Why All Printers Suck, Even the Best Ones
thewirecutter.com
thewirecutter.com
As for being happy, I must be the exception to the rule. I have a Laserjet 4000 here which has been sat on my home network since I was given it as part of a load of IT gear I was given in 2000. It has a page count of over 70k (it was the low mileage one of the two printers I was given at about 40k when I got it - the other already had 130k on it!), and just works. All I've ever had to to do it in 16 years of reasonably heavy use is to put paper in it, change the toner once (got 3 new toners with it as well!), and buy a new paper tray because the rollers were worn (£6). It's connected to my Ubuntu server and works on Google Cloud print as well as a locally shared Windows printer. Its only downside is the high (18W) standby consumption, but like my ageing central heating boiler, I'm not going to change it just because of that.
1. I buy a printer
2. I use the printer. Great
3. Several months pass...
4. The printer head is clogged. Occasionally I can fix it by running the cleaning cycle. Sometimes I can take it to a shop to be cleared. GOTO 2
5. Sometimes I throw the printer away. GOTO 1
I'm rather sick of this cycle. Surely I can't be the only person that wants a photo printer that can cope with being used intermittently?
What am I doing wrong?
EDIT: I just saw this from the article: "...though these printers automatically perform periodic purges to keep their nozzles clean and ready to print"
Seems like maybe I need to keep it powered on all the time so it can clean itself. I never knew this.
Can anyone confirm if this will solve my problem reliably?
Buying inkjet printers. They typically don't last well without frequent use and maintenance. Get a decent laser printer and it will last a good long time (presuming it's a good unit to start with).
Lasers are relatively cheap (you can get a decent B&W laser for $100) and don't mind either significant usage or staying in storage for a long time.
Inkjet are only suitable if you're frequently printing color (and regularly print pictures, if you're printing color but not photographs, get a color laser instead), and then you're probably better off getting a genuine photo printer.
But it looks like I'm out of luck. Laser printers suck at photos. Inkjets clog up or dry out if not used regularly.
And any alternative tech (is dye-sub still a thing?) is prohibitively expensive.
You can't beat photo quality with dedicated printers (like the ones in your local Pharmacy)
Yes, but at the cost of wasting most of your (very expensive) ink. Rather than finding that your printer head is blocked after a few months, you'll find that the cartridge is empty.
The ink nozzles on a printer head are a few tens of microns across. It's an engineering miracle that they work at all.
If you print photos very infrequently, the best option is to use a local copy centre or order your prints online. A 6x4 print typically costs about 10p and many companies offer same-day collection from high street shops.
Not using the office printer.
An used enterprise oriented printer is 100x better than any SOHO oriented printer.
Same when it comes to WiFi hardware. An $80 WiFi access point from Ubiquiti beats the pants off a fancy $200 router, as that kind of thing always seems to overheat and kick off all the WiFi connections or have some quirky opinions about ARP that will cause it to kick all the wireless and wired devices off because it doesn't like how some other device rolls -- and they don't get called to account because people assume that the softphone doesn't work because the softphone sucks, or that windows SMB sharing doesn't work because windows sucks, or their ISP sucks, or the FBI is parked across the road and messing with their WiFi with a massive directional antenna, etc.
The whole industry is backwards and creating huge amounts of waste. All printers I've pretty much ever seen are flimsy plastic pieces of crap with nonsensical control panels that look ugly as hell.
Maybe? Most people I know almost never print stuff anymore. It's almost worth it to buy cheap, use rarely when necessary and that's the end of it.
3+ years ago? Hell yeah give me a nice printer that's a little pricy and I'll buy it. I'm just not convinced there is a market for that today outside of business and there are many good but expensive printers for business.
Since that day, printing doesn't suck anymore, and my old Canon Pixma sits unused.
It's a little weird for me to see that logo on a printer, though - Brother has been a sewing machine manufacturer for a lot longer, and my mother, grandmother, and aunts have had a succession of Brother sewing machines.
I've seen modern ones that do computerized embroidery, and I guess it makes sense that there's a lot of overlap between the technology underpinning a sewing machine that does embroidery and a printer. They both require precisely positioning something in two axes over a fairly large area.
I wonder if Brother or somebody else who makes embroidery machines is really the perfect company to bring 3-d printing to the home. They have the expertise at not only the software and hardware side of building the embroidery machines, but also the experience of doing it cheaply and reliably enough for the mass market.
Assuming there's really a market for a 3-d printer in the $200 to $500 range, anybody who makes embroidery machines should be a Z-axis, build platform, and extruder head away from taking the world by storm. As an added bonus, they don't have to make all the other stuff that makes an embroidery machine expensive: the parts that actually do the sewing.
Thanks for making that connection for me!
A B/W duplex laser printer with a document feeder is a fantastic thing when you have your own business. They're a couple hundred dollars and they do Just Work. If you need color printing, you should send it to your local print shop who will do a better job than any inkjet ever will; if you need to print contracts, sign them, and scan them, a B&W laser printer with a document feeder is a godsend.
http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Color-Laser-Printer-1320c/dp/B001...
I had to buy a new toner cartridge once, which cost about 70 EUR. It gets frequent usage. It just sits on my home network and prints. I don't think it has ever had a paper jam.
Every single ink jet printer I had beforehand was an overpriced rip-off.
This Dell one has been awesome, and it only costs $112 on Amazon at the moment. Bargain.
Ink jets have all been an unreliable waste of money and time but I'd say this one doesn't suck...
This printer is probably one of my favorite pieces of technology for the above reasons. I should add I print around 10-20 pages per day.
Uses the 75X toner cartridge, which is still in production. Costs about $50 for ~5000 sheets worth of printing (which is about 5 to 6 years). Has a USB port, so it's networked through an Apple Airport Express. 600dpi, and does envelopes just as well. The drivers are the old school LaserJet/JetDirect drivers, so they'll likely be supported until the heat death of the universe.
Way back, I used to see these things in the field that have printed 15-20 times as many pages without even needing a replacement anything. I think 300-500K sheets is when they needed basic servicing.
I think I paid $600 in 1999. Not cheap, but 17 years of foolproof dead reliable service and not even needing to install/configure drivers has made it worth every cent.
A company offering an actual-priced printer, with actual-priced ink would go out of business fast: almost nobody would buy the expensive, unsubsidized printers.
I currently have a $60 printer which does just fine. Previously I had a >$200 fancy HP printer, but I got rid of it when I found out it would "expire" my ink. As someone that prints maybe a handful of concert tickets a year, that is bullshit.
I got a B/W Samsung laser for 80€, which printed for 3 years despite default toner that comes with the printer isn't even full capacity. After that I got a renewed toner for 28€, still prints.
Cousin bought a Xerox B/W laser for about 55€ last month and it comes with Wi-fi built-in. Renewed toner is also in the 30€ area. That's how cheap they are now.
But I don't agree with the article completely though, nowadays if you need colour printing (for documents, I wouldn't print photographs on a laser, it's still cheaper to print them in a shop) as well regularly, get a colour laser. It's 50-80$€ more then B/W (from 150 up) and you're also set for years.
Either you leave it plugged in, and it occasionally does a nozzle cleaning operation, using up ink each time, or you leave it unplugged, and it gets clogged if you don't use it regularly.
Granted, it does take longer than 6 months to empty an ink jet cartridge just through cleaning, but for an infrequently used printer, cleaning will use up a significant portion of your ink.
Either way the per ml price of ink is several orders of magnitude below even refilled cartridges, and since it's legit Epson ink, (hopefully) it won't screw up the print head.
Of course, the printer purchase price reflects the actual cost of making the printer as there is no cross subsidy but I am happy to pay 250 euros for the printer, in the knowledge that I won't be paying extortionate amounts for cartridges every month or two.
I also like not throwing out the used cartridges which always seems a huge waste.
just buy a damn laser printer.
Sincerely, a fellow Brother laser printer owner
Now we're running a Ricoh gel printer. Higher print quality, more features (duplex for free), cheap ink that doesn't dry out, comparable price for the printer itself, and less/no parts to replace regularly. And no half-assed "you need this undocumented 32 bit binary" wannabe CUPS driver like with Brother. Single PPD file, done.
First, the politics of ink management, which is probably half the article, have very little to do with the title, especially the "even the best ones" part. If you plan and budget to pay for the authorised ink (and you should plan your consumables and price them in when buying anything that uses consumables), printers generally won't suck, especially the best ones. TANSTAAFL.
Second, the most important point isn't being made: If your needs are such that you think you need a cheap inkjet colour printer, think again. If you need to print a lot, get a real, big mid-to-high-end colour laser printer (and/or a mid-to-high-end specialised photo printer). You'll make up the initial cost on a more sensible consumables approach. However, chances are heavily in favour of you not actually needing this. Mail-order your photo prints or go to the pharmacy. Have the occasional colour prints done at a copy shop (and if it's for a client meeting, have them finish the product professionally for you while they're at it). It's much more expensive per copy, but probably not by much at the end of the day.
Third, get a wifi-networked Brother laser printer. They are cheap and solid and the original toner is reasonably enough priced that I've never been seriously tempted by third-party alternatives.
Now that a majority of the ink jet patents have expired I hope that someone can come up with a reasonably durable open source inkjet printer where anyone can make the proper ink for it.
It's a very long time since I was in one of their stores, but those cables were typically £20-£25 for an unbranded with a wholesale of about 50p.
The printers rejecting alien print cartridges reminds me of brood parasitism with birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite. Birds who co-evolve in environments where this is a problem develop defenses.
Any printer that supports AirPrint (almost any wireless printer) will at least give you a base level of functionality without printer specific drivers required. The only reason that I'm keeping the printer is because it still works with my iOS devices and I'm getting a Mac eventually.
But not with the OKI, it just works, always. I feel a little bad for using cheap Chinese toner but the discrepancy in price towards the OEM ones is just too large.
Using a website that has models/prices listed there are 466 new printers since 03/06/2015 with 25 brands coming down to an average of 18 new printer models per brand.
Anyone knows why printer brands don't just make a few good models and keep them for a long while ? (I suspect this problem is not limited to the printer business.)
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the internal components are mostly the same between models.
When my wife was doing her second degree, I used some of those ink injectors to save on ink. They worked fine, but now I usually just end up buying the HP brand.
I think a printer that is 10 years old and still works fine says something about the technology.
Inkjet is only reliable if the printer is used and calibrated regularly. Even large scale plotters are switching to solid ink (ie wax ball).
This is largely a 'solved' problem but most consumers will still gravitate toward lower price tags and purchase cheap throwaway inkjet printers.
Why would you need to navigate an LCD screen on a black and white laser printer? Most low end lasers don't even have an LCD. You use the included utility on your computer which tells you everything you need to know about toner level, pages printed, ECO mode, etc.
Or as someone else has suggestion, a Dyson printer