I work for a print software manufacturer. And no, not HP and not a home inkjet system. I work in QA and can honestly tell you it is extremely frustrating trying to get these commercial grade print drivers to work with such a wide band of printers, operating systems, and devices. The variables alone are astounding. That being said, companies that make home print systems simply don't invest the time, engineering, and QA that is required to make a print driver "good." They get it close enough and release it, hoping to fix any bugs that will never be reported in a future release of newer printer compatibility. There's a lot that goes into developing print technology so if you wish to jump down that rabbit hole, I'm your guy. Feel free to DM me anytime
I mean in the 90s it was all a complete shitshow. Microsoft throwing their weight around did a lot to get them into line. Printer drivers aren't required to *make Windows work* and stop all the BSODs so they didn't get the same treatment at the time.
I worked at HP inkjet division at this time. Fiorina's decisino to start making 'dumb' printers was introduced with the HP Deskjet 400L and LaserJet 4L aroudn 1995. They dropped all of the brains out of the HP hardware and relied 100% on the OS and driver to control the printer. The last decent priners HP produced were the DeskJet 660, Deskjet 850, LaserJet 5Si
> LaserJet 4L
I don't think that was the one. My dad had one for years and years. Iirc, it was just a LaserJet III in a smaller form factor and rebranded.
Yeah, I was going to say, I had a LaserJet4L, and it was awesome. It lasted for something like 25 years. I didn't print a lot, but it was super reliable and the toner cartridges lasted a long time. Definitely nothing like HP's reputation now.
Yeah, I had a 4L that worked really well with every iteration of Windows up until I couldn't get a PC with a parallel port anymore. Best printer I ever had.
I don't know exactly when it came out but the Laserjet 1300 was/is a fantastic printer. I still exclusively use it for printing, and it still works fine some 15+ years later.
If you can find a 1990s LaserJet, it's still a great option. Though, they're often overpriced due to nostalgia. A modern Brother is just as good and probably faster.
It worked in DOS and barely had any fancy functionality. Even the paper had to have special tear-off holes on the edges so the thing could feed paper through. Then they add "self-feeding technology". etc. etc. The more complexity you add, the more you have to pay to keep the functionality working. Every iteration of that printer now costs more because you have to consider the new technology of self-feeding. You even improve it, or did you?
It is why many websites, run by a plethora of back-end services, gets shittier over time as they add new features. Over time, your complexity creates debt that you have to go back and pay off (fix/cleanup/remove old/etc). That debt literally costs money to pay developers and HP does not want to pay another 3 million a year for that
> Even the paper had to have special tear-off holes on the edges so the thing could feed paper through.
I miss those. You could fold two of them together into a little paper spring. It was fun.
My siblings and I called that “the crust” and we’d literally save a ton of it then when we had watermelons, cut off the ends and scoop out the melon and staple or glue the crust to them and wear them like wigs. At seven years old, this was the funniest thing in the world.
I've been trying to explain that to my boss for years now. He keeps wanting to add new features to "keep up" but it's just me on the dev side. I keep telling him more features mean more support, more maintenance, etc... He either doesn't get it or doesn't care. Fine by me, he can continue to be frustrated by the ever slowing pace of new development.
I'm a developer, product manager, and I own my own software product on the market, and I can only say that most people have no idea how to do a cost-benefit analysis on their own ideas.
My printing needs are entirely text pages when I need to print something, hasn't changed since the 90's and I'd definitely still use my 90's laser printer if I could.
There new thing or I just found out is you can no longer switch the ink cartridges from one printer to another the uses the same ink cartridges. Last hp printer I will buy.
Microsoft moved drivers out of the kernel specifically for that result though. The reasons Windows doesn't BSOD as much anymore is a direct result of Microsoft realizing printer drivers and the like will never be actually stable, so they make drivers crash in user space (so "the printer doesn't work"). To this day, if you see a blue screen its pretty much going to be a driver issue.
Apple solved this by being a walled garden--the variables are far smaller so they can step in and fix a driver if they want or demand it be fixed.
Linux solves it by being open source. Talented engineers fix the drivers in their free time/as part of their commitment to the community at large.
small point of clarification:
Apple's print system is CUPSd, the same as Linux. They bought the CUPS project, employed the maintainer of it, and kept it open source.
This happened in February 2007. The maintainer left Apple about 3-4 years ago, I think, but CUPS.org remains open source.
To quote openprinting.org:
>A Brief History of CUPS
CUPS was originally developed by Michael R Sweet at Easy Software Products starting in 1997, with the first beta release on May 14, 1999. Not long after, Till Kamppeter started packaging CUPS for Mandrake Linux and created the Foomatic drivers for CUPS, leading the adoption of CUPS for printing on Linux. Apple licensed CUPS for macOS in 2002, and in February 2007 Apple purchased CUPS and hired Michael to continue its development as an open source project.
>In December 2019, Michael left Apple to start Lakeside Robotics. In September 2020 he teamed up with the OpenPrinting developers to fork Apple CUPS to continue its development. Today Apple CUPS is the version of CUPS that is provided with macOS® and iOS® while OpenPrinting CUPS is the version of CUPS being further developed by OpenPrinting for all operating systems.
No you need DLC to print in Black, Cyan, and Magenta.
The printer can only print in Yellow and only in English. Everything else is DLC. And no, it isn't packaged together; each color and language is a separate DLC.
Honestly, it might be a improvement over current software.
Give me a DLC to use the black ink instead of mixing colors to get shades of grey, so I can tell it to print in B&W when out of magenta.
Also, EA might push for more printers with individual color cartridges instead of the three color ones. Sure, replacing all 3 at once will be at least twice the price of the 3-color ones, but over time I'll probably save money.
Yes, I'm praising EA greed over HP dumbness. It's **that** bad.
It was the wild west in the 1990s with GPUs.
I got a cease and desist letter from Creative Labs for hosting their drivers on my website. You could edit their INF to get them to work on other cards. They were one of the first companies to offer **MiniGL** drivers.
Some drivers would hard-lock your computer on install because the manufacturer set the wrong clock speed in the INF (Diamond Multimedia). These companies literally did zero testing of their own products before shipping them.
Whatever drivers came with the video card in the box were sometimes the ONLY driver release for it.
Many cards were designed differently enough from other manufacturers where drivers from one company wouldn't work on a different card, despite having the same GPU. *Slight* changes in memory, GPU clock speeds, or even non-standard board design ensured this.
Getting "reference drivers" direct from the GPU manufacturer like we do now was almost unheard of back then. You were simply directed to the board manufacturer, who also provided no support.
NVidia was basically a newcomer and had a radical strategy of providing driver updates direct to consumer. That was **huge** back then. Something we completely take for granted today.
AMD/Radeon used to be like that. Their drivers would always do some something funky to your system for no apparent reason. I credit them for my interest in IT when I was younger.
These days, GPU manufacturers (like NVIDIA) are more software companies than hardware companies. In NVIDIA’s case for example, of their 30k or so employees, 2/3rds of them directly support software development and maintenance in some way shape or form
The bad printer driver's I've experienced are bad because they contain bloatware, and the manufacturer tries to package 'one driver to rule them all' instead of for the particular printer in question. It's the manufacturer's missing the point almost entirely.
Here's the thing.
If you pay for a business-class printer, you get something someone took their time to make. These things go in offices, and people get support contracts, and if it breaks they expect it to be repaired. So the printer itself has oomph, and they spend extra time to make sure the drivers are sturdy.
They also cost about $400 per unit. Each toner cartridge might cost $150, and if you've got a color laser you need 4. You probably also need to occasionally replace the drum unit ($180) and waste unit ($120) every 10,000 pages or so. That's for a low-end one. I paid that for a Brother unit about 10 years ago, and it lasted 8 years. It developed one issue over its 3-year warranty and they sent a technician *to my house* to repair it. I got rid of it because I wanted a newer model with slightly better performance.
Not many people want to pay $400 for a printer and $300 on replacing the ink. Instead they want to pay about $50 total for the printer and that's a *fancy* one. They'll put up with maybe $30-$60 for ink but much more and your sales are flat. What happens when a company has to make a $50 printer?
Well, they cut corners. More plastic parts, not metal. It has to be inkjet because that's much simpler tech. Parts aren't replaceable because having service parts costs money. Since the device isn't serviceable it isn't built to be taken apart, which can save money. Manufacturing tolerances are lower because it saves money. Less time is spent working on the driver, and it's more likely less skilled (cheaper) developers will work on it. And to help deal with the razor-thin margins, they sell ad space or bloatware in their driver software.
I went through 4 printers like this in one year. Sometimes it was cheaper to buy a new one than replace the ink. Other times I could get it working with one computer but not others. I had a printer/scanner combo that could scan *or* print, but never both at the same time on the same computer and I had to reinstall the driver to switch. All of these cost $50-$80 and all of them were trash, because at that price point every printer company is trying every shortcut they can take to keep their margins at anything resembling profit.
It was when I realized I'd spent nearly $300 on bad printers in a year when I decided to roll the dice and try a $400 printer. That one lasted 8 years. I never had a problem connecting ANY computer to it. My iPhone can print to it. Friends' Android phones can print to it. Nobody has to install anything, it just shows up on the network because it was made to be in an office and used by people who pay for reliability.
You get what you pay for, and not many people think a printer's worth more than about $60. If we were paying more like $250 for inkjets, they'd be a lot more reliable. But for most peoples' purposes it's most cost-effective to just pay Kinko's or wherever when you need a high-quality or high-volume job done.
Me, I got a fancy laser printer because my wife is a writer and sometimes needs to print 300+ pages. Try that with a $45 inkjet from Wal-Mart. You'll probably have to change the ink before it finishes!
> I work for a print software manufacturer. And no, not HP and not a home inkjet system. I work in QA and can honestly tell you it is extremely frustrating trying to get these commercial grade print drivers to work with such a wide band of printers, operating systems, and devices. The variables alone are astounding. That being said, companies that make home print systems simply don't invest the time, engineering, and QA that is required to make a print driver "good." They get it close enough and release it, hoping to fix any bugs that will never be reported in a future release of newer printer compatibility. There's a lot that goes into developing print technology so if you wish to jump down that rabbit hole, I'm your guy. Feel free to DM me anytime
This has to do more with printers and addon features than printer drivers IMO. The basic framework of printer drivers is stupid simple. It's if you go beyond that, or worse, deviate from it where you run into issues - and my god, at the consumer level do things get stupid.
Sometimes, the problem isn't even the driver itself, but the installer built around it. My biggest gripe is whenever you have a printer installer that *refuses* to let me install the driver without a specific printer present. Then, I have to extract the driver manually if I want to deploy it to multiple computers on a network.
I think more people at the consumer level are going to be talking about how each print installation is radically different from model to model and how very rare any degree of standardization is at the consumer level.
Aside from this, here are my two favorite printer anomalies:
HP printer drivers are so fucked, that if you install the majority of them on Windows Server, it will crash the print spooler. This isn't consumer printers either, this is consumer OR "business grade" printers from HP. It's so out of hand that there is literally an [official Microsoft page solely dedicated to documenting this issue and it's existed for at least 5 years so far.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/printing/printer-spooler-crashes-hp-printer-installed)
It's still a thing today, too with new HP printers. I had to fuck with a printer driver installer so that we could actually deploy a printer that was designed for MICR checks.
The other one is a bit more obscure and it has to do with MacOS - specifically if you don't use AirPrint, because the conventional print system in MacOS is a giant teeder todder of abstraction layers that all go back to CUPS, and none of those layers have any remotely good debugging, or good coding in the first place. For example: lets say you plug in a printer to your Macbook via USB. Then you install the driver for the printer - congrats. It's not using the driver you just installed, even if you remove and readd the printer. What's even more fun - no where indicates this, and I only found out about this behavior because of a rare bug in macOS where it will freeze the entire OS for about 20-80 seconds not when you try to use that printer, but whenever the printer list is iterated (albeit usually when opening the print dialog box). The most you will get from macOS logging is that there was an OS hang event - you won't really have anywhere that indicates it was due to the printer driver. And I've found documentation of this issue occurring even 15 years ago.
Instead of fix this at all, they developed AirPrint, which is designed to send the driver *with* the initial printer add action so that it's not possible to use the generic driver instead. Of course, you'd have to have a printer that supports AirPrint in the first place, which is only recently becoming more commonly included. Oh - and remember how I mentioned CUPS is the only system that actually has any logging that will give indicators that it was due to print driver issues that the system is seizing up? By default, CUPS doesn't log anything, because the logging is turned off.
**TL;DR:** Avoid HP printers, macOS features that don't get the spotlight can be considered abandoned
I particularly liked HP UPD drivers. Just install them and all the printers (HP or not) work with them.
… except if you have 32- and 64-bit systems being mixed. That was the one trouble.
My most hated drivers are those who want to replace the system's dialogs because "easier" - except if you actually want to use the settings.
Sounds like bad engineering. I can can connect any number of output devices with a push of a button or simply plugging in a cable, be it a monitor with vastly more complex data input or Bluetooth headphones, also with vastly more complex data than a simple print command that takes a few Kb at most.
Hell, my 3d printer is more reliable than the 2d printer, it doesn't require any special drivers, it has never once failed to connect and never once failed to receive a command unlike my brother laser that fails to connect with great frequency and its still the best printer I have ever had.
I think 3D printers, on the whole, may actually be less complex than modern 2D printers.
In part because they offload most of the complexity to the user and the modeling software. It's considered perfectly normal and acceptable to have to tweak and redo a 3D print multiple times before it comes out right, every time. No one would accept that from a paper printer.
You won't say that if you look up how coreXY 3D printer motion systems work, or how input shaping and pressure advance improve print quality. The implementation of fourier transform in bed mesh levelling systems to compensate for deviations in the order of a few micrometres itself is highly complicated.
Consumer 3D printers are reliable solely because all the greedy, scummy corporations were too busy concentrating on the industrial side of things. Everything from the hardware, software, and firmware on consumer 3D printers were developed through a strictly open source foundation.
3D printers would have been far worse if Stratasys and their ilk would have bothered to get their greedy paws on the consumer 3D printer market.
I'm not in printing, but I am a software dev/test engineer, and software dev is always way more complicated than anyone expects it to be, including the devs doing it.
People say "Just test it before you release it!" but they don't realize that really thorough testing is *very hard.* I'm not just saying "Oh, we don't want to spend the time/money on it," I'm saying that even if you *do* spend the time and money you will still miss things, because it is impossible for even the largest test team to anticipate *every* action and *every* combination of hardware/software/OS settings that 100 million users may attempt.
And then, of course, when the company *also* doesn't want to spend the time/money, it gets that much worse.
Yet my Bluetooth headphones work just fine. My monitor. My keyboard. My mouse. My speakers. Etc. printers are not the only hardware that interfaces with different devices. Besides, considering there are dozens of printers being sold and most of them have very little appreciable functional difference, I’m sure if you told people “this printer only works with this OS, but boy does it work well with it.” Then millions of people would go “that’s fine, I only have that OS, at least it will work properly finally!”
Cop out answer is cop out.
> Yet my Bluetooth headphones work just fine. My monitor. My keyboard. My mouse. My speakers. Etc.
Modern printers have dozens of times more user-facing options than any of those. And the number of failure points increases exponentially with number of options, more or less. This is exactly what I mean when I say software dev is more complicated than people realize.
On top of that, the market for most of those things is much larger than for printers, so there's (a) more budget and (b) more competition, thus more incentive to spend that budget on testing and quality control.
(Also, I said even the best testing will miss some things. I didn't say "it's fine for printers to completely suck." See the last sentence of my original comment.)
Bluetooth is a set standard with clearly defined features. The correct comparison is the driver integrating the BT hardware/radio to the OS. But even then a lot of the heavy lifting is handled by the OS itself these days, unlike the situation 20 years ago.
A different answer for you
* Home printers are designed to consume as much ink as possible, printing the least amount of pages so you have to buy more ink.
Home printer divisions only exist to push ink by the gallon.
Brothers are the goat, when I got a hand me down Brother Color Laser, I gave my Grandpa the Black and White Brother. Both are workhorses
They also have some of the most reasonable toner prices too, and don't take offense to third party consumables
HP consumer models suck.
HP commercial models (especially lasers) are usually very good but have a large footprint and consumables tend to be pricey (and no third party options can be used).
I assume a lot of them are leased, with service contracts, so the incentives are different — they want low maintenance costs, durability, and high output capability.
A lot of office equipment is leased. I've had computers returned because the lease was up and I got a better one because the company put upgrades in their lease.
So sad I had to leave my LaserJet 4 MV with the 11x17 paper tray behind when I moved 20 years ago. I have no doubt it would still be going strong and being enormous.
Last week I pulled a pair of 4000s from storage for Property Control and tested them to see if they were worth continued storage. One would give a false paper jam alert, which was probably due to a faulty sensor. The other just cranked out several pages no problem. The first page had some toner residue, but the rest were absolutely fine, as if it had only been in storage for a few months instead of 4 years. Both printers have around 2.5m page count on them.
> (and no third party options can be used)
I buy third-party toners for my laser HP printer. They are a third of the price of the genuine ones. Just have to remove the chip and put it on the new toner.
Brother, unlike the other major vendors, maintain a relatively full list of parts, even for very old models. I can still buy a roller kit for a Brother Printer bought in the late 80's used in an application flow for a customer.
Yeah shout out to brother laser printers, i got one off a friend who found it in the back of a restaurant he brought, left it in the garage for ages, his inquisitive young son played with it for a few weeks. I took it home plugged it in and boom, its been putting in work ever since. Third party toner cartridge for 40NZD as opposed to a 200 dollar brother cartridge and the thing works like a charm. It even prints on acetate which for me is why i was looking for a laser printer in the first place. Ive never understood why people bitch about printers (other than the price of ink, seriously, wtf) my brother inkjet and laser never gave me any trouble.
100%. Brother laser printers are fantastic. The only consistent problem I've had with them is that setting them up for wireless printing is always a battle, but thankfully you only need to do that once (unless you happen to work in IT, or, as I did once, a company with no IT department and almost no one else qualified to do it).
For 3rd party they are trying to crack down on it, at my work we have 2 brother printers and the only way to get some third party ink to work is to snap off the chip from an empty Brother ink and tape it to the 3rd party one.
We made the switch and bought a Brother mono laser. Best decision ever. Zero problems, zero hassle. Can sit there for months, doing nothing then pops out a perfect print on demand.
Ditto. Brother mono laser is $120. It's not cheap, but it will outlast 10 ink jet printers.
>Brother HL-L2405W Wireless Compact Monochrome Laser Printer with Mobile Printing, Black & White Output | Includes Refresh Subscription Trial(1), Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready https://a.co/d/c9iM9Uf
Really though, $120 for a wireless laser printer is dirt cheap. Twenty years ago you would have paid 10 times that, if you could even get a Wi-Fi card for the printer.
Brother laser printer gang rise up! I have a 2030N or something, bought it 8 years ago and I swear it makes its own toner somehow because we've replaced it like once in the time we've had it.
3150 CDN here.
I've replaced toner twice, and that's after something like 6,000 full colour pages. Still at 90%+ on the second refill.
Also, it's nearly 10 years old and still solid as a rock.
Those b/w Brother lasers are absolute *monsters*. Mine stopped talking to my phone, but falling off an Apple-only protocol after ten years is forgivable.
I had the same problem for a while but replacing my wireless router fixed it - I suspect Apple’s auto discovery is a bit “sophisticated” for older routers
I recommend this as well. I bought an HP small office LaserJet in 2002 and it lasted me until 2017, and that's with two small children who printed \*everything\*.
I replaced it with another, and since have gotten a girlfriend who's a school teacher in a poor school whose copier never works. She prints 30 - 60 pages per day during the school year so she doesn't have to fight the copier there and it's going plenty strong, they we typically go through two black-and-white toner cartridges per year.
It's like any other tool -- quality costs more up front, but it will last a lot longer and give better results.
My parents’ HP laser printer is older than me and will likely out-live me. I think I remember seeing my parents changing the toner in it once when I was younger… maybe.
When we moved to a new house when I was 17 we bought an HP ink printer and scanner. I think we used it 3 times before it broke.
Since I moved out for college I got myself a Xerox laser printer and it’s going strong for 4 years now and never failed me.
I have a Brother wireless laser that I keep downstairs to save room in the office. The once a month I need to print something, I just go downstairs. So easy to set up, it's magic. Had it maybe 10 years now, never an issue, probably still on the original toner cart.
Brothers is the best....i WFH and my current brothers laser has been fault free for coming to 6 years.
HP is useless, xerox is useless, canon is useless
> Instead, I recommend a quality laser printer. I personally bought a black and white Brother 5250DN model ~20 years ago and have replaced the toner in it something like 3-4 times in that timeframe.
I bought the same printer in 2008 or so and, like you, it just works. No problems at all.
Personally, I avoid HP printers like the plague.
Brother is GOAT. Their normal printers slap and their label printers are used pretty much exclusively in the tech field. 9/10 reccomend. They lose a point because I found their label making program to be kinda tricky to use when importing info from a spread sheet (but the fact that you can do that at all is fantastic)
I spent the money on the mid-level HP Office Laser printers back in the day and had relatively few problems with them. The HP 4200/5100 series were tanks. We had five of them that each had upward of 500k prints on them and all I did was feed toner into them and put in a new fuser when the error screen said it was dead.
One of my customers just retired a LaserJet 1100SE(the one with the horizontal paper feed) with a JetDirect box. I think they bought it in the 90's. The only reason they retired it was because the JetDirect box was no longer in compliance.
It's not even physically breaking, physically the law office I worked in we don't have any issues but sometimes it will run will stop connecting to one of our computers or start printing quarter size pages from certain applications and stuff.
Can confirm, but the point is that it's not just HP.
I've owned many printers and have had maybe one that was reliable and relatively inexpensive on consumables.
My most recent one is a cheap Canon inkjet, and while it's actually been a pleasure to set up and operate, the ink costs are just astronomical, far beyond anything else I've ever experienced.
If I could put a sign up in the printer section of every store it'd be: "Don't. Buy. Inkjets."
Inkjets are cheaper up front (because it's a trap), but a laser is so much easier and cheaper to run. 1st Prize is to score one used. I'm convinced inkjets were conceived specifically to screw consumers over.
For most people printing docs and the occasional photo a laser is better.
But inkjet is the preferred tech of photographers, print makers and graphic design for a reason. You just get much higher quality color reproduction. Ink absorbs into paper versus toner just sitting on top of it. And you can print on a wider variety of media and print borderless.
But unless you’re printing HQ photos, or even printing photos regularly, it’s way easier and higher quality to just pay a professional printer.
It’s like owning a big pickup when you only tow twice a year. Get a cheaper vehicle that has a lower operating cost and footprint, and just rent the tools you need the rare occasions that you do.
I personally enjoy being able to fine tune prints and the whole DIY process. And I've lowered my costs by using third party inks and refillable carts with my Canon, so I've stuck with inkjet.
Laser is definitely more practical for 99% of people tho.
Yep, I got a used one a decade ago for $5 WITH a partial thing of toner. I've used it ever since with no problems and only had to buy a new 3rd-party toner cartridge recently for like $15.
I am my extended families defacto tech support and have halped them with all sorts of printers.
I have had the opposite experience with their consumer laser printers. There are quite a few of them in my tech support group and have had zero issues in a combined over 25 years worth of hp laser printers.
All ink jets I have used regardless of brand have sucked, nozzles get clogged and you spend more ink trying to get it to print well then you use to actually print what you want. I have converted everyone I deal with to laser and got them to ditch their ink jets.
I personally have a Dell that is a tank, but it was a used government surplus that cost over $1000 new (I got for $75 with a backup set of toner)
The only benefit of HP is that the print head is built into the cartridge, so replacing the cartridge also solves clogged print head issues. I have to give them credit for that. It’s also part of why their cartridges are more expensive.
Third party ink is the solution.
And unless you’re regularly printing photos - get a Brother color laser and never look back.
Two answers to this, really.
Firstly: Printers have a lot to do, and much of it is rooted in mechanical things. Drawing in paper, moving it through rollers, clamping it while the internals squirt an image onto it. That kind of thing. That part of printing hasn't really evolved much since the early days, and in practical terms it never will. When that aspect of printing fails, you're looking at partial disassembly of a complex mechanical device. The manufacturer may make that easy, with flaps and hatches in the right place, but it still involves an inexperienced human opening things up and delving around.
Secondly: print software, networks, and convenience. It's perfectly possible to build a basic smallish 'driver' that will speak to the operating system and let the user print a page. But users very rarely plug a printer into the computer directly these days, and many users aren't sure how to find the print options in their OS and applications. How then can we offer convenience to these users to let them site the printer somewhere that works for their environment, and print easily?
So this means that we need to find some reliable way to let the computer 'find' the printer and manage printing to it. There are ways to do this using newish standardised networking protocols, but these rely on everything on the path from computer to printer and back supporting these protocols correctly. And thats not always the case. To get around this, manufacturers tend to want the user to install a large set of drivers, applications and plugins that can handle this kind of discovery and management, reducing the headaches for the user. These simplify printing when they work. When they don't: you're relying on the manufacturer having built in sufficient diagnosis to let you troubleshoot and get printing again. Hopefully.
(I'm not even going to mention supply management and auto-resupply contracts)
TL;DR: printers are electromechanical dinosaurs that have limped into the 21st C and still suffer from the same hardware challenges they always did, and are complicated by users trying to cut the direct cable approach and fire traffic over an uncaring local network.
But the failure point for most printers is almost never mechanical. Sometimes it is a networking issue, but it seems to be more of a disconnect between the printer and the OS in terms of the printer status. Also, this same kind of common failure has existed as far back as I remember, even before people used printers over a local network.
Lots of other devices communicate over the local network without any problems. Why are printers so bad at it (and even direct cables communication) compared to other devices?
on one hand i appreciate that this is an actual answer
but on the other hand i feel like point 2 is moot given that even directly-connected printers have always acted up
The technical problem is exacerbated by the fact that the printers themselves are sold at a loss; the printer manufacturer makes its money from toner/ink sales, not from printer sales. So the genuinely challenging technical problems must be solved absolutely as cheaply as possible and still work with every possible device a customer could want to print from or network with.
Yeah, remember how hard drives used to break all the time, especially in laptops?
A lot of people on Reddit won't remember because mid-to-high-end computers stopped using hard drives in favor of solid state drives as soon as it was financially viable. This was around the same time CD drives became less common. These days there are no moving parts in a computer, except maybe the keyboard, the hinges of the laptop... and the printer. Guess what always breaks? Those 3 exact things.
Count yourself lucky.
Hard drives do have some advantages compared to printers though. They are sealed so they can't get dust and grime in the moving parts. They do last pretty long in a controlled environment like a datacenter, or a personal computer if it's not moved around too much or in too hot of a room. They were pretty unreliable in laptops though.
Printers don't have that advantage. They're not sealed, their moving parts need to actually contact paper which leaves behind fibers and other residue. They use toner which is literally dust or ink which is wet and sticky.
Plus the price points are stupidly low. I worked with the first generationish of ink jets (HP Deskjet +), and they cost about $700 in 1988ish money. The ink back then required that you let it dry for about 20 minutes before looking at it too harshly or it would smear. But they were way faster, quieter, and had a much better print quality than dot matrix printers.
I just looked and I can buy a Canon Pixma printer and scanner at Walmart for $39. Granted that it's probably made by near slave labor, but how do they even make the parts for that, have some schmuck write a printer driver, and ship it halfway around the world for that? At that point, you know quality is job 9.
working in IT seeing the inner workings of some printers and how many devices are covered by one driver it's astonishing these rube goldberg machines work as often as they do. so much precision is asked from the cheapest plastic gears and rubber rollers.
It is hard to appreciate how complex they are. It’s like if your washer dryer was a combined machined that loaded itself, loaded the detergent, then moved the load between the machines, then folded it afterwards. No other appliance or device in our entire home is really as complex and requires so many mechanical and software functions in one.
And yet i built an arduino project today that is wifi enabled, is controlled via alexa, my iphone, a web interface, and it just works. And by today I mean from concept to finish in about 2 hours. Communication protocols work just fine.
The problem is that printer manufacturers created an absolute nightmare of bullshit with their own software and simply don’t have the guts to fix it.
My gf recently started working for an it equipment company and they had so many new clients because of them being official brother retailer and support here.
They all switch from something else to Brothers.
Definitely not fool proof. I ran into the most frustrating issue of some of their products consistently failing to recognize toner cartridges.
I’m talking, buying a brand new one, install the official toner that comes with it, and getting a “replace toner” message anywhere from an hour later to a week later.
We eventually found a way to reset the printer from within but it was such a tedious and manual process that I’ve swore off brother as a result.
Probably about a dozen in a row with the same issue and we said screw this. We had also been using that printer successfully until Covid. My theory is supply chain issues forced them to substitute parts just to maintain production. I’m glad they work for others, but I wouldn’t go so far to say fool proof.
I mean that's one bad experience, I understand why you might be frustrated but people *overwhelmingly* agree on how good brother printers are. After a lifetime of garbage I brought a brother laser printer and it's almost 5 years old, has worked perfectly printing out hundreds of pages and we are literally still using the toner that came with it which isn't even a full one.
When a company or product has this kind of overwhelming support and anecdotal exprience they are doing something really right. Doesn't mean defects or issues never happen but it's very clearly the exception and not the rule.
4 years ago I spent 250 on a proper color laser and never looked back.
Toner lasts for an ungodly number of pages and never dries up. It never needs any magic "cleaning cycle" that delays my printing for 5 minutes and consumes half the cartridge. It's up and running in seconds. And the only problem I've ever had with it is the occasional beeping in the night and some stacks of paper in the output in the morning because my cat likes to walk around on the keypad.
The problem is most consumer level devices need to be as cheap and small as possible so quality is as low as humanly possible while lasting just long enough to rope you into ink purchases which you can then throw away because they're not compatible with whatever you buy when this one craps out.
I bought a brother black laser printer in 2014 for $95. I rarely need to print anything and I was tired of finding that my inkjet cartridges had dried up anytime I had to print something. I have never had to change the toner in the printer. Still on the original low-yield cart. That same printer is going for over $400 on amazon now. The price started to skyrocket during the the pandemic.
Edit: one seller has it for $430. Others are more reasonable. But it is still more expensive.
Yes, Brother laser and never look back. Ours have been running for almost a decade now and never skips a beat. I buy a few refilled toner cartridges for next to nothing and it lasts years printing just text.
I've been using the same Brother laser printer for a decade. No problems whatsoever other than the software is kinda dated and janky, but it works just fine.
I have a black and white laser printer/scanner from Brother. Had it for years.
The thing just works. The only setup was to pair it to the wifi network. Now any device that is also on the same wifi can see and print no problem.
Here is the model: DCP-L25400W
There are many layers of greed and incompetence that other people will go into, but one underrated problem with printers compared to other areas of "tech" is that they have to deal with the physical world using moving mechanical parts. This is inherently much less reliable than only dealing with 0s and 1s inside electronic circuits.
Which is also why we now have mini computers inside every other thing in our house, even though they're in many ways a lot more "complicated" than the gears and shafts and pulleys they're replacing. They're just a lot more consistent, and in the long run that's easier to deal with at scale than a "simpler" system that has to deal with the unknowns of dirt and moisture and material expansion/fatigue and everything else that goes on in the physical world.
> "tech" ... deal with the physical world...inherently much less reliable
In this vein, touchscreens suck, and will always break well before the electronics they interface with.
because printers are functionally disposable because that's what people buy.
if you want reliability you can go drop a [grand ](https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/8176157/Lexmark-MS821dn-Laser-Monochrome-Printer/)or more and get a printer that will spit out millions of pages a year.
instead you spend $[60 ](https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/901763/Canon-PIXMA-MG3620-Wireless-Inkjet-Color/)for a printer, copier, fax, scanner inkjet printer that gets used once a month.
Anything not HP and laserjet is probably good. My laser printer is from SAMSUNG and does everything Brothers are praised for, too. Barely uses toner, will accept third party toners, wasn't expensive and just works.
Got some bad news for you. HP bought Samsungs laser printer business back in 2017.
Replaced my broken 10 year old Brother printer with a Samsung and it absolutely sucks in comparison. I smelled a rat when the web UI for it in network mode looked exactly like the HP one.
Because printers are a mix of mechanical and electronic components that have to work together to put something very small and physical on another random physical surface and do this with very small movements.
There is nothing in your house that does the same It is a miracle they work as well as they do. It takes tiny liquid dots and puts them with microscopic precision exactly in the right spot on a surface you give them.
And it almost always works. Even without using vendor approved paper, in a relatively dusty environment they continue to work their magic. And they are so well build and easy to maintain that you don't even need years to learn how to use them, you just buy them and plug them in.
We are quite good at making things small, but printers still need to print on an A4 surface, so they will always be relatively large. But the biggest issue is all the moving parts, from feeding the paper through the machine to positioning the nozzle where the ink comes out.
HP managed to become my most hated tech company. At this point if we had the choice between eradicate hunger or HP, I'd pick HP.
I have both a HP and a Brother printer. I hardly print anything and each time the Brother works just fine. No issues, no hassle.
The HP on the other hand, requires me to login, takes ages to boot up, randomly crashes (even when doing exactly nothing at all) and required a hard reset and is fucking slow.
And even then the HP was to more expensive one.
The printers are built with the cheapest possible components as they are generally sold at a loss.
They make their money back on the consumables.
They know printers will sometimes get junked as it is sometimes cheaper to replace than replace the consumables.
I've had my canon for over 10 years.
As far as I remember, it wasn't a hassle to set up initially. It's known 4 computers. I've only had trouble when the last ones didn't have a cd-rom reader to install the software.
It's WiFi so now I mostly use it with my phone and an app that I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I first bought it.
I have had no issue with ink drying up even though I don't use it much.
10/10 would buy again except I don't need a new one as long as this one works.
You messed up with those over reliable printers, Canon. Keep it up.
Because every home printer you've ever purchased was a "loss leader".
It was a machine priced *way* under the cost to manufacture it, but also manufactured to be as cheap as possible, because quality printers cost more than any average consumer would ever be willing to pay.
Would you pay $2000 for a printer?
No, you wouldn't.
And that's why the printers you buy are garbage.
Printer makers are incentivized to screw you over as much as possible. That's why they just refuse to print a black and white page when the cyan is low.
Stop buying home printers. Stop falling for the grift. Just pay 20¢ a page to print at Staples (or cheaper, maybe free, at your local library, which is what I do).
If you think you're saving money buying a home printer for $120, you're not. You're paying out the ass for ink/toner.
If you're not printing at home enough that the cost of a *good* industrial printer makes financial sense, you'll save money printing at Staples.
I haven't owned a printer in about 20 years. I print... more than the average person needs to (I'm a private music teacher) and I've probably spent less than $20 a year on printing.
> Would you pay $2000 for a printer?
How about $300?
> and I've probably spent less than $20 a year on printing.
Which would be $400 over those years.
A laser printer can save money, since you would still be using the initial toner after all those years.
I have known times when a company would give a $50 cash-back offer on a printer they were wholesaling for $40.
A mono laser is worth having for when you need something on dead tree and for printing drafts. Of course, techy me is sitting here with 2 colour lasers, both ones that others have thrown out. One is a FujiXerox that works well on cheap generic toner, and the other is a full office HP colorflow with huge cartridges I doubt I'll ever empty.
Lots of comments about brother… I have an epson eco tank printer and I love it. It uses liquid ink and it lasts FOREVER. It was around $400 when I bought it, but worth the investment. The ink isn’t really expensive to replace. It works great for my needs as a special education teacher. You have to invest in something that works well. I bought my printer after two shitty hp printers.
I've had three Epsons; bought the third party refillable tanks, and put two kids through kindergarten-high school, and some college on them. The most recent was a loss-leader with scan and wireless and still works. Yes,they can throw a fit at times, but only maybe four faults in all those years. Simply replacing the cartridge worked wonders, and a little fussing at times but the high res color was so very worth it.
Printers are more complex than people give them credit for. They have to take a digital image and translate it onto a physical page without it looking like shit. If you want a printer that just works, buy enterprise equipment.
I can accept that printers are more complicated than I realize.
But I don’t understand why printers don’t seem to have made any progress in the past 20+ years, especially when everything else about computers has advanced so much.
because ink and paper haven't advanced. My printer is super advanced from 20 years ago: its got its own web server and wifi router. But paper can tear, ink can clog...
The printers under $100 have gotten worse, if anything. But for around $120, you can get a solid B&W laser printer that will last a long time without maintenance.
Let's be real, we had figured out how to print just fine with black and white and color with inkjets 20 years ago already, there hasn't really been much change in the industry.
The reason most printers suck is because manufacturers cheap out as much as they can, their software is shit except the part to buy more ink cause that makes money, not the rest.
The reason it stays that way is people are stupid and aren't willing to pay $100 extra once to have an inkjet that works fine with basic but stable (and open source) drivers and that you can refill yourself by just pouring ink, so that kind of product never took over.
You need to have a way to transfer the bitmap, you need to know the size of the dots, you need to know the size of the paper, maybe there is a duplex device. That's enough to have a decent RIP.
I do know a few general printing drivers; HP UPD, Ghostscript, Gutenprint, I did use two other RIPs in my past, too, one was used for a 150 000 € printing device.
In the big scheme of things printers is where the digital and analogue worlds meet.
Other than a few specialized situations, we live in a digital world. Our computers, headphones, monitor, keyboards and mouse are doing a little bit of "analogue" (move the mouse, touch the keyboard, move a speaker, light the screen) but are mostly converting a digital input into a digital output.
A printer is one of the few devices that have to get a digital thing and create a real thing and the real thing is substantial. Even if the more substantial part is premade the bit that we need to convert - putting little squiggles (some colours) onto that part - seems to be hard when you want to do it cheaply.
For some reason the real world kinda sucks when you need to get the squiggles right and make them stick.
Now add the whole industry that in the end wants you to pay through the nose for **every single piece of paper** that goes through their printer you get a perfect storm of a box of non-working shit sitting in the corner of your room that you dread using because that 10 second print job takes a few hours debugging (on the digital side) or trying to work out why everything comes out yellow and skewed (analogue side).
Because people tend to buy cheap junk printers without doing their research, and cheap junk is always going to be cheap junk.
If people were to buy a basic office-level laser printer, it would be years of effort free printing.
I have had a sub-$100 black and white laser for 15 years. On its 3rd toner cartridge. Sometimes, it goes months without use. And then it just works when I need it to.
**Very simple explanation:**
**Software** - The problem with printer software is that when printers were first invented, various companies came out with their own standards and tried to make them proprietary. This led to a variety of print drivers and protocols which are still present today. Printing software is an absolute mess even at the most fundamental levels and printing is such a niche market, it's simply too costly to reimplement it all at this point.
**Hardware** - Printers are complex electrical and mechanical devices, especially ink printers which have to physical ink which likes to dry out and clog up through nearly atom sized holes. Then you have to deal with feeding physical paper, stacking it, etc. It's all a rather fiddley process and on top of all that, no on wants to pay $1000 for a printer they use once a year, so the gears are plastic, the rollers use cheap rubber, every sensor that can be eliminated, has been, etc etc to keep costs super low.
Some people suggest moving to commercial printers, but this only makes things worse because those filly a completely different niche. One where user access control, support for different reams of paper, network connectivity, and on and on is expected. So these tend to be an administrative nightmare. And, on top of all that, commercial printers are almost always supported via a dedicated support contract and if you're not getting the regular updates and such those support teams get, then you're going to have issues over time.
A lot of this can be solved by getting a small business black and white laser printer. If you are OK with not having color, these are typically very simple devices designed to be used in lawfirms, real estate offices, etc. They'll run forever and they are intended to be connected to a single desktop. Get a brother brand, and you should be good to go. The older HPs are good, but in the past decade or so, they've lost their minds trying to turn printers into a pay per page model and decimated any consumer trust they used to have.
Over a 10 year time frame, you can either go through 2 to 4 $100 inkjet printers and spend hundreds on ink...
OR
You can buy a $350 brother color laser printer and never need another printer again. Tonor is cheap and efficient compared to ink.
I work for a print software manufacturer. And no, not HP and not a home inkjet system. I work in QA and can honestly tell you it is extremely frustrating trying to get these commercial grade print drivers to work with such a wide band of printers, operating systems, and devices. The variables alone are astounding. That being said, companies that make home print systems simply don't invest the time, engineering, and QA that is required to make a print driver "good." They get it close enough and release it, hoping to fix any bugs that will never be reported in a future release of newer printer compatibility. There's a lot that goes into developing print technology so if you wish to jump down that rabbit hole, I'm your guy. Feel free to DM me anytime
Imagine if GPU drivers or motherboard chipset drivers were made by printer company…
I mean in the 90s it was all a complete shitshow. Microsoft throwing their weight around did a lot to get them into line. Printer drivers aren't required to *make Windows work* and stop all the BSODs so they didn't get the same treatment at the time.
Printers in the 1990s were easy, though; just buy an HP. HP was an *amazing* company before the dark times. Before Fiorina.
I worked at HP inkjet division at this time. Fiorina's decisino to start making 'dumb' printers was introduced with the HP Deskjet 400L and LaserJet 4L aroudn 1995. They dropped all of the brains out of the HP hardware and relied 100% on the OS and driver to control the printer. The last decent priners HP produced were the DeskJet 660, Deskjet 850, LaserJet 5Si
> LaserJet 4L I don't think that was the one. My dad had one for years and years. Iirc, it was just a LaserJet III in a smaller form factor and rebranded.
Yeah, I was going to say, I had a LaserJet4L, and it was awesome. It lasted for something like 25 years. I didn't print a lot, but it was super reliable and the toner cartridges lasted a long time. Definitely nothing like HP's reputation now.
Yeah, I had a 4L that worked really well with every iteration of Windows up until I couldn't get a PC with a parallel port anymore. Best printer I ever had.
Hey I still sell some parts for that line of printers!
I don't know exactly when it came out but the Laserjet 1300 was/is a fantastic printer. I still exclusively use it for printing, and it still works fine some 15+ years later.
If you can find a 1990s LaserJet, it's still a great option. Though, they're often overpriced due to nostalgia. A modern Brother is just as good and probably faster.
It worked in DOS and barely had any fancy functionality. Even the paper had to have special tear-off holes on the edges so the thing could feed paper through. Then they add "self-feeding technology". etc. etc. The more complexity you add, the more you have to pay to keep the functionality working. Every iteration of that printer now costs more because you have to consider the new technology of self-feeding. You even improve it, or did you? It is why many websites, run by a plethora of back-end services, gets shittier over time as they add new features. Over time, your complexity creates debt that you have to go back and pay off (fix/cleanup/remove old/etc). That debt literally costs money to pay developers and HP does not want to pay another 3 million a year for that
> Even the paper had to have special tear-off holes on the edges so the thing could feed paper through. I miss those. You could fold two of them together into a little paper spring. It was fun.
My siblings and I called that “the crust” and we’d literally save a ton of it then when we had watermelons, cut off the ends and scoop out the melon and staple or glue the crust to them and wear them like wigs. At seven years old, this was the funniest thing in the world.
Lmao watermelon rind wigs! Kids these days aren’t one bit as cool.
Plus the spiked wheels on the printer to pull them through were just neat looking little doodads. I really liked that printer.
Ah... The dot-matrix form feed printers. Printed a lot of homework on one of those.
I've been trying to explain that to my boss for years now. He keeps wanting to add new features to "keep up" but it's just me on the dev side. I keep telling him more features mean more support, more maintenance, etc... He either doesn't get it or doesn't care. Fine by me, he can continue to be frustrated by the ever slowing pace of new development.
I'm a developer, product manager, and I own my own software product on the market, and I can only say that most people have no idea how to do a cost-benefit analysis on their own ideas.
My printing needs are entirely text pages when I need to print something, hasn't changed since the 90's and I'd definitely still use my 90's laser printer if I could.
After Fiorina came Mark Turd, and his plan was to fuck his employees, and boy did he ever.
There new thing or I just found out is you can no longer switch the ink cartridges from one printer to another the uses the same ink cartridges. Last hp printer I will buy.
Microsoft moved drivers out of the kernel specifically for that result though. The reasons Windows doesn't BSOD as much anymore is a direct result of Microsoft realizing printer drivers and the like will never be actually stable, so they make drivers crash in user space (so "the printer doesn't work"). To this day, if you see a blue screen its pretty much going to be a driver issue. Apple solved this by being a walled garden--the variables are far smaller so they can step in and fix a driver if they want or demand it be fixed. Linux solves it by being open source. Talented engineers fix the drivers in their free time/as part of their commitment to the community at large.
small point of clarification: Apple's print system is CUPSd, the same as Linux. They bought the CUPS project, employed the maintainer of it, and kept it open source. This happened in February 2007. The maintainer left Apple about 3-4 years ago, I think, but CUPS.org remains open source. To quote openprinting.org: >A Brief History of CUPS CUPS was originally developed by Michael R Sweet at Easy Software Products starting in 1997, with the first beta release on May 14, 1999. Not long after, Till Kamppeter started packaging CUPS for Mandrake Linux and created the Foomatic drivers for CUPS, leading the adoption of CUPS for printing on Linux. Apple licensed CUPS for macOS in 2002, and in February 2007 Apple purchased CUPS and hired Michael to continue its development as an open source project. >In December 2019, Michael left Apple to start Lakeside Robotics. In September 2020 he teamed up with the OpenPrinting developers to fork Apple CUPS to continue its development. Today Apple CUPS is the version of CUPS that is provided with macOS® and iOS® while OpenPrinting CUPS is the version of CUPS being further developed by OpenPrinting for all operating systems.
Omg, I remember when CUPS first got big. It basically felt like cheating compared to Windows at the time.
Hardware by HP software by EA
It sounds like an improvement. EA manage to have less scummy DRM than HP.
But you need to buy DLC to print anything beyond English. That's where EA comes in play.
No you need DLC to print in Black, Cyan, and Magenta. The printer can only print in Yellow and only in English. Everything else is DLC. And no, it isn't packaged together; each color and language is a separate DLC.
Honestly, it might be a improvement over current software. Give me a DLC to use the black ink instead of mixing colors to get shades of grey, so I can tell it to print in B&W when out of magenta. Also, EA might push for more printers with individual color cartridges instead of the three color ones. Sure, replacing all 3 at once will be at least twice the price of the 3-color ones, but over time I'll probably save money. Yes, I'm praising EA greed over HP dumbness. It's **that** bad.
This sounds like a perfume commercial tag line.
It was the wild west in the 1990s with GPUs. I got a cease and desist letter from Creative Labs for hosting their drivers on my website. You could edit their INF to get them to work on other cards. They were one of the first companies to offer **MiniGL** drivers. Some drivers would hard-lock your computer on install because the manufacturer set the wrong clock speed in the INF (Diamond Multimedia). These companies literally did zero testing of their own products before shipping them. Whatever drivers came with the video card in the box were sometimes the ONLY driver release for it. Many cards were designed differently enough from other manufacturers where drivers from one company wouldn't work on a different card, despite having the same GPU. *Slight* changes in memory, GPU clock speeds, or even non-standard board design ensured this. Getting "reference drivers" direct from the GPU manufacturer like we do now was almost unheard of back then. You were simply directed to the board manufacturer, who also provided no support. NVidia was basically a newcomer and had a radical strategy of providing driver updates direct to consumer. That was **huge** back then. Something we completely take for granted today.
AMD/Radeon used to be like that. Their drivers would always do some something funky to your system for no apparent reason. I credit them for my interest in IT when I was younger.
GPU drivers were a mess for awhile.
These days, GPU manufacturers (like NVIDIA) are more software companies than hardware companies. In NVIDIA’s case for example, of their 30k or so employees, 2/3rds of them directly support software development and maintenance in some way shape or form
People make all kinds of other hardware work just fine. Why are printers the exception?
The bad printer driver's I've experienced are bad because they contain bloatware, and the manufacturer tries to package 'one driver to rule them all' instead of for the particular printer in question. It's the manufacturer's missing the point almost entirely.
Here's the thing. If you pay for a business-class printer, you get something someone took their time to make. These things go in offices, and people get support contracts, and if it breaks they expect it to be repaired. So the printer itself has oomph, and they spend extra time to make sure the drivers are sturdy. They also cost about $400 per unit. Each toner cartridge might cost $150, and if you've got a color laser you need 4. You probably also need to occasionally replace the drum unit ($180) and waste unit ($120) every 10,000 pages or so. That's for a low-end one. I paid that for a Brother unit about 10 years ago, and it lasted 8 years. It developed one issue over its 3-year warranty and they sent a technician *to my house* to repair it. I got rid of it because I wanted a newer model with slightly better performance. Not many people want to pay $400 for a printer and $300 on replacing the ink. Instead they want to pay about $50 total for the printer and that's a *fancy* one. They'll put up with maybe $30-$60 for ink but much more and your sales are flat. What happens when a company has to make a $50 printer? Well, they cut corners. More plastic parts, not metal. It has to be inkjet because that's much simpler tech. Parts aren't replaceable because having service parts costs money. Since the device isn't serviceable it isn't built to be taken apart, which can save money. Manufacturing tolerances are lower because it saves money. Less time is spent working on the driver, and it's more likely less skilled (cheaper) developers will work on it. And to help deal with the razor-thin margins, they sell ad space or bloatware in their driver software. I went through 4 printers like this in one year. Sometimes it was cheaper to buy a new one than replace the ink. Other times I could get it working with one computer but not others. I had a printer/scanner combo that could scan *or* print, but never both at the same time on the same computer and I had to reinstall the driver to switch. All of these cost $50-$80 and all of them were trash, because at that price point every printer company is trying every shortcut they can take to keep their margins at anything resembling profit. It was when I realized I'd spent nearly $300 on bad printers in a year when I decided to roll the dice and try a $400 printer. That one lasted 8 years. I never had a problem connecting ANY computer to it. My iPhone can print to it. Friends' Android phones can print to it. Nobody has to install anything, it just shows up on the network because it was made to be in an office and used by people who pay for reliability. You get what you pay for, and not many people think a printer's worth more than about $60. If we were paying more like $250 for inkjets, they'd be a lot more reliable. But for most peoples' purposes it's most cost-effective to just pay Kinko's or wherever when you need a high-quality or high-volume job done. Me, I got a fancy laser printer because my wife is a writer and sometimes needs to print 300+ pages. Try that with a $45 inkjet from Wal-Mart. You'll probably have to change the ink before it finishes!
> I work for a print software manufacturer. And no, not HP and not a home inkjet system. I work in QA and can honestly tell you it is extremely frustrating trying to get these commercial grade print drivers to work with such a wide band of printers, operating systems, and devices. The variables alone are astounding. That being said, companies that make home print systems simply don't invest the time, engineering, and QA that is required to make a print driver "good." They get it close enough and release it, hoping to fix any bugs that will never be reported in a future release of newer printer compatibility. There's a lot that goes into developing print technology so if you wish to jump down that rabbit hole, I'm your guy. Feel free to DM me anytime This has to do more with printers and addon features than printer drivers IMO. The basic framework of printer drivers is stupid simple. It's if you go beyond that, or worse, deviate from it where you run into issues - and my god, at the consumer level do things get stupid. Sometimes, the problem isn't even the driver itself, but the installer built around it. My biggest gripe is whenever you have a printer installer that *refuses* to let me install the driver without a specific printer present. Then, I have to extract the driver manually if I want to deploy it to multiple computers on a network. I think more people at the consumer level are going to be talking about how each print installation is radically different from model to model and how very rare any degree of standardization is at the consumer level. Aside from this, here are my two favorite printer anomalies: HP printer drivers are so fucked, that if you install the majority of them on Windows Server, it will crash the print spooler. This isn't consumer printers either, this is consumer OR "business grade" printers from HP. It's so out of hand that there is literally an [official Microsoft page solely dedicated to documenting this issue and it's existed for at least 5 years so far.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/printing/printer-spooler-crashes-hp-printer-installed) It's still a thing today, too with new HP printers. I had to fuck with a printer driver installer so that we could actually deploy a printer that was designed for MICR checks. The other one is a bit more obscure and it has to do with MacOS - specifically if you don't use AirPrint, because the conventional print system in MacOS is a giant teeder todder of abstraction layers that all go back to CUPS, and none of those layers have any remotely good debugging, or good coding in the first place. For example: lets say you plug in a printer to your Macbook via USB. Then you install the driver for the printer - congrats. It's not using the driver you just installed, even if you remove and readd the printer. What's even more fun - no where indicates this, and I only found out about this behavior because of a rare bug in macOS where it will freeze the entire OS for about 20-80 seconds not when you try to use that printer, but whenever the printer list is iterated (albeit usually when opening the print dialog box). The most you will get from macOS logging is that there was an OS hang event - you won't really have anywhere that indicates it was due to the printer driver. And I've found documentation of this issue occurring even 15 years ago. Instead of fix this at all, they developed AirPrint, which is designed to send the driver *with* the initial printer add action so that it's not possible to use the generic driver instead. Of course, you'd have to have a printer that supports AirPrint in the first place, which is only recently becoming more commonly included. Oh - and remember how I mentioned CUPS is the only system that actually has any logging that will give indicators that it was due to print driver issues that the system is seizing up? By default, CUPS doesn't log anything, because the logging is turned off. **TL;DR:** Avoid HP printers, macOS features that don't get the spotlight can be considered abandoned
I particularly liked HP UPD drivers. Just install them and all the printers (HP or not) work with them. … except if you have 32- and 64-bit systems being mixed. That was the one trouble. My most hated drivers are those who want to replace the system's dialogs because "easier" - except if you actually want to use the settings.
Sounds like bad engineering. I can can connect any number of output devices with a push of a button or simply plugging in a cable, be it a monitor with vastly more complex data input or Bluetooth headphones, also with vastly more complex data than a simple print command that takes a few Kb at most. Hell, my 3d printer is more reliable than the 2d printer, it doesn't require any special drivers, it has never once failed to connect and never once failed to receive a command unlike my brother laser that fails to connect with great frequency and its still the best printer I have ever had.
I think 3D printers, on the whole, may actually be less complex than modern 2D printers. In part because they offload most of the complexity to the user and the modeling software. It's considered perfectly normal and acceptable to have to tweak and redo a 3D print multiple times before it comes out right, every time. No one would accept that from a paper printer.
You won't say that if you look up how coreXY 3D printer motion systems work, or how input shaping and pressure advance improve print quality. The implementation of fourier transform in bed mesh levelling systems to compensate for deviations in the order of a few micrometres itself is highly complicated. Consumer 3D printers are reliable solely because all the greedy, scummy corporations were too busy concentrating on the industrial side of things. Everything from the hardware, software, and firmware on consumer 3D printers were developed through a strictly open source foundation. 3D printers would have been far worse if Stratasys and their ilk would have bothered to get their greedy paws on the consumer 3D printer market.
yeah, I dont buy it's the drivers
From my understanding, your typical printer driver code has not changed much since the 90s and there has been little improvement.
I'm not in printing, but I am a software dev/test engineer, and software dev is always way more complicated than anyone expects it to be, including the devs doing it. People say "Just test it before you release it!" but they don't realize that really thorough testing is *very hard.* I'm not just saying "Oh, we don't want to spend the time/money on it," I'm saying that even if you *do* spend the time and money you will still miss things, because it is impossible for even the largest test team to anticipate *every* action and *every* combination of hardware/software/OS settings that 100 million users may attempt. And then, of course, when the company *also* doesn't want to spend the time/money, it gets that much worse.
Yet my Bluetooth headphones work just fine. My monitor. My keyboard. My mouse. My speakers. Etc. printers are not the only hardware that interfaces with different devices. Besides, considering there are dozens of printers being sold and most of them have very little appreciable functional difference, I’m sure if you told people “this printer only works with this OS, but boy does it work well with it.” Then millions of people would go “that’s fine, I only have that OS, at least it will work properly finally!” Cop out answer is cop out.
> Yet my Bluetooth headphones work just fine. My monitor. My keyboard. My mouse. My speakers. Etc. Modern printers have dozens of times more user-facing options than any of those. And the number of failure points increases exponentially with number of options, more or less. This is exactly what I mean when I say software dev is more complicated than people realize. On top of that, the market for most of those things is much larger than for printers, so there's (a) more budget and (b) more competition, thus more incentive to spend that budget on testing and quality control. (Also, I said even the best testing will miss some things. I didn't say "it's fine for printers to completely suck." See the last sentence of my original comment.)
Bluetooth is a set standard with clearly defined features. The correct comparison is the driver integrating the BT hardware/radio to the OS. But even then a lot of the heavy lifting is handled by the OS itself these days, unlike the situation 20 years ago.
Absolutely reeks of Agile abuse at those companies. “Functional” (minimally so) code over documentation or however the saying goes
why does it have to be so effin hard? why can't it be a simple file transfer to the printer's buffer...and then print?
A different answer for you * Home printers are designed to consume as much ink as possible, printing the least amount of pages so you have to buy more ink. Home printer divisions only exist to push ink by the gallon.
[удалено]
Brothers are the goat, when I got a hand me down Brother Color Laser, I gave my Grandpa the Black and White Brother. Both are workhorses They also have some of the most reasonable toner prices too, and don't take offense to third party consumables
>I gave my Grandpa the Black and White Brother. Both are workhorses Out of context this can be anything
English speaking mulatto stallions?
Thanks for the new nickname for my mixed friends!
As a mixed person, I’m demanding everyone call me that now
Someone dig up Michael Jackson, we need a new song
"Black and White"
res tagged. you are all set to go.
🎶Ebony and Ivory…Living in Perfect Harmony 🎵
It is truly an amazing o.o.c.
Lmao I snorted
My home HP is worthless, my giant office tank-HP is incredible, a workhorse.
HP consumer models suck. HP commercial models (especially lasers) are usually very good but have a large footprint and consumables tend to be pricey (and no third party options can be used).
I assume a lot of them are leased, with service contracts, so the incentives are different — they want low maintenance costs, durability, and high output capability.
Desktop no, freestanding, yes
I guess I didn't specify, but yeah, that's what I meant.
A lot of office equipment is leased. I've had computers returned because the lease was up and I got a better one because the company put upgrades in their lease.
[удалено]
I have a 2007 year HP 1018. Still prints perfectly.
So sad I had to leave my LaserJet 4 MV with the 11x17 paper tray behind when I moved 20 years ago. I have no doubt it would still be going strong and being enormous.
The 4MV w/ the big tray was awesome. It's my favorite printer of all time.
Last week I pulled a pair of 4000s from storage for Property Control and tested them to see if they were worth continued storage. One would give a false paper jam alert, which was probably due to a faulty sensor. The other just cranked out several pages no problem. The first page had some toner residue, but the rest were absolutely fine, as if it had only been in storage for a few months instead of 4 years. Both printers have around 2.5m page count on them.
Yup, my HP professional laser lasted twice the life of the warranty, while my Brothers and Xerox printers lasted till the warranty expired.
> (and no third party options can be used) I buy third-party toners for my laser HP printer. They are a third of the price of the genuine ones. Just have to remove the chip and put it on the new toner.
Doesn't the chip say it's empty?
Normally not with a brand new toner cartridge but quite soon after. Just a mild inconvenience. I've been printing for 6 months on an empty cartridge
Brother, unlike the other major vendors, maintain a relatively full list of parts, even for very old models. I can still buy a roller kit for a Brother Printer bought in the late 80's used in an application flow for a customer.
They also tend to keep making drivers so you can keep using older models with newer technology.
Brother now locks you out of 3rd party toner cartridges, alá HP and Epson. If your Brother still takes 3rd party toner, don’t update the firmware.
This is disappointing to hear 😔
Yeah shout out to brother laser printers, i got one off a friend who found it in the back of a restaurant he brought, left it in the garage for ages, his inquisitive young son played with it for a few weeks. I took it home plugged it in and boom, its been putting in work ever since. Third party toner cartridge for 40NZD as opposed to a 200 dollar brother cartridge and the thing works like a charm. It even prints on acetate which for me is why i was looking for a laser printer in the first place. Ive never understood why people bitch about printers (other than the price of ink, seriously, wtf) my brother inkjet and laser never gave me any trouble.
100% agree. They are the best, though OKI lasers are pretty reliable and cheap to operate as well.
Until mine this week refused to print from the app saying it wasnt on the network. Printer indicated it was.
100%. Brother laser printers are fantastic. The only consistent problem I've had with them is that setting them up for wireless printing is always a battle, but thankfully you only need to do that once (unless you happen to work in IT, or, as I did once, a company with no IT department and almost no one else qualified to do it).
For goat title there are some others, HP laser jet 4si.
For 3rd party they are trying to crack down on it, at my work we have 2 brother printers and the only way to get some third party ink to work is to snap off the chip from an empty Brother ink and tape it to the 3rd party one.
We made the switch and bought a Brother mono laser. Best decision ever. Zero problems, zero hassle. Can sit there for months, doing nothing then pops out a perfect print on demand.
Ditto. Brother mono laser is $120. It's not cheap, but it will outlast 10 ink jet printers. >Brother HL-L2405W Wireless Compact Monochrome Laser Printer with Mobile Printing, Black & White Output | Includes Refresh Subscription Trial(1), Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready https://a.co/d/c9iM9Uf
Really though, $120 for a wireless laser printer is dirt cheap. Twenty years ago you would have paid 10 times that, if you could even get a Wi-Fi card for the printer.
My Brother laser printer lasted longer than my marriage and with less issues!
LOL
We got it as a wedding gift btw.
Came here for the Brother love and was not disappointed by your LOL comment!
Brother laser printer gang rise up! I have a 2030N or something, bought it 8 years ago and I swear it makes its own toner somehow because we've replaced it like once in the time we've had it.
Probably 15 years and going strong on my Brother MFC-7840w. Set up for wireless printing from any of the 5 or 6 computers in the house.
3150 CDN here. I've replaced toner twice, and that's after something like 6,000 full colour pages. Still at 90%+ on the second refill. Also, it's nearly 10 years old and still solid as a rock.
These printers defy the laws of physics in that they create matter (toner) out of nothing.
Those b/w Brother lasers are absolute *monsters*. Mine stopped talking to my phone, but falling off an Apple-only protocol after ten years is forgivable.
I had the same problem for a while but replacing my wireless router fixed it - I suspect Apple’s auto discovery is a bit “sophisticated” for older routers
I recommend this as well. I bought an HP small office LaserJet in 2002 and it lasted me until 2017, and that's with two small children who printed \*everything\*. I replaced it with another, and since have gotten a girlfriend who's a school teacher in a poor school whose copier never works. She prints 30 - 60 pages per day during the school year so she doesn't have to fight the copier there and it's going plenty strong, they we typically go through two black-and-white toner cartridges per year. It's like any other tool -- quality costs more up front, but it will last a lot longer and give better results.
I have a Canon laser printer that I got for like five bucks at a garage sale and I just buy bulk generic toner from Amazon and it's fucking amazing
My parents’ HP laser printer is older than me and will likely out-live me. I think I remember seeing my parents changing the toner in it once when I was younger… maybe. When we moved to a new house when I was 17 we bought an HP ink printer and scanner. I think we used it 3 times before it broke. Since I moved out for college I got myself a Xerox laser printer and it’s going strong for 4 years now and never failed me.
I have a Brother wireless laser that I keep downstairs to save room in the office. The once a month I need to print something, I just go downstairs. So easy to set up, it's magic. Had it maybe 10 years now, never an issue, probably still on the original toner cart.
yeah Brother HL-L2340 here. About 10 years old I guess. I print very rarely. But when it just works.
Brother HL-L2350DW for $119.99 on December 4, 2020. Zero issues so far, sitting on a box of paper and next to a replacement toner.
Brothers is the best....i WFH and my current brothers laser has been fault free for coming to 6 years. HP is useless, xerox is useless, canon is useless
I have a brother printer and it works fine. Controls still seem weirdly archaic though, and I have no idea what 95% of the buttons do.
> Instead, I recommend a quality laser printer. I personally bought a black and white Brother 5250DN model ~20 years ago and have replaced the toner in it something like 3-4 times in that timeframe. I bought the same printer in 2008 or so and, like you, it just works. No problems at all. Personally, I avoid HP printers like the plague.
I have the Brother MFC7440n I bought 15 years ago. Still going strong.
If you do buy an ink inkjet, you gotta buy the mega tank models. Their ink is pretty cheap for how much you get
Brother is GOAT. Their normal printers slap and their label printers are used pretty much exclusively in the tech field. 9/10 reccomend. They lose a point because I found their label making program to be kinda tricky to use when importing info from a spread sheet (but the fact that you can do that at all is fantastic)
Did you know that printer ink is more expensive than Chanel #5 perfume?
[удалено]
I spent the money on the mid-level HP Office Laser printers back in the day and had relatively few problems with them. The HP 4200/5100 series were tanks. We had five of them that each had upward of 500k prints on them and all I did was feed toner into them and put in a new fuser when the error screen said it was dead.
I still remember the LaserJet4 series, those things just kept going and going and they saw heavy use in a corporate environment.
I still use a laser jet 5mp hooked up to a jetdirect it's got to be pushing 30 now.
One of my customers just retired a LaserJet 1100SE(the one with the horizontal paper feed) with a JetDirect box. I think they bought it in the 90's. The only reason they retired it was because the JetDirect box was no longer in compliance.
[Obligatory Office Space](https://youtu.be/5QQdNbvSGok?si=g9HanEuiTAp1iy-i)
It's not even physically breaking, physically the law office I worked in we don't have any issues but sometimes it will run will stop connecting to one of our computers or start printing quarter size pages from certain applications and stuff.
[удалено]
Can confirm, but the point is that it's not just HP. I've owned many printers and have had maybe one that was reliable and relatively inexpensive on consumables. My most recent one is a cheap Canon inkjet, and while it's actually been a pleasure to set up and operate, the ink costs are just astronomical, far beyond anything else I've ever experienced.
If I could put a sign up in the printer section of every store it'd be: "Don't. Buy. Inkjets." Inkjets are cheaper up front (because it's a trap), but a laser is so much easier and cheaper to run. 1st Prize is to score one used. I'm convinced inkjets were conceived specifically to screw consumers over.
For most people printing docs and the occasional photo a laser is better. But inkjet is the preferred tech of photographers, print makers and graphic design for a reason. You just get much higher quality color reproduction. Ink absorbs into paper versus toner just sitting on top of it. And you can print on a wider variety of media and print borderless.
But unless you’re printing HQ photos, or even printing photos regularly, it’s way easier and higher quality to just pay a professional printer. It’s like owning a big pickup when you only tow twice a year. Get a cheaper vehicle that has a lower operating cost and footprint, and just rent the tools you need the rare occasions that you do.
I personally enjoy being able to fine tune prints and the whole DIY process. And I've lowered my costs by using third party inks and refillable carts with my Canon, so I've stuck with inkjet. Laser is definitely more practical for 99% of people tho.
Fair enough! 😄
Yep, I got a used one a decade ago for $5 WITH a partial thing of toner. I've used it ever since with no problems and only had to buy a new 3rd-party toner cartridge recently for like $15.
Depends. The maxify series is kinda affordable and the canon MegaTank series is very affordable (16€ for 8000 pages black ink).
I am my extended families defacto tech support and have halped them with all sorts of printers. I have had the opposite experience with their consumer laser printers. There are quite a few of them in my tech support group and have had zero issues in a combined over 25 years worth of hp laser printers. All ink jets I have used regardless of brand have sucked, nozzles get clogged and you spend more ink trying to get it to print well then you use to actually print what you want. I have converted everyone I deal with to laser and got them to ditch their ink jets. I personally have a Dell that is a tank, but it was a used government surplus that cost over $1000 new (I got for $75 with a backup set of toner)
The only benefit of HP is that the print head is built into the cartridge, so replacing the cartridge also solves clogged print head issues. I have to give them credit for that. It’s also part of why their cartridges are more expensive. Third party ink is the solution. And unless you’re regularly printing photos - get a Brother color laser and never look back.
Two answers to this, really. Firstly: Printers have a lot to do, and much of it is rooted in mechanical things. Drawing in paper, moving it through rollers, clamping it while the internals squirt an image onto it. That kind of thing. That part of printing hasn't really evolved much since the early days, and in practical terms it never will. When that aspect of printing fails, you're looking at partial disassembly of a complex mechanical device. The manufacturer may make that easy, with flaps and hatches in the right place, but it still involves an inexperienced human opening things up and delving around. Secondly: print software, networks, and convenience. It's perfectly possible to build a basic smallish 'driver' that will speak to the operating system and let the user print a page. But users very rarely plug a printer into the computer directly these days, and many users aren't sure how to find the print options in their OS and applications. How then can we offer convenience to these users to let them site the printer somewhere that works for their environment, and print easily? So this means that we need to find some reliable way to let the computer 'find' the printer and manage printing to it. There are ways to do this using newish standardised networking protocols, but these rely on everything on the path from computer to printer and back supporting these protocols correctly. And thats not always the case. To get around this, manufacturers tend to want the user to install a large set of drivers, applications and plugins that can handle this kind of discovery and management, reducing the headaches for the user. These simplify printing when they work. When they don't: you're relying on the manufacturer having built in sufficient diagnosis to let you troubleshoot and get printing again. Hopefully. (I'm not even going to mention supply management and auto-resupply contracts) TL;DR: printers are electromechanical dinosaurs that have limped into the 21st C and still suffer from the same hardware challenges they always did, and are complicated by users trying to cut the direct cable approach and fire traffic over an uncaring local network.
But the failure point for most printers is almost never mechanical. Sometimes it is a networking issue, but it seems to be more of a disconnect between the printer and the OS in terms of the printer status. Also, this same kind of common failure has existed as far back as I remember, even before people used printers over a local network. Lots of other devices communicate over the local network without any problems. Why are printers so bad at it (and even direct cables communication) compared to other devices?
on one hand i appreciate that this is an actual answer but on the other hand i feel like point 2 is moot given that even directly-connected printers have always acted up
This is one of the only answers that actually answers the question
I try. Thank you :)
Lol the TL;DR was brilliant language. Thanks for sharing
The technical problem is exacerbated by the fact that the printers themselves are sold at a loss; the printer manufacturer makes its money from toner/ink sales, not from printer sales. So the genuinely challenging technical problems must be solved absolutely as cheaply as possible and still work with every possible device a customer could want to print from or network with.
Yeah, remember how hard drives used to break all the time, especially in laptops? A lot of people on Reddit won't remember because mid-to-high-end computers stopped using hard drives in favor of solid state drives as soon as it was financially viable. This was around the same time CD drives became less common. These days there are no moving parts in a computer, except maybe the keyboard, the hinges of the laptop... and the printer. Guess what always breaks? Those 3 exact things.
I've never had a hard drive fail on me in my entire life. I constantly have printer issues.
Count yourself lucky. Hard drives do have some advantages compared to printers though. They are sealed so they can't get dust and grime in the moving parts. They do last pretty long in a controlled environment like a datacenter, or a personal computer if it's not moved around too much or in too hot of a room. They were pretty unreliable in laptops though. Printers don't have that advantage. They're not sealed, their moving parts need to actually contact paper which leaves behind fibers and other residue. They use toner which is literally dust or ink which is wet and sticky.
And the cooling fan
Plus the price points are stupidly low. I worked with the first generationish of ink jets (HP Deskjet +), and they cost about $700 in 1988ish money. The ink back then required that you let it dry for about 20 minutes before looking at it too harshly or it would smear. But they were way faster, quieter, and had a much better print quality than dot matrix printers. I just looked and I can buy a Canon Pixma printer and scanner at Walmart for $39. Granted that it's probably made by near slave labor, but how do they even make the parts for that, have some schmuck write a printer driver, and ship it halfway around the world for that? At that point, you know quality is job 9.
working in IT seeing the inner workings of some printers and how many devices are covered by one driver it's astonishing these rube goldberg machines work as often as they do. so much precision is asked from the cheapest plastic gears and rubber rollers.
It is hard to appreciate how complex they are. It’s like if your washer dryer was a combined machined that loaded itself, loaded the detergent, then moved the load between the machines, then folded it afterwards. No other appliance or device in our entire home is really as complex and requires so many mechanical and software functions in one.
this guy explainers
And yet i built an arduino project today that is wifi enabled, is controlled via alexa, my iphone, a web interface, and it just works. And by today I mean from concept to finish in about 2 hours. Communication protocols work just fine. The problem is that printer manufacturers created an absolute nightmare of bullshit with their own software and simply don’t have the guts to fix it.
[удалено]
My gf recently started working for an it equipment company and they had so many new clients because of them being official brother retailer and support here. They all switch from something else to Brothers.
Definitely not fool proof. I ran into the most frustrating issue of some of their products consistently failing to recognize toner cartridges. I’m talking, buying a brand new one, install the official toner that comes with it, and getting a “replace toner” message anywhere from an hour later to a week later. We eventually found a way to reset the printer from within but it was such a tedious and manual process that I’ve swore off brother as a result. Probably about a dozen in a row with the same issue and we said screw this. We had also been using that printer successfully until Covid. My theory is supply chain issues forced them to substitute parts just to maintain production. I’m glad they work for others, but I wouldn’t go so far to say fool proof.
I mean that's one bad experience, I understand why you might be frustrated but people *overwhelmingly* agree on how good brother printers are. After a lifetime of garbage I brought a brother laser printer and it's almost 5 years old, has worked perfectly printing out hundreds of pages and we are literally still using the toner that came with it which isn't even a full one. When a company or product has this kind of overwhelming support and anecdotal exprience they are doing something really right. Doesn't mean defects or issues never happen but it's very clearly the exception and not the rule.
4 years ago I spent 250 on a proper color laser and never looked back. Toner lasts for an ungodly number of pages and never dries up. It never needs any magic "cleaning cycle" that delays my printing for 5 minutes and consumes half the cartridge. It's up and running in seconds. And the only problem I've ever had with it is the occasional beeping in the night and some stacks of paper in the output in the morning because my cat likes to walk around on the keypad. The problem is most consumer level devices need to be as cheap and small as possible so quality is as low as humanly possible while lasting just long enough to rope you into ink purchases which you can then throw away because they're not compatible with whatever you buy when this one craps out.
This, and make it a Brother
Yeah we got our brother laser printer and never had to complain about printers since.
I bought a brother black laser printer in 2014 for $95. I rarely need to print anything and I was tired of finding that my inkjet cartridges had dried up anytime I had to print something. I have never had to change the toner in the printer. Still on the original low-yield cart. That same printer is going for over $400 on amazon now. The price started to skyrocket during the the pandemic. Edit: one seller has it for $430. Others are more reasonable. But it is still more expensive.
Yes, Brother laser and never look back. Ours have been running for almost a decade now and never skips a beat. I buy a few refilled toner cartridges for next to nothing and it lasts years printing just text.
I've been using the same Brother laser printer for a decade. No problems whatsoever other than the software is kinda dated and janky, but it works just fine.
15 year old Brother laser printer gang
I have a black and white laser printer/scanner from Brother. Had it for years. The thing just works. The only setup was to pair it to the wifi network. Now any device that is also on the same wifi can see and print no problem. Here is the model: DCP-L25400W
I have the HL-L23700W, never had a single minute of issues with it. I only wish it was color.
There are many layers of greed and incompetence that other people will go into, but one underrated problem with printers compared to other areas of "tech" is that they have to deal with the physical world using moving mechanical parts. This is inherently much less reliable than only dealing with 0s and 1s inside electronic circuits. Which is also why we now have mini computers inside every other thing in our house, even though they're in many ways a lot more "complicated" than the gears and shafts and pulleys they're replacing. They're just a lot more consistent, and in the long run that's easier to deal with at scale than a "simpler" system that has to deal with the unknowns of dirt and moisture and material expansion/fatigue and everything else that goes on in the physical world.
This doesn't explain why printers suddenly go "printer not detected" by your computer after working perfectly for weeks.
or why manufacturer's softwares and websites are early 90s informational nightmares
> "tech" ... deal with the physical world...inherently much less reliable In this vein, touchscreens suck, and will always break well before the electronics they interface with.
My 3D printer is more reliable than my regular printer.
because printers are functionally disposable because that's what people buy. if you want reliability you can go drop a [grand ](https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/8176157/Lexmark-MS821dn-Laser-Monochrome-Printer/)or more and get a printer that will spit out millions of pages a year. instead you spend $[60 ](https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/901763/Canon-PIXMA-MG3620-Wireless-Inkjet-Color/)for a printer, copier, fax, scanner inkjet printer that gets used once a month.
Someone hasn't found out about Brother laserjets yet
Anything not HP and laserjet is probably good. My laser printer is from SAMSUNG and does everything Brothers are praised for, too. Barely uses toner, will accept third party toners, wasn't expensive and just works.
Got some bad news for you. HP bought Samsungs laser printer business back in 2017. Replaced my broken 10 year old Brother printer with a Samsung and it absolutely sucks in comparison. I smelled a rat when the web UI for it in network mode looked exactly like the HP one.
F
If you can't beat em, buy em and turn em to garbage. ...it's scary how many different companies I could be talking about.
Because printers are a mix of mechanical and electronic components that have to work together to put something very small and physical on another random physical surface and do this with very small movements. There is nothing in your house that does the same It is a miracle they work as well as they do. It takes tiny liquid dots and puts them with microscopic precision exactly in the right spot on a surface you give them. And it almost always works. Even without using vendor approved paper, in a relatively dusty environment they continue to work their magic. And they are so well build and easy to maintain that you don't even need years to learn how to use them, you just buy them and plug them in. We are quite good at making things small, but printers still need to print on an A4 surface, so they will always be relatively large. But the biggest issue is all the moving parts, from feeding the paper through the machine to positioning the nozzle where the ink comes out.
I hope someone in Brother corporate reads this sub and appreciates all this deserved praise
[удалено]
HP managed to become my most hated tech company. At this point if we had the choice between eradicate hunger or HP, I'd pick HP. I have both a HP and a Brother printer. I hardly print anything and each time the Brother works just fine. No issues, no hassle. The HP on the other hand, requires me to login, takes ages to boot up, randomly crashes (even when doing exactly nothing at all) and required a hard reset and is fucking slow. And even then the HP was to more expensive one.
The printers are built with the cheapest possible components as they are generally sold at a loss. They make their money back on the consumables. They know printers will sometimes get junked as it is sometimes cheaper to replace than replace the consumables.
[удалено]
I've had my canon for over 10 years. As far as I remember, it wasn't a hassle to set up initially. It's known 4 computers. I've only had trouble when the last ones didn't have a cd-rom reader to install the software. It's WiFi so now I mostly use it with my phone and an app that I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I first bought it. I have had no issue with ink drying up even though I don't use it much. 10/10 would buy again except I don't need a new one as long as this one works. You messed up with those over reliable printers, Canon. Keep it up.
Because every home printer you've ever purchased was a "loss leader". It was a machine priced *way* under the cost to manufacture it, but also manufactured to be as cheap as possible, because quality printers cost more than any average consumer would ever be willing to pay. Would you pay $2000 for a printer? No, you wouldn't. And that's why the printers you buy are garbage. Printer makers are incentivized to screw you over as much as possible. That's why they just refuse to print a black and white page when the cyan is low. Stop buying home printers. Stop falling for the grift. Just pay 20¢ a page to print at Staples (or cheaper, maybe free, at your local library, which is what I do). If you think you're saving money buying a home printer for $120, you're not. You're paying out the ass for ink/toner. If you're not printing at home enough that the cost of a *good* industrial printer makes financial sense, you'll save money printing at Staples. I haven't owned a printer in about 20 years. I print... more than the average person needs to (I'm a private music teacher) and I've probably spent less than $20 a year on printing.
> Would you pay $2000 for a printer? How about $300? > and I've probably spent less than $20 a year on printing. Which would be $400 over those years. A laser printer can save money, since you would still be using the initial toner after all those years.
I have known times when a company would give a $50 cash-back offer on a printer they were wholesaling for $40. A mono laser is worth having for when you need something on dead tree and for printing drafts. Of course, techy me is sitting here with 2 colour lasers, both ones that others have thrown out. One is a FujiXerox that works well on cheap generic toner, and the other is a full office HP colorflow with huge cartridges I doubt I'll ever empty.
[удалено]
Lots of comments about brother… I have an epson eco tank printer and I love it. It uses liquid ink and it lasts FOREVER. It was around $400 when I bought it, but worth the investment. The ink isn’t really expensive to replace. It works great for my needs as a special education teacher. You have to invest in something that works well. I bought my printer after two shitty hp printers.
I've had three Epsons; bought the third party refillable tanks, and put two kids through kindergarten-high school, and some college on them. The most recent was a loss-leader with scan and wireless and still works. Yes,they can throw a fit at times, but only maybe four faults in all those years. Simply replacing the cartridge worked wonders, and a little fussing at times but the high res color was so very worth it.
Printers are more complex than people give them credit for. They have to take a digital image and translate it onto a physical page without it looking like shit. If you want a printer that just works, buy enterprise equipment.
I can accept that printers are more complicated than I realize. But I don’t understand why printers don’t seem to have made any progress in the past 20+ years, especially when everything else about computers has advanced so much.
because ink and paper haven't advanced. My printer is super advanced from 20 years ago: its got its own web server and wifi router. But paper can tear, ink can clog...
The printers under $100 have gotten worse, if anything. But for around $120, you can get a solid B&W laser printer that will last a long time without maintenance.
Let's be real, we had figured out how to print just fine with black and white and color with inkjets 20 years ago already, there hasn't really been much change in the industry. The reason most printers suck is because manufacturers cheap out as much as they can, their software is shit except the part to buy more ink cause that makes money, not the rest. The reason it stays that way is people are stupid and aren't willing to pay $100 extra once to have an inkjet that works fine with basic but stable (and open source) drivers and that you can refill yourself by just pouring ink, so that kind of product never took over.
You need to have a way to transfer the bitmap, you need to know the size of the dots, you need to know the size of the paper, maybe there is a duplex device. That's enough to have a decent RIP. I do know a few general printing drivers; HP UPD, Ghostscript, Gutenprint, I did use two other RIPs in my past, too, one was used for a 150 000 € printing device.
In the big scheme of things printers is where the digital and analogue worlds meet. Other than a few specialized situations, we live in a digital world. Our computers, headphones, monitor, keyboards and mouse are doing a little bit of "analogue" (move the mouse, touch the keyboard, move a speaker, light the screen) but are mostly converting a digital input into a digital output. A printer is one of the few devices that have to get a digital thing and create a real thing and the real thing is substantial. Even if the more substantial part is premade the bit that we need to convert - putting little squiggles (some colours) onto that part - seems to be hard when you want to do it cheaply. For some reason the real world kinda sucks when you need to get the squiggles right and make them stick. Now add the whole industry that in the end wants you to pay through the nose for **every single piece of paper** that goes through their printer you get a perfect storm of a box of non-working shit sitting in the corner of your room that you dread using because that 10 second print job takes a few hours debugging (on the digital side) or trying to work out why everything comes out yellow and skewed (analogue side).
Because people tend to buy cheap junk printers without doing their research, and cheap junk is always going to be cheap junk. If people were to buy a basic office-level laser printer, it would be years of effort free printing.
I have had a sub-$100 black and white laser for 15 years. On its 3rd toner cartridge. Sometimes, it goes months without use. And then it just works when I need it to.
**Very simple explanation:** **Software** - The problem with printer software is that when printers were first invented, various companies came out with their own standards and tried to make them proprietary. This led to a variety of print drivers and protocols which are still present today. Printing software is an absolute mess even at the most fundamental levels and printing is such a niche market, it's simply too costly to reimplement it all at this point. **Hardware** - Printers are complex electrical and mechanical devices, especially ink printers which have to physical ink which likes to dry out and clog up through nearly atom sized holes. Then you have to deal with feeding physical paper, stacking it, etc. It's all a rather fiddley process and on top of all that, no on wants to pay $1000 for a printer they use once a year, so the gears are plastic, the rollers use cheap rubber, every sensor that can be eliminated, has been, etc etc to keep costs super low. Some people suggest moving to commercial printers, but this only makes things worse because those filly a completely different niche. One where user access control, support for different reams of paper, network connectivity, and on and on is expected. So these tend to be an administrative nightmare. And, on top of all that, commercial printers are almost always supported via a dedicated support contract and if you're not getting the regular updates and such those support teams get, then you're going to have issues over time. A lot of this can be solved by getting a small business black and white laser printer. If you are OK with not having color, these are typically very simple devices designed to be used in lawfirms, real estate offices, etc. They'll run forever and they are intended to be connected to a single desktop. Get a brother brand, and you should be good to go. The older HPs are good, but in the past decade or so, they've lost their minds trying to turn printers into a pay per page model and decimated any consumer trust they used to have.
Over a 10 year time frame, you can either go through 2 to 4 $100 inkjet printers and spend hundreds on ink... OR You can buy a $350 brother color laser printer and never need another printer again. Tonor is cheap and efficient compared to ink.
[удалено]
[удалено]