#printers
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why are printers so hated? it's simple:
computers are good at computering. they are not good at the real world.
the biggest problems in computers, the ones that have had to change the most over the time they've existed, are the parts that deal with the real world. The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. every computer needs these, but they involve interacting with the real world. that's a problem. that's why they get replaced so much.
now, printers: printers have some of the most complex real-world interaction. they need to deposit ink on paper in 2 dimensions, and that results in at least three ways it can go on right from the start. (this is why 3D printers are just 2D printers that can go wrong in another whole dimension)
scanners fall into many of the same problems printers have, but fewer people have scanners, and they're not as cost-optimized. But they are nearly as annoying.
This is also why you can make a printer better by cutting down on the number of moving elements: laser printers are better than inkjets, because they only need to move in one dimension, and their ink is a powder, not a liquid. and the best-behaved printers of all are thermal printers: no ink and the head doesn't move. That's why every receipt printer is a thermal printer, because they need that shit to work all the time so they can sell shit. And thermal is the most reliable way to do that.
But yeah, cost-optimization is also a big part of why printers are such finicky unreliable bastards: you don't want to pay much for them. Who is excited for all the printing they're gonna be doing? basically nobody. But people get forced to have a printer because they gotta print something, for school or work or the government or whatever. So they want the cheapest thing that'll work. They're not shopping on features and functionality and design, they want something that costs barely anything, and can fucking PRINT. anything else is an optional bonus.
And here's the thing: there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable.
And that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone. This is why you can buy a keyboard for 20$ and a mouse for 10$ and they both work plenty fine for 90% of users. They're objectively shit compared to the ones in the 60-150$ range, but do they work? yep. So that's what people get.
Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office.
It's the same place floppy disks were in in about 2000. CD-burners were not yet cheap enough, USB flash drives didn't exist yet (but were coming), modems weren't fast enough yet to copy stuff over the internet, superfloppies hadn't taken over like some hoped, and memory cards were too expensive and not everyone had a drive for them. So we still needed floppy disks, but at the same time this was a technology that hadn't changed in nearly 20 years. So people were tired of paying out the nose for them... the only solution? cut corners. I have floppy disks from 1984 that read perfectly, but a shrinkwrapped box of disks from 1999 will have over half the disks failed. They cut corners on the material quality, the QA process, the cleaning cloth inside the disk, everything they could. And the disks were shit as a result.
So, printers are in that particular note of the death-spiral where they've reached the point of "no one likes or cares about this technology, but it's still required so it's gone to shit". That's why they are so annoying, so unreliable, so fucking crap.
So, here's the good news:
You can still buy a better printer, and it will work far better. Laser printers still exist, and LED printers work the same way but even cheaper. They're still more expensive than inkjets (especially if you need color), but if you have to print stuff, they're a godsend. Way more reliable.
This is not a stable equilibrium. Printers cannot limp along in this terrible state forever. You know why I brought up floppy disk there? (besides the fact I'm a giant floppy disk nerd)
because floppy disks GOT REPLACED. Have you used one this decade? CD-Rs and USB drives and internet sharing came along and ate the lunch of floppy disks, so much so that it's been over a decade since any more have been made.
The same will happen to (inkjet) printers, eventually. This kind of clearly-broken situation cannot hold. It'll push people to go paperless, for companies to build cheaper alternatives to take over from the inkjets, or someone will come up with a new, more reliable printer based on some new technology that's now cheap enough to use in printers.
Yeah, it sucks right now, but it can't last.
So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minimum of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.
Random fun facts about printing of the past and their local minimums:
in the hot metal type era, not only would the whole printing process expose you to lead, the most common method of printing text was the linotype, which could go wrong in a very fun way: if the next for a line wasn't properly justified (filling out the whole row), it could "squirt", and lead would escape through gaps in the type matrix. This would result in molten lead squirting out of the machine, possibly onto the operator. Anecdotally, linotype operators would sometimes recognize each other on the street because of the telltale spots on their forearms where they had white splotches where no hair grew, because they got bad lead burns. This type of printing remained in use until the 80s.
Another fun type of now-retired printers are drum printers, a type of line printer. These work something like a typewriter or dot-matrix printer, except the elements extend across the entire width of the paper. So instead of printing a character at time by smacking it into the paper, the whole line got smacked nearly at once. The problem is that if the paper jammed and the printer continued to try to print, that line of the paper would be repeatedly struck at high speed, creating a lot of heat. This worry created the now-infamous Linux error: "lp0 on fire". This was displayed when the error signals from a parallel printer didn't make sense... and it was a real worry. A high speed printer could definitely set the paper on fire, though this was rare.
So... one thing to be grateful about current shitty inkjet printers: they are very unlikely to burn anything, especially you.
(because before they could do that they'd have to work, at least a little, first, and that's very unlikely)
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youtube
You might already have seen this videograph elsewhere, but I was rather excited to add this particular book to my collection! One of only twenty-four copies, I feel deeply privileged to be able to share it with you all.
Not only is the story itself very special to me (and worryingly accurate in many respects), it is most gloriously and skilfully bound, and contained in a burr oak box with brass fittings, lined with hand-marbled paper of celestial blue, and illustrated by that marvel of portraiture, Mister Paul Kidby.
Within the box are an assortment of ephemera, some of which are pictured below.
(And yes, I can read the alien ‘penalty notice’.)
#hashytag Good Omens#leave it alone Jim#Fenella Fudge reads the news#we like holding hands#don’t ask about the leopard#All Hail#terry pratchett#neil gaiman#paul kidby#rob wilkins#dunmanifestin#a very nice courier named Graham#and a host of artisans including bookbinders#Lyra’s Books#paper marblers#metalworkers#printers#cabinetmakers and diuerse others#Youtube
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Avoid HP Printers At All Costs
I've had an HP Officejet 6962 for years. For the most part, it's been fine, beyond the usual printer issues. (Which honestly isn't saying much, but I digress.)
Went to print out some forms I need to fill out and, lo and behold, I can't use the brand new ink I just bought.
Why?
These are non-HP ink cartridges, but I've gotten them in the past and they've been fine. It's literally been months, maybe a year, since we needed to print anything.
HOWEVER
HP recently pushed out a firmware update to make it IMPOSSIBLE to use your printer without their brand of cartridges.
For record, these cartridges - a brand I've reliably used for years - cost like $35-$40 bucks.
HP's brand of the same cartridges cost $75 - $84, depending on if there's a sale or not.
So, that's fun. [/seething sarcasm]
Apparently, in non-US countries, HP has been fined for pulling shit like this.
So, yeah, if you're in the US, avoid HP products.
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printers are so terrifying like they can feel when you need them the most and will just start malfunctioning like no other
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When I worked at DEC in the 80s we had these HP 7580 pen plotters, absolute monsters that could do color plots on D-sized drafting paper, which is an enormous 22x34 inch work area. Slow but super cool to watch in action, and the results had that vector display accuracy you couldn't get on regular printers of the time.
(To be honest though what I saw it getting used for most was plotting gate array layouts for chips we were designing, so people could hang them in their office.)
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The Verge published a "review" of printers and it's.. stunning.
Just please, go read it. Not what you're expecting.
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#funny#funny memes#memes#meme#dank memes#funny meme#dank#dystopian#mario#printers#conspiracy#conspiracy theories#yellow
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The EU should ban printers with subscriptions that artificially stop your printer from working.
The printer market is dystopian and I want to withdraw the bank accounts of all the executives who implementwd it and force them to work at McDonald's and see if they can pay their bills and the godsdamn printer subscription
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My printer is misbehaving and I'm about to go insane. What the fuck is this supposed to mean.
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💾
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Hello everyone! There is a sale today on Society6!
Prints and stickers are 50% off!
If you ever wanted some of my prints or even stickers, now is the time to get some and save some money!
https://society6.com/jf-madjesters1
#society6#printers#stickers#TTOA#Litt#Cuphead#disney hades#super smash bros#Mario#nintendo#super smash brawl#mermaid#fantasy#fanart#signal boost
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Me: dies and goes to hell
Satan: Your job for the rest of eternity is to support these 1,000 end users.
Me: That doesn't sound too horrible
Satan: And they each have their own printer.
Me: Oh no
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ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡‧₊˚
#💙 sugar life posting 🌙#stim#stimming#stimblr#tech#technology#techcore#Nintendo#printers#Nintendo Printer#Gameboy Printer#gray#red#black#white#gifsets#gifs
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