I used to work for Lexmark, back when they were in the inkjet business. They are perhaps most notable for starting and fueling the race to the bottom in printer price. The theory was that if you could lock the users in, the customer lifetime value would be made on selling profitably prices supplies (i.e. the ink cartridge).

There were a few big problems with this:

- People often could buy a new printer, with supplies included, for cheaper than a new set of cartridges.

- The primary focus of new printer development was on eliminating as much cost as possible.

- Refillers and remanufacturers compete with the official supplies.

The result was an almost completely customer-hostile industry. Printers became worse over the years. DRM and write-only memory were used to try to stop refilling and remanufacturing. Expiry of the ink was considered a good thing, as it would force customers to buy more ink even if they had low usage.

While I was there, Lexmark sometimes made losses by selling too many printers. About a decade ago, they left the inkjet industry, which they had played a major role in wrecking. Laser has come down in price to the point that it has largely supplanted inkjet for light-duty use. The manufacturers in the home/small office laser market haven't been quite as hostile.

Interestingly, we're seeing a similar dynamic play out in the venture-backed startup world of the past decade. What's old is new.

Companies eventually started marketing higher quality machines, targeted towards power users with broader needs. But the era of the bargain inkjet printers seems to be pretty much over. Also, it took an entire generation, but we're finally much further along towards the paperless office/society.

Just an anecdote: my grandfather passed away a few years ago and he was always into new technology. After he passed when we were cleaning up his home we found no fewer than 11 inkjet printers in his basement.

Every time one stopped working (probably ran out of ink, or printed poorly because of long delays between printing) he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.

It's just incredible to see this story in action.

>> he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.

In a past life I worked at Best Buy, and the standard printer sales tactics were nuts. If a customer wanted to buy a printer, you were supposed to sell them:

  2 packs of color ink (remind the customer that the included cartridges are only half-full)
  2 packs of black ink
  4 reams of regular paper
  2 packages of photo paper
  GOLD printer cable
  The Best Buy Service Plan, of course

The GOLD printer cable used to get me.

At Staples they also told us something about better USB cables for faster, more reliable printing.

How bad does your existing USB cable need to be before it starts to cause your printing to fail? Stop running it over with your chair.

Reminds me of a story of a printer I installed for a customer (could have been Lexmark? It was a very cheap printer). It came with an unpowered USB hub which I thought was odd. The printer was not printing right. I happened to read the instructions for once out of frustration and it mentioned that you MUST use the USB hub. That didn't make any sense as usually a troubleshooting step is to remove the USB hub. But when I put the hub into the chain, the printer started working correctly. I wish I still had the model number to prove it, but there were knowledgebase articles about the hub being required. Probably to correct some mistake in manufacturing where it was cheaper to include the hub than fix all the printers.

Fellow former $BBY-er here... you gotta admit, the bundle pricing Best Buy ran on all of that stuff (with the purchase of a new printer, of course) made it so easy to talk them into it.

When I started I had just left commission-based sales in electronics at Sears and I was amazed at how much better Best Buy was at pushing accessories with big ticket items.

Best Buy has certainly felt the competition though. I went in and got a USB-C to USB-C cable for 8 bucks.

It's nice to see the market drive bad practices away through competition.

This kind of thing is one item in the long list of reasons why I stopped shopping at Best Buy.

And all 11 of those will still be in landfill when your childrens children are old and dying. It's a pity they didn't make them out of metals that could be easily recycled.

Just curious what metals would be affordable and durable that would not bring the cost of cheap printers up too high?

All of them, Aluminium is 2.49 USD per KG, steel is like 4 times cheaper.

We use plastics because they can be moulded into any shape in seconds. Aluminium is used for premium products instead of steel because it's easier to manufacture into shape - you can cut an aluminium beam as large as your arm with a hacksaw in a minute or two. If that was structural steel, you would batrely make a dent in hours. This reflects on wear of cutting and shaping equipment in factories too.

Stainless steel is the king of materials, but a bitch to work with, that's why you only ever see simple shapes made out of it.

An oxy/acetylene torch can cut steel in seconds. Plasma also.

There really aren't any sadly. Maybe cast magnesium, like in sewing machines. It'd be better if the printer was built out of some bio-polymer plastic so it just fell apart after 20 years. But we're rapidly getting to a paperless society so give it 10-20 years it'll be less of an issue.

My dad ran a pet grooming business, and he went through probably a printer a year. I always figured it died because of the amount of pet fur in the air clogging up the printer, so at one point I asked him why he didn't put a door on the office to keep the fur out so his printer wouldn't get jammed up with pet fur.

He told me they weren't replaced because the fur killed them, it just wasn't worth replacing the inks since it was so damn expensive. It was always cheaper for him to replace the printer instead of replacing the ink, and because he never held onto a printer for much longer than a year he never bothered trying to keep it protected from the shop environment.

About the only think he ever printed was the occasional door flyer, checklists and general office paperwork, probably a single ream of paper a year at most.

They sell you printers with half empty cartridges to prevent [people buying new printers for the cartridges.

They do, but in over a decade that I remember him buying and replacing printers for the groom shop, I think he only ended up buying replacement ink (because he actually used all of it in under a year) maybe twice.

I think that was when the local print shop either shut down or was too backlogged for my dad to get his business cards done in reasonable time so he used print-at-home business card sheets for a bit to tide him over.

He may have been smart. Cost of printer with starter ink was occasionally cheaper then just getting new ink.

Yeah, totally. He only printed things a few times a year and by then inkjets usually dry and print poorly. I don't fault him but it's interesting to these strange market forces in my life.

As an aside, my grandfather was a terrific guy. He bought a Gateway 2000 PC in the 90's and spent lots of time with me getting Sim City 2000 loaded up on it. He always had some gadget to show me since he knew how much I loved technology and he was very good at it for someone of his generation. I don't begrudge recycling 11 printers as I cleaned up his house and it always gives my dad and I a good laugh and nice memories of an important person in my life.

Lovely story. Never knew any of my grandparents and my kids chose not to have kids, so no grandchildren to spoil.

But incredibly wasteful. For sporadic printing it really makes the most sense to go somewhere where you can print by the page like a public library, office supply store etc. I think I've spent about $2 on printing in the past 5 years.

The most common electronics I see being thrown out these days is some shitty inkjet printer. Unlike a CRT or computer nobody wants them and so they sit by the side of the road for several days.

> The most common electronics I see being thrown out these days is some shitty inkjet printer.

I've had a broken HP inkjet on my desk for 10 years. The only reason I've hung onto it is because it makes for a very nice network-connected document scanner. I got it used from one of my spouse's parents, and I haven't ever even tried to print with it. I keep thinking about replacing it with a multifunction laser printer, but why bother? I only ever really need the scanner.

100% agreed, wish the "printing somewhere" experience was better too.

Printed at a print shop, paid 50cts for the prints and $3 to use the computer for 10min trying to print from USB drive

Printed at a library and for the printer could only pay in cash and there was a long line.

Ah that sucks. My local library's is pretty good as you can just email the file and use a print release station to print it. They have enough that I've never had to wait. Plus you can add print credit with a debit/credit card if need be.

But the starter cartridges are probably only partially filled.

Does it really matter if you're only printing a dozen or so pages a year? They might dry out before going completely empty.

But if you bought full cartridges they would be expired or clogged before you half-used them.

They are these days, but did printers always used to come with "starter cartridges"?

I got a great deal on a Canon MF743C (a pretty decent color laser multi-function). MRSP is something like $600 (but in deals can be $400).

A guy on FB marketplace was locally selling one brand new for $250 (and took $175 if I picked up same day), because his dad had one that ran out of toner so the father had just bought a new one. It actually came with the new receipts from Best Buy. Looks like BB upsold on lasers too.

Except, it's a low-end business class laser, and they last forever. This thing is great.

> - People often could buy a new printer, with supplies included, for cheaper than a new set of cartridges.

I had a friend who would actually do this -- every time they ran out of ink, they'd buy a new printer. I found out when I helped him troubleshoot something and saw 5+ different printer drivers installed.

After he told me about it, he opened the closet door to reveal a (actual) leaning tower of printers

> - People often could buy a new printer, with supplies included, for cheaper than a new set of cartridges.

I have a relative that does this all the time. Personally, if it costs me more than it cost me to buy a cheap printer to refill it I will likely do the same thing. I just don't print enough to justify.

> Interestingly, we're seeing a similar dynamic play out in the venture-backed startup world of the past decade. What's old is new.

Related to the printing industry? (if so, I'd like to hear more)

Or do you mean in general?

My uncle bought a Lexmark inkjet for my parents about 20 years ago. If anyone wanted to print something, it was a 50% chance there would be some problem (driver issues, wouldn't turn on, ink dried out, etc), and another 50% chance that it would be recoverable and result in an acceptable printout. It was such a piece of crap that it made me avoid printers of all kinds because of the trauma. I swear that the Canon inkjet that came with the old 486 was more reliable.

I got a Canon laser printer 2 years ago. I guess I'm a boomer now.

Toner printers are "less scammy", at least in my experience. I had a HP one and always bought the genuine cartridges.

Then I saw those videos about the printing industry scams (which does happen) and tried a third party toner that costs 1/5 of the price. Guess what? After like 10 perfect printed pages, it started leaking some powder, then stopped printing random chunks of the page and turned impossible to use.

I went back to the genuine cartridges and never left ever since. Also, the printing issues it had were identical to some issues I've had with public printers in libraries etc in the past. I guess that's because they're using those low-quality toners.

My large institution mandated a switch to OfficeMax/Staples remanufactured toners to save (truly huge sums) of money. It was an unmitigated disaster. The toners leaked. When they didn't leak, the toner failed to fuse appropriately to the paper which made for an atrocious print quality and since the toner started flaking off even while still in the machine it would build up on everything and lead to smearing and then damage to the printer.

My department switched to buying toners directly from the manufacturer and reimbursing staff to get around the financial blocks that were put in to place. After two years they dropped the policy as a complete waste. We paid out so much money in repairs, new cartridges, new printers, and management that it made buying 'real' toner look cheap. Theoretically OfficeMax/Staples offered repair guarantees on their toners but of course managing those warranty claims is essentially impossible when you have thousands of printers scattered around.

I need to refill the toner in my home laser printer. I looked at some of the clone cartridges on Amazon etc and >90% of the reviews are of the form, "The cartridges arrived broken, but the seller gave me a full refund! Five stars, excellent service." Like, every single review. So either they're really shoddy and these people are extraordinarily forgiving, or they're buying reviews trying to alleviate worries from people who read reports like yours.

I wonder if you should be reporting those types of reviews to Amazon as misleading. They're reviewing the seller, not the product.

Maybe, but you're talking thousands of reviews. (Also I closed my Amazon account years ago and don't shop there.)

Amazon doesn't care.

I also have laser printer. It’s ancient low budget color(!) Dell with genuine cartridges. Yes, they were expensive, but now the price is dropping. And I never had any quality issues with genuine cartridges on this device. Before I toyed with all the cheap ink jets and drying nozzles. Extremely bad experience.

Yeah, if you can find an HP LaserJet III - V, chances are, it's still printing just fine. Worst thing that ever went wrong in any of those things is the fuser. I worked on Color LaserJets too and everything was replaceable/pluggable. They were extremely rugged.

I've bought dozens of NEW third party cartridges for a variety of laser printer models and have never had an issue. I stay away from the third party REFILLED cartridges.

Possibly, when a market or a business isn't growing, it's dying, so they make shorter term decisions that ignore conseqeunces and externalities the managers don't believe they will be around for.

Detecting scammy behaviour could be a leading indicator of an inflection point in a market or company where its growth phase is behind it. Printer companies are responding to paperlessness by hollowing out the goodwill of their customers, because there is no longer any long term value in it.

>>Detecting scammy behaviour could be a leading indicator of an inflection point in a market or company where its growth phase is behind it.

Agree this would seem like a good indicator.

The counterpoint is entire VC-backed industries that unnecessarily use scammy biz models from the start, e.g., requiring everything to be an internet-based "service", exfiltrating data and requiring subscription funding when it obviously is not required. Examples: robot vacuums, remotely-settable thermostats [0], security cameras [0], etc...

[0] No I don't need the full "service", at most I need a way to keep track of the external IP address of the device. If you want to offer the extra "service", fine, but it needs to be an add-on, not an obligatory dependency and cost.

This could be co-opted as evidence for the theory as well, where all these products that are converting to services models are economic "inferior goods," where you switch away from them when you can afford something better. Month-to-month subscriptions are what you have when the product isn't good enough to buy an annual one, or just buy it outright.

The companies position themselves that way because they want to take advantage of peoples indifference to small subscriptions - because they know their products are objectively lame.

>>because they want to take advantage of peoples indifference to small subscriptions

Hmmm. I may be odd, but I and everyone I know have a very high resistance to subscriptions, even small ones, because they are maintenance and just a general budget leak. My impression of the reason that companies want subscriptions is that they tend to extract much more revenue from the customer; of course they don't get it all up front, but recurring revenue streams and especially that continue even when the product provides no value (e.g., the customer forgets about the ongoing charges), can be ridiculously profitable.

Printers are the most mechanically complex computer related product. Just think, fans are basically single bearing and motor. Pumps are pretty much same. Traditional spinning disk, nearly closed system with two motors.

Printers have multiple times this complexity. And the products bought are bought for lowest price. Or at least reasonable price. You get what you pay for. And what is paid is often very little. Thus poor quality and need for other revenue streams.

But we don't really have the option to buy a good quality printer. We can spend more on a printer, but the printer companies don't say "here we have a cheap printer that is designed to cause you trouble so that it becomes effectively a subscription service; there we have a quality printer that will last". And if they tried, it's unlikely we could reasonably believe them because everyone else lies. Cost is no indicator of quality, the reputation brand names are not protected, business do not have pride in their products. All they want is to take more money out of you than you gain in benefit.

I've found that second-hand small-business or light enterprise printers tend to be far more reliable than consumer level printers.

I have a Dell small-business multi-function color laser and it's run like a champ for about 5 years now, with only one round of toner changes in that time. The only downside is that this particular model doesn't support cardstock or any thicker types of paper (~60lbs cover stock max IIRC).

But that's only been an issue a couple of times in the past.

> But we don't really have the option to buy a good quality printer

Sure we do. A few years ago I looked for a list of the best printers (I used wirecutter, but there are other comparable options), and got one they recommended. It works great, even going a few months between prints, was easy to setup, and is still running great with just the toner it shipped with.

Sure you do. But printers aimed at the commercial market.

It's still magic for me how they can get just 1 sheet of paper at a time.

Sometimes it takes me 10 seconds to separate 2 sheets

I lol'd at this. :D

> Printers are the most mechanically complex computer related product

1. Even more so than cars?

2. Printers are also one of the few devices that need to measure liquid by the picoliter.

> products bought are bought for lowest price. Or at least reasonable price. You get what you pay for. And what is paid is often very little. Thus poor quality and need for other revenue streams.

This reminds me of the perennial discussion on airline quality. People comparison-shop by the sticker price, so the entire industry evolved into nickel-and-dime scams instead of having honest all-inclusive pricing.

Cars don’t require a computer to function. You literally can’t print off a computer without a computer.

i understand that but 90% of the time that i try to print something it just sits in the queue all alone with no error code and no attempt at printing, i don't think that's a mechanical problem.

Could be a sensor problem, or a part of the startup mechanism has failed.

Printers are powered by spite and vengeance

Office Space has relevant scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8

Still, showing no error message is inexcusable.

My Brother black-and-white laser is about ten years old. Pretty low volume of use from me, but it's held up well and is one of the most satisfying technology purchases I've ever made. If it stopped working, I would buy a Brother printer tomorrow without even looking at other brands.

The printer industry is horrible, but also HP is toxic at every level and across every product and service. Just avoid.

Brother printers have regressed as well. See this post: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Et tu Brother? My Brother wireless laser printer/scanner has been so reliable you’d think it wasn’t even a mechanical device.

Ugh, same. Bought a Brother laser scanner/printer that has been a delight. I don't print much, but it does its job stashed away in my closet through wifi. I can even print from my phone. I've used maybe 3 toners in about 10 years and it still works perfectly.

Would also buy a new Brother without even considering other brands. Sad to hear it might be going downhill as well.

HP used to be such a mark of quality. It's a shame how much modern market logic convinced them becoming a rotted husk of a company without any value add was a wonderful corporate strategy.

Their early 90s laserjets are still going. My friend's school was throwing one out a few weeks ago. It was sitting dusty in a closet. I plugged it in and it worked right away. Probably 30 years old.

They stopped making things like that a long time ago. They've got the resources and the public capital to turn the ship around if they wanted to

I also swear by my Brother black-and-white laser. Now that I work remotely and I can't grift off of printers at work, it's become invaluable for printing out online purchase returns, hiking maps, etc. I require surprisingly little color printing, as it turns out.

Only printer I’ll buy. Does everything I need. Upkeep costs are negligible. Firmware updates don’t regress features.

Don’t have a lot of brand loyalty but nice to see them not shit on their customers.

> Firmware updates don’t regress features.

They do now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

~20 year old HP Laserjet 1200 here.

Same. Those things were built to last (at least in the low volumes I use it for). Needs a new cartridge by now (the third I think in 20 years?) but other than that it still runs perfectly fine. And it speaks PCL5 and PS so it's compatible with everything, from the Amiga to the latest Windows 11 (and of course Linux).

Where I live in Mexico nobody owns a printer. Instead there is a print shop on almost every street corner. You walk in, print wirelessly from your phone or laptop, or hand them a USB drive, and they hand you your prints made on an expensive office printer. They also scan and copy. And it's cheap.

This is what I've been recommending to inkjet printer owners for over 10 years. Buy a B&W laser for regular printing, or a color laser for medium quality color printouts, but if you want to print photo-quality images, it's cheaper to go to Walmart.

> People that do print at home, are mostly photographers that want physical prints of their photos.

And parents printing color-in pages of Elsa and Anna

A simple black and white laser printer can do that. I had one for about a decade until I bought my color laser. It worked great, and only needed toner every 2-3 years. I regret getting rid of my black and white laser.

> And parents printing color-in pages of Elsa and Anna

I can relate.

I probably printed more coloring pages than anything with my printer.

Serious photographers printing at home are using dye sub instead of ink jet

Which also means you're printing frequently enough to be worth the maintenance hassles. Less frequently, you're better off sending out to a service (says guy who still has a pile of wet darkroom stuff).

That's the beauty of dye sub, the maintenance is pretty simple. You can buy a brand new roll, print only 2 images, and then leave the thing sitting there for a year and the next print will come out the same.

This is from experience designing/operating photo booth kiosks based on dye sub printers.

wfh attorneys are very heavy users of black toner cartridges

Laser printers are the way to go. They are typically for offices and follow a different business level: large volume printing and low-cost ink.

I've got a Laserjet from the 90's still kicking. It's wireless too with a RPi Zero W and a USB<->Parallel cable. Generic toner cartridges are cheap and available everywhere. Only issue is that the rubber on the runners need a refresh.

Anything color that's reasonably priced?

They're reasonably priced if you consider that toner doesn't dry up like ink does.

If you only need to print a few times per year, it's far cheaper to buy a laser w/ toner. With inkjet, you'll have to buy (and wait for) new ink cartridges because they dry out in less than a year.

If you need to print a lot of color materials frequently and don't mind the quality, then ink jet is a better deal.

I have been happy with the OKI 332 w/ a duplexer. Plugs into ethernet, if all else fails you can drop a file to the printer with your browser.

The LED "laser" printers are usually all very reasonably priced, carry a good set of features and last long. The downside is that they're rather bulky since they have 4 drums.

I had good luck with Oki printers (most of them come with Duplex unit, Ethernet and all OS support), a lot of people are very happy with Brother printers.

Here in Norway the HP Color Laser 150nw seems to be the only one, at about twice the price of the cheapest non-color laser printers.

Home printers are like coffee pod machines:

The money is made on the ink/coffee, and machines are pushed at a discount to dominate the ink/coffee distribution.

The market is big and uncritical. Investing in high-quality machines is a long game that many can't justify and so avoid.

> The money is made on the ink/coffee, and machines are pushed at a discount to dominate the ink/coffee distribution.

Some years ago Walmart had a HP printer on sale for so cheap that it was more expensive to replace the ink than to get a new printer.

I have been using a safety razor for over a decade after buying some awful 7 blade nonsense from Wilinson that really hurt my face. Ever since the Mach 3 they seem to have been getting worse and more expensive and enough was enough. At the time I bought some trial blades from different companies for £10, they lasted a few years and I was fine with either the Gilette or Wilkinson Sword blades. I bought a stack of blades from Wilkinson Sword direct which I will be using for another 30 years, they cost £20 total.

It does take longer to shave with a safety razor since you need two or three passes but its a better shave with a lot less pain afterwards and its an insane amount cheaper.

But the ink/toner that comes with new printers now is much less than the refill.

That is true, but with as little as I use it, even the ink that comes with the printer dries up before I can use it all.

Its a dying industry, trying desperately to scrape and claw the last remnants of revenue out of a dwindling customer base. In the fight for survival, they've all gotten mean and nasty. As others have said, stick to laser -- and preferably older models. I have a B&W Brother laser from 2007 that still pounds out the pages and needs new toner roughly once a year -- and happily takes aftermarket cartridges without complaint.

I don't think printers are a dying industry. But they're a commodity where nothing new happens anymore and sale volumes are pretty stable. But companies try to figure out how to increase their margins anyway they can, which leads to all these scammy tactics.

I _wish_ printers would die. I've hated them with a passion ever since I've had my first job as a computer "operator" where I had to feed and align perforated paper forms to monster IBM printers. The boundary between electromechanics and software is a very dirty place.

A few years back I got frustrated with the unreliability and cost of my home printer and a friend suggested I pick up an HP LaserJet 4000N - a printer that came out in the late 90’s. After a bit of convincing I found one that was being thrown out and lugged the 50lb+ piece of yellowed 90’s plastic home. My friend provided a large jug of official HP toner, showed me how to fill the reservoir, and since that day I have not had to refill the toner or do any other maintenance - it has honestly been one of the most reliable and carefree pieces of my home network for 5+ years at this point.

The 4000N is also a modular design with the ability to add attachments for things such as extra paper trays, auto-staplers, auto-folders, or networking cards; if that is your thing. I’ve have mine connected to my home network and have never needed an explicit driver or had issues using the printer from any of the major operating systems.

If you are someone that only needs to print in black and white, and has the space, it may be worth checking out - I assume they can still be found for cheap/free as well

I think it's a natural part of industry decline. They've gradually migrated from an industry based on innovation and customer acquisition to one based on milking every last penny from their installed base. 20 years ago printers were critical business machines and very popular home electronics. The current generation is comfortable reading off their screens.

One "scam" that I realise HP is pulling: my OfficeJet 8710 printer seems to be cleaning its print heads every time it's turned on.

I've gotten "please replace ink cartridges" messages when I've never even printed a single page since I replaced the previous cartridge — since I use the printer mostly for its ADF scanning function.

Well, that's ~$100 I'll never get back.

It's sad that the industry has moved in this direction.

I think inkjets have to do that or the ink dries inside the heads and they clog up. This is why if you print rarely, you should really go for a toner-based printer.

Yeah. But also if you print frequently, toner-based printer is cheaper for TCO. It's weird.

That is something they often do. I recall one of the times I bought a HP with document feeder and scanner that it was rated one of the most economic in terms of its cleaning. Some of them consume insane amounts of ink just cleaning themselves on a daily basis or on start whereas other models from HP are rated some of the best in the inkjet industry for this and use very little.

Avoid ink jet and use laser jet instead.

This solved most of the frustration for me. The upfront cost is slightly higher, the print quality is slightly decreased but the long term satisfaction is greatly enhanced.

Ink jet in any form is dead in my mind.

> The upfront cost is slightly higher, the print quality is slightly decreased but the long term satisfaction is greatly enhanced.

OK but they still stop updating the drivers after 3 years, which is the main problem. Otherwise they would last forever.

I've had my HP LaserJet Pro P1102w, one of the cheapest laser printers I could find at the time, for about a decade without any driver issues. Same as with the previous HP lasers I've had.

That doesn't really matter in my experience, they're just attached as a mostly generic network printer and the driver is very basic.

Largely true. I've always spent a few more dollars on Postscript printers, because that tended to solve some headaches with printing under Linux in the past, and I think that makes it less of an issue with driver longevity. But the problem is security updates, lots of attacks use printers to gain a foothold.

I received updates for my Samsung printer for more than 10 years. Now that they finally stopped supporting the latest MacOS i can still use it by printing via a Raspberry Pi.

What do you expect such a driver to do? The printer is essentially just a random network device. Packets go in, paper comes out. No drivers needed.

My AirPrint capable printer that I bought almost a decade ago works perfectly with the newest iPhone/Macs…

"updating the drivers" no

Good printers use PS/PCL, nobody cares about drivers, a generic one usually works

Why do driver updates matter?

My father in law had an old laser printer that he could not get to work under windows 10 since the drivers only support windows 7 and refuse to install.

Does it need proprietary drivers at all? I don't think I've seen a printer that does for decades, but I certainly haven't used all printers.

Windows 10 found no supported drivers and refused to print to it, while it worked fine with Windows 7

> the print quality is slightly decreased

That's heavily understating it.

Depends on your needs.

If I want display quality photos on heavy weight paper, I go to WalMart or Office Depot and pay for their commercial printer. For small photos embedded in business documents on plain paper, my Canon laser jet does an acceptable job and is relatively frustration free at reasonable cost. Text quality is never an issue.

Ink jet and photos are the main pain points to avoid.

For black & white (grayscale) text, my experience has been that laser printers are just as good, or superior (esp. if your laser printer does 600dpi or higher), and they don't smudge as easily as ink jet prints.

Who makes a quality color laser?

Canon, HP and Brother all have them. I chose a Canon for it's ability to do 2-sided duplex printing and collating in a compact design for small office use (up to 5 people).

I recommend looking for "office" instead of "home". The manufacturers seem aware of the fact that business people have low tolerance for unreliable crap.

Thanks. Good point in the commercial grade search.

I have a ~$400 HP with a flatbed scanner and sheet feeder, no complaints. Works well with Windows, Mac GUI apps, Mac CLI, Linux, iOS, and Chromebook. Use the generic Post Script driver for Mac CLI printing with lp, not Air Print, as the duplexer won’t work with Air Print and CLI apps (for instance I print groff PS files.) Works fine with Mac GUI apps and Air Print.

IPv6 completely locked it up. It would reboot over and over. This happened after changing my home router to one with full ipv6 support. Disabling ipv6 on the printer fixed it. It could be that subsequent firmware updates fixed this but I haven’t checked.

I use only genuine HP toner. No way I am trusting random toner from the flea market—er, Amazon.

HP Color Laser Jet MFP 281cdw

Even if HP makes good printers, i would never buy a printer from them after their past behaviour. See https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968704526/why-printers-are-th...

I think this is what I have…that died way prematurely

Because mass-market customers by and large are cheap, stupid and easily parted from their money. If they weren't one of these companies would have figured out that producing quality printers/refillable ink cartridges makes more money, and consumers would avoid the scams. It clearly doesn't work that way. See also payday loans, sub-prime mortgages, most targeted credit cards (the cards are fine, but they target people they know have a higher chance to misuse them), food and alcohol in stadiums, the car rental company that tries to up-sell you from the Toyota Corolla to the more expensive convertible, etc. If you're in a mass-market business and not trying to scam people as much as possible you're leaving money on the table by definition. It's only when the scams are actually illegal that the risk becomes too great to tolerate, and even then some bet that they can get away with it.

Also people are printing less than they used to. So much single-use paper is now a QR code on your phone or completely digitized. I bought 10 reams of printer paper about 5 years ago for home use, my family has worked our way through three over the years. When the kids get old enough I imagine the bulk of it will be used for school papers. On the business side we've seen a mass digitization of most documents, my company is steadily getting rid of the last of the old file cabinets as any relevant info in them is scanned/archived. So volume is less, and existing printer companies need squeeze more to maintain profits.

"If they weren't one of these companies would have figured out that producing quality printers/refillable ink cartridges makes more money"

The same bullship is happening with tractors, home appliances, hospital equipoment, military radio equipment !

The truth of hte matter is that giving companies unremovable ownership and control over a product they've already sold, and allowing them to reach into my house over my WiFi was a step away from freedom and towards feudalism.

Not in the industry but the problems here are quite clear: it's a combination of short-term decision making and the way consumers make decisions.

Cheap printers are sold at cost or at a loss. The companies make this up on ink cartridges. Obviously this creates an opportunity for third-party cartridges so your printer gets hundreds of firmware updates to try and defeat these cartridges and protect this business model. Ink is also wasted on things like cleaning the heads. This is by design.

But why does this model exist? Because consumers make a purchasing decision based on the sticker price not the total cost of ownership. You see this behaviour all over the price.

Why are their checked baggage fees, seat allocation fees, etc on airline seats? Because consumers make a decision based solely on the seat price.

Companies like McDonald's sell the burger at about cost. They make all their money on the drinks and fries. You can view the burger as almost a loss leader. A bunch of other stuff happens here too, like the medium drink exists solely to get you to buy the large drink (ie it looks like better value).

You should never, ever buy a cartridge printer. Ever. Instead, buy a tank printer. It's more expensive but you literally just pour ink into the wells. There's no firmware to stop you from doing this. It's much cheaper to run.

All the software for this is terrible unfortunately. There's really no incentive to improve it. Sadly no company has yet disrupted this market and forced change through competition. There was hopes Apple might do this at one point. It obviously never happened.

> the medium drink exists solely to get you to buy the large drink

Not true any more - McDonald's change their drink pricing so that S, M, and L all cost $1.

Haven't most companies that produce home electronics converged to device designs that guarantee steady revenue streams (as opposed to: sell once every 20 years devices)?

By doing things like: opting for subscription models, short device lifetime, cross financing the device through asking high prices for commodities like the cartrigdges.

I guess it's just more obvious with printers because you have this duality of the device itself _and_ the need for a steady supply of either toner or ink, which most companies abuse with nasty business models.

I have an almost 20 years old HP b/w home laser printer (guess one of the first with USB, no ethernet). It doesn't copy/scan, it can only print.

I don't use it much and it produces some minor artefacts but mostly works surprisingly well after so many years. The cheap toner costs like 10 USD or so and lasts several years with my usage.

No printer company would design such a device nowadays anymore. Since it has no network access it cannot be updated to stop working.

Many people want to print over network today and if I wanted to I could plug it into our router so I can print over WIFI.

The razor-and-blades business model, in the middle of the Venn diagram of shareholder duty, consumable supplies and vendor lock-in.

I have a Brother b/w laser printer from 2012. It cost around 60 EUR. Never had any problems with it. It's build like a tank, has 4 status LEDs, and one button. I buy a new off-brand toner every 2 years or so, and that's it.

Before this printer I went through multiple hp and Epson inkjet models. They were all horrible and usually broken after 2-3 years.

I haven't had printer issues at home in a decade now. Brother laser printer. So far have only replaced the toner once for $50

Not trolling - but what are y'all still printing these days?

I've literally printed 2 things this year, and one was a boarding pass (I like having a paper backup, call me old-fashioned).

If anything, I've used the scan-to-email function on the printer about 10x more, and I could probably have gotten away with just taking a photo of the documents in extremis.

I only need to print one or two things per year, and a long time ago I realised it wasn't worth me owning my own printer for that. Now I just get stuff printed out at the local library.

The per-page cost is relatively high, but still an order of magnitude lower than amortising the cost of a whole printer myself, not to mention offloading the hassle of maintenance and refills, and the money goes to supporting the library - which I'm totally fine with. Yeah, I have to go to the library to do the printing, but it's not that much out of my way, especially if I combine it with other errands nearby.

I spent about $400 on a color laser MFP and I'll probably never consume all the toner in my lifetime! My amortization schedule sucks compared to yours

That said, the scanner has been super-handy through the pandemic

- I print at least a few shipping labels a year. - I sometimes print activities for the kids. This includes checklists that will then be laminated and need updated roughly quarterly. - I have to photocopy papers for some financial services (completely stupid that I can't just send scans). - I sometimes have to print forms that need signed, both for kid stuff and business. - I print things for proofing so that I can mark them up with a pen. It may seem wasteful over marking up on the computer, but it helps me focus on it better.

There may be other things I'm not thinking of. Overall it ends up being a few hundred pages a year.

I mostly print topo maps of wilderness areas I'll be backpacking in.

Thank for you your response, this makes sense, a backup in case electronic documentation fails just like my boarding pass

Yes, that for certain. Also, there are times when a paper map can be more useful than an electronic one.

Kids homework

Schools don't offer a print service for that? Or allow kids to submit their homework electronically?

Yes, you are in fact trolling and doing the tired equivalent of the 20 year old Slashdot meme: “Do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 20 years”.

Why can't paper printers be more like 3D printers? Amazing repairability, many suppliers of standardized source material...

Some of the companies are trying to move to much more streamlined initial setups and propriety parts to bring more reliable printing but at least for now the amount of open repairable printers is more than sufficient and popular.

The complexity of the ink jets themselves. Or rather their microscopic size.

You should probably clarify if you're asking about inkjet printers.

I bought a laser printer almost 2 years ago. No complaints so far, but we'll see how long that lasts.

I have a Brother laser printer/scanner combo that I bought 8 years ago, I actually wish it broke down so I could replace it with something that supports AirPrint without feeling bad about throwing out perfectly good hardware

Then don't! Plug it to a Pi or something like that and turn it into an AirPrint server, which is (an extension of) IPP plus Bonjour for discovery.

Just get a raspberry pi, the cheapest will do, and you now have Airprint.

Same here.

The android brother plug in sucks and I wish google cloud print was still around. I tried mobility print but it didn't quite work as expected and decided to just stick to printing from my laptop.

I thought that too, but once I had access to AirPrint I realized I have never needed to print from my phone, or even barely ever from my laptop.

Hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and expose the printer over network

There you go, DIY AirPrint

I tried this with a Brother HL-L23200 printer and an old raspberry pi, and couldn't get it to work. Seemed like something in the stack was OOM'ing - it worked fine for just a page or two, but when I tried to print a longer document it would crap out. I gave up and now on the rare occasion when I need to print something I carry my laptop over and physically plug in the USB cord like a neanderthal.

This! inkjets printers are a horrible industry, but office printers need to be stable and work. I got a brother black and white laser printer designed for an office on 'Prime Day" years ago and it's never failed me.

I’ve stayed away from inkjets since the mid 90s. I bought a then “affordable” $1000 LaserWriter LS/300.

I had a Samsung CLP-315W that didn't work with original replacement toners that I kept in a cupboard for a couple of years, since I bought them during a sale.

I'm guessing that either one of their firmware updates broke their chip DRM recognition, or the chips that were in my original toners somehow corroded due to age.

Even for laser printers, it looks like it will be compatibles and refills for me moving forward.

Bought mine twenty years ago, that's when the price drop happened, when consumer-priced laser printers started to become a thing. Never looked back. Some years ago the paper drive started having trouble getting traction on the next page (probably some plastic springs losing their springyness?), but that's perfectly acceptable for a dozen pages a year.

My HP color laser died before the first set of toner cartridges ran out. The fake paper jam error

A printer is capex (lasts a long time), but as a consumer device has to be low priced. So it’s hard to stay alive as a printer manufacturer.

This is in no way a defense of the printer industry’s odious tactics! I’m just pointing out the situation that made unscrupulous people consider those tactics.

> In particular, there is some brand that was praised for consumer friendly practices here on HN that joined the dark side recently too; Brother iirc.

What did Brother do to join the "dark side"? I and lots of other folks love our Brother laser printers. I haven't heard of them doing anything evil...

The brother printer (HL-L2350DW) I have auto-detects when the toner is "low" and refuses to print. It does this even though I haven't noticed any degradation in printing quality and would prefer to continue printing with the old cartridge even if it results in a worse print. I find this kind of infuriating actually. Being able to continue using a cartridge as it gets low was always one the features I loved about laser printers. I wouldn't have bought this printer had I known and I don't recommend it (or Brother) to new buyers.

I have a previous model DCPL2550DW and it has the low-toner warning too. Can't remember if it refused to print because I just went and bought a new toner for $45 which is cheap IMO. Anyways, I was perusing the Amazon reviews for my printer and came across this... maybe it'll help you?

Now, to override the alert Brother gives you when it THINKS you are out of ink, I have user Allegra to thank for that as follows:

"Go to the buttons and follow these instructions:

MENU > GENERAL SETTINGS

Press the down button (minus sign) until you get to REPLACE TONER

Hit OK

Please the down button (minus sign) until you see CONTINUE

Hit OK

Thanks for the tip! I ended up buying a new toner, but I think I still have the old one somewhere so I'll see if I can find it and see if it works.

I've had some middling success with taking the cartridge out, shaking it back and forth, and re-inserting it. But I agree that behavior is really frustrating

I did find some vague claims on the internet saying there were ways around this, but I just don't have the energy. Tinkering with things can be fun, but I specifically bought a laser printer and specifically from Brother because I thought they cared about their customers and wouldn't do stuff like this. It's a betrayal of trust.

My HP laser will warn its toner is low but it will keep on printing. I keep using a toner until the pages have white streaks.

Having the choice to do exactly this was one of the primary reasons I bought the printer. Hence my disappointment.

I'm also a halfway happy Brother laser customer. Except sometimes the scanner missing the computer (which means restarting both printer and computer) no complaints here. Can't say the same about Epson or HP, myg what for a garbage called software they install on your comp...

Canon & a few other major brands have consumer grade MFP that use ink tanks instead of cartridges and you avoid this kind of hassle & get a much lower price on ink refills that you just dump into the corresponding color tank on the printer.

This is what I use at home, a canon G-series printer. The "down side" of this is that the printers cost a fair bit more upfront. It's also not photo-grade quality. But with decent quality paper & high quality print settings it does just fine, and monochrome is no problem at all. I also don't consider the higher up front price to be an actual down side. I know I'm simply not getting the machine at a subsidy price, and in exchange I have to pay the true cost of the machine but have a much better user experience.

There's also the fact if you don't print very often it will run through the whole tank "cleaning" and wreck itself after everything is jammed up with dried ink.

Every time I have a frustrating experience with a printer, I spend the next two days imagining inventions to overthrow printer market, then I move on to over things because, really, who gives a shit about printers. I assume there are lots of people in this camp.

People not recommending inkjet - I won't recommend them too.

But there are ink tank printers available. I bought a cheap one, it doesn't have nice colors, but it has colors. And that printer doesn't need a refill for months (well, mostly printing for kids)

I have HP Smart Tank 510 series. Altgouh I would recommend researching HP ink tank / Epson EcoTank / (other vendors may have different names), I don't recommend particular budget model I have - sometimes it is frustrating that it doesn't want to print over wifi. And that is my complaint in general, that I haven't been lucky enought to own "it just works" printer.

But no, I haven't been familiar with issues you mention (technician?)

For a short while, I worked on office Xerox printers and scanners. They weren't particularly scammy, though they were expensive and the consumables were pricey.

Home printers, yeah the ink is expensive. You're mostly paying for convenience. I don't print photos at home, we order prints online and they're mailed to us, very cheap and easy.

What I print at home is strictly things I need to sign and bring to someone (or sign and scan/email). For that purpose, they work fine. I don't mind paying the price for ink, it lasts for a couple years before I need a new cartridge. I like the fact that I can still go to an actual store and buy ink for my printer if I need it on short notice.

Nobody wants to invest in hardware alone. If you make hardware, you have to have some way of growing your income. Those quarterlies are expected to always rise. Now, it's hard to make devices more expensive because people will stop buying them (generally) or put off buying a new one for as long as they can. BUT, if you make the consumables more expensive, people will continue to buy those because they have too. Yay! Your quarterlies show growth. You're a hero! But wait, what if someone tries to undercut you by selling consumables cheaper!? THE HORROR! What do you do? Well, you start doing all sorts of fuckery. And here we are.

From The Great Train Robbery (movie):

Judge: "Now, on the matter of motive, we ask you: Why did you conceive, plan and execute this dastardly and scandalous crime?"

Edward Pierce: "I wanted the money."

I think you touched all relevant points. Through my filter, there are either the "serious" customers (you mentioned them: offices and photographers) who are too smart to be scammed. And then there are private consumers who lack the knowledge to pick a printer and because they print only occasionally. I wonder if for the consumer market segment investing into a good printer is it even worth, considering that 2D printing at home is rivalled by many online services who print on far superior printers and deliver at home?

It would be better for the consumer printer segment to die off, and for the consumer to see the price of a proper printer that works correctly, and decide whether to buy that or use a print service.

Commercial large format inkjet for art/photography has all the same issues but with zeroes on the end. And added expense/complexity, including colorimetry.

Some models have 12 colour cartridges, each costing more than a budget printer.

I wouldn't say photographers can avoid being scammed, because the industry is basically an Epson/Canon duopoly with HP as a somewhat distant third choice.

So competition is very limited, and unless you're bulk-buying printers and ink for a huge print shop there's no leverage to negotiate prices down.

> considering that 2D printing at home is rivalled by many online services who print on far superior printers and deliver at home?

Dunno, unless you're looking for larger formats most print shops will not have printers superior to decent home units like Epson SC-P900

All industries are scummy if you dig in to them. Capitalism is unchecked and people have been trained not to say anything negative for fear of being ostracized.

Time for the tech community to declare a code of ethics and refuse to participate in corporate sociopathy.

So how do you support your addiction to food and shelter?

Who has been trained not to say anything negative about capitalism? I've heard and made many complaints. The number of people who complain about inflation profiteering is quite significant. If anything, unchecked capitalism is peaking. We may only be in for a plateau, but we may even be about to see another generational change about now.

As others have said: The solution is to buy a laser printer; if you need color, order prints online or at your local drug store/print shop. I've had a laser printer for 10 years. It doesn't give me any problems. I buy toner once every few years. It'd be great if we had some regulation to pass along the cost of generated landfill waste to companies, so they'd think twice before making a something that's destined for the landfill after only 2 years.

I wrote a piece about why office printers in particular break down so much. One thing that stuck with me when I spoke to an IT repair guy was that users often cause more damage to worn out printers by trying to fix it. https://www.ciodive.com/news/perplexing-it-questions-answere...

From what I understand, in the inkjet market the inkjet printer firms own the inkjet patents, which means it's not possible to disrupt the market.

Patents have a lifetime of 20 years. I’d take an open source 2002 printer, but I doubt it’s economical for anyone to make and sell one.

Inkjets are also super complicated to build, regardless of the patents there's a very high barrier to entry.

This is one case where judge-made law has really impacted how business models are formed. Until 2017, the 'exhaustion doctrine' had Quanta Computers v. LG as its main precedent. Exhaustion is the point at which you have sold your patented stuff, and the consumer is using it as intended, so even though you maintain your patent on e.g. 'making/using ink cartridges', as soon as you sell them, the consumer can do what they want with them.

Quanta left some unfortunate uncertainty: once a seller had created a product that "embodies the essential features of the patents", and sold it, exhaustion kicked in. However, the printer/ink industry still argued that part of the inventive process was the customer (who fully owned the cartridges and printer) putting ink in cartridges and cartridges in printers. This was not meant as much to sue consumers but to bully ink resellers.

This all came to a head in the Supreme Court case Lexmark (linked below), on this exact question. In effect, the Supreme Court said "Once you sell the printer and ink, you're exhausted", under the argument that allowing Lexmark to sue ink resellers for patent infringement would clog commerce. They used probably the simplest argument in 'exhaustion' doctrine, the "first sale doctrine", which says that, once you sell your product, all IP around that product is exhausted with respect to that product.

This can get very confusing, because exhaustion is NOT about the actual methods of making ink, but about when a specific product--the ink cartridge you found in your grandfather's basement--is totally outside of the manufacturers control. Thank god, the Supreme Court has made it a lot harder to claim IP infringement in 'downstream' commerce, and I bet that the printer industry is currently changing its "free printer but ink costs its weight in platinum" model.

Not sure if there are other aspects of the business that make printer sellers inherently skeevy (the stories here tell me that it is part sleazy salesmanship, part lawyer-bullying), but this is definitely an industry that shaped its business model around using IP to threaten resellers so they could keep the margins on ink sky high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_Prods.,_Inc._v._Lex....

Same reason the airline industry has universally garbage quality: customers comparison-shopping by sticker price and sticker price alone.

Bit off topic, but what printer would people recommend for someone who needs one every now and then, that is capable of color prints and scanning, that won't stop working when unused for several months?

I'm getting the impression ink jet is not the way to go due to the long pauses, but the color lasers are all seem very expensive for such occasional use.

Pick up a Brother color laser. They are one of the least hostile to their customers, and their prices are reasonable. Buy new if you have to, but if you can find one a few years old in good condition, I find their older models to be the most reliable and least scammy...

Thanks! I'll take a look.

Consider looking for a used color laser. They tend to last long enough that it's worth buying and selling.

I think they're finally lightening up because of the environment.

Every big brand now has a range of models with ink tanks you can simply refill. Even the official ink is not overly expensive.

Of course the printers are more expensive but not crazily so. If it always had been like this we'd have had nothing to complain about IMO.

My laser printer is now over 10 years old. I bought toner 2/3 times I think. The only thing I needed to replace was one internal battery for a couple of dollars recently that was used to keep the time of the internal fax machine I never used, kept bugging me for the date.

A lot of useful insights that I will use the next time I need a printer. This comment is totally off topic- I have noticed the same thing about external cameras for my desktop computer. Never needed one until the pandemic forced Zoom et al on all of us. Any comments?

Center Cam is pretty good with its narrower field of view and decent color handling, essentially what a typical webcam should be. I think primarily what sets it apart is it was designed post-2020 and has to compete with the high expectations we all hold from ubiquitous cutting edge phone cameras. The incumbent webcams (even that term sounds dated) are all from an era in which sending video over the internet at all was an impressive feat.

As a trend, huge profit margins incentive drastic behavior on either side of the market.

I have an old Samsung color laser printer. Where can i find information on maintenance? The printouts have developed some stripes etc. I'm sure it's something that can be fixed, hopefully trivially.

Noone here has recommended Kyocera. Their printers are a bit more pricy but from what I've seen they are not scammy. Get one with Postscript support so you don't need updated drivers.

Years ago I worked for a software startup that was acquired by HP. At some point after our acquisition, we had presentations from various directors. I'll never forget the presentation from someone in the printer division. He was gloating about printer ink sales, how the printer division was a cash machine, and then he made this arm-pumping motion as he verbalized the sound effect of a cash register drawer opening: "cha-ching." It was gross. Nothing from him about technology, or the HP way, or making the best printers, or solving customer problems. Just "how can we wring more cash out of people?"

I didn't stay at HP very long. It was during the Mark Hurd era and it was a company being run by backstabbing sociopaths.

I'm surprised to not see anyone here saying how they are still sticking to dot-matrix printers.

There's a great supply of cheap printer/cartridges in Chinese market.

The ultimate problem is 'shareholder value' and the over-financialization of everything. Of course in a capitalist market economy you need to make profit.

But it should not be the only thing; Society requires goods and services for people, and incentives should be aligned to society's goals, not finance's goals.

All industries are like this.

Because they can be. Who's going to stop them?

This question further reinforces my belief that most people really haven't internalized the motives and means of modern capitalism.

You can answer many questions like this by referring to a crude old southern homily:

"Why does a dog lick his balls?"

The very widely applicable metaphorical answer:

"Because he can."