Ask HN: Why does office printing suck so much? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does office printing suck so much?

12 pointsbjourne10 comments

At work we have three Bizhub C258 printers, managed by IT staff. If someone were to measure their availability, it would range from 10 to 30%. There is hands down no tech I deal with on a daily basis that is as unreliable as office printing. Just some of the issues I've encountered recently:

* No paper cause the person(s) whose job is to deliver paper isn't doing it. * Paper jams. Self-repair is possible but the error message says the plates are "extremely hot". Surprised that hasn't been the subject of a "hot coffee" lawsuit. * Lack of ink causing unreadable gray text. * Tilted pages becaue the papers weren't perfectly aligned in the tray. * Printer mysteriously printing multiple pages on the same paper. * Printer mysteriously flushing the print queue. * Login error: invalid user. * Login error: invalid password (no way). * Connection timeout: Network unreachable. * Only prints first two pages of pdf. * "Ghost printing": Printer makes printing sounds but paper with no print comes out.

Why is no startup addressing this? Imagine all business people running late to meetings because their printer is a POS. Contracts lost cause the printer fucked up double-sided printing. Must be billions here...

The last time I worked for a larger, local company with printing needs, we had printers that were either leased with a support contract or were rented or something like that.

Pricing was per unit, with billing per page. Reasonably cheap, too. Pennies per page.

The maintenance guy stopped by once a week to refill consumables and run diagnostics. I was convinced it was a waste of money.

But the printers always worked.

You describe an office where no one helps each other, the IT support team do not provide effective support and too much is being done last minute. If a startup needs to address anything, it's not the printer.

I think pretty much everything you mention is a solved problem.

To contrast, at work, we have some big fancy photocopiers that print too scattered around the floor. To print, you print to a 'smart queue' from the desktop, then you can walk up to any photocopier/printer and log in with your badge (same as is used for the doors/building access), and print whatever you printed to the 'smart queue'. If one printer is broken, out of paper, etc. (which has never happened to me), you could go up to any other printer in the organization and log in/fetch/print from there.

I guess the photocopiers take entire reams of paper of various sizes, and there's someone that refills them so they never run out. Probably there is some maintenance contract that keeps them all working.

Anyway, I'd say in my experience having worked there for five years, I can print with 100% reliability, and the 'smart queue' approach is much nicer than having to choose the 'right' printer from some big dropdown, sometimes accidentally printing something to some wrong far-off distant printer, etc.

Your current experience sucks. But are you empowered to change it?

Printing seems like an extreme case of where the person who has the authority to pay for it is extremely removed from the person who is asked to work with it day to day.

It also has the issue of being expensive and painful in aggregate, but not for any particular organizations.

Basically all printing sucks. Being at the office aggravates a pre-existing bad situation.

Is this really a problem? Buy a $100 ish Brother laser and it'll work for years without issue... just get one for yourself if the office printer is unreliable.

Tale as old as time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj_4KkTWW2o

It has been a solved problem for forty years or so.

Buy yourself a printer. Set it on your desk and manage the logistics and print quality yourself.

Good luck.

Startups aren’t addressing this because printing isn’t sexy and Silicon Valley doesn’t really want to acknowledge paper as a solution to anything.

You'd think printing companies would address it.

VCs will steer far away from things like this, yet it's too expensive for most people to tackle on their own. It's a problem above the level of LinkedIn or Asana, where the founders had the funds after selling PayPal. Printers are more expensive than to do than software and more entrenched.

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