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.
