I have a printer story for you young whipper-snappers.
Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing.
We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky.
There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time.
But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation....
So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape.
You had me at whipper-snappers. I think more people should write books filled with stories just like yours. Feynman's was basically that.
There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.
It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.
When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.
Lol, that reminds me of the time we were playing "Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator" in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX, and an IT person on the opposing team remotely rebooted our commander's workstation mid battle. Good times!
The trick is to buy a laser printer. Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time. Laser does not suffer from this problem.
Seriously. Brother has sold laser printers under $100 for many years now -- they're reliable and last seemingly forever, and toner is cheap.
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
Laser printers are better in so many ways. Just make sure that they are not placed too closely next to your desk or in rooms where you spend a lot of time in since they can emit toner dust and volatile compounds that could potentially be harmful to one’s health over a long period of time.
Made a solemn vow years ago to never ever buy another HP product again when I realised that the inkjet printer I bought in the UK from a major UK retailer was region-locked to US ink. No official HP ink cartridge bought in the UK would work with it and there was nothing official I could do to change it. Had to muck about with refills, blank chips and ink systems for years until the happy day when the thing broke and I threw it as hard as I could into the e-waste skip.
The rot set in with printers when the technology got good enough for there not to be any easy improvements and the mindset changed from building a tool to help people create, to seeing customers as a resource to be exploited.
Every user-hostile bit of nonsense from shoddy software to region-locked, staggeringly overpriced ink stems from there.
The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created.
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
I had a LaserJet 4 too, and I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here. I have a Brother DCPL2550DW that I got for $130 when the pandemic started and it's been better than the LaserJet 4 ever was in the following ways: more reliable (not a single jam), duplex printing out of the box, much cheaper, built-in networking (both Ethernet and WiFi), uses a modern interface (USB) that modern computers actually have ports for, built-in combo flatbed/feed tray scanner, better/more intuitive buttons on the printer, faster printer speed, and high enough data throughput to max out its print speed even for complicated pages. For a bit more money you can get a version of this that does duplex feed scanning as well (it wasn't worth it for me but it was for troydavis in one of the sibling comments).
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
I think, based on the other comments here, and my experience with my own Brother printers... I think they are the "less clever" people building reliable printers.
> HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
> Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
I know someone still using a LaserJet 1100. Looks like it might be from 2002? She can still find toner for it, and adding a PCIe parallel port was enough to get the printer working in Windows 10.
Back when I used to do IT work, close to ten years ago, the HP LaserJet 4 and I want to say both the 3000 and 4000 were always the printers I was happiest to see when I walked into a new client’s office. They seemed to last forever, they broke the least frequently, their drivers were the easiest to install and the most stable. It’s both wild to me and not totally unsurprising that so many people have fond memories for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were still squeezing life out of theirs!
I bought a Lexmark e232 back in 2006 for a mere €120. Fifteen years later and the damn thing works like a charm. It's not just HP that made high quality products.
I still have an HP Laserjet 4 series printer with network card. I bought it 10+ years ago on Craigslist for $40 which included toner in it. I love it! Has two 500 page (1 ream) trays. That toner lasted a few years. Bought more toner that lasted 5+ more years. Bought another toner cartridge. Finally starting to look at replacing it with a multi function color laser printer.
My parents still have an HP LaserJet 4 series printer. As long as you are just printing text that thing generally works great (some PDFs seem to max out the buffer and take forever to print). It will be interesting to see how long their much newer HP all in one laserJet lasts in comparison.
My nearly a decade old hp laser printer is chugging along nicely and in addition to my work related printing, has handled multiple kids going through middle, high school and college including snapchat picture wall phases!! On first set of toner cartridges.
I have a Brother duplex color laser printer connected to the network here at home and it's been reliable but I don't use it heavily so I don't know if moderate use would have broken it by now or not.
Still running our LaserJet 5si on the network for 11x17 pages. Been out of service (maintenance contract) for years, but it's still working fine with some light cleaning.
You seem to be saying contradictory things... if printer quality has decreased so that printers now break quickly, wouldn't that make a second-hand one a really bad idea?
The HP8150DN was also awesome. It had extra's that could tack, sort, duplex, multiple trays for odd papersizes and a massive, massive 3000 (?) page bay.
I have a Brother entry level laser printer, first printer in years that I've liked. Will never buy an inkjet again, there is something inherently flawed with that technology.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
If that is the only problem, wouldn't laser printers have fixed it? There's a ton of other things that don't work, e.g. paper jams. With the multi-function devices this gets even worse.
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
I think people underestimate just how difficult it is to design and manufacture a printer! Paper isn't easy to work with, especially when it comes with all sorts of thicknesses and finishes. We expect extreme accuracy and reliability, with no maintenance. It is amazing they work as well as they do!
Ask yourself: What is the best hardware on the planet with the worst software?
LABEL PRINTING
I realized a few years ago that, if my clients fired me, I’d have to go get a “real job.” My expertise has been Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), and I became pretty good with hardware integration UI/UX. That’s when I asked myself the question above.
I learned React/Electron and built a solution named Label LIVE. Check it out at https://label.live.
This side-hustle has been a HUGE challenge and helps augment my consulting income.
Do you have to print Avery sheets with dynamic data? Don’t want to mail merge? Copy/paste got you down? Want to use your Zebra printer on a Mac? These simple things were incredibly difficult a few years ago...
My app has tons of fun features powered by the JavaScript ecosystem: USB, Fonts, Barcodes, Excel/CSV integration, dithering via WASM, PDF generation, etc.
It may not be the most memory efficient app, but it lets you get your printing done so you can focus on something else.
Label printing was a dumpster fire. Users expect a high-stress stinky mess. If I can make it 50% better I’ve succeeded in my goal. There’s still a ton of work to do... I just need to make time for it.
p.s. Do you know another hardware industry that needs better software? Get in touch!
From my own experience (my own history with printers and of those of the people around me who I've done pc clean ups for in the past) I fell that it's all down to the fact that consumer grade printers are built down to a price, often to the point where the profit lies in the ink refills and with inkjet printers consumer printers are not used enough to prevent them from drying out in between prints.
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
Haven't owned a printer in about 10 years. I hated the bloody things. The expense, the jams, and above all the pointlessness of taking an electronic document and printing it on paper, when everyone has email.
I have an HP inkjet now, that I bought for my son's school work during lockdown. We had no choice. He was actually expected to print out work, stick it in his book, then send in a photo of the work. FFS.
It came with a three month free subscription service, to their automatic ink cartridge resupply.
So we had some cartridges arrive in the post, just as the ink was running out, and I changed cartridges.
A month later, the free subscription ended, and the printer refused to print, using the cartridges, unless I renewed my subscription, which I had to do through their mobile app.
How can you make such a simple technology, so ridiculously complex?
When we were young and poor I got my wife HP 2200D for $40. It was in 2010, the printer was already really old and beat. Since then it has printed roughly 200 000 pages for her and God knows how many before we got it. The C4096A toners are roughly $20 where I live and easily print on average 10 000 pages but some we did almost 20 000, it’s technically impossible (most toners are built for 6000 pages) but it happened. In the meantime my parents changed 3 or 4 XXI century printers and some of them were very expensive. The only trouble with 2200D we have is it won’t run on Windows 8/10, worked flawlessly on 7. I spent days trying to figure out the drivers and surrendered. So we’re just printing on Mac. It’s extremely easy to fix (I personally replaced broken duplex mechanism and it was 100 times easier than changing RAM in Mac Mini) and did nothing else excepting feeding it paper and new toners. I hate printers and am really scared what is going to happen once our old timer breaks for good.
Only job I was ever fired from - it was a temp job. Mortgage comps in the early 90s. Printing was the slowest part of the process. I installed a print spooler and was 3x more productive than peers and boss.
I was fired for “installing unsanctioned software”. Yet a friend’s brother was a muckity there and heard what happened and wanted to hire me full time - this was a summer part time job. I said nope. Had fun being the right hand for a chemical engineer at one of the local refineries and learned a lot more.
I have an HP LaserJet MFP M28w, and it's actually somewhat decent! It does B&W prints, and that's actually all we need at home. I can print directly from my phone, scan directly to my phone, and amazingly, I can print from Linux, which I would never have dreamed of in all my 20 years of Linux desktop usage.
Being the family tech support, I'm slowly but surely migrating all family members away from inkjets to laser printers. This is easy because the inkjets invariably die within a couple of years. I make the beloved relatives think really hard about needing color or not. Let's be fair, we don't need it for printing ticket QR codes.
I read an article years ago about how high the markup is for ink toner.
Unless I inherently misunderstand something about this industry, it seems like the perfect opportunity for a new startup to swoop in with a new quality printer with affordable toner cartridges. My only conclusion for why this hasn't been done is that it must not be profitable.
I like the Xerox Workcenters.
Speaks PCL + Postscript, can netcat a job to it. Automatically shows up in CUPS and Windows, and has a full duplex scanner to boot. I got mine for 400$, which considering it's monthly duty cycle is 10x my yearly output
I don't really mind.
From reading many of the comments both in the original article and the HN post there is a clear theme: HP printers seem to be the source of many people's frustrations. Perhaps printers wouldn't have such a bad rep if it wasn't for HP.
I very rarely print nowadays but I'd certainly never buy an HP printer based on what I've read. The amount of e-waste they're responsible for as a result of their crappy semi-disposible printers must be shocking.
Until you've used a wet process printer you haven't lived..
Bromides are cool. feeding them the tape of the fonts, super cool: adjusting the hex for minor positioning, extra merit points (I never did that but I know a guy who did)
The Early canon laser was half good, but the size of a fridge. The Benson Varian stuff was ok, but the paper felt slimy.
I think using the pen plotter to write cursive was my favourite, but the operators hated me when I did that.
You have your choice: you can get an inkjet, and all of them suck at the consumer price level.
Or you can get a laser made by a company that got its start making sewing machines and still does, or a company that got its start making test and measurement equipment and spun off that bit of the company (i. e. The good bit) to focus on making crap printers.
[+] [-] wstrange|5 years ago|reply
Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing.
We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky.
There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time.
But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation....
So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape.
The virtual equivalent of chaff I suppose
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|5 years ago|reply
There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.
It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.
[+] [-] spacemanmatt|5 years ago|reply
When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.
[+] [-] sgtnoodle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgufus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|5 years ago|reply
http://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sun/games/fltsim.tar.gz
> This flight simulator seems to origin with Ed Falk at Sun
Edit: No networking code in this one though, so maybe it's not the one.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienb_sea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
[+] [-] shwoopdiwoop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattkevan|5 years ago|reply
The rot set in with printers when the technology got good enough for there not to be any easy improvements and the mindset changed from building a tool to help people create, to seeing customers as a resource to be exploited.
Every user-hostile bit of nonsense from shoddy software to region-locked, staggeringly overpriced ink stems from there.
[+] [-] gjvc|5 years ago|reply
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|5 years ago|reply
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
[+] [-] troydavis|5 years ago|reply
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
[+] [-] tanseydavid|5 years ago|reply
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
[+] [-] jayofdoom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|5 years ago|reply
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lstodd|5 years ago|reply
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
- failure rate: 50% per year to ensure sales
what's next ?
- > 300MB driver install with at least 5 annoying 3rd party crap
Now I can be wrong ..
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sickcodebruh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elorant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs235|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RhysU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fedorareis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_dcnt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macjohnmcc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vt240|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verpeteren|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniellarusso|5 years ago|reply
I now have a multifunction Officejet Laser, so scanning multiple pages over wifi is an added bonus.
[+] [-] sharadov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|5 years ago|reply
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
[+] [-] magicalhippo|5 years ago|reply
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
[+] [-] harha|5 years ago|reply
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
[+] [-] roland35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] semireg|5 years ago|reply
LABEL PRINTING
I realized a few years ago that, if my clients fired me, I’d have to go get a “real job.” My expertise has been Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), and I became pretty good with hardware integration UI/UX. That’s when I asked myself the question above.
I learned React/Electron and built a solution named Label LIVE. Check it out at https://label.live.
This side-hustle has been a HUGE challenge and helps augment my consulting income.
Do you have to print Avery sheets with dynamic data? Don’t want to mail merge? Copy/paste got you down? Want to use your Zebra printer on a Mac? These simple things were incredibly difficult a few years ago...
My app has tons of fun features powered by the JavaScript ecosystem: USB, Fonts, Barcodes, Excel/CSV integration, dithering via WASM, PDF generation, etc.
It may not be the most memory efficient app, but it lets you get your printing done so you can focus on something else.
Label printing was a dumpster fire. Users expect a high-stress stinky mess. If I can make it 50% better I’ve succeeded in my goal. There’s still a ton of work to do... I just need to make time for it.
p.s. Do you know another hardware industry that needs better software? Get in touch!
[+] [-] Crosseye_Jack|5 years ago|reply
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
[+] [-] MarcScott|5 years ago|reply
I have an HP inkjet now, that I bought for my son's school work during lockdown. We had no choice. He was actually expected to print out work, stick it in his book, then send in a photo of the work. FFS.
It came with a three month free subscription service, to their automatic ink cartridge resupply.
So we had some cartridges arrive in the post, just as the ink was running out, and I changed cartridges.
A month later, the free subscription ended, and the printer refused to print, using the cartridges, unless I renewed my subscription, which I had to do through their mobile app.
How can you make such a simple technology, so ridiculously complex?
[+] [-] b212|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|5 years ago|reply
I was fired for “installing unsanctioned software”. Yet a friend’s brother was a muckity there and heard what happened and wanted to hire me full time - this was a summer part time job. I said nope. Had fun being the right hand for a chemical engineer at one of the local refineries and learned a lot more.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j0057|5 years ago|reply
Being the family tech support, I'm slowly but surely migrating all family members away from inkjets to laser printers. This is easy because the inkjets invariably die within a couple of years. I make the beloved relatives think really hard about needing color or not. Let's be fair, we don't need it for printing ticket QR codes.
[+] [-] chrysoprace|5 years ago|reply
Unless I inherently misunderstand something about this industry, it seems like the perfect opportunity for a new startup to swoop in with a new quality printer with affordable toner cartridges. My only conclusion for why this hasn't been done is that it must not be profitable.
[+] [-] bfuclusion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickt|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312501
[+] [-] harg|5 years ago|reply
I very rarely print nowadays but I'd certainly never buy an HP printer based on what I've read. The amount of e-waste they're responsible for as a result of their crappy semi-disposible printers must be shocking.
[+] [-] ggm|5 years ago|reply
Bromides are cool. feeding them the tape of the fonts, super cool: adjusting the hex for minor positioning, extra merit points (I never did that but I know a guy who did)
The Early canon laser was half good, but the size of a fridge. The Benson Varian stuff was ok, but the paper felt slimy.
I think using the pen plotter to write cursive was my favourite, but the operators hated me when I did that.
[+] [-] mauvehaus|5 years ago|reply
Or you can get a laser made by a company that got its start making sewing machines and still does, or a company that got its start making test and measurement equipment and spun off that bit of the company (i. e. The good bit) to focus on making crap printers.