Why are printers such pieces of crap?

[Marcel Birgelen]

We could probably write a Stephen King sized novel filled with printer horror stories and sell the filming rights to the highest bidder. :P

The company that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard once founded is long gone. It has been merged, split, merged, split again and what was left has been stolen by grave-robbers. The last bit of quality engineering went into Agilent, the "professional" part of the business went to "HPE" and the consumer end of things still called "HP" is essentially just the consumer part of Compaq and a shell of the former printer division. HP still makes professional grade printers, like their large format inkjet based printers and their Indigo printing presses, but that's an entirely different business section with prices to match.

I guess we can at least partly blame HP for the race to the bottom, they were the 800-pound gorilla, they could've hold onto their design philosophy of delivering high-quality products at steep but still fair prices and neglect the bottom-dwelling market, but they decided otherwise.

HP original ink cartridges and toners never have been cheap. Earlier cartridges at least still came with a fresh printer head, but they've stopped doing that years ago. Those highly expensive cartridges are literally just sponges with a few grams of ink soaked into them. Their early design LaserJets and DeskJets were made to last. I've owned an original DeskJet and several early LaserJets for many years... The last HP "DeskJet" I tried to service, since it wasn't capable of pulling in paper straight, had practically everything in there made from cheap plastic. It was literally designed to blow itself apart after just a minimum of use.

[Jim Cassedy]

Ironically, the only ink cartridges I've had trouble with have been the genuine (expensive) ones from HP.
I had managed to find a decent supplier of cheaper re-filled cartridges, and never had any issues over
the several years I bought from them. Unfortunately, they seem to have gone out of business during
the Coronacapolyse.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I do like the mechanical simplicity of ink jet printers. It seems like laser printers are really complex in comparison with more stuff to go wrong along with a higher initial cost. Pretty much just two stepper motors and little heaters in the print head to force ink out. No photosensitive drum, high voltage, fuser, etc.

The first ink jet printer I saw was an Olivetti with a single ink jet. The carriage would fly back and forth across the paper printing one pixel at a time. Then I had an HP monochrome DeskJet, and now the HP 8600 which has worked well in its relatively light duty home use.

Next time I go to buy a printer, though, I'll research it a bit more (perhaps people here have recommendations). As mentioned previously, it would be interesting to see what Consumer Reports has to say.

Harold

[James Wyrembelski]

Laser is the way to go.

Interestingly I have an HP laser printer that's probably going on over 10 years old now. Has never failed.

I ended up upgrading last year to a Canon laser printer because I needed a scanner. So, I just purchased an all in one.

I do massive amounts of printing at year end. I couldn't imagine waiting for an inkjet to do the job (or have to replace the cartridges every two seconds).

[Jack Ondracek]

I stopped using inkjets when i started printing color posters for my boxoffice. The cost of ink is obscene and the printers are just loss-leaders to lock you into the tiny ink cartridges.

As for laser: I had very good service from a Cannon IC940. My last two "all-in ones" have been Brothers. The latest is a MFC9340CDW color model, purchased off-the-shelf at Office Depot.

Can't see any reason why I'd go back to inkjet... and certainly nothing from HP.

[Marcel Birgelen]

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[Mitchell Dvoskin]

> Why are printers such pieces of crap?

Obviously, because people buy them.

The average consumer does not print enough to need a reliable high end printer, so for them the cheapest is the best. Unfortunately for those of us who need something better than a cheap low end printer but do not need an expensive industrial high end printer, there are very few options any more.

I swore off ever buying anything with the letters HP around 15 years ago. Between their bloatware laden PC’s and their inkjet printers who’s cartridges time out and stop working after a period of time even if they are still full of link, they are a company that deserves to go out of business.

I have an Epson PhotoStyles 1400 inkjet printer that I bought back in 2008 that still works great, although it occasionally needs some easy maintenance. A few years ago I need to buy special print head cleaning cartridges to unclog the print heads that clogged up from infrequent use. I also every now and again, need to clean the rubber paper feed rollers with rubber cleaner when it starts to have trouble feeding paper. There is a counter that will kill the printer after a certain number of prints but even after all these years I have not hit that yet. When I do I have a program that I downloaded to reset the counter back to 1.

I also have a Brother B&W Laser Printer that is almost as old and have never had a problem.

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't know why the likes of Greenpeace aren't over there at the HP, Epson, Canon and whatnot headquarters, protesting the hell out of their policies of making printers cheaper than the ink in their as-hard-to-refill-as-possible cartridges... I don't know how many printers I sent to the junkyard in the last 10 years...

Epson tried to get into Greta Thunberg's good books with their "EcoTank" line: as their name implies, you refill them from bottles, but do not swap out the head.

When our eight-year old HP started to vomit ink all over the place, we bought one, because my wife does do quite high quantity printing. I've had to do the cleaning routine on it once, when it was unused for around 2-3 weeks. And the document feeder for scanning is total garbage, just like it was on the HP. Put more than 3-4 sheets on it and it will jam.

[Randy Stankey]

... And the document feeder for scanning is total garbage, just like it was on the HP. Put more than 3-4 sheets on it and it will jam.

I don't buy "All-in-One" printer/scanner/fax machines. If a printer does more than one thing, it is likely that it will do none of them very well.

I have a printer and a scanner. Separate devices. I use each for what it was intended.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

[Leo Enticknap]

I've had standalone scanners with garbage sheet feeders, too. The only remotely reliable ones I've used (i.e. you can put a pile of 30-40 sheets on it, push the button, and come back when it's done) have been on industrial strength office photocopier/scanner machines.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Epson tried to get into Greta Thunberg's good books with their "EcoTank" line: as their name implies, you refill them from bottles, but do not swap out the head.

When our eight-year old HP started to vomit ink all over the place, we bought one, because my wife does do quite high quantity printing. I've had to do the cleaning routine on it once, when it was unused for around 2-3 weeks. And the document feeder for scanning is total garbage, just like it was on the HP. Put more than 3-4 sheets on it and it will jam.

Yeah, I guess the fact that many people retrofitted their cheapo printers with external tank kits (known as CISS), offered for less than a new ink cartridge on AliExpress, has nothing to do with it.

[Leo Enticknap]

I tried one of those with the HP. The resulting ink spray around the room when one of the little hoses accidentally separated from the tank stuck on the side of the printer created what might have been the world's first calico cat with patches of magenta on her coat. It took the poor kit 4-6 weeks to shed away the magenta hair and return to her natural color, not to mention half an hour on hold waiting for the vet to answer, to confirm that licking it wouldn't hurt her.

[Scott Norwood]

My home printer is an HP Laserjet 4050N. I bought it refurbished in Y2K. It still works great, although it is now hard to find HP toner for it, since that is no longer sold by HP. I've done nothing more than replacing the toner (and maybe changing a couple of rubber rollers). I don't do a lot of printing, but I do use it regularly.

B&W laser printing is a solved problem and has been since the '90s. Inkjet is still garbage, as is anything that supports color.

If I were replacing this one now, I'd get something like an HP M507N. The new ones aren't as good (and the toner costs per page are actually higher than the old printers), but a network B&W laser jet that supports Postscript and PCL (which means that it will work with pretty much anything without needing a proprietary driver) should be good for many years. HP is an irritating company, but they still seem to make the least-bad printers.

Of course, this doesn't help if you actually need color output, in which case I have no suggestions--they're all terrible.

[Mike Blakesley]

I will say that our HP all-in-one laser does make nice color prints -- for my newer Epson to get as good results as the HP laser does, I'd have to use deluxe paper plus the "best" print setting... even using the high-quality print on plain paper gives bland colors compared to the laser. The printer part of the HP is fine, it's the scanner/copier part that's falling apart. And it has some annoying software habits. The most annoying of all is, it has a fax function, but it's impossible to turn off "auto print." Since most of the faxes we get any more are junk mail, I finally just unplugged it from the phone jack. It's pretty rare that we get a request to fax something anymore anyway.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most modern laser and LED printers are capable of printing pretty decent color prints. Where they still have some catching up to do is in the photo printing business. One of the major problems is the color gamut that's achievable on a laser printer with just 4 colors, v.s. an inkjet with like 5, 7, 9 or whatnot many colors. It's far easier for inkjet printers to add a color than for a laser printer. Another common problem with darker photos on laser printers is some kind of posterization effects.

As for home and small office printing gear, my best experiences in the last few years have been with Brother equipment.

I tried one of those with the HP. The resulting ink spray around the room when one of the little hoses accidentally separated from the tank stuck on the side of the printer created what might have been the world's first calico cat with patches of magenta on her coat. It took the poor kit 4-6 weeks to shed away the magenta hair and return to her natural color, not to mention half an hour on hold waiting for the vet to answer, to confirm that licking it wouldn't hurt her.

Yeah, it's those kind of horror stories that have kept me away from most of those Frankensteinian upgrades. Cats apparently aren't capable of seeing "reds", so besides some funny odor, it may not have been bothered too much by it.