Why All Printers Suck, Even the Best Ones (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Why All Printers Suck, Even the Best Ones (2016)

nytimes.com

25 pointsnixass48 comments

The best advice I have for people is to stop buying inkjet printers. For 95% of people, you are not printing enough to go through the ink before it dries.

I have had the same Brother laser printer for about 15 years and it may be the most reliable piece of technology I have ever owned.

I bought a brother laser printer also and have been using the demo cartridge that came with it for the past three years. It's still printing, and I've printed several books with it.

As an added bonus water doesn’t destroy laser prints like it does inkjet prints. I bought a color laser many years ago to print topographical maps when I go into the backcountry because they don’t get damaged when I have to take them out of the ziploc bag I use as a map case. Anything printed with ink gets ruined.

Not sure about water, but I found that most glues dissolve [something] in the printed surface.

this is true only for inkjet printers that use dye-based inks. If your printer uses pigment based ones, the colors won't run when wet.

Totally agree, I have a Canon laser that I bought for $100-$150 around eight years when we moved house (lots of stuff to print for lawyers etc).

The problem with Ink jets is that the ink dries up and clogs before I get to use them. So far the Canon hasn't missed a beat.

Got a used/written off HP laserjet for 30 bucks ten years ago, still on the same toner cartridge and no issues whatsoever yet. Good investment

Mostly agree but the release of "Tank Inkjet" printers has radically changed the economics. You ARE an idiot if you still own or buy an ink cartridge-based inkjet printer.

But yes, I go with both B/W and color laser printers mostly.

There are times when inkjet can give improved color rendering but on the right computer, you can get close to gamut even on newer color laser printers.

The OP's advice was the right advice for a long time. Occasional users were far better off with a laser, because of the reasons he gave.

But the advent of continuous ink printers has turned that on it's head. Continuous ink jet are colour (not marvellous colour, around the same standard a laser - but still), cheaper than the laser equivalents, cheaper per page and to address the direct concern about longevity some come with 12,000 pages of ink in the box which means they require 0 maintenance or supplies (except paper) for the life of the printer.

Then again I have those ecotank things, and dear lord, it needs 3 prints before it makes a clear print. I did the cleaning/calibration etc, doesn't matter. It's draft printing mode is apparently a while different way of printing, because that's broken beyond repair.

I paid 5 Euros for a HP 4050N from a bankrupt bank back in 2008.

I still have not changed the cartridge 13 years later!

I am starting to get worried that all the cartridge refill shops will go out of business before I get a chance to do a refill.

I just bought a new printer and got me the Epson EcoTank. No more printer on subsidy. You a a bit more but it got delivered with a set of ink bottles (no more cartridges) and now that I filled it I should be able to print for the next 3 years (that's how much ink these bottles contain). The ink is not super cheap but then again: they contain 10 times more ink than the old cartridges...

Does it also have a waste ink outlet? If not, you'll have to take it in for service when the pads which absorb the waste ink get full.

There is a waste ink pad that is user replaceable. I believe it's around 20 bucks for the original, or you can get one from AliExpress for 1/10th of that.

Depends on the specific country. In some areas, they do sell replacement pads (and there are knockoffs if you don't want it), while in other countries you have to call a service technician.

But doesn't the ink still dry up over time? An EcoTank seems like it increases the likelihood of lines or jets clogging and causing malfunctions, especially if you use older and older ink to refill it.

Anecdotally no. I'm not sure if it's the ink formulation, or just that when the ink is so cheap you print much more often so the ink doesn't dry up.

I have one too. Prints very nice (bought it mainly to print photos at home), ink consumption is minimal.

But the pritnt head carriage started to be dirty with ink and leaving dark smudges on the paper. The cleaning pad is soaked with ink. It is not user-replaceable. The waste ink container is nearly empty (less than 1/4). From time to time I have to suck out the excess ink with paper towels and clean the head carriage.

Maybe I do not use it frequenly enough to pump the waste ink to the container? I'm just guessing, based on the ink pad and waste container position and hose routing it can't be gravity based. There may be some kind of peristaltic pump powered by the paper feed axle (as it rotates the paper feed rollers vigorously during self-cleaning)

same deal here, quite worthless. Also takes 3 prints before it's readable. Especially irritating for barcodes/qr codes.

"Basically, printers are a dismal product category. But doesn’t it feel better to know why?"

This article didn't explain anything! Printers suck because they are technology, and they have a business model. Okay, thanks NYT.

I guess my expectations of printers are low -- don't need color or fancy LCD screens. So I had HP 1022n for about 2 decades now and it works wonderfully every single time. Just need to replace toner cartridge every 2-5 years, but they're cheap.

Its very hard to find another device in my home that has operated for this long without becoming obsolete or breaking down. Even my AC unit is obsolete by current efficiency standards.

I've realized I don't need a printer at all anymore. The rare times I've need to print something I just do it at the public library. I've printed probably 10 sheets in the past 3 years.

I used to feel the same way until I took an unused printer from my office. Now I print a ton of things. Return labels, invitations, envelopes, signed documents, contracts, etc.

If I need to sign something somebody emailed me I just do it on my tablet. Return labels are done at the library!

I feel similarly, hardly ever print anything, but when I need to print I REALLY need to print.

The frustrating thing is the cartridges are often dried up, the printer needs calibrating, or worst of all, the rubber rollers that feed the paper no longer grip the paper properly and cause serial jams.

I end up printing at fedex/kinkos.

I have been using Brother MFC printers for over 10 years and they have been awesome.

I remember when I got access to the Apple LaserWriter II at my dad’s work for the first time. Until then all I had access to had been dot matrix printers at school. As fun as folding springs from the side tabs was, this new printer opened so many doors for me. Illustrator (of the Aldus variety) drawings came out perfectly. School papers looked good. I couldn’t get over what I could now do.

I still have a deep fondness for laser printers and I’ve never owned anything else. As the article notes, they ‘just work’, and the results allow near-perfect reproduction really quickly.

I have an Epson inkjet with refillable ink. Cheap and easy to add ink, lovely photos (which I actually print a lot of - for elderly relatives). Only complaint is that I need to connect it over 2.4Ghz

Headline: “why all printers suck”

Body: “There’s not a good reason for this”

I am increasingly convinced that a great deal about inkjet pricing models results from an undeclared subsidy for the manufacture of print heads.

I have two inkjets. One is a base-tier HP AIO from about 2015. While I get the ink for ~free, if I paid MSRP for it, a full set of four replacement cartridges (including built-in, disposable heads) is $160.

The other is a Canon Pixma Pro 100. A full replacement set of eight ink tanks for it costs $100. The print head is a separate part. It costs $350.

I get the HP ink for ~free via "Instant Ink", whose wholly per-page subscription pricing model works out extremely well for me because I print photos on it - each sheet comes out full of ink, so the unit economics are as strongly in my favor as they would be in HP's if I used that printer for documents. The other side of the Instant Ink deal is, new cartridge sets come with packaging that you use to ship back the spent ones, which are refilled and shipped back out to other subscribers.

Every time that happens, it's a set of print heads that doesn't have to be manufactured anew, and the wild variance in parts cost from the Canon suggests strongly to me that this is the hidden variable which makes the Instant Ink unit economics work out as well for HP as they do for me, even though they are giving me the ink.

It makes sense that this should be the case, given the oft-repeated truism that printer consumables subsidize the loss leader of the printer itself. What I don't understand is why no one who actually participates in the "printer ink costs more than gold" discourse ever talks about this. Either I'm way off base here, or there's some folks out there who haven't noticed something that by now you'd think they would have - I mean yeah, this article mentions heads, but briefly, and seems not to notice the manufacturing cost that goes in the trash every time anyone throws out a cartridge with a built-in head.

(If anyone's curious, I also have a cheap monochrome laser, which I use to print documents and book blocks - it's been very reliable so far, but isn't really designed for the heavy use I give it, and I suspect that when its fuser wears out I'm going to replace it and strip it down for parts because, just as with the $100 Canon and its $350 print head, buying a new loss-leader printer entirely will prove cheaper than buying that replacement part.)

A couple of decades ago I did tech support for HP, and one of the stand out features of the HP cartridges was the print head that would be replaced every time you swapped it.

I’m curious if they refurbish the head or just replace it on a recycled cartridge.

For the Instant Ink cartridges, I expect they test and do one or the other as needed. Too, the cartridge knows how many cycles it's run, so probably there's a threshold below which the policy is to just refill and ship, and then apologetically replace in case of customer complaint.

That's how I'd do it, anyway, I think - assuming at least that my analysis of the unit economics is not off base. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone in the industry to ask. Wirecutter's writers could probably find someone, which is why I wish they'd cotton on to it, but I don't wish that hard enough to go to the trouble of emailing them about it.

What a disgusting and condescending article. Basically saying we should be grateful that printer companies give us cheap printers so they can bleed us for the ink.

Printers suck because it's the only physical thing we ask computers to do, and it's a difficult thing. But that doesn't excuse the fact that printer companies don't give a single shit about the user experience.

My favorite part about printers is I can pay less for a printer that makes physical objects by moving a plate up and down in a vat of UV curing resin at the resolution of 0.01mm and does so perfectly every time, than a machine that is pretty much the equivalent of banging rocks together to spit ink onto a piece of paper that will still fail more often.

Yeah, but you can take the page out of the paper printer safely without gloves.

If I were king for a day I would simply ban printer makers from selling ink/toner/cartridges. This would fix practically all of the perverse incentives currently plaguing the printer industry. For that matter I'd also ban cellular carriers from selling phones.

A law standardizing cartridges would fix the problem. Of course, with a patent-free royalty-free open standard.

Pretty much. The only problem with this is you'd prevent genuine innovation in print technology, but a requirement that all printers use some open standard (even a novel one published by the manufacturer) would fix the problem well. The universal availability of third party cartridges shows that if you build it, they will come.

...Actually if you don't publish a standard, they figure out how to build it anyway, yet here we are. So as far as I can tell that's not the issue. Though it would at least stop vendors from haunting people with scaremongering about third party cartridges. Clearly there are enough people buying ink from the vendors to make the subsidy model viable. Maybe more standardisation would at least shift this attitude and make more people (e.g. organizational purchasers) see it as a genuine choice as to who to buy from.

In Brazil, HP sued a third party manufacturer for selling compatible cartridges: http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2012/05/hp-resolve-di...

People would probably think twice when buying a car if you could only fill it with gas from stations allowed by the carmaker.

Just somewhat related, I have both an inkjet printer and a 3D one, and came to a realization that it should be very easy to combine both in the same device.

I would buy it just for the space savings, never mind the $$ saved.

If you can figure out how to make ink print in 3D, or get polymer to stick to paper, that would indeed be revolutionary.

You might be surprised to learn there are 3D printers with what is essentially a inkjet print head in them to do full colour 3D prints. Search up, Mimaki, HP Jet Fusion and ColorJet technology to start.

Sadly you can't use them for printing on paper though!

Anecdotally, I have a 10 year old Samsung wireless printer. I buy knockoff toner and cheap paper. It has 12128 pages on the counter. It just works 99% of the time. Is this unexpected?

My LaserJet 4050 that I bought used a couple of years before the turn of the millenium doesn't suck that badly!

Long live EcoTank.

What's wrong with a color laser printer?

My Oki impact printer works great.

> Unhelpful customer support, making it impossible to troubleshoot problems anyway

Sadly this is by explicit intention. I used to work at HP and got involved with the printer group because of their policies - they were and probably still are mostly horrible, greedy people with small minds!

We were one of the other "B2B" organizations so we routinely talked to customers because 99% of our sales were direct face-to-face (and they still are today since the split). So we were happy to let customers contact us and our web site had that provision.

The printer group absolutely did NOT want to ever talk to customers. It was worse than customers being lepers in 1 AD!!

Some of the arguments given to us included:

* "That's why we have channels - so we don't have to talk to customers"

* "It costs us the margin of 14.3 DeskJets to even look at an e-mail from one customer. It's not worth it!" They never asked or cared about how many fewer customer issues might be addressed to avoid attempts to contact with some modest Pareto sorting

* They said it was "too hard" to sort and categorize messages that came in (this being the COMPUTER/Printer organizations) and we were only a measurement division.

I wrote a text scanning system in about a week to do exactly that (an early NN/ML system) and it would output: Organization, Product Number (most people were really good about including enough information to arrive at that), Product Line, Product Line Manager, Product Line Support Contact. So I used it on our incoming messages and then on the poor souls who couldn't find contact info for printers who contacted us. And it worked just fine. I just got several corporate databases which would key off of product numbers. 99% accurate in summarizing and scanning to that.

So next meeting I brought up the issue of "printer customers contacting us", they repeated the same excuses, and handed out that months summary and detailed referable messages for their products. They didn't like that - definitely a f-ck you on my part. I then summarized what that report meant for this business (I don't suffer fools well) which included: CompuUSA failing to uphold their channel contract which required they deliver warrantee services, and a major design flaw in one of the DeskJets that was causing massive failures in the field. They had no clue about any of this! Because they didn't want to talk to customers. Nor even engage their channel partners regularly!

I also happened to sit next to the marketing guy in charge of that product: he actually knew before it shipped. His "plan" (because I overheard him brag about it) was to get as much revenue in to get promoted and then it would be his replacement's problem. The very antithesis of the HP Way - fuck him!

All of this is why, despite being a long-time customer of and ex-employee of HP, I'd NEVER buy HP printers or computers nor would I even accept them as gifts! Hell NO!

There are competing companies out there that actually care about quality and customer value. That is NOT HP Inc. nor HP Ent.

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