Printers
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You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
Why are printers the most consistently shit piece of consumer technology out there? It seems like in terms of reliability, there hasn't been any progress made and no matter what you buy, it goes and dies faster than any other device. And it's not just home printers either, it also seems to be the one thing most likely to die in any office environment as well.
Oddly enough, the only one that's survived a decent amount of time for me is the somewhat ancient black and white HP laserjet that I've had for longer than I can remember.
Here's the trick: NOBODY MAKES MONEY OFF OF THE ACTUAL INKJET PRINTERS.
What happens instead:
>ink for printers becomes a hot commodity
>the printers themselves are always sold at a loss, so companies try to get them as cheap as they humanly can
>this means they're fragile as shit
>this means they break quickly
>none of this matters, because they just need to sell more ink to you
Buy a laser printer, nerds
It's actually cheaper to buy a new printer than replace the ink lol
Costco offers good inkjet refills.
>>51644967
>>the printers themselves are always sold at a loss, so companies try to get them as cheap as they humanly can
Industry printers are very expensive though. They are all still very shit and companies will still jew you by saying that the ink cartridge is finished when it's still 20% full.
Shitty consumer grade printers are all made out of shit just to jew you into buying ink. Thesek Printers cost less than the the fucking ink.
>>51644967
My HP PSC1209 I bought in 2005 is still running fine.
>>51644967
nowhere I can find the most reliable consumer printer...
>>51645044
>Buy a laser printer, nerds
I did. Now it does this.
>>51645243
Clean the drum and corona wire
My HP F4185 AIO from 2009 is still chugging along nicely after all these years, just replaced the ink carts a few times, recently modded it to have ink tanks and you can grab a litre of ink for $25 bucks.
Printers are fine if you run them a few times a week, it's the people that rarely print that have problems, either from the nozzles clogging up and dying or from the waste ink sponge getting filled from nozzle cleaning.
That said, I'm probably going to upgrade to a Brother A3 AIO as my printing needs are starting to call for more larger sized prints, from posters to saddle bound pamphlets.
We run a ink tank modded HP 4610 at the office and it copies 50 pages from the autofeeder in 1 go without any problems.
If you don't print fairly often, don't buy an inkjet.
If you print often, in color, with images or photos, then get a big tank inkjet.
What color laser printer can you guys recommend for semi-regular printing?
>>51645056
But new printers usually come with an ink cartridge that's only half full.
Have great experience with more expensive Canon MF Multipass models.
This things are great, duplex printing, duplex scanning, saves files it creates on network shares, makes super optimized pdfs and are very reliable, cheap replacement toner available everywhere and lasts forever.
It changed my mind on printers being always shit.
>>51645243
>fucks up
>blames printer
Never change.
>>51644967
Fucking beats me.
Printers are pretty much the single computer peripheral that has not gotten better in the last two or three decades.
Perhaps it is because they didn't standardize a fucking communication method or something. Pretty much every single keyboard or mouse can be plugged into any computer, Windows, Mac, *nix and it will work, a fucking swathe load of things will just work because they have default drivers but can have specialist drivers for special features.
Printers? Fuck no. Every single one needs its own driver which means that the stability of the device is completely up to some dumb fucks at HP or Canon or Brother.
One thing I learned early in my computing experience is that troubleshooting printers is right up there in the things you don't want to do. Better off just binning it than trying to figure out what is wrong when one is acting up.
>>51644967
Not quite. People buy a printer assuming they're all the same. People don't do that with laptops however. I looked into a good printer many years ago. Ended up with a Canon MP980. It was reviewed as a hard worker, good image quality and good features etc. That was maybe 7 years ago and I still run it daily, roughly 15 pages a day, every day. It's got to be around 30,000 pages printed by now. Ink is dirt cheap also.
>>51645298
>If you don't print fairly often, don't buy an inkjet.
It's good practice to make scheduled task that prints test page once a week to prevent ink drying up in heads.
In my experience two weeks of inactivity is enough to fuck up inkjet printer.
Brother A3/landscape are the most reliable inkjets I've seen. Also expensive, but ink is relatively cheap.
>>51645321
>>51645353
Have 185k pages on my MF5880, often print books and service manuals for me and and my friends with it, never had a single hardware fault and I use the cheapest $20 chinese toners. Don't even remember the last paper jam, probably had 3-4 tops in all this years I have it.
Because you get what you pay for.
>>51645468
Doesn't explain high-end/office printers also being shit.
>>51644967
>It seems like in terms of reliability, there hasn't been any progress made
It's actually the opposite. Old printers were much better, newer ones are really shit. They switched profit, from selling printers to selling ink.
To the point this is true: >>51645056
I'm genuinely worried about the future of printers, just as much as the future of MP3 players, of physical buttons, and a ton of other shit that just fucking works and is superior to everything else on all points but two: cost of production and marketability.
Because normies would rather pay a fortune for shit they don't need. Fuck this normie world.
>>51645468
The concept of you get what you pay for also applies to other hardware and you get much more value for any price you pay.
Printers are shit and a constant hassle with drivers.
My PSC1210 I found somewhere near a recycle bin in my neighbourhood still works and I use it for scanning, because printing with it is not affortable - a post-leasing Lexmark duplex laser printer with a 1000-page toner costs as much as 1 original 30ml black toner for PSC1210 + 10$. Not worth it.
>>51645468
Yeah usually you can't get anything unless you pay for it. Now whether the quality of what you paid for equals the price is an entirely different topic, because the actual cost of most printers is mere dollars.
I know that, I work in Shenzen. $250 HP wireless "smartprinters" actually cost $13 to produce. Few months ago I paid two beers to a guy there, he offered me a printer straight from the production line.
I'm wondering how long it'll be before we can have diy printers, because it's about fucking time.
>>51645477
The office I manage has Konica Minolta printers. They consistently work, and if it stops working it'll automatically send a distress call, and a technician will be dispatched.
Even if it breaks, I rarely have to do anything. It even orders its own toner when it's running low.
because you buy the cheap ones, faggot
>>51645672
>waah you didn't pay enough so it's completely understandable that the product you paid for doesn't for at all
Get a cheap Brother monochrome Laser.
Lasts forever, toner is cheap, you can just hit ignore on low toner warnings instead of it locking you out.
>>51644967
Lots of moving parts in a machine that feeds in brittle paper and dispenses sticky liquid? Of course it's going to break
