Yes, that’s sort of the fundamental issue - injket printers for consumer document use are an inherently stupid product, always have been, and always will be, for technical reasons that go beyond the battle between the manufacturers who want to sell them at a loss and make money on cartridges vs. the smart-stupid people who think they can beat the system. Trying to regulate them or make them better is like trying to regulate the purity of homopathic cold medicine or the honesty of fortune tellers - these are products for people who want to be scammed so what’s the point. And just like you can buy actual Dayquil at the same CVS, any inkjet printer manufacturer will be more than happy to sell you a laser printer that actually does what you are expecting a printer to do. Just get the thing that works and stop trying to ice-skate uphill.
Speaking of printers, I have an old laserjet that works very well, a Brother, and it has a scanner bed. I thought I’d use it rather than the good one at work (I’m off this week) or my phone (just makes a nicer square). But it turns out:
- Brother has deleted the software that would make the scan work. I can see old scans that I made five years ago, but otherwise the program is missing.
- Brother does not seem to support the program any more for this model of printer. There’s a similar one, but
- The installation is so complicated now because of technology that didn’t exist when I bought the printer that it’s just not worth my time to figure out.
Bonus rant:
My old windows profiles from the last four machines are installed on this computer. The machine defaults to “you can’t access these” even though (A) none were ever password protected (it’s a personal computer) and (B) they’re all me and (C) there’s nothing particularly precious there, anyway. It’s a right royal pain to go and configure things so I can access my own damn files, even though the important ones (documents etc) were all ported over to the new machine. Pictures and music, however, were all over the place.
Has anybody had to replace a car fob battery recently? Last week when I was on a road trip, my car informed me that my fob battery needed to be replaced. So I found a hardware store and bought a 2-pack of the 2026 batteries. But later, in my hotel room, as I began the replacement process, I soon realized that one needs a pair of scissors to open the damn blister pack. I don’t carry such an item in my travel kit, but fortunately the helpful front desk clerk was able to cut open the package to free the batteries.
This. I finally got tired of spending 60 bucks every 6 months to replace the cartridges in a printer that cost 99 bucks. I bought an HP color laser printer/scanner two years ago and have yet to replace the toner cartridges.
Meh.
If all you are doing is printing documents, than a laser printer is clearly a better choice over an inkjet (although toners are often chipped just like ink is), but if you want to print photo-quality images, there is no consumer-grade laser than will do that, and plenty of inkjets that can.
Yep, as expected, the laser printer will refuse to accept third party or refilled toner cartridges, and will use page count to stop using the existing toner cartridge or drum cartridge, instead of waiting for the toner to empty or the drum to wear out. Any company smart enough to play these games with inkjet printers is also smart enough to play them with lasers.
I do agree that excepting photo printing, lasers are going to be the better, and somewhat less scummy/scammy option. Still seems awfully suspicious for a drum to die at exactly 12,000 pages, and cost 75% the price of a new printer. I have to explain to people that printers are disposable, and when the cost to run them is too high, or they show any sign of wearing out, they need to go.
While true, I wonder if a lot of people are taken in by false notions of how often they actually print photos.
I was, for a while. I bought a nice inkjet, thinking that I want to print documents and photos. But I actually rarely print at all, maybe a couple of times per month. So the inkjet wastes 95% of its ink in cleaning cycles, which also make it take way longer to print in general. And it turned out that I almost never want to print photos.
Eventually I got sick of that crap and replaced it with a laser. It has no cleaning cycles, and can go indefinitely between prints with no extra fuss. It’s always finished by the time I walk to that side of the house.
If I need a photo, I can use an online service. Haven’t actually needed it yet.
A lot of people buy things for the 1% case, forgetting that even small inefficiencies in the 99% case overwhelm that. And the difference between an inkjet and a laser is not a small inefficiency.
I bought a laser printer because I was constantly having the ink jet carts clog here in Arizona no matter what I did with them.
Yup. That was my problem in Colorado. I don’t print very much but whenever I needed to, the ink was dried out or clogged. I could sometimes get it to work. Sometimes.
Me too, which is why I moved to laser.
As I grow older, I’ve come to realize that what I care most about in technology isn’t features or price, it’s reliability. I just want stuff to work when I need it.
Yup. I live kinda remote. I can’t just pop over to the ‘store’ when I need something.
This.
I can upload my pictures to Walgreens and have them professionally printed for 28 cents each. I’m guessing that an inkjet printer costs way more than that to print a picture.
Ditto for Kansas.
Only reason I have an inkjet multifunction is for use as an inexpensive scanner with some ocassional bonus copier/printer use, because I do scan paper with some frequency. Back when I was doing regular printing in the mid-20teens I got myself a basic laser as a primary, that is still at my PR house and still working.
And it works as a scanner without ink? What brand is it? Both the Brother I have now and the HP I had before refuse to do anything at all if any of the inks/toners is empty, even tasks that don’t use that (or any) color.
The universal complaints about printers (I’ve got five useless ones in my house somewhere at the moment) lead me to believe that this is a ripe field for competition. I’ve even got an ad campaign for them: “OUR PRINTERS DON’T SUCK!”
I’ve never seen an entire field quite like this one, where every brand is seen as a total consumer rip-off, where no one is satisfied with the printers they bought for years, yet everyone owns at least one or two. This is an unexploited idea for a thriving business–all you have to do is manufacture a reliable machine that uses affordable ink, which seems a barrier that is easy to get over.
FWIW, I worked in the printer industry for a while, and had it explained to me thusly:
If printers were priced based on their cost to manufacture, nobody could afford them. By making the cheaply-produced ink very expensive, they’re moving closer to the model of paying for prints, not for the printer. (This is the biz. model that made Xerox their $billions back in the day.)
But oh, everybody on the internet (present company excepted) just knows it’s a huge scandal, a giant rip-off, etc. But they never seem to realize that they are enjoying the privilege owning of a high-tech, tabloid, photo-quality printer for ridiculously cheap, as my Epson model is. Darn thing even has a scanner on it–super useful–and I’ve used this printer for over 10 years with near perfect reliability. It cost me all of $350 when I bought it in about 2014. (OK, sure, I almost never use it for photos.)
If it wasn’t for this “cheap printer, expensive ink” pricing model, most people wouldn’t be able to have such a device in their homes.
Never tried it but according to
Epson it’s supposed to: Availability of Non-Printing Functions on Epson All-in-Ones When Ink is Expended | Epson US as long as the cartridges are all in. Take with the appropriate grains of salt. (I mean, it would not surprise me if after the umpteenth warning after the tank is most truly sincerely empty the whole device itself just safed out, taking the scanner along, rather than keep going forever. And notice the insistent repetition of “all the genuine Epson cartridges”)
I have both a toaster oven and a regular pop-up toaster that’s a holdover from our RV days. The latter is a cheery red color and does an adequate job of browning bread, but for some reason the power cord enters at what I would call the ‘front’ of the toaster. In other words, right below the lever that submerges the bread into the elements. This means, because of the stinginess of the cord length, that it is impossible to use the toaster with the front sticking out towards the user.
That’s not the part I have trouble with. The part I have trouble with is that they appear to be constructed so as to break down within a few years; and, with my current one, that the damn thing insists on being online and refuses to connect via the perfectly good USB cable that’s plugged into it – and is so designed that attempting to force it to use the USB cable broke all ability to attempt to instruct or adjust it. Plus which, it keeps updating itself against my wishes, and I’m worried that this may cause it to eventually update itself to the point where it won’t work with the current computer. I understand that many people want their printers to be online. I have no need for my printer to be online, and don’t want it to be; for me it only provides another avenue for things to go wrong.
In addition, I am annoyed by warning notices that try very hard to get you to change the cartridges a couple of hundred pages early, and that then don’t warn you when actually down to the last dozen or two pages; as well as by repeated obnoxious attempts to make me buy, not only the company’s own cartridges which I’m willing to do, but cartridges directly from the company’s subscription service instead of from my local office supply/bookstore.
I do quite a bit of printing; but the number of pages is highly variable from day to day and also from month to month. They’re never going to guess it right. And I don’t want them recording how much printing I do, anyway.
I hear you!
While working in the consumer printer industry, the last thing any sane engineer, sales or marketing person wanted to do was…use the printer. Especially in front of customers. They have hundreds of failure modes!
I count myself lucky my 9-year-old Epson still works. The driver and monitoring software is equally old and is showing signs of creakiness. On Win 11, for instance, the scan button on the UI window does not even appear. I have to click the right spot, working from memory.
I can’t scan directly from the printer/scanner. I have to load the scanner, then go into the computer, open system preferences, open printers/scanners, open the scanner, then tell it to scan from there.
Presuming, of course, that the printer will deign to acknowledge that it’s connected to the computer. Which see above.
It will, at least, still copy things without complaining about whether it’s connected or not. But one of the things I need it for is to be able to get things into or out of the computer.