Let’s not sugarcoat anything here: Printers are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the black hole of the entire technological industry. Nothing else comes close to the printer community’s collective display of incompetency.
Nowhere else is there ever any glimmer of a doubt about communication between electronic devices—much less ones that are hardwired to each other. You never have to unplug and re-plug your power cord into the wall four times because your laptop doesn’t recognize the outlet. Your flash drive doesn’t have to upload a test document every time you connect. Your mouse doesn’t have only one button that sometimes means power, sometimes means reset, sometimes means I’m ready for side two, and sometimes means Chance Time! depending on when or how hard you press it. Your external hard drive has no problem understanding when you need to stop a file transfer, and doesn’t go completely bonkers any time you hit the cancel button, or attempt to transfer the file anyway the next time you plug the drive in to anything.
You’ll probably hear those sorts of complaints about anywhere. In fact, CollegeHumor made an incredibly accurate cartoon about the whole situation.
But here’s a new bit of criticism I’d like to add to the mix: it is quite nearly impossible to buy a printer that fits the specifications of what you’d like it to do.
Buying an external hard drive is simple: it’s got a certain amount of space (Gigabytes or Terabytes) and can store a correlated (and easily calculable) number of documents or files. If you’re picky, you can pick whether you want a USB 2.0 cord (pretty fast) or USB 3.0 cord (really fast).
As for printers:
- Honest to goodness, I don’t care that one printer can spew out 120 pages per minute while its competitor can only muster 110. If I’m looking to do 100 documents a minute, I’m probably not in the market for a printer that’s under $100. (Further, I should probably think about loosening up my schedule.)
- I don’t care that the printer is wireless. More than most anything else electronic, I’m okay with my printer being wired. The overarching premise of printing is that I need something on my computer to be in my hands—I don’t want it far away from me! And further, given all the other headaches printers have, why would I want to add network connectivity to the list of foreseeable problems?
- I don’t need to scan, and I don’t need to photocopy, and I don’t need to receive faxes. I want a printer. Your frivolous bells and whistles do not amuse me.
- Most of all, why, for the life of me, is it so damn near impossible to find an honest explanation of how many printed pages I’ll get out of one ink cartridge? And not under the circumstances where my first 60 documents only use Cyan, and my next 60 only use Magenta, and my next 60 only use Yellow, and I’m using the impossible-to-find Express Settings which drain less ink. If I know that I print about 30 documents per month, I think it’s entirely reasonable that you tell me approximately how often I’ll need to come back and buy more ink—or if I’m better off buying $0.30 a page prints at my local FedEx.
I tried printing this article, but the printer couldn’t decide whether the printer door was open or there was a paper jam.