Ask HN: Why Are Printers Cursed?

12 points by J0_k3r 5 years ago | 27 comments

dirktheman 5 years ago |

For home office use you can't go wrong with a Brother HL-series laser printer. Cheap as beans, and (unlike HP), toner cartridges don't cost more than the printer itself.

For large offices: I have NEVER encountered a large multifunctional that didn't suck. The number of times I've pressed CTRL-P on my dekstop, only to have walked to the printer and found that somehow the print job hasn't arrived, was printed on A2 instead of A4 or the paper was jammed in one of 15 trays...

apohn 5 years ago | |

>For home office use you can't go wrong with a Brother HL-series laser printer. Cheap as beans, and (unlike HP), toner cartridges don't cost more than the printer itself.

Can't upvote this enough. Get a B/W Laser Printer with replacement toner that is reasonably priced. Brother is also really good about having original/authentic toner easily available. I've got a Brother B/W MFC with duplex printing and I've had zero issues for the 3 years I've had it.

I used to have a Samsung B/W Laser printer. Not only was the toner expensive, but I could never actually get it. Even the "Authentic Samsung" toners were fake. And I could never get anywhere close to the advertised printed pages.

I gave up on inkjets years ago.

ksec 5 years ago |

Buy a Laser Printer.

Dont Buy Inkjet. They All suck. They are designed so the Ink Cartridge head will be blocked after opening for x months. And Ink Cartridge are filled with Ink but either dry up or you will never be able to make full use of it. In Colour Inkjet some manufactures even make it so have to have enough ink in ALL colours to print. Even if you try to print something without it, mixed or not.

Their business model is basically force you to buy more Ink Cartridge.

Basically Consumer Inkjet printing sucks.

Edit: I think Xerox or Fujitsu had a new LED based printing tech similar to Laser, they were very good for first two years, but generally speaking they dont last as long as old Laser.

detaro 5 years ago | |

If you just need a few pages b/w every now and then, a cheap laser is probably more hassle-free.

Higher-end inkjets have gotten better, and are often competitive price-per-page with similarly priced lasers. E.g. there's now various models with ink tanks you refill from a bottle instead of cartridges.

I'm not a fan for ideological reasons, but e.g. HP also sells some printers with a "20 pages per month for free" pay-per-page model where they'll send you ink. Also an option, especially if you want to the cheaply print the occasional large photo (which is also just "a page")

avian 5 years ago | |

The issue with cheap (<1000 EUR) color laser printers seem to be that you will throw them out once you use up the supplied cartridges.

Either 1) you won't be able get new cartridges because of model churn 2) new cartridges will cost more than a new printer or 3) even with new cartridges your printouts will be unusable because the transfer drum/fuser/paper feeder will be worn out at that point.

In my opinion, for that kind of money you're better off buying a high-end inkjet if you need color printing.

cpach 5 years ago |

IME: Simple b/w laser printers can actually be quite reliable. The one I have doesn’t even have a color display.

theonemind 5 years ago | |

anecdata seconded here.

salamanderman 5 years ago | | |

Ditto. Honestly had the same printer happily running for 20 years. It eventually became too hard to frankenstein connector adaptors for it.

detaro 5 years ago |

* Few companies are good at hard- and software at the same time.

* Competitive market - pressure on price, in consumer market especially on up-front price. Weirdness around pricing schemes with ink, fight against cheaper alternative ink/refills, now ink subscriptions, ...

* this has generally let to low expectations, and in consumer market getting out of that is difficult. What does a "premium" consumer printer brand look like?!

* Complexity: Quite mechanical in nature compared to e.g. PCs or phones. Some parts need to be very precise (but still cheap). Handling paper is just tricky. Printers have very differing usage patterns - sometimes very high load at once, otherwise stuck in a corner for months or years. This doesn't jive well with cheap.

hakfoo 5 years ago | |

What I don't understand is the need for product churn.

Okay, photo printing at home was a new thing with some tighter tolerances, but a lot of home and office printing is asking for not much more than it was in 1997-- 300-600dpi black and a few coloured charts. Why not just take a bulletproof design from that era and swap out the control board from parallel to USB/Ethernet/Wifi? The R&D and tooling is done, and you can sell the premise of "takes big affordable cartridges with cheap generics available" if you're willing to not get on the Gilette business model train.

avian 5 years ago | | |

One role of product churn is to reduce the impact of unbiased reviews and make comparisons with the competition harder. If the model you're buying is only available in your specific region for a month or two it's impossible to know beforehand what kind of lemon you're buying.

My recent example: local consumer association published a comprehensive test of some 250 printer models in July. Out of those I could find 6 models I could actually buy, none of which met my needs.

dangus 5 years ago |

They aren’t. If you buy a cheap one, it will suck.

If you buy a color inkjet printer and you didn’t spend at least $200, you messed up.

I have the HP OfficeJet 9015, Wirecutter’s pick. It is far and away the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Also, if you want to print stuff, it doesn’t hurt to use Apple devices. AirPrint is dreamy.

Also, don’t forget how lousy printers used to be, especially in relation to drivers and software. Now it’s just join the printer to the WiFi and it’s there, ready to both print and scan wirelessly.

bzzzt 5 years ago | |

I recently bought an OfficeJet 9020. Can't say anything about reliability yet, but at least the ink is not outrageously expensive (just normal expensive...).

Installing the thing requires you to connect with an app that (thanks iOS 14) asks for much more permissions than it should (especially GPS location). It transmits your wifi password to the printer even if you've got a network cable plugged in! (it even has the nerve to ask you to remove the cable). Printer will not boot before completing this process, just hang on a 'connect with app' display. I'm not sure it even is legal to sell such a product here (Europe), but it sure is annoying they ship a product that requires an IT degree to use without giving up your privacy.

dangus 5 years ago | | |

I didn’t give the app any location permissions during setup, IIRC.

I was setting up the printer over WiFi, so that WiFi setup functionality didn’t bother me.

I assume you could avoid the app by plugging the printer with a USB cable, though I didn’t try.

cyberdrunk 5 years ago | |

> Now it’s just join the printer to the WiFi and it’s there, ready to both print and scan wirelessly.

Or, alternatively, spend a frustrating afternoon trying to set it up, give up and buy very long USB cable...

thorin 5 years ago |

Any idea what would be a decent home printer for work ( and some schooling). It would be nice to have colour but maybe something like this would be more appropriate.

It's never been an issue before as I've always been office based, but with lockdown and school shutdown this would have been useful. Needs to be small as I don't have office space!

Brother HL-L2350DW Mono Laser Printer - Single Function, Wireless/USB 2.0, 2 Sided Printing, 30PPM, A4 Printer, Small Office/Home Office Printer

UK Based

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-HL-L2350DW-Wireless-Connect...

asplake 5 years ago | |

I see that Brother gets several mentions here and I’m pleased with my inkjet. A3, multifunction, and ludicrously cheap from PC World

franzwong 5 years ago |

office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM

_ah 5 years ago |

+1 to all the recommendations for Brother laser printers. I've had a full-color machine for several years now and it's been rock solid. Prints literally every time, the first time. I didn't even know that was possible. Calling it "life changing" is only barely hyperbole.

Plus, I splashed out for the model with full-duplex scanning which makes random paperwork archiving a breeze. I set it to scan to a NAS on my local network, and then the NAS backup job uploads to cloud storage overnight. One-step archiving FTW.

frompdx 5 years ago |

I've definitely had my fair share of inkjet printers that were essentially worthless. However, my Brother HL-5370DW is excellent. I bought it 10 years ago for $125. This year, for the first time ever, I replaced the toner cartage. The cartage was $70. I'll probably get another 10 years out of the new cartage.

simonblack 5 years ago |

Black and White Laser Printer for the win.

Any other printer will drive you insane. That includes Color Laser printers, any kind of Ink Jet printer, all dot-matrix printers, heat-sensitive paper printers are particularly bad, printers with multi-part paper, printers that use paper with sprocket-holes. I think I've covered most of them.

qazxcvbnmlp 5 years ago |

If you buy a good one, they last a while and work reliably. If you buy a cheap one, the continuously have problems. Kinda like most things for that matter.

ecpottinger 5 years ago | |

One major problem I had, the store I worked at sold a range of laser printers. We had a cheaper one that was great for a student to print their reports, but it had a lot of plastic parts and thus if you did too much printing you could have problems with rollers and gears shifting. The manufacturer included the duty cycles on how many pages it should print in a single job.

The more expensive printers had Bakelite and Metal frames and parts. The duty cycles was so high you could basically run the printers for 24 hours without damaging anything. But the printers were a lot more expensive.

Take a guess which models cheap business men (and it always seemed to be men) insisted in buying even when we explained in detail why the cheaper printers should not be used in a business environment?

qazxcvbnmlp 5 years ago | | |

'I saved $50 on printers while taking up 2x of my employees time at $20 an hour' oops.

alexvoda 5 years ago |

Does anyone have any opinion about Epson CISS equiped inkjet printers?

phonon 5 years ago |

Don't buy cheap paper.

znpy 5 years ago |

Because people are dumb. Most people look at the purchase cost and do not care about operating cost, cost per printed page and OS support.

Over the years I realized that for non-professional use (that is, unless you can write off all the expenses) the way to go is to ALWAYS buy HP printers (everything else is worthless) and get laser printers, black and white, networked (WIFI/cabled, i prefer ethernet-cabled), ideally for the low-end professional segment.

I had a 2nd hand HP LaserJet 1200, worked tirelessly for years. It died a couple of years ago, but I really can't complain: that printer has been working for at least 15-18 years.

During the lockdown I got myself a LaserJet Pro M118dw, because reading RFCs on the laptop display is just awful living.

It's remarkable and worked out of the box with Xubuntu.

I can't stress the whole "HP-only" thing: their drivers are open source and often bundled, their advanced software (HPLip toolbox) reports pretty much everthing, never had a problem with them. Even with the all-in-one scanner enabled at my parents, I used the wireless scanner functionality in GNU/Linux and was extatic when it worked out of the box (i really wasn't expecting that).

Toners are a bit more expensive but they last waaay longer. You can just buy one and forget, if you print some documents from time to time it'll last years. And unlike inkjet cartridges, it won't dry off.

Just buy HP laser printers. They just work.

The 20-50€ more in the price difference are for all the hassles you're not dealing with.