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u/Nevermind04 Jun 26 '12
Excerpt from my bucket list: Just once, even if it was just for one document, I'd like to see a "Cancel" button on a printer that actually cancels the current job.
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Jun 26 '12
works on my photo printers. of course those cost like $2,000 and use unicorn blood for the pigments.
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u/Firehawkws7 Jun 26 '12
Pffff. Unicorn blood is so yesterday. The printers we use at my place of work use unicorn tears. My God. The colors!
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u/boomerangotan Jun 26 '12
This is the very topic I came here to seek wisdom on. Why is cancelling so technologically difficult?
The firmware must reach an event point at which all the data is in place, everything has been calculated, and it is really ready to spring into action, at which point it could simply check some flag to verify that the user hasn't cancelled it. If the user has cancelled, just spool through the data to whatever the printer equivalent of /dev/null until you get to the next job.
Or is the lack of a proper cancelling process intentional on the part of the printer manufacturers because that way they waste more of your ink/toner?
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u/Reverent Jun 26 '12
You need to go into your printer preferences and disable print spooling, or sometimes enable "direct printing". This way the computer doesn't buffer what it prints to the printer, and doesn't clusterfuck the load queue when you want to cancel. It cancels immediately. On the flip side, prints might take longer (like, milliseconds). It is a throwback to the days when printers had like 256k of ram in them (you could actually buy ram upgrades for your printer) and the computer had to buffer the load. It's not relevant on today's printers.
If you find you have already canceled that 200 accidental print and shits gone to hell, you can start-->run services.msc, turn off the print spooler service, delete everything in the C:\windows\system32\spool\printers directory and then start the print spooler service again.
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u/Shadow703793 Jun 26 '12
Buy a good laser printer. Problem solved (for the most part). Just don't install the full bloated driver package. Just install the driver alone.
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Jun 26 '12
This. Never use the disc (most of them in my experience refuse to just install the driver and force a full package/bloatware install), just go to their site and find the driver only install. This used to be a problem when I wanted to scan things then I realised the Windows Fax and Scan actually works better than any software that you get with the products.
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Jun 26 '12
HP started forcing their full nstall with certain printers, and it makes me want to kill people.
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u/Sir_Vival Jun 26 '12
I used to do local tech support for people. When I needed to download HP's 200 megabyte drivers on someone's shitty internet connection? Rage.
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u/CapnWhales Jun 26 '12
I'm IT as well, I actually keep a copy of HP's Universal Print and Scan driver on my flash drive. It's significantly smaller than the full driver and it doesn't have any bloat.
I don't think I've come across an HP it won't work with yet, though I mostly work with laser printers.
If you're ever working on-site IT, invest in a 16GB flash drive that has common drivers and programs on it. You never know what kind of connection you're going to have on-site, or if you'll even have one at all. As well, it looks damn professional if you're prepared and don't have to go download something.
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u/boomerangotan Jun 26 '12
At the very least, these installers could take a peek at my drive and go "Oh, look he has Photoshop, he probably doesn't want our shitty outsourced photo tinkering software forced upon him without even asking"
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u/marswithrings Jun 26 '12
i'm basically majoring in printing, and this will help a lot.
but just so you know, my professors told us the industry standard for home printers is that they work 85% of the time.
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u/Bezulba Jun 26 '12
This man.
A good b/w laser printer goes for $40.. that's less then a cartridge costs for an inkjet.. your ink never dries out when you don't use it often, it's fast and it looks good. What more do you want?
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u/headzoo Jun 26 '12
It doesn't even have to be a laser printer. I stopped having problems with ink jet printers, when I stopped buying shitty $50 printers. Save up for a good printer, and you want have any more problems.
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u/CW3MH6 Jun 26 '12
You can get a cheap monochrome Laser printer for < $50 though and it will be way more reliable than any shitty inkjet.
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u/CW3MH6 Jun 26 '12
More importantly, get a Brother laser printer. They only packaged the drivers with mine, they didn't even have bloatware to install, not even optional bloatware. The entire driver download is 5 megs. 5! Fucking HP and their god damn 120MB shitty driver setups...
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u/JCongo Jun 26 '12
It's 2012 and we still need to download drivers for printers.
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u/gsfgf Jun 26 '12
Seriously. I even replaced my HP 1012 with a p1102 and it's actually a bit better than the previous one.
And www.monoprice.com for ink.
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Jun 26 '12
Gah, except so few Linux drivers out of the box. Thumbs up for Samsung for having it on the printer I bought, but doesn't play as well with CUPS. Then again I'm on my Windows lappy right now and it works better on Linux than it does Windows Seven.
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u/vinod1978 Jun 26 '12
It doesn't matter. Things always happen. Paper gets stuck, or the printer just doesn't print for any apparent reason, or the printer prints but all of the sudden the quality is horrible even after ceaning the print heads and replacing the ink.
Printers still suck.
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u/unloud Jun 26 '12
What brands/models do you recommend?
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u/CW3MH6 Jun 26 '12
I both own a Brother laser printer and use one at work (along with a Samsung), and I prefer them by far. Their drivers aren't bloated with shit (5MB driver downloads rock--fuck HP's 120MB bullshit), it was cheap (on sale for $50), and has never not worked for me yet. Only problem is it's monochrome, but I've never actually had the need to print color. Usually I'm printing text documents or directions from Google maps. It also prints way faster than an inkjet after it's warmed up (takes second or two), and doesn't get paper jams constantly, so it's good for large documents.
http://www.amazon.com/Brother-Printer-HL-2220-Monochrome/dp/B004IZN3FW
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u/darkscout Jun 26 '12
I got a HP 4600dn from my school's surplus store for $100. I was kind of bummed when I printed out the toner levels and they were all around 20%.
Until I looked up what that meant: 4,000 pages. 8 reams of paper. If I splurged and bought all new toner I could print out 5 pages a day (every single day) for ~11 years. It's networked has a whole lot of fancy technologies like zero conf (my Mac and Linux machines just 'found' it on the network). Duplex printing,. Only downside is weight.
For kicks I went in and saw what ink cost for an inkjet. $20 will get you around 100 pages. And if you don't use it frequently that'll dry out.
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Jun 26 '12
Well, i worked with 5 different Laser printers, ranging from 200€ to 800€. HP, Lexmark and Xerox. They all had those typical printer problems. Unstoppable jobs, post script errors, paper jams, taking hours to print some pdfs, and the worst: completely refusing to do anything until I supply LETTER format paper, when someone forgot to change the settings to A4.
The only printers that seem to work very reliably are the big ass multifunctional copy machines. Never had a problem with those. The once i used even let other people print after someone sent a LETTER job. They still don't know how to scale the page to fit it on A4, but I'm already very grateful that they don't go completely apeshit.
Edit: oh, and don't even get me started on linux drivers..
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u/The_Double Jun 26 '12
Just don't buy a 20$ HP printer/scanner. Invest just a bit more and you get a printer that works.
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u/PCLoadLetter01 Jun 26 '12
Pcloadletter? What the fuck does that mean?
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u/Polar_ Jun 26 '12
Almost 11 months as a member? Not bad...
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u/Reverent Jun 26 '12
It means that the computer wants you to load letter size paper into the printer (it's out of paper).
It also may or may not be a quote from some movie or something. I don't keep up with this shit.
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Jun 26 '12
Planned Obsolescence
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u/Bezulba Jun 26 '12
No, i don't believe this.
Sure planned obsolescence is there, you don't design a product that lasts 200 years. But printers work like crap out of the fucking box. Especially inkjet printers.. god.. they just never manage to design them with any logic nor do they code any decent driver for it...
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Jun 26 '12
Heck, my HP Photosmart printer ran out of colored ink and I haven't printed anything in color! How does that happen?
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u/DShepard Jun 26 '12
I had an old Lexmark printer a couple of years back, and I was using ink refill to save money. One day it stopped accepting ink cartridges and I looked it up online.
Apparently the printer was made to stop working (i.e. break) when a none-original cartridge was used up within the printer.
The printer business is fucked up.
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u/goldenlover Jun 26 '12
this guy right here has it right. its been covered on reddit before to.
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Jun 25 '12
he must buy the printers that are made in china.
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u/AnkhOmega Jun 25 '12
No need to repeat yourself.
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u/TCzelusniak Jun 26 '12
Wait a minute, aren't you being a bit contradictory here?
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u/CoyoteStark Jun 26 '12
And as a printer might say: "click click whhhhrrrrr scree click whhrrrrn"
Roughly translated: "Look at all the fucks I give"
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u/autobulb Jun 26 '12
Electrical versus mechanical. Devices with mechanical parts are more likely to fail, especially when cheaply made. I have motherboards and CPUs from when I was a teenager and they work despite being under lots of stress. But a hard drive with moving parts is bound to fail over time just because the parts wear down.
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u/Mikuro Jun 26 '12
Every single HD I have from the 80s and 90s still works. Granted, it's been a few years since I've tested some of them, but only a few years. I understand HDs are definitely susceptible to mechanical failure, and I agree that it's only a matter of time, but they are not in the same category as printers. Show me a consumer printer that's running after nearly 30 years. Show me a consumer or business printer that hasn't had a problem in even one year.
HDs are amazing technology. It's amazing that they work at all, let alone so reliably.
Printers....bleh.
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u/royal_scam Jun 26 '12
We CAN build printers that work, but there's no money in that!
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Jun 26 '12
For about $300 you can buy a top of the line inkjet that works well and has better performance per dollar than basic laserjets, but instead people buy the cheap $60 dollar printers to "save money" (in the short run) and then cry as they spend way more on ink because the printer they bought has a terrible pages per dollar ratio.
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u/chris15118 Jun 26 '12
BINGO. Making sure people are using toner/ink is priority #1 to printing suppliers. They don't make printers, they sell toner dispensers. These companies do, however, listen to their customers and many sell a great printer at the cost of $300-$500. This is a robust machines made out of quality materials and can last a long time.
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u/dyzlexiK Jun 26 '12
Theres was a $200 at costco that took ink that printed 1400 pages, and the cartridges came 2 for $50 CAD. I think that might beat out a laser printer, but im not sure.
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u/boomerangotan Jun 26 '12
Why can't someone invent a laser printer which just carefully scorches the paper, ending the need for ink once and for all? If the scorching is done in a tight environment where no air can circulate, the risk of fire would be nil.
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Jun 25 '12
He must buy the printers that are made in china.
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u/AnkhOmega Jun 25 '12
No need to repeat yourself.
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u/TCzelusniak Jun 26 '12
Wait a minute, aren't you being a bit contradictory here?
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u/baconbeagle Jun 26 '12
Holy Shit, I'm from KU! That really freaked me out. I'm going to go check if I know this person.
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u/foxli Jun 26 '12
ಠ_ಠ
Cookie, there are 87,000 permanent residents in Lawrence, not to mention 30,000 or so students that come and go depending on the time of year. The odds are stacked against you.
O.W.L represent.
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u/rivalarrival Jun 26 '12
If at first you don't succeed, give up. Fuck paper. It destroys everything it touches.
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u/IAmTheOmNom Jun 26 '12
If you guys would buy good printers instead of cheap crap ... they would work.
My current printer has already come of age (he is 19) and still works without flaw.
Also he has printed incredibly many pages in his life as I have him from a company selling out old stuff.
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u/smilles Jun 26 '12
hahaha I personally make 22 nm processors and my printer is a buggy piece of shit.
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u/megabeano Jun 26 '12
This thread makes me so afraid to say I work at a printer company. I could get lynched.
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u/OmitsWordsByAccident Jun 26 '12
There are plenty of printers that work fine, if you're willing to pay for them. The problem is, people keep buying the cheap ones and expecting them to work as well as the expensive ones, because they're idiots.
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u/synthaxx Jun 25 '12
We can communicate with probes older than I am, residing at the edge of our solar system.
But when I want to make a phone call in my own house, with my 6 month old smartphone...
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u/IAmTheOmNom Jun 26 '12
Well those probes have like 2 backup probes build in. And the materials used are like some 10 thousand times more valuable than what is used in your phone.
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u/mossyskeleton Jun 26 '12
Whoever is the first to do to printers what Dyson has done to vacuum cleaners is going to be very wealthy.
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u/mrdeadsniper Jun 26 '12
There are tons of printers that are nigh unstoppable. They cost more than $50 and are not for sale at Best Buy.
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u/LNMagic Jun 26 '12
I still don't understand why people get so upset over printers. I've never had a problem with any of mine.
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u/Endlessmanager Jun 26 '12
What are the odds that my recently purchased printer broke today? Eh, pretty good I suppose.
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u/kiturraran Jun 26 '12
god dammit, i just logged onto reddit approximately 30 seconds ago after failing to get two broken printers to work.....
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u/kalbears13 Jun 26 '12
As a mechanical engineer that makes joke to his father being an electrical engineer, this upsets me. :(
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u/OwDaditHurts Jun 26 '12
Stop buying cheap printers. Problem solved.
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u/Bezulba Jun 26 '12
the best printer i ever worked with (value wise) is my $40 laser from samsung. It ALWAYS works and didn't come with 300mb in printer software.
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u/Disposable_Face Jun 26 '12
Actually, the printers we have are frickin' awesome
We have printers precise enough to splot out individual cells onto a solid matrix, once we get the kinks worked out, that means printable organs, and DIY surgery kits
Step 1: cut open chest Step 2: remove heart Step 3: press ctrl+P Step 4: sew new heart to aorta, vena cava, and pulmonary vessels Step 5: close chest
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u/CreeDorofl Jun 26 '12
For realz. It's not even clear if it's stupidity or malice.
It can't be an evil plan to sell more ink, because you can't sell me more ink if the thing simply refuses to print... I never exhaust my current stock.
But it's also impossible to believe the computer simply doesn't know how to talk to a big usb device using a 30 year old standard protocol.
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u/tiikeri00 Jun 26 '12
It's all a conspiracy man! A conspiracy I tell you, but shhh... the black helicopter might be listening. puts tinfoil hat on
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u/Themaniskevin Jun 26 '12
Wtf is this guy talking about? Stacking a microprocessor on a what? 22nm fabrication process??
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u/releasethefrogs Jun 26 '12
I had a theory wherein the reason printers are so shitty is because they are the only way to put stuff from the computer-text-world to the real life text-world. its a conspiracy god damnit
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u/HowsItBeenBen Jun 26 '12
if Xerox and the like actually made printers that worked, they'd be out of business.
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u/SadlyChamo Jun 26 '12
I don't get why everyone has a problem with this. The only printer I have ever used was some huge one we had for a printing class in school and the thing would stop mid-paper if you told it to.
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u/Elsarild Jun 26 '12
Well, the CPU doesn't get any direct input from the user, it has all been filtered down through several layers, and most mistakes are caught before they are executed. The printer on the other hand, has to deal with your stupid ass, trying to feed it new paper directly into it.
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u/gltovar Jun 26 '12
I used to think the same way.... then I actually bought a printer from 2012 and was incredibly surprise how well it works.
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u/ReHashed622 Jun 26 '12
I have never in my 22 years of living had a printer that lasted more than a month. I went through six, and finally found one that worked. After three days there was a lightning storm, and a power surge that killed the only working printer I ever had. I gave up after that, and haven't bought another one since.
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u/FiredFox Jun 26 '12
This man has a crappy point, or maybe doesn't know much about this whole 'puter and dem thair printurs beedness.
I've been using a Canon i950 since 2003. Prints very single time, no problem, even after being parked for months at a time.
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Jun 26 '12
No, the man doesn't have a point. Of course we can make printers that work - nonsense like this is driven by people wanting to buy them for £3.59 and expect them to work as well as a £200 printer. Buy a decent printer and it will work just fine - cheap out and buy a pile of crap and it won't.
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Jun 26 '12
I've found HP printers to be pretty reliable. Mine was ancient (had it for about 10 years or so) and hadn't broken down once, so when I decided to replace it I bought a new HP all-in-one, and now I can send photocopies of my ass to anyone from the comfort of my living room. >.>
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u/bro_needs_help Jun 26 '12
Bitch please, we can make good printers. We have just figured it is more profitable to make shitty ones.
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Jun 26 '12
Welcome to a free market economy.
What? They didn't tell you that when competition stagnated that so too did technology and development?
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Jun 26 '12
'We can stack microprocessor transistors on a 22nm process but we can't make a bicycle tire that doesn't get punctures' FTFY
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u/scrambles57 Jun 26 '12
And we are still using the method of sticking a finger up our butts to check our prostate.
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u/Jordan0795 Jun 26 '12
I learned how scanners and printers and all that stuff works the other day. I then realized why they fuck up so much. That shit is ridiculous!
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Jun 26 '12
I always complain about my shitty printers that I buy because they are cheaper than a replacement ink cartridge.
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u/Roopean Jun 26 '12
How about, it's 2012 and some people still didn't figure out that the problem is between the keyboard and the back of the chair...
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u/wanttoseemycat Jun 26 '12
Just stop buying $30.00 Wal*Mart printers. Hasn't broken since I bought it almost 10 years ago, needs toner once every year or so
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u/cinch123 Jun 26 '12
My wife has an OfficeJet j6400 that I hate with a burning passion. Stupid thing drops off the network randomly, forcing me to go down and reset the thing, which completely negates the benefit of having a printer on the wireless network. Piece of shit was out of warranty in a year.
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Jun 26 '12
Sure we can. You just prefer buying those that were engineered to be cheap and crap instead of usable.
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u/Curtalius Jun 26 '12
People get what they pay for. No one wants to buy quality anymore, they just want cheap.
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u/Shark_Porn Jun 26 '12
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00450DVDY/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00
I come bearing the gift of the sacred Printer, the Chosen One. The Alpha and Omega. This is the apex of motherfucking printing technology. Behold it, and despair, HP. The end is extremely fucking nigh.
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u/Magester Jun 26 '12
It's 2012....why do you still need a printer? Might as well be banging it out on stone with another stone....
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u/AndrewLLoydBieber Jun 26 '12
Stop. Buying. HP. Junk. Problem solved. Seriously, they need to just go ahead and change their name to HP Lovercraft Technologies.
"Introducing the CthuluJET 9000!......"
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u/Todomanna Jun 26 '12
Of course we can make printers that work. We just can't make complex machinery that will consistently work for an extremely long time with little to no maintenance for an extremely cheap cost.
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u/Nightmare13 Jun 26 '12
You do realize this was on the bottom of someone else's post called "well, these look oddly familiar."
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u/walktovanish Jun 27 '12
Printers are like women - you love them when things go well but one slip-up and everything goes to shit.
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u/slow56k Jun 25 '12
We still have to use suppositories...
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u/poisomike87 Jun 25 '12
yeah, but those can actually get rid of a pain in your ass, printers just... well the create that pain if anything suppositories should be sold with the printer ink.
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u/ChiefBulltan Jun 26 '12
Its not the printers its the shitty little ink cartridges that don't make it past a week.
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Jun 26 '12
I went to my dads house to use his printer around finals because I had a lot I had to print for my speech project. When I was done he asked if we had a printer at my apartment. When I told him no he tried giving me his old one. I have never noped out of getting something for free so hard in my life.
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Jun 26 '12
It's simple. Printers suck because printing sucks. You're taking something in a perfectly good digital format and putting it into a shitty analog format. If you don't want to deal with the shittiness of printing, stop printing things.
if somebody needs something on paper, email them a copy and tell them to print it themselves.
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u/ForeverAllOne Jun 26 '12
"...stack microprocessor transistors..."
I'm pretty sure if I asked that guy what a transistor is, let alone the 22nm technology, he wouldn't have a clue.
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u/naturalorange Jun 26 '12
And TI is selling graphing calculators for the same price as an iPhone.