Damn You, Printer
Printers are shit. There is no denying this. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore why printing technology is so riddled with problems and how Google wants to change it all with cloud aware printers.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Are we giving printers too much of a hard time? Is printing changing? Do you think the cloud approach to printing makes sense? Do we even need printers?
69 Comments to “Damn You, Printer”
Leave a Reply
Ha,
I just went to http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/ to register at my new address in time to postal vote at the next election. Which all works really well… except that I need to sign it and get it to them.
Crazy thing is that they decide who can vote by sending a letter to a house that says “who lives there then?” anyway so what signature are they going to use to verify its me? (they now have scribble done by my mum as she had a scanner and I didn’t.)
Tom
Ha! Exactly what I needed the printer for
The whole thing about signatures, an unverified copyable scrawl of text, being enough to qualify you in law, is a separate discussion.
I had the same issue, with the delightful dilemma that my printer was out of toner. So, what do I do to get toner in time to send the application off, given that I can’t justify the expense of shop-bought toner (£100+). Buying it from some Amazon seller is about £20, but would it get here in time?!
Then a voting card arrived for me so issue became moot.
RE: the “cloud printers” IMHO this is a good idea. In essence its a standardization of all printers – albeit to google’s standard.
Also, last time I flew, all I needed was a passport? Your airline sucks
But I do agree on the lights. I hate those combinations – why the hell cant they put a readout on the LCD?
Who did you fly with that didn’t need a boarding pass? Lufthansa have boarding passes that can appear on your mobile, which is loveliness incarnate, but no-one else does afaict; they need paper boarding passes.
I seem to recall flying recently and when checking in I handed over my passport, it was scanned and then the relevant details were printed out and handed to me (for free).
It doesn’t happen every time, admittedly.
To be fair, by including an LCD on your printer you’re signing yourself up for quite a bit of work and cost beyond just including an LCD panel. On one hand you can have a clear list of light combinations on the device, and then print out the corresponding messages in a variety of languages in country-specific manuals. On the other, you need to embed all the languages, and language settings/preferences, into the device, with all the extra software complexity that involves.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t do it these days, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the cost-to-benefit ratio isn’t high enough to include them on low-end domestic devices you pick up at the Post Office. As discussed, the real money in printing is in the cartridges, not in the printing devices (at least at the domestic level).
Oh markdown ate my numbers.
Ooh, I will ask Langridge to fix that. Langridge! Yoohoo!…
Just got to the end of the show.
Re: a database of all of the citizens of the country. I think I’m pro (even though its not a groovy thing to say) as the government needs some joined up thinking. I moved house after getting 6pts on my driving licence and being reduced to a provisional and when I applied they asked me if I was the Tom Hall who used to live at OldAddress, can I just say no and start over? I dont mind if the government knows where I am, otherwise as I am honest I just have to tell dozens of different departments separately anyway.
Tom
Also I’ve been very happy with http://www.konicaminolta.co.uk/business-solutions/products/laser-printers/colour/magicolor-1650en/introduction.html for the last few months.
PCL/Postscript support, linux .ppd on the CD, excellent quality (just a tad on the large side)
Tom
I have an Epson Stylus Scan which I found in a skip. I buy compatible cartidges which cost about £2 each of the net. It has an LCD display on the front which tells me what’s wrong. Can’t complain!
Lacking a satnav, I use it primarily to print out bits from Google maps. However, when I get my touchbook, I expect I’ll start using that instead. I haven’t had to print out a form and sign it for a long time, and if I do I’m usually at work where it’s someone else’s problem if it doesn’t work.
The long-term solution would be electronic paper. As it only uses power when changing what it’s displaying (as I understand it), there wouldn’t be a problem with it running out of battery when you’re trying to read it. I can imagine a Write-Once-Read-Many file format being used for form templates, allowing you to sign forms with a stylus and touchscreen.
I can’t stand printers.
In my flat there are three of us, each running a different OS. We got around this by getting a Samsung CLP300N. It’s attached to our network and seems to work perfectly for every OS we’ve thrown at it.
As for USB printers. Grr.
Scanners are a whole other story – I’ve yet to find a linux-compatible scanner.
@Flamekebab, I bought my mum a HP Deskjet F4580 (printer/scanner/copier), which installed itself when connecting to her pc! (Ubuntu 10.04) Scanning works out of the box.
It’s USB and inkjet though, so in 6 months time the printing side of it will be gone I guess, but she can scan still!
My Canon CanoScan 600 worked fine with Ubuntu whereas it bombed with my Mac.
I own a Canon D646U and it seems to be totally unsupported. I borrowed my girlfriend’s Xerox 4800 One Touch and found that was totally unsupported too.
It’s not a big sample size, but I’ve had the Canon one for a good few years and was hoping that by now there’d be at least rudimentary support for it.
As much as I’d love to scratch my own itch, I simply don’t have the skills required.
I hate printers too and use them rarely, they always seem to be going wrong. That said, I have had a much better experience since using a cheapo Samsung laser printer. The big problem with the inkjets is that if you don’t use them regularly the ink goes rubbish.
When I used printers, whenever I ran out of tint I would buy another printer, it’s cheaper that way. Cartridges are too expensive!
This shot was comedy! Great anti-print rant!
My Samsung monochrome laserprinter, connected to my Ubuntu server, is my first fine working printer ever. It runs without a prob for over two years now. My GF is a PhD student and likes to print out papers regularly when she works from home. I print random bullocks twice a week (e.g. ubuntu printer test pages, just for fun). I’ve refilled the toner with $random_chinese_toner twice now, and the thing doesn’t complain.
Before that I had several issues with inkjet printers, coming to the point where I used to go to a copyshop 2 miles away whenever I had to print something, because my own printer(s) were just too unreliable, and the drivers made pc’s freeze.
It seems like the printer side of business is analogous to the Windows world, where they just seem to make things buggy, undocumented and unreliable just to have some nice cashflow at the service side of it.
Printers should be banned, instead you should have a “print to favorite e-reader file format, and send to my default e-reader device”-button in every application, and those ‘prints’ should be accepted everywhere, from music gigs to airports. Eat that, Ink-Maffia!!
I have had printers from all the major manufacturers, and they’ve all been fragile pieces of crap. Except for HP, which I’d avoided because the refills seemed so expensive.
Then when my canon comitted sepuku for no aparent reason, I found an HP on Special Offer in my local supermarket.
It worked out of the box. The paper hasn’t jammed, the ink level monitor works with the standard drivers shipped with Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora et al. Both the Scanner and the printer work faultlessly over Wi-Fi, no matter which OS I send from. It has a little colour screen that seems to give error messages in plain english (according to the manual, i haven’t yet seen it have an error). It prints photos directly from all my flash media without needing a PC.
So Kudos to HP for all that. Brilliant.
Just one tiny detail. To paraphrase an Aq tweet, I presume the ink is made of concentrated unicorn semen, judging by the price of replacement cartridges. Ah well, nearly there…
Cheap inkjet printers are shit, and only exist to sell ink cartridges. However even eyewateringly expensive printer can be troublesome, althought these are usually looked after by an engineer.
If you only print a small amount, don’t bother with any inkjet printers, get an old HP Laserjet 4000 series, with a network card in it. You can pick them up for next to nothing, and if it comes with some toner you should never need to buy any consumables for a good few years.
Ok I don’t know where you got that you cannot get dot matrix printers brand new. http://www.epson.com.au/products/dotmatrix/
Yet they are still in production. They can in locations that will kill every other kind of printer dead. Like in the middle of a saw mill where before printing you have to shake the saw dust out of them just so you don’t for real have the printer on fire message in Linux be true.
They are also scarily priced like you can by a decent laser printer for the same price. Ie about 600 to 700 AUD for either.
If you are not printing much and ink could dry in head you want either laser or dot matrix.
Funny thing us Linux guys are fine with Dot matrix. You don’t want to try to run them from vista or windows 7.
Just remembered this (“Why I believe Printers are from hell”) http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
I see most of the issues you talked about being associated with inkjet printer. I recently got a wireless laser printer and most of the problems that invoke murderous rage with printers are gone. More pages per ink cartridge, no more running out of red, but have plenty other colors. The error meesage still suck, but it is a better experience.
Actually you can still buy brand new dot matrix printers. Well at least in Romania you can. It might be because we still use them to print out invoices or other documents that come in duplicates and need physical contact when you fill them in. The only problem is that they cost about twice as much as an ink-jet printer does: http://www.emag.ro/imprimante_matriciale
Cheapest one is almost 200 euros on that site.
Yes, you can still buy them in the UK, they are used for the same thing. Not sure you’d want one for home use though, a Mono laser is almost certainly a better option.
I don’t think I could stand a dot matrix in my home. The noise alone would drive me nuts in minutes.
E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E Vmmm E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E Vmmm E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E Vmmm E-E-E-E-E-smash
A Dot matrix vs an Inkjet HP with tracking headaches.
I would take the Dot matrix any day. The Inkjet HP go nuts really does go nuts. I still have Dot matix sound profing box. Ie double the size of the dot matix but you cannot hear it at all.
This reminds me of my current printer issue with an HP photo printer.. 7 colours, great photos and normal prints… But all the shops in the country only stock yellow, light cyan, and dark magenta… Some have black. My printer needs some dark cyan ink and refuses to print anything! Not even black text on a regular white page… With a cartridge FULL of black ink.
Solution? Buy a big chunky expensive laser printer. It is quicker, nicer looking, gives off a funny smell when warm and the toner lasts longer. The pain is the same, just a longer threshold and more painful when it happens. Now I know that sounds to most as: Do you prefer death by a thousand cuts or just getting your arm ripped off once?
Gents the very simple answer is to buy a decent printer that would have originally been in the enterprise as a refurbished product.
Case in point, the HP 4100n. You can pick them up refurbished with a warranty for £59. Toners cost £25 a pop at most and last thousands and thousands of pages. Also don’t forget that they’re so reliable I recon I could put my shoe through one and it wouldn’t jam!
Ink-jets were designed to fleece the foolish. Solution is an HP Laser-jet 4000 or 1200. Buy rebuilt cartridges and find a vendor who will replace the roller when they become smooth. Better yet learn how to replace them yourself. Order from http://www.moweroffice.com they are good guys.
I have a Samsung ML-1740 laser printer and it’s great. If you don’t print very often a laser printer is much better because the ink doesn’t dry out. A cartridge of dry toner can last for years. I really wouldn’t recommend buying an ink jet printer unless you have some special needs.
As for “cloud printing”, I worked at a company which had plotters for printing out large CAD drawings. They were on the network just like the regular laser printers. Every so often one of the salesmen in another part of the building would decide to print out all his e-mail and send it to the plotter instead of the correct printer. The result was long reams of e-mails on the continuous roll of plotter paper. Since his e-mail didn’t appear on the sales department printer, he would of course try printing it all again, and again, and again …
Now, I can imagine having the plotters on the Internet …
Stop buying cheap bad printers.
And why would Jono say bad things about TAP, my country’s biggest airline?
Because those incompetent muppets got me stuck in Heathrow Airport for two days due to sending incorrect tickets, not handling e-tickets, and treating the whole situation with rudeness and no desire to help.
Not bitter at all.
After listening to that and remembering why I so loathe printers, I had to go and re-watch that scene from the movie “Office Space”. To relive it, or to enjoy it for the first time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFS06Z0CCpk&feature=related
Call it therapy
Classic
Aq, I think you have rose-tinted memories of dot matrix printers. We had them for three of my four years of uni and they almost never worked, due to being jammed all the time. They were great for printing out reams of code, but it was pretty rare that they worked. The big laser printer that replaced them was, truth be told, a lot more reliable.
At home, I quite agree, most printers are absolutely shit. Naming names quite clearly: Epson is rubbish – you spend more time and ink cleaning the heads when you print something once a month than you do using the frickin’ thing. The free Dell printer I got with my laptop was pretty good, actually, but I never got around to replacing the ink when it ran out.
However, I do have a success story for you. At work we bought (back in 2005-ish) a top-of-the-line domestic all-in-one HP printer(scanner/fax/copier/etc). It gets used sporadically (perhaps every month or two it’ll get print job) due to its location and no-one knowing about it. It has never needed ink to be replaced and prints fantastic printouts every time. Next time I buy a printer and I don’t want a laser, I’m getting me an HP.
I agree that we print out far more than we should, but there are valid uses. It’s far easier (to me) to read a research paper or article on paper than on my screen (esp if it’s a PDA screen).
Personally I’d rail more against the forced use of faxes by our Tax departments – I had to send a letter by fax to them yesterday. They wouldn’t accept email and posting it will let it arrive later than I want. I had to try faxing this thing 6 times during the day before the bloody thing went through! I can’t believe it’s how offices used to work.
Now to read the other comments.
Keep up the great work.
I have to print most assignments I receive at university, otherwise I get charged some ridiculous price per page using the uni’s printers.
I also like to scan in a section of a textbook I need and then print it out for highlighting, annotating and of course, reading in the bath.
University was my primary reason for printing. I saved a lot of money printing my dissertation at home, but printing 3 copies at 200 pages each on an inkjet is no laughing matter
Great pic, btw.
Printers suck. They seem to have gotten worse over the last 10-20 years: ink doesn’t last as long, they jam more often, they break more often, the running costs are huge. I know grown sysadmins that cower in fear at the mere mention of the word “printer”.
I never got around to replacing my old inkjet that died in 1999. It’s dawned on me typing this that I’ve happily spent the last decade without a printer at home. Bliss.
I’ve been looking at printers this week. My family probably print at least a page per day of recipes, pics for the kids to take to school or the odd letter. The kids will also have project reports that they need to print. So we need something basic that can do colour. For photos we can use an on-line service and get free prints without internet service.
I was looking at cheap colour lasers, but they may be OTT for my needs. They start at well under £200, but the carts cost at least that. I had a recommendation of an HP all-in-one inkjet that does wireless networking. That’s £40. The inks are not cheap, but I don’t see us using too much and hope we use it enough to avoid them drying out. The wireless will make it easy to use from multiple PCs and HP do Linux drivers.
I’ve got an old Canon inkjet that has lasted well, but doesn’t have decent Linux drivers. I was using TurboPrint, but that stopped working and I can’t be bothered to pay for an upgrade.
I had a dot matrix years ago. The print quality was not great and it was SO NOISY! A friend bought an old daisy wheel with plans to use it to make music!?
Keep an eye out for colour laser printers – some have toner that’s very reasonably priced. I just replenished my Samsung CLP300N’s toner for ~£30 (all the colours, not just black).
Annoyingly, the successor to the CLP300, the 310, seems to have much more expensive toner. Shop around and don’t be afraid of third-party toner, it seems to be just as good.
You don’t need a paper boarding card anymore, at least at some airports.
I’ve had an HP Deskjet 3500 printer for over 5 years now. It’s been solid and reliable (and works great under Linux) it’s entire life. But the cartridges have become more scarce of late, and thus more expensive.
On a recent trip to buy more ink, I noticed that rather than spending £23.99 on a black cartridge, I could spend £29.99 on an HP Deskjet D1600 – basically the same printer but newer, and it’s black cartridges are only £13, so I save £10 for every cartridge I buy. Bonus
I think we should be glad that the bulk of the price is in the cartridges, because it means you’re no longer paying a fortune for something that you only rarely use, but rather you’re paying only for the ink you use.
I still like having a printer and having paper. If you work anywhere outside the tech sector, people don’t want to receive a digital file – they want a “handout”. When I speak, I usually use paper notes rather than a laptop or similar.
We print around 4K pages a day (invoices, POs, pick slips, despatch notes, etc etc) – and we’ve now started marking the toner as “Unicorn Blood” on our internal budgeting system.
I’ve got to say, the HP range of Laserjet printers (we prefer the 4200) are pretty good with the errors. If there’s an issue, it gives you instructions on the LCD what to do (open back door, remove paper, open and close top lid).
Though, we do spend a fair chunk on maintenance, and have printers ready to “hot swap” out incase any of them break (which they do, every couple of months… mainly it’s the rollers that pick up the paper).
Luckily, we’ve got a great guy who comes in regularly, services our printers, and replaces the parts… One of our printers hit the 2 million pages mark last month, and it’s still running strong (albeit having been through maintenance several times)
Oh, and on another note… All our printers run via Linux, even the little old Zebra labeller (with the aid of a serial print server)… pretty awesome that we have our internal apps based on web technologies printing directly to our printers
I dont have a printer simple as that. They cost waaaaay too much like 25 euro for a set of cheep cartages is a lot. I have ways of getting around it though with printers in my college and my dads house.
My lecturer from first year talked about the first printer his department saw and they were all amazed but it was huge. They have come very far though in terms of user interface.
The printers remind me of crack, the first one is cheep but it gets you hooked and the rest suck the money out of your pockets.
Look up the light code, write it on the printer. Also write the sequence to force the printer to print a config page.
Or whinge.
I’ve found writing useful stuff where it’s needed is a good habit.
Thanks, Kent
“Look up the light code” would be easy if I had the manual, which I do not. The HP website doesn’t seem to want to give me it either. If anyone else knows the light flash codes for a Deskjet 520 off the top of their head, say on.
Aq, maybe this will help:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documentSubCategory?tmp_rule=50779&tmp_task=solveCategory&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=59768&lang=en
It doesn’t help. I found that. The flashing lights I have don’t seem to be any of the issues mentioned there.
However, I care not, because, based on advice from this very thread, I have purchased a mono laser printer (a Kyocera Mita FS-1010) and it works perfectly. It has a network card, so I just plugged it into my network and then Ubuntu found it and printed to it. No effort. It even has a built-in webserver where I can see how much ink is in it. Perfect.
Google this: site:hp.com deskjet 520 lights problem code
First result is the manual.
ok, not the top of my head, but not too painful.
Thanks, Kent
Clever spot. I would not have thought to look under a completely different printer on the HP site to find the manual, and that manual is not linked from the Deskjet 520 pages as far as I can tell. Thanks for the help — Google are better at indexing HP’s site than HP are, which is unsurprising but disappointing.
I can’t remember the last time I had printer problems, if I need to print something out I e-mail the document to work, and print it there. In almost 10 years of having a computer in my house, there’s only been a couple of times I’ve needed something quicker than that, when I pegged it down the road to the nearest i/net cafe.
Yestaday i waited 30min for the color printer to print, finalt gave up beliving that the display “printing document”, it’s normalt slow but this was more then usual, opned it up and saw that the papir had stoped. After cleaning it i coudn’t get it to print for the rest of the day. Then this morning when i turned it On, it just printed the document from yestaday with out a hitch.
Aside from the moral issues, you can’t say “printers are s***” to a 5 year old.
My daughter prints out her Ceebeebies artwork creations. She gets a buzz out of running downstairs to grab the latest print out which we can then colour with pencils “in real life”.
The printer is a huge Dell S2500N which I got for £4 at a car boot sale. No LCD, just lights. It’s a network laser printer and finding the IP address was a question until it spitted out a “current settings” page with the IP etc.
From a sysadmin point of view I hate them. And scanners.
A lot of people rate HP and so do I, I bought a mono laser HP for my dads business and it “just works” and works well.
I hesitated listening to this podcast because I hate printers so damn much. They were the bane of my existence when I did computer tech support, and I don’t like them any better now. I’ve used everything from a 9-pin dot matrix (back in ‘88, as a college freshman) to my current OfficeJet Pro “all-in-one” (which at least has a nice readout with useful error messages) and my opinion on them hasn’t changed. They are shit. Total agreement with you guys there.
The situation is the same but different for 3D printers. The commercial ones require expensive consumables, but there is the open source 3D printer projects where you can build a printer that is capable of printing the part for itself. Thus making a new printer. (though at the moment it cant print all the parts) Is there an opportunity to make an “Open source” printer that is reliable and can use cheap commodity consumables?
Lasers are generally much less stress than inkjets. I have one of both; a Samsung ML-1210 laser, and an HP OfficeJet 5600 3-in-1 colour inkjet for colour printing. It gives me ink hassle, but then I hardly ever use it. How often do you need colour? For photos, if you ever want them printed (v. rare), send them off to one of the companies which does that for you and posts you the results. When does one need a colour print of something ASAP?
Gerv
I am not a fan of printers, they constantly give error messages and are expensive to run. Even if you use them sparingly the jets clog up then you have to waste ink clearing the nozzles. I agree with Jono that when I am offered my ‘free’ printer I have never accepted it. In independant stores this can lead to a discount
However, due to the current guidelines, they are still a necessity in schools, the one place that can’t afford to lose money.
I’m a teacher of graphics and part of the course invloves producing a magazine, leaflets and flyers. Buisness cards and headed notepaper are also common themes.
But due to the criteria we have to work to, a soft/electronic copy cannot be accepted as a final piece we are told they must be printed if they are to be awarded any credit. I personally think this is ridiculous in itself, but wait it gets worse.
If the printer has a problem, breaks down or runs out of ink a couple of days before the deadline and the pupil has not printed their pieces, we are told to fail them. Yes, through no fault of their own, the pupil has just wasted a year.
OK, spare ink cartridges are always kept, but our department simply cannot afford a spare printer. Why should a pupil be penalised due to the spendig budgets the government sets. The sooner we get rid of this crazy rule, the easier life will become for both teachers and pupils.
Picked up an HP LaserJet 5, about five years ago, for 50$. It is an enterprise-grade network-aware printer from the 1995 era.
It is a fucking tank, both in size/weight and in reliability. And the toner (which you can get for maybe 50$ from toner wholesalers) lasts for ~6800 pages or more.
It pretty much never jams. If it does though, it’s a world of pain. But that happened once (for a couple of months) years ago. I had a bit of plastic stuck inside. Since then, it has kept on chugging with no problems at all. I wish it was smaller, lighter, quieter and didn’t use 24 frickin’ watts in “power save” mode, but hey, it’s the most reliable piece of equipment I’ve seen in years (granted I print very little).
I hate printers.
I spent a year as an IT technician and seemed to spend most of my time coaxing printers back to life, unjamming paper jams and cleaning printer rollers with a paintbrush.
The thing about printers is they’re relatively complex mechanical devices with lots of physical moving parts – that makes them a lot less predictable than the digital world most of us inhabit a lot of the time!
Firstly, thanks for making me laugh out loud a number of times as I walked home from work.
Hi, my name’s David, and I fricking hate printers too. Randomly jamming, deciding not to print stuff, always misbehaving given the chance and the rest of the time they just sit there watching you – why are they so big? they’re such a waste of space.
And then when they do print correctly, you can guarantee the paper will somehow fall on the floor, get eaten by the dog and everything’s in the wrong order.
Please, let’s just embrace our digital overlords and stop using paper!
Oh, and finally, lets not forget the idiots who always make my print jobs go just over 1 page – so the 2nd page has something like a one line online copyright notice on it.
Just saw a tv ad here in the States about overpaying for printer ink. It was a Kodak ad, and they said that their printer ink is fairly and reasonable priced. Their website is printandprosper.com . Just made me think of this shot.
I haven’t owned a printer in years and stories like the ones above remind me of how much stress I am missing out on!
Not owning a printer means I don’t print anything out unless absolutely necessary. If a company asks me to print something out and sign it, I ask them to please put a hard copy in the post. If I do need to print something (maybe about once a month) I put it on a USB stick and go to the local print shop. Sure it’s a little less convenient than printing it out at home but I’m truly glad of the hassle it saves.