Appealing. It may not seem it but the printer is actually a fairly complicated and difficult machine- well… the user is a complicated link. So a printer needs to be designed to meet the demands of quality and such your user might throw at it, it needs to balance economy with performance like speed, output quality, noise, and then reliability. Mechanically it is lots of small moving parts and many repetitive fast motions and it often is creating tiny particles and heat or accumulating tiny particles from the environment. Electronically there are all sorts of issues from compatibility to connectivity and even security- your network is generally only as secure as the most open device on it.
And…. Most printers seldom get any preventative maintenance or upkeep. Only the most expensive printers even get repaired generally. Cheaper models are usually replaced and it is even often cheaper to buy a new printer than buy ink, so many people often do that.
That leads to a place where there isn’t a lot of demand for manufacturers to make printers that are designed to be cleaned and adjusted and repaired. What’s more- the market largely demands cheaper machines, meaning that if they produced a printer that could last a lifetime and work flawlessly as long as you did preventative upkeep and periodic repairs… most people would likely balk st the price and not buy it. Of course, those who did buy would probably find that in a few years perhaps but certainly within a decade that newer better technology existed that was faster or quieter or used less ink or cheaper ink or was just “better” and made their model obsolete even though it was still perfectly functional. That’s if we didn’t introduce a new wireless standard or some other technological infrastructure leaps that would make that old printer not able to work with modern machines and thusly useless but perfectly tuned and otherwise functioning.
So on the market side there isn’t actually the demand. You see that across industries- do most homes have $5k-10k TV’s that have perfect black? How about furniture? Most of us have solid stuff that one piece costs as much as an entire room or house from IKEA or wayfarer but can last hundreds of years right? Probably not. For many possible reasons. So that’s the demand on the market, and then from the manufacturer stand point- would you REALLY be rich? After you sell that first printer to your customers, what next? Where does your money come from? Ink? That can be made by other people to work in your machine anyway so you can’t count on the profits there necessarily. Are your sales going to be enough to keep your workforce? What do you do with all the people who make the printers and such after the demand dies down because people have your “always working printer?” It’s starts a chain reaction that ripples from offices through factories and warehouses and transporters and retailers.
And that’s if… no one knocks off your design and finds a way to produce or cheaper. The boot leg gets already have a cost advantage because they don’t have the research or development costs you do. They likely don’t have the legal and compliance costs- they don’t need to start the company or file patents and trade marks. They probably don’t have the labor and benefits requirements and supply chain ethics constraints you do. They generally go direct to customer or direct to market. They copy the design and possibly steal molds or skim parts from the same factories making your components- they mass produce while often cutting costs where able, and then they sell online or through established channels in bulk. Generally very low overhead and they don’t generally have the liability you do. They are a flash in the pan- knock off whatever product is hot regardless of industry. If you get a bad rep you shutter up and rebrand or relabel.
So while most of us have had some sort of printer problems in our lives, we also often don’t want to or cannot pay what the cost is to not have those problems- and even if we did there isn’t a lot of reason for the manufacturer to shut down their long term revenue stream and disrupt the down stream economics of their business model.
Not to say that isn’t terrible- resources and pollution and waste are big topics that are likely to become bigger topics with time, so cutting waste will likely someday become a necessity and things will have to change regardless of the disruption that may cause. For now most people on both the seller and the buyer side are, if unwilling or unable to realize it- getting pretty much what they are happy with.
While I understand and agree with your assessment, and my experience is subjective and evidence anecdotal, I've never had as much trouble with printers across thirty years and multiple versions of multiple OSs running on multiple architectures as I have today.
It used to be that you matched up the physical port, usually some version of TTL or Centronics 8bit parallel, with an appropriate PostScript file. Standard driver installations made this easier in the nineties.
These days it's a nightmare every time. Assuming the wi-fi printer hasn't changed IP, the driver is correctly installed (and hasn't been altered in the last update) and the printer has all the paper and ink it needs and agrees that you've paid for it then I still have to keep it from leaking my credit card details.
It just seems like the increased complexity in technology would be followed by increased standardisation and ease of use as it has in most other products developed over seventy years.
As always there is wisdom and a touch of humor to your words. The high end stuff that most people don’t get (sadly even those who pay for pricey printers are often getting a lot of mark up in the box and not necessarily quality…) do have some standards- but when it comes to things like the woeful driver demons and connectivity issues- I think you’re dead on with standards.
I see an issue two places with modern printers- where there are standards and where there aren’t.
When it comes to wireless standard res they don’t have much choice if they want it to work- so they have to use Bluetooth or established Wi-Fi standards for their market generally. Where they DO have choice and we run into trouble is… if you decide to do a standard without legacy support, anyone running an older standard on their other equipment will have problems. If you DO include legacy support (common in home printers), then you have to more or less include all the quirks and bugs and issues that exist in the…
.. legacy standard or that come up when you have multiple standards- and then it gets really complicated when there are multiple legacy standards supported and a device or devices in the user network to the printer are operating on different standards or have different implementations of legacy support themselves so multiple devices may be hunting for a standard. So that is certainly an issue. But to your point about no standards…. Oh man. Yeah. I agree it’s a huge issue and that largely the industry doesn’t operate on standards. Well…caveat… we can say it operates on TOO MANY standards to call anything a standard.
Each manufacturer- neigh, each printer they produce may have its own “standard.” To some degree the mechanical standards are locked in- if you’ve got a mechanism that works for you for things like paper feed you might reuse it, and for the most part they’re going to try to minimize making parts from scratch so certain things like gears and such will come from a standard catalog from a supplier- but that’s about it. Why? Well… many reasons so I’ll just go with a few. Firstly, most printer companies are islands. Beyond needing some sort of communications protocols to allow connection to a given device- they don’t know or care what your set up looks like. To be fair- it would be impossible for most printer companies to be able to replicate even a handful of possible device and set up cases across all the hardware and software and network possibilities. But it’s still a case where they really mostly don’t care.
At the enterprise level, companies like Zebra have their own ecosphere. Their stuff tends to work well for enterprise clients because the zebra portable computer and the zebra approved software vendors and the zebra printer are all made to work pretty well together as long as the enterprise follows the spec for what they are sending to or asking from the device. Some big professional machine might be tested by an enterprise company on popular systems like IBM I series 5450 etc. or ADP services or such and enterprise clients with good people will tend to know what hardware is friendly to their systems. That’s the sort of “classic” scenario anyway. Enter the modern age.
So I’ll try to be relatively succinct. I call it the “open source syndrome.” Open source and android tend to be cheaper up front than Apple wether you are enterprise or not. The flexibility is superior for anyone who doesn’t have a use case that falls neatly into the Apple philosophy. There are some things that unless you crack the device or software- they just aren’t possible with Apple stuff. The trade there is that Apple is about as standardized as you get and those standards are why many things won’t work. The software knows the specs for the hardware, where anything you’d care to access on the system is, what is and isn’t on the system. Compatibility issues are somewhat rare and generally predictable. When you design something to work on ONE iPhone 13 it will work exactly the same on almost ALL iPhone 13. When you create code to run on ONE Galaxy…. Every single other user is effectively on a different device.
What launcher are they using? What does their file system look like? How do you predict the effect of 16 apps running in the background all making calls and setting hooks and latches to various hardware and jockeying to use that part of the device? The non mobile sphere isn’t much better- Java and all its versions, 100 ways to write a line of code to accomplish the same task… etc etc. like the printer companies- many software aka app companies are islands. They make an app and their concern is if their app works. They aren’t concerned if your OTHER apps work. So it’s actually fairly common for app makers to code aggressively so that their software is trying to get priority use of resources it needs to work- and when you have lots of programs all aggressively fighting for resources… things can get unpredictable because whoever gets there first and holds in is going to jam up the stack for everyone else.
So the often haphazard and non standardized nature of software like apps and OS contribute but the printers themselves like many apps are an island- the design and focus is all internal.
Which brings us to the black magic of drivers. I won’t go deep here because alot of it replicates the above- lots of software and hardware possibilities and legacy vs. non supported issues with drivers- one thing unique to drivers is that there is a question of wether a printer company wants to go with a proprietary driver or use a common open or licensed driver or something that is OS native. Of course there are all sorts of ways for drivers to get screwed up or “misfire,” and it can happen from the system side, it can happen from the driver side, and it can happen when the overall environment and hardware have some little quirk that the driver doesn’t like.
But let’s say that your printer is working fine and then there is an update to a driver or some software- it could be your OS, the printer, you’re router, your phone. If that devices maker put in some new code that now deviates from what the other machines software can jibe with- you now have printer problems.
The other big one as I see it is that push forward. The profits in printing are mostly in ink, paper, and bundling. Printer hardware are often sold at a loss. That’s why it is often cheaper to buy a new printer than new ink.
Printer companies push forwards to release new product and keep those wheels turning. This can be said of much if the industry. So there isn’t big push to go back and fix things like legacy standards that are largely depreciated when they are trying to optimize the present standard or work towards the new standard. You may get periodic software updates on a printer but the amount of effort being put in to upkeep on the old product usually falls off very
quickly as development resources are focussed on profits for the next period and supporting largely dead product only has so much profit and its contextual. So alot of problems you’ll have in this sense are “pocket cases” and “one offs.” It turns out that your printer has an issue that will take 10-40 hours of total labor from call center to end of problem and it effects users who are on Amazon kindle hacked to run windows 98 (hyperbole) but basically it’s some niche- this person is using some combo of programs or an obscure device or launcher or network or whatever- so the odds that others will have the exact same issue with the same fix are slim. The cost to solve the problem in a market of $50-100 devices with a short lifespan is probably greater than the profit.
So the nature of the game sort of makes it so that going back to fix old mistakes isn’t worth it- or less cynically we could say that it takes low priority next to innovation and new developments. Of course the legacy thing will often bring the potential for those old problems forward so ultimately it’s like building a 1 story flat and then deciding to add stories to it each year until it is a sky scraper- but each floor below has these problems with plumbing or wiring or structure and so each floor you build- any given unit might encounter problems.
Standards and such do finally phase out though- and sometimes that is the game. If you can stretch the clock and not fix the problem until the element that is causing the problem is no longer supported- well… if a fix would take 12 months and the standard is set to fall off in 24- is it worth putting 12 months that could go to new development into fixing old problems that won’t exist 12 months later? Some would say yes. Many modern..
.. companies say no. It’s all disposable anyway. They also tend to have a market that isn’t the most competitive and where they know you probably aren’t going to go without a printer at all even if you have problems with them. So that is a difference to many industries where there is strong competition or the user isn’t necessarily captive-
Tl:Dr- lol. Yeah. It does seem to be getting worse and I think that there are a few reasons but the way that printer companies handle standards and the overall software/hardware industry trending towards very loose or non existent standards with high variance and such are probably big ones. The glob answer to the OP saying that someone needs to make a printer that works would be to say to buy a printer and approved software from a vendor with a closed or regulated ecosystem and follow system spec. The modern user is a bit like a straight anarchist that complains about how the city isn’t doing enough to keep the streets safe. Though I do sympathize.
Great idea but nah like I get why printers so ridiculous
1Reply
deleted
· 2 years ago
Just buy a fucking Kyocera, boom, problem solved. Where's my billion bucks?
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Seriously: Buy! A! Kyocera! They're the best, most parts are replaceable (if needed) toner is cheap and lasts forever. We have four of these on the job and the handful of problems we've seen the past +15 years were caused by the offices "home made" operating software (which sucks balls cause our hippie company founder thought he was a decent coder but wasn't even half decent…) - never a problem with the printers. Like never.
And…. Most printers seldom get any preventative maintenance or upkeep. Only the most expensive printers even get repaired generally. Cheaper models are usually replaced and it is even often cheaper to buy a new printer than buy ink, so many people often do that.
Not to say that isn’t terrible- resources and pollution and waste are big topics that are likely to become bigger topics with time, so cutting waste will likely someday become a necessity and things will have to change regardless of the disruption that may cause. For now most people on both the seller and the buyer side are, if unwilling or unable to realize it- getting pretty much what they are happy with.
It used to be that you matched up the physical port, usually some version of TTL or Centronics 8bit parallel, with an appropriate PostScript file. Standard driver installations made this easier in the nineties.
These days it's a nightmare every time. Assuming the wi-fi printer hasn't changed IP, the driver is correctly installed (and hasn't been altered in the last update) and the printer has all the paper and ink it needs and agrees that you've paid for it then I still have to keep it from leaking my credit card details.
It just seems like the increased complexity in technology would be followed by increased standardisation and ease of use as it has in most other products developed over seventy years.
I see an issue two places with modern printers- where there are standards and where there aren’t.
When it comes to wireless standard res they don’t have much choice if they want it to work- so they have to use Bluetooth or established Wi-Fi standards for their market generally. Where they DO have choice and we run into trouble is… if you decide to do a standard without legacy support, anyone running an older standard on their other equipment will have problems. If you DO include legacy support (common in home printers), then you have to more or less include all the quirks and bugs and issues that exist in the…
Which brings us to the black magic of drivers. I won’t go deep here because alot of it replicates the above- lots of software and hardware possibilities and legacy vs. non supported issues with drivers- one thing unique to drivers is that there is a question of wether a printer company wants to go with a proprietary driver or use a common open or licensed driver or something that is OS native. Of course there are all sorts of ways for drivers to get screwed up or “misfire,” and it can happen from the system side, it can happen from the driver side, and it can happen when the overall environment and hardware have some little quirk that the driver doesn’t like.
The other big one as I see it is that push forward. The profits in printing are mostly in ink, paper, and bundling. Printer hardware are often sold at a loss. That’s why it is often cheaper to buy a new printer than new ink.
Printer companies push forwards to release new product and keep those wheels turning. This can be said of much if the industry. So there isn’t big push to go back and fix things like legacy standards that are largely depreciated when they are trying to optimize the present standard or work towards the new standard. You may get periodic software updates on a printer but the amount of effort being put in to upkeep on the old product usually falls off very
Standards and such do finally phase out though- and sometimes that is the game. If you can stretch the clock and not fix the problem until the element that is causing the problem is no longer supported- well… if a fix would take 12 months and the standard is set to fall off in 24- is it worth putting 12 months that could go to new development into fixing old problems that won’t exist 12 months later? Some would say yes. Many modern..
.
Seriously: Buy! A! Kyocera! They're the best, most parts are replaceable (if needed) toner is cheap and lasts forever. We have four of these on the job and the handful of problems we've seen the past +15 years were caused by the offices "home made" operating software (which sucks balls cause our hippie company founder thought he was a decent coder but wasn't even half decent…) - never a problem with the printers. Like never.