Am I the only one that thinks printers are the work of Satan?

[lord_galathon]

Context: I've been working in IT since 1998, was hired on the edge of the announced Y2K apocalypse, by a bank IT services sub-contractor and my first IT job was to drive around the Québec province and update the firmware and BIOS on old X25 gateways.

 

After Y2K I was assigned to tech support where I learned that printers suck. Not HP printers, or Canon printers or Konika, Epson, Brother, Lexmark, no. ALL printers suck. I think it's about time that the way jobs are sent to a printer is re-thought out and the printing process simplified.

 

I have NEVER in 25 years been able to state with 100% certainty that yes, this specific printer will work forever pending regular maintenance kits replacements, rollers, fresh paper and toner/ink. Never.

 

All of the printers I've ever dealt with would have "voodoo" issues. Some will print perfectly one day, be slow as nails the next day and then return back to being a print hero the day after that, for no specific reason. Same computers, same environment, same network infrastructure, same printer, same firmware, driver, etc.

 

I think it's related to solar flares.

 

Anyone else have this experience with printers?

 

My conclusion is that I LOATHE anything print related. 

 

/rant

[tkitch]

congratulations, things with lots of moving parts end up breaking.  It happens.  

 

Printers are also no longer the expensive purchases they once were.  HP LJ4000's were $$$$ 30 years ago.  Now it's 300-400 bucks for a good, duplex, B&W Business class networked laser.  You can buy multiple for the price of one 4000 back in the day.

[DrMacintosh]

Inkjets suck. I have a Brother B&W laser printer that I fire up once in a blue moon. It's great.

[seanondemand]

1999's Office Space had this pretty well covered. 
 

https://youtu.be/fjsSr3z5nVk

[Sarra]

Yeah, printers are a mixed bag, at best.

 

It's pretty garbage tier that companies, like HP, use that as an excuse to be ridiculous and predatory, with shit like Ink DRM, and bricking printers for whatever reason, not to mention, selling 2 oz of ink, in a cart that has space for 8 oz, for $99.99+ tax.

[Monkey Dust]

Home printers are absolute shite. Office ones seem to give less trouble, but in fairness, I've never worked IT support. How much printing do people still do now? I haven't had a home printer for over 10 years, not missed that temperamental heap of junk once. I never print at work either now, and post covid a lot of people in the office are the same.

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, lord_galathon said:

 

My conclusion is that I LOATHE anything print related. 

 

/rant

As a long term Linux user I feel what you are saying.  For a long time LINUX printing was HELL. SO many printers were windows specific.  They had no brains and were drive by the CPU and "Win print" drivers.  Eventually it became possible to get a standard ink jet printer driver to work with linux.  Before then one needed a PostScript printer, usually an expensive laser, to get it to work.  

Now that I have that ... I can say a networked laser printer WILL work with any reasonable OS, even Android without any issues as long as it has paper and toner. 

[Zodiark1593]

I’ve never had a home printer give me a good experience, inkjet or laser. If anyone ever asks me what printer to recommend them, I have no legitimate recommendations, and will instead suggest the library printer. 

[dilpickle]

I've been using Brother Laser for the last decade and never had issues.

[Guest]

thats pretty much my experience with printer, no matter the brand no matter the use case no matter the price all of them just suck. either printer head just suddenly breaking after 1 year no matter if being used all the time or barely used, the tank suddenly clogged or ink dried, software issues saying something went wrong and you need to change something, and all of the bs i can list but i cant be bothered.

 

thankfully in near my house there is a mall that has a lot of place that modifies the printer basically to make it easier for us, either by converting cartridges to tank, or changing the original tank to universal tank so you can use any ink that is way cheaper and with their own magic the software just think of it as normal and works flawlessly.

[wasab]

 

[lord_galathon]

It's not only the physical moving parts that fail. Often a driver that worked yesterday will not work today and it has to be changed. And don't get me started about the SNMP (I think) options for network printers. 

 

Or the famous printers that work 100% perfectly when you leave the site but after 2-3 days start printing slow as nails for no reason until they are restarted. Some will not come out of "sleep mode" which always gets me.

Also yes: You'd be surprised how much printing still goes on at any given company. Some still use fax machines. 

 

 

[RollyShed]

All of these via Linux - two HP laser printers in our home office. They work OK.

Another place I'm involved with, a combined printer scanner running direct connection and internet, OK.

A colour laser, that one insists on only Windows.

 

The inkjet printers are only used as scanners and they work OK.

 

Problems? Yes, after printing a few thousand pages the toner will run out. We get the cartridges refilled at the cheapest place.

[tkitch]

5 hours ago, lord_galathon said:

It's not only the physical moving parts that fail. Often a driver that worked yesterday will not work today and it has to be changed. And don't get me started about the SNMP (I think) options for network printers. 

 

Or the famous printers that work 100% perfectly when you leave the site but after 2-3 days start printing slow as nails for no reason until they are restarted. Some will not come out of "sleep mode" which always gets me.

Also yes: You'd be surprised how much printing still goes on at any given company. Some still use fax machines. 

 

 

my office has (lliterally) a million plus pounds of paper on any given day.  

 

And pallets of printer paper for office use.

[r00tb33r]

I had a pretty good run with Samsung laser printers, one of them, a printer/scanner combo is like 14 years old, next one is about 9 years old.  My newest is 5 years old.  Those 3 have not given me trouble.

 

Samsung sold it's printer division to HP, HP spun it off to Xerox for consumer models as well, but none were as good as the Samsung originals.

[HarriK]

Any time I have used an HP printer.. the amount of rage it brings up in me.. if they would be mine, I would throw them out of a high floor window, walk down, beat it with a baseball bat and set on fire. NEVER will I EVER buy an HP printer ever again in my lifetime.

[Stahlmann]

The Konica printers we have at work never had an issue. We lease them so they automatically do service every now and then and we get a new one every 3-5 years. But the cheap-ish printers for home use generally do not work as you want them to.

[Needfuldoer]

On 6/21/2023 at 2:10 PM, DrMacintosh said:

Inkjets suck. I have a Brother B&W laser printer that I fire up once in a blue moon. It's great.

Same, except mine's a personal LaserJet the size of a bread box. The only thing it doesn't do is print color, but I got it for $10 at a thrift store (including a nearly new toner cartridge) so I'm not complaining.

 

I've got a Zebra label printer too, for printing shipping labels. The proprietary utilities are a little dated, but once it's set up it works fine.

 

The HP LaserJet 4000 and Apple LaserWriter IIg were great printers.

[atxcyclist]

We have a plotter and several smaller-sized printers at my office, all inkjets. The HP plotter is the most cantankerous with ink tank replacements, it's not worth the trouble to buy 3rd party ink because they sometimes won't be accepted, but even with OE tanks they have an expiration date. Also, 3rd party ink tanks have taken-out printheads which are expensive and difficult to get.

 

The Canon multi-function and the Canon wide-format (tabloid sized) printer also have some issues with 3rd party ink, but not nearly as bad. Still, they don't make it easy and the ink costs 1/3rd as much as the printer for a full OE replacement.

[Sarra]

If every swear word, insult, or angry comment my manager ever made to or about our office printer was recorded and played back on broadcast tv, it would amount to the longest single censor beep in the history of our species.

[YellowJersey]

I shit you not, I once had an HP printer back in the late 90s that was doing it's pre-print thing (you know, where it makes all that noise and moves the parts around a whole bunch) and it just kept doing it for an hour and nothing seemed to stop it, so I just unplugged the damn thing. It kept going for another 5 minutes even after I'd unplugged it.

[Sarra]

13 hours ago, YellowJersey said:

I shit you not, I once had an HP printer back in the late 90s that was doing it's pre-print thing (you know, where it makes all that noise and moves the parts around a whole bunch) and it just kept doing it for an hour and nothing seemed to stop it, so I just unplugged the damn thing. It kept going for another 5 minutes even after I'd unplugged it.

My friend, in High School, plugged a laserjet printer he found in a recycling pile, in to test it.

 

Then, the lights in the room went out.

 

And the lights in the entire building were out.

 

That printer, somehow, managed to trip ever breaker in the building. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

 

In fact, it tripped breakers and blew fuses in the two buildings adjacent to the school... Special kind of epic. The power connector on that printer got cut off the next day lol

[snorkel]

Even Jesus had to use stone tablets. Kinda speaks for itself... 

[K2S9]

(This rant brought to you by my time in large-company IT with networked printers)

 

Not only do printers have the "voodoo" issues, they're one of the most unstandardized segments of my IT experience. Been an expert at a certain printer type? Enjoy looking like a newbie as you're called to troubleshoot the weird issues of a different brands printer. Find the IP? Might be on the display, or maybe they buried it behind an admin login only menu. Print a config page? Should be simple right?  Roll the dice on how many touches it'll take to get to that task. Like the print industry saw other IT areas standardizing and said "hold my beer!".

 

I. Hate. Supporting. Printers. 

 

[NadiaMayer]

On 6/22/2023 at 5:04 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

As a long term Linux user I feel what you are saying.  For a long time LINUX printing was HELL. SO many printers were windows specific.  They had no brains and were drive by the CPU and "Win print" drivers.  Eventually it became possible to get a standard ink jet printer driver to work with linux.  Before then one needed a PostScript printer, usually an expensive laser, to get it to work.  

Now that I have that ... I can say a networked laser printer WILL work with any reasonable OS, even Android without any issues as long as it has paper and toner. 

When I has go for Linux back in the mid 2010s CUPS was way more useful then anything m$ could bake up. printing just worst it was fast it didn't complain just did the job and has nice webserver see all I need and told me what was wrong.

When I print on windows i better hope I praised the machine god and give my PC a good dusting for when I need to print.