Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable

Seriously, why are 99% of printers terrible?

I'm a retired IT consultant and have spent a lifetime working with printers. I loved all the printers I ever owned (all B&W), until I bought an HP Photosmart color about 10 years ago. I had so much trouble with it that I sent it to "appliance heaven" with a 15 lb sledge hammer in the garage. I just bought my second color printer - a wireless Samsung color laser costing $99 on sale at Officemax. It cost me another $90 to get a network specialist to come in and spend four hours setting it up so it worked with 2 desktops and a laptop. I haven't ran our of toner yet as I don't use it that much, so we'll see how it goes.

Because they are designed to be. They sell printers cheap because they make the real money off ink.

I need to find out if I can find "fake" ink cartriges which fool the machine into thinking it's full when all I want to print with is black ink. I was going to look into that months ago but forgot.

Actually, if the person is printing in 'rich black' they would need to have CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to print a black and white document.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/printers/soa/HP-Photosmart-Plus-B209/0,2000065768,339300007,00.htm

Like this piece of crap!!!!

1. Firstly not fully compatible with Win7
2. Everytime I print with a different app i get the choice of 3 different versions of the same printer
3. After each print job (when I finally get it working) the thing has an epiletic fit cleaning/parking its heads
4. Yes Ive already spent more in ink than the printer and Ive only had it 3 months!

Arrrrgggg!

I've always hated printers. This is why I won't own one any more at home.

But I have to use them occasionally at work. My coworkers are familiar with my rant about how Printers are the only technology that never improves, and how they have been maliciously designed to make people miserable.

I'd better email out this comic before they all send it to me.

It blows my mind to think that technology has come this far with cars, appliances, and personal computers, and yet they still can't seem to produce a printer that doesn't paper jam on a regular basis and has ink issues.

I gave up on inkjet printers. For Christmas the family bought me (and themselves, it's networked) a Samsung CLP-310N colour laser.

OK, it won't do great photo-quality prints - I use an online service for that - let someone else maintain tens of thousands worth of expensive kit for the few occasions I need photo quality. What it does do is never dry out and work at a moment's notice reliably even after weeks of idleness.

No more dried up cartridges for me.

The state of the Printer market is proof that a whole industry can collude to screw the entire world out of tons of money and not a single government on earth will stand up and say anything to prevent them.

Lol... very funny article, and yes... printers are damn evil.
Just the other day we were trying to print out something on our 2month old printer and the damn thing kept saying there was no paper even though the tray was full. THEN when it finally did start trying to print, it jammed. Oh joy.

It is not just cheap printers either. My $200 one was crappy too. Ugh.

My last printer/scanner got kicked so hard i broke the glass in the scanner bed. the one before that got thrown down a flight of stairs.

i will second (or third or fourth at this point) the frustration towards printers.

if any company can make a printer which doesn't gargle testes i shall gladly pay double for that.

apple? iprint? maybe?

Laser printers tend to be far better than inkjets. The latter cause me endless headaches and always seem to be out of one of the numerous colours in there.

There are just two simple rules:

1. Never buy a multifunctional (each peripheral must do one job -- scanner, printer, fax, whatever);

2. The printer must be a laser printer, preferably a B&W one if you can deal with the limitations. If you need to print photos do it in a dedicated shop (chapeau Skipweasel).

Follow these rules and you won't even know about those problems.

After losing my printer cables in a move, I realized I don't really need a printer anymore now that I'm out of school. When I do need stuff printed, I just put it on a flash drive and take it to Kinkos

Most things you print at home don't need to be in colour. If you have to do something fancy in colour, email the file to a copy store or photolab and pick it up later. They have better equipment and printing the occasional colour item is cheaper with them than it is to maintain an inkjet at home.

I know some people have special colour printing requirements. Go ahead and buy yourself what you need!

One year ago, I outsourced my company's printers management. It's not cheap, but I live in heavens now :)

You think that is difficult?

Try hooking up an ascii printer to an ebcdic mainframe. Now lets say it is a parallel printer which means bridging it over windows so that windows doesn't stuff up the spool file. Now lets make it a programmable printer say a Zebra, Monarch or Intermec. Enjoy : )

Perhaps an IP printer that only works through a windows driver so you can't bypass windows easily. (I am looking at you Samsung).

Perhaps you need to learn PCL/PJL, HPSI, daemons, LPD/LPR....there are circles in hell that specialise in these forms of pain.

I hate printers.

ps: I think the multi-function devices have reached acceptability.

I'm glad I'm still in school. Free B&W printing ftw! I may get a B&W printer for my home, but I am SO not into printers that demand colour ink just to print a word document!

@Kev

The problem is, many printers are programs to requires all colours of ink register as full, before you can even tell it to print only black ink.

This reminded me of the also excellent and equally cathartic video "Your Printer is a Brat" from College Humor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQGtucrJ8hM

we always keep track of our family tree because it is exciting to know the family tree ~."