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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

Gerv

First result is the manual.

ok, not the top of my head, but not too painful.

Thanks, Kent

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.

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.

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.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documentSubCategory?tmp_rule=50779&tmp_task=solveCategory&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=59768&lang=en

Or whinge.

I’ve found writing useful stuff where it’s needed is a good habit.

Thanks, Kent

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.

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)

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.