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I bought three printers from three different name brands last year: all of them sucked, none of them worked for print and scan across Mac and Windows, much less Linux. We eventually kept the least worst. After 30 years of solid global consumer demand, one can say printers are truly a bullshit industry. Our office is basically paperless now, I tend to use the thing more to scan hand-written notes than to print.

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Don't give up on the industry. I believe that HP is actually seeding the idea that no printer is better, because I've heard several people resignedly tell me that they're getting an HP because "they're terrible, but every printer is terrible and at least I recognize the brand". Some sort of endgame of marketing perhaps. But reliable and good printers are indeed available to purchase, as long as you can find them. I can recommend the Brother HL-2270DW I purchased nearly a decade ago which is still completely trouble-free (And prints duplex in a small footprint! Delightful.)

Making printers is not trivial. Paper is not as simple as it seems. It's super thin and light which is difficult for machines to handle at speed, and it also comes stacked in a near-solid block from which pieces need to be separated delicately but firmly. The materials science behind the rubber to grip with just the right amount of friction, time after time, accounting for wear and dirt, is mind-boggling. Paper is also noticeably affected by temperature and humidity, both of which change its properties nearly by the minute. This changing nature affects feeding, making the pieces floppier at times and liable to miss the handoff to the next set of rollers, or clingy at others and adhering to a plastic guide for longer than expected. Also the electrostatic properties vary which affects how much charge the drum needs to put on each piece to ensure the correct amount of toner particles adhere -- too much and you get squished smears, too little and the text is faint. And let's not forget the fixing process, which heats the paper to bake the toner into the crevices of the page, which may take twice as long due to extra moisture, but you wouldn't want to burn things if someone is sending through some extra thin paper for some reason. And of course as it's printing the printer is changing all of these variables with its heat and motion, changing the dimensions of every space in its interior. Every printer contains many environmental sensors so they can detect these changes and tweak their control mechanisms for each individual piece of paper. It's kind of akin to baking a perfect baguette every time.

Printers are miniature marvels, and there are still some wizards out there who know how to make them well. But we have to, like, patronize those wizards instead of the goblins of HP or else we will truly be buying our own way into the dismal future of crap that HP creates.

While a great comment, and not discounting how difficult of a problem it is, most people hate the garbage tier drivers and apps much more than the occasional jam or misprint.

HP created the LaserJet III over 25 years ago. A tank of a printer. Bulletproof. What happened?

Carly Fiorina.

HP's business/corporate printers are still bulletproof. Just stay away from their consumer stuff.

Interestingly the bulk of that printer didn't come from HP. Canon made the print engine and HP (alongside Apple and a few others) put their controller inside it.

It was probably the peak for reliability, I worked for a company that sold a lot of them and the failure rate increased quite noticeably when they introduced the LaserJet 4.

HP bought Samsung's printer business and is transitioning away from Canon print engines wherever they can (i.e. not for high-end models).

It is a hard problem, but it is also largely a solved problem since literally decades ago. If you were to start from scratch, you'd need to reinvent all of those things, which undoubtedly would make any such endeavor not worth it.

Of course, that doesn't make it worth it for just anyone to start making printers. But we see time and time again that where they fail nowadays is in UI, integration, and business models.

It's similar to the post on the first page about USB-C hubs, and graphics cards, and earphones. Typically you buy them as OEM stuff - very very few go through the trouble and design earphone drivers (loudspeakers) from scratch (etc). That, and reference designs. Visiting Shenzhen is an eye opener, browsing Aliexpress too :).

I bought a Brother HL-L2320D which at the time was the cheapest mono laser with duplexing I could find. On Windows and macOS it's fantastically uneventful, unfortunately on Linux the situation is less great. brlaser [0] does mostly work, but it seems there is a bug as some more complex documents (typically scans) won't print [1]. I ended up patching my version to reduce the size of one of the buffers [2], and haven't seen it fail since, but I doubt I've actually fixed the issue and instead just moved the threshold.

[0] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser

[1] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/issues/79#issuecomment-7...

[2] - https://github.com/benpye/nix-config/blob/main/overlays/brla...

I just got an Epson Eco Tank thing, and I freakin love it. Works great with CUPS (no scanning, but I don’t care about that) and it’s cheaper per page than any laser; full color!

There is actually scanning over the network now under Linux without any special drivers. called eSCL

It's a bit fiddly to set up, but once set up works well.

Oh, nice. Gonna give that a shot. Thanks!

I've found getting a multifunction device with wifi/network capability and the ability to directly upload to Dropbox or other cloud services is a _huge_ sanity saver. You can just completely throw away having to install or janitor drivers for document scanning and do it all on the device. Send things straight to your cloud file store of choice and the doc is right there on whatever computer you need. This is how scanning should work but absolutely never does when you have to touch drivers and such.

For printing if you use a modern version of Ubuntu or other distro it's pretty uneventful and network printers, especially those that support Apple print and advertise themselves on your network, all just work.

I bought an HP M521dn in 2020 for $150 on craigslist. It takes $30 55A toner cartridges and worked out of the box for Mac, Windows, and Linux and scans to email or a fileshare.

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