> "to breathe much needed new energy and ideas into the industry"
Much needed indeed. The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation, everybody keeps making the same crap over and over again, with new branding, and new numbers/designations. Is your Samsung X1214LX2 better than your HP LP19311A?
Also, where are the specialized niche printers? Why can't I print ink on a copper PCB, so that I can etch it later? Why can't I print soldermasks or silkscreens? Where is my printer that prints on fabric? All of these could be sold for much more than the ultra-low-margin generic home office printers, and yet manufacturers can't be bothered to innovate.
I'm pretty sure one big printer company buying another big printer company is the exact opposite of "disruption" and reduces the amount of "new ideas and energy" in the industry. Indeed, the press release says something slighthy different: "Today, HP is investing to disrupt this category by replacing copiers with superior multifunction printer (MFP) technology." Basically, they want to replace the copier industry with printers, bringing the exact same crap you complain about to a whole new market segment. (Most photocopiers are already just digital scanners coupled to printers internally. They just want to replace them with cheaper, worse ones.)
Hasn't pretty much every copier sold in the past 20 years essentially been an MFP anyway? And isn't it fairly obvious that once you're bringing in a scanner and a printer anyway, you might as well expose them on the network as separate devices? (I use the scan-to-email function of the office "copier" fairly frequently myself, I print a bit too, but I practically never copy anything directly)
What drives me crazy is why are there always new drivers for printers? At this point isn't there more than enough compute power in the devices to supply a consistent abstract interface?
PostScript has never been that consistent, and the abstraction is decidedly leaky. Having to upgrade the RAM in your printer in order to print more complex documents is not a fun experience. As it happens, I think a lot of modern printers do expose an abstract interface - it's just generally a proprietary raster-based one that doesn't involve running arbitrary user-supplied code.
HP goes out of its way to avoid putting PS support into its consumer level printers. I can only imagine it's to trim money spent on internal RAM since any common embedded processor these days has the power to run an on board RIP.
I'd seriously wonder if the infrastructure to support putting that into drivers, deployments, testing of different versions, etc exceeds all the RAM savings cost at this point.
At this point, I don't recall - I've gone over to only buying network capable printers as they do tend to be better about their drivers (still need somthing usually) - but the ones I've been looking at lately seem to speak some dialect of PCL.
most windows xps printer drivers just convert the xps into the printers native language. And maxing out one core for the exe that initiated the printing.
Scan to SMB is a pain. We had to have our copier company come out to upgrade the firmware on all of the devices when we moved to Server 2012. Even then, we have to enable SMB 1.0 for the feature to work.
What? It's really simple. First figure out what version of SMB/CIFS you're using and if that's compatible. Then figure out if you have packet encryption enabled and if that's compatible. Then figure out if the compatibility issue you're still experiencing is due to the volume being served by a non-Windows appliance or server. If it's Windows dig through group policy settings applied and start toggling them on and off desperately until you're ready to explode. Then after days or weeks of packet captures and support calls find out it was a known issue and get a firmware patch from the MFP manufacturer.
I just went through all of that when upgrading our file server to 2012 R2. Would not recommend. SMTP is easier but has its own problems (such as file size limits).
I've had it go both ways. I've found it easier in the past if someone already compromised security by disabling signing. But that was a long time ago in another life. Things have probably changed a lot since.
My mom worked in the printing industry with a company doing refills. She told me newer printers are hardwired to unrecoverably die after a fixed number of pages. Depending on the model you can even query how many pages you have left in the machine (not talking about ink here).
Also my vet once told me he replaces his home printer every time it runs out of ink, because replacing the cartridge costs the same order of magnitude as a new printer and this he can always have the latest and greatest.
You should let you vet know that the printers ship with "starter cartridges" that are lower capacity than the replacements. Buying new ink cartridges might cost $10 more than the new printer, but it'll give him twice as many pages.
I've figured it makes most sense to have a cheap'n'stupid B/W laserprinter at home, and just order whatever photo prints I need from a print shop. Occasional color photo printing at home is more expensive per photo than getting it from a shop i I'm not printing photos every week.
The only thing I seem to print these days is a yearly tax form or two. I don't even waste the space with a printer - I just go to 7/11 for my printing needs and pay a couple cents per page.
In the US very sensitive. Mostly because they contain all the personal information you would need to commit identity fraud. They also us information from prior year returns to positively identify you on subsequent years. ie: your AGI from last years form is used to verify your identity for the next year.
Ditto. I have a ten year old Dell 1110 that continues to work despite moves, drops, and abuse. This includes a period when it was stored in a hay barn.
Same, I have an older HP Laserjet I forget the model of that's been rock solid for 15 years.
You can also still buy parts for these printers as well reasonably cheap. I was able to find a plastic gear that got stripped due to an object falling into the paper tray - cost me about $8 and 20 minutes of repair time and it's good as new.
The average person doesn't print much, but when they do they really need it right now (e.g. boarding passes, legal document to sign, concert tickets, whatever) and having a rock-solid printer that you know just works every time even if you haven't printed in 6 months is great.
I have a Canon Pixma something or other printer. After an upgrade of OS X, Canon stopped suppling drivers for newer versions. It wasn't even straight forward to use the driver for the previous version. I think I had to extract the driver from their lousy installer to get it to work. Very fun when I just wanted to print flight tickets ASAP. It's a PRINTER. All it does 95% of the time is printing B/W documents. How hard can it be to get this right?
Printers are really just a hardware distribution mechanism for printer drivers, which are an unusually bulky form of malware.
Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets.
If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
Been this way for years. Old dot-matrix printers often had a dip-switch to select 'options'. If there were 4 of them, you had a 1-in-16 chance of it working. If there were 8, forget it.
Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.
I had a used HP4000 series that was bough used at a school auction, probably 5+ years old at that time... thing ran for another 3 years on the toner that was in there when I got it and another 3-4 after that before it died and wouldn't come on... replaced it with an hp color laserjet 3-4 years ago, and that one still runs like a tank...
When you rarely print, having a laser is better as they can sit a long time and not dry out or gum up like the ink printers.
I had to give up on my LaserJet IIIP a while ago. I spent nearly as much on trying to recondition all the dried out rubber parts as I did on a cheap laser printer.
Early 90's printers tend to do that. We have a LaserJet IV gathering dust in a corner at work. Turned it on the other day, to a three minute warmup and much smell of dust burning, but it still printed well.
Sometimes the cartridge is the first thing to fail, especially if you go days between printing anything. The delicate print heads get tarry ink deposits.
Pages per dollar means something if you're printing in bulk. Otherwise, its trouble-free-printing-per-dollar. Which may be improved by buying a new printer periodically as a sort of prophylactic maintenance.
Which is why I bought a black and white laser printer 10+ years ago. Never need to worry about the ink drying out. I am still on the starter toner. Not sure if I will be able to buy toner when it runs out, but it still works even with Windows 10 over USB. Network mode only works for printing, no network scanner drivers anymore.
Why would they kill the printers when they make their money off the consumables? If my HP printer dies I might replace it with an Epson, so they would lose that revenue stream. Also, I find it difficult to believe that they would be so explicit as it could cause legal trouble.
Now cartridges needing to be replaced prematurely 'because we haven't figured out a technology to prevent them drying up' does sound suspicious.
I wouldn't be suprised if what his mother said was true. The printer industry must know about printer chip reset chips, universal refill systems, drilling out their liquid gold containers, and refilling with better/cheaper ink, etc.
My printers sit idle. First it was the price of ink. Then I just found I didn't like fiddling with them. Then I just got used to not using them.
I think the printing industry is in a huge hole, and it will take a lot of ass kissing, and honest innovation, that benefits the consumer, to bring home printing back.
Well in the Canon Pixma case they have the "discharge sponge" which collects ink and is used when cleaning the heads. That "fills up" apparently and then the printer is dead. My wife spent a couple of interesting weeks going around and around with customer service trying to understand how a product can be designed to fail like that, they eventually gave up and sent her another one, but I was thinking it would be interesting to take it to court to see how California's warranty protection laws would be interpreted. (I think its a defect to have a designed in product killing part that isn't replaceable).
Laser printers: The imaging drums have a chip on them which counts how many pages they have processed, and will refuse to work after a certain number of pages even if the drum itself is fine. They do this to stop potential damage to the drum.
You can buy cheap chips to put into the printer if you want to risk it - search for "drum reset refill chip".
That's not to stop potential damage to the drum. It's because on average the drum starts showing damage around 30.000 pages (a damaged drum it leaves lighter or darker bands on the paper, same as on old badly-maintained photocopiers). But because _sometimes_ it starts shows damage earlier, and they don't want you to confuse a damaged drum and an empty toner cartridge, they just force you to change it around 20.000 pages.
The drum reset refill chip is not even a chip, it's a 56 ohm resistor that acts like a fuse. The drum has two resistors in parallel, one with very low resistance and one that's like 200 000 ohm. If the printer sees a high current when you turn on the printer, the firmware thinks it's a new drum and resets the page counter. After a short while the 100 ohm resistor burns (quite literally), and from that point on the firmware will only see a low current when you turn on the printer, and it will not reset the page counter.
So the drum reset refill chip lets you connect the two pads where the printer applies the current with a resistor like the one on a new drum. You can buy a 56 ohm resistor yourself to achieve the same effect.
It's literally a resistor and some plastic, only usable once, and they sell it to you for $10, which makes it much more of a scam than anything printer manufacturers do.
He should stop buying inkjet printers. You can pick up an HP m402dn laser printer on Amazon for $150. It's fast, plugs directly into an ethernet network, and handles full duplex without a hiccup.
Once I realized home laser printers were cheap, I switched and it was the best decision on a printer I'll probably ever make. I can get generic toner cartridges for $15-20 that last a long time, don't yell at me if I don't replace according to their schedule, and print black and white super fast.
The printer I bought was a Samsung and cost right around $100. Compare that to my old HP inkjet that cost more than that and required upwards of 5 ink cartridges.
I don't get color printing out of this but I can't recall the last time I needed to print in color. If I want to print photos, it's cheaper and easier to just order them.
- Mobile internet access was prohibitively expensive (sometimes as high as a penny per kilobyte), browsers were terrible, and some even pushed for an alternative language to HTML for the mobile web. [0]
- Every phone was running a mobile JVM, but apps still had compatibility issues across models and carriers.
- Camera quality was horrid.
- Many phones had poor or inconsistent support for MMS, group texts, and visual voicemail. Even the iPhone itself didn't support MMS at first.
And these were problems even with the devices that were marketed as "smartphones" back then. Mobile phones were awful.
I got my mom a nice Lexmark MFP, so she could print and scan and copy and fax (she still faxes, yes).
After a while, the printer started complaining on the beautiful big touch screen display, and said "Service cartridges" or print head or something along those lines (my mom might have put in non-"genuine" replacement cartridges, I seem to recall, but not sure). Fair enough - we had gotten her a cheap laser for printing anyway by that time, as it's really cheaper and far less trouble.
However, this stupid Lexmark thingy would not allow you to acknowledge that warning and then start up, so mom could at least still scan and fax - no, it would just sit there and complain about the print head or ink or what have you and refuse to do anything!
Needless to say, we tossed it. Still need to get a scanner and fax now :-/
I worked IT when I was a freshman in college and the printers were known to fail automatically after a certain amount of pages. To fix it, we would just remove a certain part and out it back in. We'd get much more life out of it because it just reset the counter.
I actually had to look up how traditional copiers worked based on your statement "Most photocopiers are already just digital scanners coupled with printers". I was so use to think of a copier being scanner + printer in the modern era, I had to take a step back and realize that wouldn't have been feasible 30 years ago.
> The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation
I agree with you that printers are still terrible and a pain to work with from the user's perspective. However, I don't think it's true that there has been no innovation. It's just that it has been mostly on the side of reducing per-unit manufacturing costs. I recently took apart a modern HP inkjet and was surprised to find for instance that stepper motors have been replaced with DC motors and optical encoders.
That's what you get for using Windows. In Linux, the PPD drivers are tiny, and they never become "obsolete" like in Windows where you can't get an older printer to work in Win10 because there's no drivers.
I hear MacOSX is about the same as Linux, and since Apple owns CUPS (the printing subsystem in Linux) that would make sense.
This has nothing to do with Windows. The Windows drivers themselves are relatively small, it's the software suite they push that is bloated. The two download options for my latest Brother printer was a 2MB driver only download, or a 300MB software suite. I've also seen this for Dell and HP printers. I use mostly B/W laser printers, so YMMV.
It has everything to do with Windows, as you admit yourself here. On Linux, there is no included software suite, there's only PPD drivers. Those bloated software suites only exist on Windows because they commonly tie them to the printer drivers. As for offering a driver-only download, I don't think that's normal for consumer-grade inkjets.
Edit: I'd also like to add that the whole "bloated software suite", not just for printers but for everything else, is mainly a Windows problem because Windows has a culture of downloading bloated software suites from the manufacturer, instead of having a "distro" with all the device drivers included by default along with lots of open-source software to use those devices. The idea of downloading some big pie of software (or getting it from an included optical disc) from a hardware maker, just to use your piece of hardware, simply does not exist on Linux. And that's the way it should be: the Windows way is what's given us gigabyte+ software suites for simple tasks like using a printer.
Last three printers I had detected via the network install, and downloaded the drivers from windows update directly, just the driver, not the bloatware... seems to work fine in windows.
Absolutely, I remember selling the first colour PostScript printer in the UK to an advertising agency, they paid £25,000 for something much worse than I can get for £50 in my local Staples.
However they have been absolutely terrible at the software side of things. This is a shame as it's as visible as the rest of the package to the consumer.
The software side of printers have gotten worse. Back in the day, when all high end printers support PostScript, you didn't have to worry about drivers. Now, especially with Windows, your printer can become obsolete with the next OS upgrade.
At least on the Mac/iOS side, most consumer printers support AirPrint and you don't need drivers to support basic operations. I have a perfectly functional (cheap) color laser printer that doesn't work pass Windows 7. But works fine with my iOS devices thanks to AirPrint. It also supports Google's Cloud Print so I guess that's one way I could make it work with Windows 10 if I were so inclined.
AirPrint is, when compared to what came before it, mind-numbingly simple. Printer announces itself with Bonjour, provides basic configuration (like choice of paper tray) with IPP, then accepts documents in PDF format. The end.
Put simply, it upends the retarded mess of printer drivers and replaces it with something that does the job perfectly well 99 percent of the time. All it requires is for the printer to have sufficient MIPS to raster PDF files.
It does happen on the host (I think). That reminds me of another advantage of hosting a network printer on the Mac. Even if the printer does require a dedicated print driver, to the rest of the network - including Windows computers -it's seen as a generic PostScript printer and the Mac takes care of the translation.
> However they have been absolutely terrible at the software side of things. This is a shame as it's as visible as the rest of the package to the consumer.
With PCL/Postscript/PDF support in hardware these days, what software side is there? Last time we bought a printer (an HP LaserJet), we just plugged it into our router and with zero additional configuration were able to print from our Macbooks and iPhones/iPads. It literally couldn't have been easier.
My mom has bought a couple of HP ink jet printers. The software has been terrible. That seems to be the case, that consumer inkjets have terrible software and lasers are fine.
At one point while trying to figure out something else, I figured out that they had implemented the polling for the presence of the (usb) printer by having a Windows service rapidly and repeatedly start and stop a second service. So anytime the printer was unplugged, the logs would be nicely purged by this activity.
I don't remember if it was related to those services, but they also screwed up the permissions for a service, making it impossible to use the normal tools to make changes to the service.
The thinner drivers included in Windows 10 with her new computer seem to be better.
It seems to have gone in both directions, the class drivers on Windows are pretty much all configuration and little or no real software. However most printer manufacturers can't seem to resist bundling extra software to manage the printer, sell you consumables, etc.
Most printers today do not have hardware PCL or PostScript. Inkjet printers, and cheaper laser printers, usually act a lot like the older "winmodems" in that they offset almost everything that used to be done internally to the host computer, including at least rasterization and even aspects of what seem like basic motor control. This is a cost-saving measure in the printers themselves, but comes at the expense of significantly more complicated and device-specific host-side software.
I think Aiwip https://aiwip.com are doing a pretty good job of improving the user experience related to printing. The flow is: upload documents, stand next to printer, press print. It also allows you to print from any other aiwip printer and printing for free.
and every dime saved in the actual purchase is lost when you factor in the price of replacement cartridges. Ultimately, the per-unit manufacturing cost reduction simply results in sub-par units that often break and need to be fully replaced.
Sysadmin here. I think HP's quality has gone way up in the past decade or so on the enterprise level. I remember the early 2000s as having a lot of lemons on their officejet line and now we have printers that run with hundreds of thousands of pages and only needing a new fuser now and again. Their enterprise drivers are usually okay but its a crapshoot between using the dedicated driver or the universal driver. Common wisdom is to never use the universal driver in production, which is a shame, because it was supposed to solve all the driver woes HP had with its dozens of different models.
That said, the consumer line is a complete nightmare, especially the all-in-ones. HP and the rest need to stop what they're doing and just re-do all the drivers and helper software from scratch. Its also inexcusable that anyone is still selling ink-based printers. The industry really needs to move to a laser-only strategy. Everything about ink printers is terrible.
Currently, I have a $199 5+ year old brother b&w laser printer at home. Its a little tank. When I need to print photos I just send them to Walgreens. Win-win in my book.
> Why can't I print ink on a copper PCB, so that I can etch it later? Why can't I print soldermasks or silkscreens?
Well, to be fair, HP isn't in that industry. You're asking for 3D printing solutions from a paper printing company. When those things happen, they'll be from other companies. There's not a lot in common with circuit or 3D printing and traditional laser printing. Also considering HP is trying to re-do itself as a software company and always trying to find a buyer for its hardware lines, I suspect they have zero incentive to enter risky new markets. I'm guessing this acquisition is to make them more attractive to a hypothetical future buyer. This acquisition gives HP access to a robust copier line and mobile printing technology that works pretty well (samsungs copiers are android based so there are some mobile benefits and 'not reinventing the wheel' aspects here).
Ink is very expensive per page, but the ink printing process takes much less electricity, generates much less ozone, than xerographic printers. And the printers are substantially lighter. Depending on your situation, an inkjet printer could fit your purposes better.
I think the main problem for buisness printers is the inclusion of proprietary software on the device. This means that it is very difficult for third parties to innovate. I would prefer printers to be a dumb IO device that connects to a full computer than can provide a good UI. Instead they have evolved to have an onboard computer of appalling quality.
This is a general problem of the embedded industry, where products could greatly benefit from openness.
But how do you align the incentives for the hardware manufacturer ,to commodify itself(to a large extent, unless there's some sort of app ecosystem or some other network effect setup) ?
In theory, consumer outreach to only support good actors, but there are two issues there:
* It is chicken and egg. You don't get the better UX until you have quality open products to market, and manufacturing the devices may not be that expensive for a new line (at least compared to silicon) but you still need the resources of a billion dollar company.
* Consumers buying devices like this will not research quality much before buying. To my knowledge, the vast majority of muggle printer buyers are just picking up something based off a feature list at Best Buy.
So you need to persuade a company to invest in innovation in a market without any, and then you need to persuade consumers to actually care about quality.
It is the exact same issue with less horribly insecure mobile devices without rootkit backdoor class modems, or more open motherboards, or open hard drive firmware, etc. We would see much higher quality with open development drivers for almost everything, but to see attitudes change you need to present financial incentives, and its really hard to promote something when no product at market exists yet.
I think the printing industry is just inherently difficult to serve. Manufacturers can barely deliver quality products and support on the printers they make now. I can't imagine them also having to support all of these "custom" setups. I imagine a future where these custom printers you describe might exist, but in a centralized "kinkos" type store, or better yet a makerspace. There's a big difference marketing and selling to a consumer vs. specialized industry.
There are a ton of specialist printer manufacturers out there including point of sale, barcoding, wide format printing, etc. My guess is if the printer manufacturers thought there was a market for it they would do it.
That makes me wonder if there's potential there for the medical industry: print a temporary barcode on a person, rather than tracking them with charts. I suppose an RFID bracelet could serve the same purpose, though.
My workplace has a ScanSnap ix500 multi-document scanner.
It's an utterly amazing, high-quality piece of hardware.
However, the software needed to use it is some of the absolutely worst software I've ever seen.
My advice: purchase a copy of VueScan to go with it. As a bonus, VueScan even has a Linux version that works quite well. (Not a shill, and I haven't purchased a copy, I just used the trialware but I was impressed.)
I'm not a customer, and haven't used it in a while (I haven't had to do a scan in a while and don't work in that office much), but here's the main things:
1) It works in Linux. Other, simpler scanners (non-ADF) can frequently work OK in Linux, but the Linux scanning software is a bit of a mess. I use gscan2pdf at home which works well enough, but looks pretty rough and hasn't seen any updates in years. But ADF scanners are different because of their nature; I'm not sure it'd be easy to get existing software to work with them, and I don't think the SANE interface works with them. With VueScan, you just install it, plug in the scanner, and it works, at least that was my experience. It has its own built-in drivers for ADF scanners like the ix500.
2) On Windows, it's just better. The Fujitsu software was a complete nightmare; it's horribly bloated (I seem to remember it being a 500MB download!) and very difficult to get working. I'm not sure it even works in Windows 10. VueScan is not a big download, and like on Linux is simple and easy. I haven't done much with it there because it puts big ugly watermarks all over your scans with the trialware version. But if I had an ix500 of my own, I'd be buying a copy of VueScan; I think it's only $20.
Luckily I don't have to do much scanning, so I get by OK with gscan2pdf on Linux and my now-older CanoScan LiDE 50 (I think that's the model number, or is it 25? I forget now). It's slow, and a bit of a pain as I have to haul it out and plug it in, but it works reliably and decently. But if I were doing any volume scanning on a regular basis, I'd break down and buy an ix500. They're very expensive ($500 new I think, and used ones on Ebay usually fetch over $300), but I've never seen anything like them: they don't take up much desk space (they unfold out when you need to use them), they have excellent scan quality, and they're ridiculously fast, while also doing duplex scanning just as fast (using sensors on both sides). They also don't seem to have any trouble with misfeeding pages.
My father does this with large-format inkjets[1]. He uses a water-based ink and fabric that comes on a roll with a peel-off backing, but the printer itself is not special other than being large format.
Printing on fabric would generally be referred to as "Direct-on-Garment" or DOG printing and is a common method for making small-run clothing items like custom T-shirts a la CafePress. The quality is generally (but not very noticeably these days) worse than screen printing but there are no setup costs involved.
The main issue with DOG printing is that poor adjustment of the heads can result in some overspray (as they must sit some small distance from the fabric to avoid smearing). This can be avoided by competent operators, the big internet companies just don't always bother.
Anything less than the cost of the current process would be a win for the industry, right? Even if it's more expensive, isn't there benefit to having it available on demand?
Let them. I'd happily pay if it meant I could manufacture PCBs locally in a matter of hours, rather than wait weeks (right now if you want a cheap PCB, you wait 2-3 weeks).
The irony is that it would just about be a massive disruption if someone could take that same old printer and create a highly reliable set of drivers, that could be completely trusted to with multiple OSes and services like RDS.
Wouldn't work with a separate print server ?
I know there's some at Office depot for instance, but for a more flexible solution a raspberry pi works wonder as well.
Funny. The idea of need for innovation in printing strikes me as anachronistic.
Printing itself should be on the decline and increasingly outmoded. If anything, we need to focus on killing faxing and paper as a medium once and for all.
Sure, there may always (or at least long) be a need for hard-copy for some applications, but it hardly strikes me as sufficient to drive need for innovation in printers.
Paper is fantastic for auditing and archival. You can't sanitize your dirty deeds if you can't prevent your sins from appearing on the souls of dead trees locked in their fire-proof chambers. Until we start using content-hashing for everything you cannot trust the "permanence" of bits because you cannot detect their tampering. Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.
Most of the lack of innovation in printers (and scanners) comes from the problem that, once you've bought their hardware, there is no incentive to make the software that ships-by-default with it great. The innovation isn't the hardware, the innovation is waiting, stuck between the hardware and the operating system (e.g. why does my Brother mysteriously screw up my right margins on Windows?) and stuck between the application and the user. The operating-system printing dialogs are way too complicated for mere users and the printer-manufacturer's printing-dialogs are mostly rebranded operating-system printing dialogs. Users just want their bits to burn onto their paper, appropriately and reliably.
You know, it might not be such a bad idea to make a printer-bot ala a RepRap that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter. The ink might be "cheaper" that way and it would be kind of fun to watch 8 of them on your wall draw your documents concurrently.
> make a printer-bot ... that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter.
> You know, it might not be such a bad idea to make a printer-bot ala a RepRap that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter. The ink might be "cheaper" that way and it would be kind of fun to watch 8 of them on your wall draw your documents concurrently.
This is a neat idea -- for bonus points you could have it understand MetaFont, which is designed around an idealized pen.
>Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.
Depends on the industry. I would say probably 80% of the clients I work with still rely on faxing as a regular part of doing business. Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.
Are your clients on physical fax machines or an internet-based fax service? I use fax for business but I use Phaxio, and I think more than half the people I exchange faxes with are also using a fax service. This has the comical result of my producing a PDF file then paying someone to modulate it into noises that someone else will demodulate back into a PDF to deliver to the recipient. It's like e-mail if the intermediary servers lossily recompressed the attachments.
The clients I work with tend to still use physical fax machines to send/receive financing details to small banks and credit unions. The banks themselves probably use some sort of internet service, or at least I hope they do.
>Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.
It's amazing just how much society is being held back by the Windows operating system.
>Until we start using content-hashing for everything you cannot trust the...
You are pointing to technological problems that are best addressed by direct innovation on those problems vs via workarounds that rely on outmoded technology.
Our screens are still not good enough to avoid eye strain and still do not provide the tactile arrangement paper does. I have been typing as long as I have been reading, and I will still go to hard copy if I have to edit a manuscript of any length.
Apple's retina screens take care of the resolution aspect. However, the software side needs a new paradigm to deal with digital paper. PDF files are not the solution.
I need to look at four pieces of paper and write on them and draw arrows on them at once without breaking my flow. That's four ipads at this point, and there's still no great way of flipping between pages. There is something about the 3Dness of a stack of papers that makes moving to digital difficult.
Down votes. Makes sense. Sure, one might be tempted to think that advocating a paperless world would be non-controversial here.
But, yes, let's rush headlong into the world of driverless cars, while holding on to a relatively minor update to 15th century technology at all costs.
I wonder if HN know how much it parodies itself at times.
Thanks, I have actually figured out a way to make millions on them.
In seriousness, I agree that they are completely worthless as far as it goes. In fact, I've ranted in the past that the concept of downvotes is outright juvenile. Along those lines, I'm more complaining that they too frequently take the place of discussion, submarine dissenting opinions, and encourage group-think.
Which is also why I don't pose my opinions in the form of a question. I'm one of those people who believes it's OK to plainly and respectfully express a dissenting belief, without apologizing for it.
In fact, do you know of any other path to a better world? (See what I did there?)
I worked for some months on the printer industry (on the image processing side). Innovation is not a word we used a lot. A printer is basically a microcontroller driving a DSP doing some image processing (scaling and dithering mostly). The µC then sends that to another µC driving the different motors. The DSP is a generic component used by half the industry. The other half used another DSP. Both the µCs are generic components used by half the industry. The other half, you know the drill.
It was maybe 7 years ago, and I guess now they have a single µC containing the DSP and able to speak USB, do the dithering, and control the motors all in one package. There is almost no R&D in those markets. That's how you get a $20 printer (and $50 ink cartridges).
Do no count on printing on PCBs or fabric, that'll be R&D, and that's expensive, no one cares up there.
To state the obvious, it's an industry that will really have a serious growth problem in the coming decades.
Right now people are still printing a ton and more every year, but laptops and tablet are becoming very affordable in most situations where paper was needed in companies, and paperless is something that starts to become the norm.
I hear the printer in our office like once a week, my printer at home actually prints twice a year. We used to have whole areas in big supermarkets with printer boxes, now it's like three models in a corner.
What saddens me is that scanners haven't evolve much as well, at this time where they are more needed that anytime before. I deeply regret not having bought a snapscan, but then the software that drives them seems so limited (last time I checked it was coupled with evernote, and nothing like dropbox or gdrive integration) it doesn't feel that much better than other scanners coupled with a always on home server solution.
Hi there. Would you mind dropping me an email? (In profile - I checked yours but didn't see a way to reach you.)
I run a company that actually is innovating in printing, and I'd like to ask you a few questions if you could spare a few minutes... Thanks in advance.
The best printer decision I ever made was to quit buying disposable inkjets and purchase a cheap Brother laser printer instead.
I've had it for about 8 years now and it's still going strong. I don't print much (which is why the inkjets kept clogging up stopped working), but about 2000 pages later, it's only on its second toner cartridge and will probably not run out for years.
I'm kind of hoping that it breaks so I can replace it with a color laser, but it's been extremely reliable.
For what its worth, the cheap Brother printers use a binary blob driver for Linux which only has x86 drivers. So don't get caught thinking you can use your ARM Raspberry Pi or Synology NAS as a low power print server...
We bought a "Brother Hl-l2360dw" and have been so happily surprised. Finally a printer that actually works and doesn't make me want to kill myself (and others) every time I interface with it.
Don't get an all-in-one, don't get an inkjet and don't get color. Following those rules will allow you to actually print things stress free.
Agree. Struggled with an Epson business inkjet for years and gained some pleasure from smashing it up in the end. Replaced with a Brother color laser and it was ridiculously easy to setup (I was expecting some pain) and works really nicely.
Hopefully we'll now have good Linux support for Samsung printers.
Last time I bought a printer I went straight to hp ones and ignored all the others (Canon printers above all), and recommend HP printers to all who ask me.
Hplip is awesome and often don't get all the praises it deserves.
I think all new inkjet printers do this. I have an Epson Workforce and after my wife printed a small color job, I had to buy new color cartridges to print a black and white document.
From what I've read, even when you are printing just in black, the printer uses a small amount of color ink to stop the cartridge heads from clogging. Still, I would appreciate not having to run out and buy a blue cartridge just to print 3 pages of a text document.
Actually this could be true. I had an assignment in our security class to investigate this[0] and it turned out three out of three printer tested used this! Made a little processing program to facilitate the detection[1]. Quite shocked to see how common it was..
Something I didn't realize at first, but read about online is that when you buy a new printer that comes with cartridges, those cartridges almost empty. You will have to get replacements for them after just a few print jobs, the next cartridge you install will last a lot longer.
That's true. If they bundled a full cartridge with the printer, it would often be cheaper to just buy another printer than to buy ink/toner. My color laser printer was $200. A full set of toner replacements from HP would be $357 - third party it's about $120 for all four colors.
Most printers do - at least that's what I found out after I realized both of my Epson printers wouldn't print in black without color cartridges. Color cartridges are still used when printing in black and white, because the black ink alone will look terrible. Granted, it would be better if printers offered an option to print with just the black ink and get the terrible result, for emergencies. However, I'm sure lots of people would just click the warnings/confirmations away and then complain about the bad quality of the results.
I should mention that if you do mostly black and white printing it may be more economical to get a laser printer, even just a grayscale one.
I know that when the color heads on my printers are obstructed, black text will often come washed out (as if you printed in economy mode, or worse). I have looked at black text, printed with my newer Epson, with a magnifying glass, and I can see a few color dots near the edges of the text (these are not photocopies, it's text documents printed in B&W mode). I suppose it works a bit like anti-aliasing in some font rendering systems.
I'm not sure how B&W inkjet printers solve it, but it's probably by spending more ink to avoid the wash-out. As other people pointed out, some color printers allow for printing with just the black cartridge in. I don't have one of these to compare, so it's possible the text doesn't look as crisp on these because of the lack of "anti-aliasing".
I suppose part of the reason for this limitation to apply to some printers but not others has to do with the business model (ink is expensive and for some brands/model lines it's the main source of revenue), and perhaps the technology used - some printers have disposable headers on the cartridges themselves, and others (like the printers I own) have non-disposable headers, which basically means the printer is ruined if ink dries up in the headers. This may be why some printers require the cartridges, even if empty, to be in, so the headers are not as exposed to the air.
Unfortunately manufacturers don't like to give extensive explanations (see my business model point above...), but on user forum threads like [0] and [1] there are some suggestions for why things are the way they are.
I have a Samsung ML-2165W, which is a wifi printer and every time I want to print something is a pain regardless if I am on Windows, Mac or Linux. It does a decent job when it works, but the software is a crap.
If I run out of paper, there is no way to resume nor cancel, and if there is a way I am sure it doesn't work.
This is why printers are hell. You have a much of communication protocols but you need per-device drivers to interface with them over that protocol. It doesn't matter that we have ipp, because for over six years driverless printing has been in draft hell[1].
> This is why printers are hell. You have a much of communication protocols but you need per-device drivers to interface with them over that protocol. It doesn't matter that we have ipp, because for over six years driverless printing has been in draft hell[1].
Business idea! A device that plugs into your printer (or network) and exposes it as a "more compatible" printer on the same network! Yes it's silly that you'd need a separate device to do this, but it would allow for having a clean implementation of IPP exposed (so no more hacks or backwards compatibility issues). Maybe a custom OS build atop a Rasberry Pi for a proof of concept.
I would definitely buy one. Spending $50 on something like that to save hours upon hours of wasted time setting up Linux printers.
Me too. I think they released a Vista driver for it but nothing since. I used to have to run a XP VM just to print stuff with it. Now it gathers dust in my closet...
The inkjet HP Envy 4500? I bought not long before Win10 arrived is not officially supported. I had to battle (superstition levels of luck) to get it to be recognized. Some conflict between Win7 drivers and x64 support .. I forgot.
Such a shame. Samsung printers were among the best in the industry.
I feel that HP were pretty mediocre in the last few years and they're just riding the hype train.
What we need are printers which are more "open". Cheaper to run, easier to service. Just like the ones Brother makes. Their toners are refillable and the drum is a separate unit. And they have Linux drivers out of the box.
That's too bad, I bought a cheap Samsung laser printer that thing was a tank, I bought one for my mother too and it's still going. HP on the other hand make the worst printers I have ever used anywhere.
I only buy samsung. The laser printers are cheap, durable and resilient. They remind me of what HP was, in 1989.
Now they are a scam. They do a better version of the hustle Gillette does with its razors.
Somewhere in the 90s they realized higher profits were available if they hoodwinked people by coercing them to become a victim to a proprietary ink-cartridge dependency racket. With that, their integrity and quality were summarily abandoned. What a crooked morally bankrupt company.
Let me ask this: How much would anyone here pay for a quality printer that lasts virtually forever, has great software support across all platform and got cheap ink/toner that fits automatically replaced?
I paid about $250 12 years ago for exactly what you describe. It's an HP Color LaserJet. Since it's laser, there are no clogged cartridges, the toner works forever. It has built in Ethernet, and both MacOs and Windows can auto discover it. Since it's jet direct, you can just send it PCL so there will always be drivers.
It only has three problems:
1) no WiFi (which is understandable given its age), which we solve with a bridge.
2) if you leave it on, it occasionally runs a self test/clean cycle, which set off our old house's smoke detector. Fixed this by turning it on when we need it.
3) no duplex option.
Other then these issues, it's a great machine and is literally the oldest piece of tech we own.
I have a wireless Brother printer that I paid $120 for 8 years ago and still on the 'starter' toner. Worked fine through XP, Windows 7, 8, 10, and Mac. I have a replacement toner that I bought 4 years ago because the printer said toner was running low, but I must've printed out at least 1000 sheets since then and still it prints fine.
Yup Brother is the way to go. I have one of their MFP units and it's been rock solid. My parents have been using a printer unit for about a decade now.
I wish I had a color laser but it's at least $300 more for an equivalent unit and I just don't care that much anymore. Most of what we'd print are photos and it's cheaper to just go to the supermarket and have them run on a Kodak machine. A couple cents per print = oh well. An inkjet system would probably end up costing us more anyway once you factor in wastage like ink lost to head cleaning.
Inkjets are really only economical for people who are using them for color photo prints on a daily basis, and those people are moving to bulk-ink/inktank systems and getting bigtime savings. For everyone else, B+W laser is by far the best solution for "occasional printing" and has really nice bleed/smear resistance, and the Brothers are best-in-class.
I've had a Brother for 10 years now. Still on the first toner cartridge, though it's been telling me it's low for about 3 years. I paid $150 for it. Just plain works. I keep wishing it would die so I have an excuse to put a wireless one somewhere not close to the router. But whatever. You can get almost the same model (newer and allegedly better and with wifi) for under $75 bucks today.
I bought an HP LaserJet 5M (with duplexer, extra tray, and network interface) at a university surplus about 11 years ago for $35. It just works (linux, mac, windows). Haven't had issues with it except for it being heavy and a bit slow printing sometimes. The toner isn't cheap, but it lasts us a long time (we don't print a ton).
I'm not quite sure how much I'd pay for a new printer like you describe. Every once in a while I look around for a new printer which can handle larger paper sizes (12x18 and A3), but I haven't found one which looks like it will do what I want (low volume laser printer for larger paper sizes with linux, mac, windows support) and still doesn't cost a ton. I think it's a niche market unfortunately.
I currently use XP-320's everywhere because of the lack of any higher grade controller printer that isn't a laser.
Those are $50 each, so I'd take what you are talking about (I get aftermarket 4 sets of ink cartridges for my printers for about $6, so the ink price would probably just be similar) for about $500.
To answer my own question I have a Samsung ML-1520, a laser printer smaller than most laser printers on the market and lasts about forever. Haven't had to replace the toner cartridge yet. It's only missing the mac driver from the list above. There exists a CUPS driver though.
It is not uncommon for Asian (?) conglomerates to have a very wide range of products, as Hitachi, Sony, Yamaha (from trumpets and pianos, motorbikes, engines to electronics) and Toshiba demonstrate. TIL that Samsung even builds drillships.
Samsungs shipping division (Samsung Heavy Industries) is one of the largest ship-builders in the world, in fact (it was, possibly still is, the worlds second largest a few years ago).
They do. I got a Samsung C480 colour laser printer, scanner, copier a few weeks back to replace a broken Dell. The cartridges are far more accessible than the Dell. All three functions are reliable so far; so it's been a good buy for 208GBP. I'm becoming something of a Samsung loyalist. My Ultra laptop is still going strong after nearly four years, as is my 3 yr old Galaxy S4 phone and 10 yr old flat screen TV.
My Samsung SL-M2020W/XAA was killed by a simple paper jam. There was literally no way to get it open to reach the shreds of jammed paper inside - one-way plastic tabs etc. Only time I've ever gone Office Space on a piece of equipment.
My family owns a CLP-315W Samsung Color Laser. It's been in service for years, has fantastic network support for Windows, OSX, and Linux, and a lot of the parts are interchangeable (even the Drum / Imaging unit can be replaced by the end user).
I dread the day I'll have to replace it, but until it keeps printing like a champ.
I own a ML-1640 (and bought one for my dad as well) with a low enough firmware number that lets me use any toner. It's a great black&white laser printer that works nicely on Linux.
There may be other competitors to HP that re-brand Samsung devices as their own under a technology sharing agreement. Multi-function printers are essentially commoditized now so not sure how "innovation" will happen when one company buys up market share.
I have a cheap laser multifunction printer and it's actually pretty good and robust. They even provide drivers for Linux and it works perfectly. The only major annoyance is the Toner DRM but pretty much every vendor does that :-(
I did! I have been getting by on my £50 Samsung ML2165W for a couple of years, even with the starter toner I think. The replacement toners are more expensive than the printer, mind you.
It starts quickly, prints well and is really really small. It isn't AirPrint enabled, but they do offer their own app for iPad / Android, and it works alright for me from my Mac OS machine, so I am happy.
Companies are weird in the things they own. Fun fact, Energizer (yes, the battery company. That Energizer) does a lot of business in feminine products, shaving products, and sun care stuff.
I've used by EliteBook 8570w for about 4 years. It's a powerful, rugged laptop with a decent keyboard and good screen. I've upgraded the memory and hard drive over time and don't plan on replacing it any time soon.
My mom just bought a Windows 10 laptop from HP for under $200 including tax; that's an amazing price point... sure there will be bloatware and it's a cheaply made laptop... but for under $200 that's pretty impressive.
My counter example is we bought 120 of their cellular equipped netbooks from Verizon and had 100 hard drive failures. They got tired of us shipping them back and just sent us hard drives to replace. Our techs did not like the headache.
I guess office use is one thing, but I haven't bothered keeping a printer at home for at least the last 8 years or so. On the rare occasion I need to print something, I use Fedex' online print service and pick up the prints at the Fedex store near my apartment.
I can't help but feel that traditional paper printers are a dying breed in general. Yeah, it'll be a long, slow death, but paper definitely seems passé in general.
Now if we're talking 3d printers and specialty printers like others have mentioned, that seems like an area where there could be some room for growth. Heck, if anything, I can't help but wonder if a company like HP shouldn't generalize the idea of "printer" even more and introduce a line of desktop CNC milling machines and the like.
the problem is us (in the general population usage of 'us').
The bulk of people are going to buy a $79 printer instead of a $89 because they are unable to see the differences (not their fault).
Therefore each and every manufacturer will find ways to lower the price and end up making the shittiest piece of knocked together crap that still looks shiny.
Hm. My printing volume is down tenfold from a few years back. Pretty much all I print now, is card stock for my game club (draft copies of new card games). And my printer has a hard time if it gets very thick.
I wonder, has paper sales volume tanked? Is specialty printing all that's left? Why don't printers do a better job there already?
I have a Canon Pixma MG7520 that works fine over wifi with a Win 8.1 client. Quality of the prints are scans are pretty much inline with the price I paid (i.e., mediocre). It sees very light use, so I have no ideas about how long or well it will last. I got it to scan contracts and for the occasional color print (not photos).
It's a weird business. Kinda like taxi cabs with the advent of Uber / SDV. Printers are from the era of paper day offices, nowadays most prints are not that useful and mostly mandatory for rare official documents. Most of things are now mailed.
The business model is also odd, a entry level wireless scanner/printer is only worth 2 packs of cartridges.
Much needed indeed. The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation, everybody keeps making the same crap over and over again, with new branding, and new numbers/designations. Is your Samsung X1214LX2 better than your HP LP19311A?
Also, where are the specialized niche printers? Why can't I print ink on a copper PCB, so that I can etch it later? Why can't I print soldermasks or silkscreens? Where is my printer that prints on fabric? All of these could be sold for much more than the ultra-low-margin generic home office printers, and yet manufacturers can't be bothered to innovate.