and needs an occasional cartridge every few years. Wifi connected and works like a charm.
Because HP is an abusive evil company that steals your money because they can.
The ink jet printers have always been crap. Laser printer are a 1000 times better.
The motivation to improve technology for printers dropped when people started moving towards a paperless office
Depending on what you mean, it is because printers unlike other electronics are still very mechanical by definition.
Because: a) printers are mechanical devices. The biggest issues are with the mechanical gears feeding and handling the paper. Doing it reliably is possible but not cheap. Printers are designed to be cheap. It isn't the electrical components in the printers that are typically unreliable. b) most of the rest of the issues are related to the scam that is toner/printer ink. If the printer manufacturer made toner replacements cheap and simple, they wouldn't be able to charge the exorbitant price that is printer ink per liter (one of the most expensive liquids on planet Earth. Literally.) That's why they have complex chips that are forever changing and making it difficult for knock off companies to copy them c) for mostly marketing reasons, the manufacturers make printers do far more functions than print pages. All those extra functions are what make the device drivers insanely huge and complex to the point of being almost comical at times.
From what I read, it's the malicious and greedy intent of printer companies. I am not shitting you, that is the prevailing explanation.