Why are printers such pieces of crap?

[Lyle Romer]

Maybe, for this particular application, they're using a "timed" QR code, a code that's only valid within a specified window. You can do this to add some security to a QR code and to avoid someone else stealing your code. The scanner may have identified this QR code as a falsified QR code...

I don't think the airlines do this. Since the name on the boarding pass is verified with an ID to go through security to get to the boarding area there is really no need. Plus it would require the codes on printed passes and the codes on the app to be handled differently.

I think Ticketmaster has QR codes that change so that people can't scalp screen shots and sell the same ticket to multiple people. The last concert I attended last year I had to show my friend's ticket on my app because I couldn't text him a screenshot.

[Frank Angel]

My very first encounter in the early 90s (that's last century) with the first HP inkjet printer, it became immediately apparent to me what HP's scam was -- you gotta buy their absurdly EXPENSIVE ink, and of course my immediate response was, Oh yeah, not when I figure out how to refill those cartridges. And thus began the quest for test all the many third party refill kits that popped up-- some ingenious ones that had bottles of ink and tubes that snaked thru the body of the printer to get them to the cartridges. Most required drilling into either the cartridge or the printer or both. Inevitably none them worked or the one time I did get one such product to seemingly syphon ink into the modified cartridge, it was so messy -- ink all over the place and ink all over me -- not to mention the time involved to set all this up, that I gave finally accepted defeat, but I knew damn well that if they WANTED to, any printer manufacturers could make carts bigger as well as refillable. Any one with half a brain could figure out how to make that work. And with a bit of ingenuity, they could easily solve the clogged jets issue by simply having a cleaning cartridge in addition to the ink that would automatically squirt an appropriate solvent thru the jets to keep them totally clean of ink after every print job. Of course to build a printer that is not a disposable and to make one that would be EFFICIENTLY self clean and a printer that doesn't need to be sent to a land fill after a few months of use, requires a desire on the part of a manufacturer to do that...something no manufacture seems to have any interest in doing.

I must say, Epson,. after all these years finally does have a model -- maybe more than one now -- that uses ink tanks instead of cartridges; You buy big bottles of ink and just fill the tanks when necessary. Of course the minute I saw that system -- same idea that I so valiantly tried to accomplish a few decades earlier -- I bought one it. It is a sturdily built ET-3700 and don't bother looking up that number, it's probably already obsolete as it is more that two years old. Manufactures change models like most people change their tooth brushes. I do love the concept, tho, but there are a number of things I really don't like about this Epson, but the big refillable ink tanks trump any of the cons. Maybe this will force the other manufactures to have to offer printers with a similar ink refilling feature. Epson is also going to have to do something about the worst user interface panel I've ever seen. Now if they could only design one with ink tanks AND the ability to change out badly clogged nozzles, they'd REALLY have something!

My one success with thwarting the evils of HP was with a one of their LaserJet printers and its laser toner cartridge that we had at the office. Our HP LaserJet finally gave up the ghost; we had to replace it and we got what seemed like the exact same unit but of course it had different model number -- like all of the manufacturers, HP has about a dozen models and they all become obsolete every year so being able replace one that just died with the exact same model was impossible. And the reason I wanted the same model was because we had a closet full of the laser cartridges from the old printer.

No surprise, the new replacement printer wouldn't accept the older toner carts. To me, they looked physically identical, so why won't these older carts fit in this new LaserJet? Well under close inspection, I find that HP had stealthy added small, inconspicuous plastic nodules on either side of the body of the cart, preventing it from sliding all the way into the printer. I see all those toner carts and know how much is invested in them so I was not a happy pup to know HP decided to make them obsolete. I was determined to deal with this scam. brought one of the older carts down to the shop and used the motorized grinder wheel to grind off HP's little "screw you" protrusions on both sides of the cartridge. Low and behold, the toner cart now would slide into the printer just as smoothly and perfectly as the new one which suppository was "correct" for that printer. We eventually used up ALL of those "wrong" carts with no issues at all, which lead to only conclusion -- HP PURPOSELY made that change to the cart body so as to prevent the customer from using their existing supply of cartridges. Unfortunately, the university with its 25 colleges, kept buying HP printers for years for every office in every college, even tho I ranted and raved about the sinister scam that HP was pulling off, even on such a volume buying customer.

I don't know why the likes of Greenpeace aren't over there at the HP, Epson, Canon and whatnot headquarters, protesting the hell out of their policies of making printers cheaper than the ink in their as-hard-to-refill-as-possible cartridges... I don't know how many printers I sent to the junkyard in the last 10 years...

I am with Marcel on this -- the tons of all this plastic with no where to go but landfill or the oceans...and no one can find a better way? I remember when flat panel monitors came on the scene and one CRT in our office died. I replaced it with a Dell LCD flat panel. The other people in the office started making noise about "how come I can't have one of those new flat monitors?" Sooner or later the IT department went about replacing ALL the perfectly good, working CRTs college-wide then university wide because in ever office where they needed to replace a legitimately malfunctioning CRT, they couldn't combat the demand of "I want one too," by professors and administrators -- people who always profess to be (using today's term) "woke." So seemingly intelligent individuals as a community, just to satisfy their desire for the newest, shiny thing, demanded to replace those thousands of still functioning and and perfectly usable CRT monitors (all Gateways, btw -- you remember the cow company?!) with Dell LCDs. I remember hearing the explanation as to WHY someone was demanding a flat panel, and it was "It takes up much less space, and then seeing that they placed the Dell monitor so the screen was in the exact same position as the Gateway CRT, so behind that flat panel was just wasted space anyway.

Human beings are really strange, silly creatures.

[Mike Blakesley]

The whole thing with flat panel TV sets and computer monitors is what gave rise to my personal favorite fact about humans: If people want something, they WILL find a way to buy it, whether they can afford it or not. Even when flat-panel TVs still cost 3 or 4 thousand bucks, it seemed like the CRT sets vanished overnight, even in the homes of people you KNEW couldn't afford flat panels.

When electric cars go mainstream in any particular region, the same thing will happen, just you watch.

[Martin Brooks]

I don't fly very often, but I would definitely use the screen shot approach to show a QR code or some other kind of barcode in my phone rather than rely on a smartphone app to display the code at the moment of truth.

I already got into the habit of using smartphone screen shots long ago, thanks to the AMC Stubs membership program. Sprint/T-Mobile signal reception has been pretty flaky at the AMC Patriot 13 theater in Lawton. Rather than rely on the AMC app to bring up my Stubs membership QR code as well as the QR code for tickets I bought online, I just use screen shots taken prior to going to the theater.

They also send an email with the QR code. As long as the email has already downloaded to the phone, it doesn't matter if there's service. At my AMCs, they don't care about the QR code for the membership. They only scan the QR code for the ticket and then check your ID to make sure it's you.

(I went to see Amsterdam today. When they scanned my QR code it didn't work. Then the guy doing the scanning says, "you booked the movie for tomorrow". I don't know how that happened because the app on my computer always defaults to current day, but it did. So I quickly cancelled it and then "bought" another ticket for today. Hardly anyone in the theater anyway.)

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The whole thing with flat panel TV sets and computer monitors is what gave rise to my personal favorite fact about humans: If people want something, they WILL find a way to buy it, whether they can afford it or not. Even when flat-panel TVs still cost 3 or 4 thousand bucks, it seemed like the CRT sets vanished overnight, even in the homes of people you KNEW couldn't afford flat panels.

When electric cars go mainstream in any particular region, the same thing will happen, just you watch.

I was guilty of buying a Mitsubishi HD Rear Projection set way back when they just started broadcasting in High Definition in the late 90's. That TV set me back about 5 grand, but having worked in Broadcast TV for a number of years I wanted to see what they were up to and how fast it would spread across the channels, and that did take a few years. There were still a few independent stations broadcasting in SD until the mid 2000's... All that was interesting to watch over the 8 or 9 years the set lasted . Once the projection tubes in that set were toast I got a flat panel set. It was a 50 inch Samsung that cost me almost a little over 2 grand at the old Circuit City store. But I think the main thing that caused the flat panel sets to take off was High Definition Television and the fact that prices really dropped quickly once sales of them took off.. These days you can buy a decent 50 inch flat panel set for $300!!

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I quit buying Ink Jet printers back about 2005. I'm just curious why so many people still buy Ink Jet printers when Laser Jet is so much more reliable, and not much more cost, or the same cost in some cases? I never had any luck with inkjets, but have had fantastic luck with the two Laser Jet's I've owned over the last ten years. The first laser jet was color and only replaced by the second one because it was an IBM and they abandoned printers all together. It needed new belts and I couldn't get them. But it lasted 8 years and still worked some what when it went into the dumpster. My current Laser jet is a Brother B&W that cost $150.00. Since it's wireless, I can print from any device in the house, even the cell phones.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I know HP has gotten a pretty bad reputation since entering the consumer products market. There's interesting reading at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet_printing . Such things as an allegation that HP paid Staples $100 million to not sell third party ink cartridges (though none of the articles I find link to the suit or its outcome), and various measures printer companies have used to prevent use of third party ink. I see now that Staples is selling refilled HP cartridges.

It is also interesting that the Wikipedia article says Kodak tried the "pay full price for the printer and get cheap ink" business model, and it did not work.

I bought an HP 8600 Plus printer/scanner/fax(!) in 2013, and it is still going strong. I print a few hundred pages a month, most double sided. I really like the simplicity of thermal ink jet printing (no lasers, optics, photosensitive drum, fusing heater, etc.). According to the above Wikipedia article, it appears I am now in the minority since it says laser printers outsell inkjet printers 2 to 1. Maybe I'll end up with a laser printer in another ten years.

[Leo Enticknap]

We had an HP 8600 Plus, coincidentally also bought in 2013! However, it started to leak ink in 2020, and after some dripped onto the carpet, my wife decided that it had to go, and I agreed. Added to which, if you didn't print something almost every day, the heads would get gunked up and I'd have to go through the ritual of removing the print head assembly, swabbing the head itself with a Q-tip soaked in isopropyl alcohol, reassembling and then printing test pages until the ink was flowing again. We replaced it with an Epson EcoTank, and have not had any problems with it in the two years since. My only issue is that it is much slower scanning than the HP was. The document feeder on both is total garbage - they can only cope with pristine condition sheets.

I'm just curious why so many people still buy Ink Jet printers when Laser Jet is so much more reliable, and not much more cost, or the same cost in some cases?

I would guess that a lot of people simply don't realize that there isn't much of a price difference between a high end consumer inkjet and low end laser anymore. However, color lasers are still pricier than their inkjet equivalents, and even a color laser printer can't print photos to the same quality. But I agree that if you don't need to print photos and/or in color, a cheap laser printer is the way to go.

[Mike Blakesley]

My previous office printer to the one that inspired this thread was a laser …. You guessed it, an HP. The top scan part started falling apart, then it wouldn’t grab paper out of its drawer anymore, but it would still print. Then it started to get more and more finicky about when it would print at all, to the point I gave up. I must have restarted that thing at least 300 times. It started its last round of bad behavior, you guessed it, right after I’d spent $400 replacing the toner packs. THAT was what made me switch to the inkjet with refillable tanks.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Before I bought the Brother Laser printer that I've had for the last two years, I looked into what an extra toner cartridge cost. First of all it comes with two cartridges, and then a pack of 2 replacements is $47.95 from Amazon. I started my third ream of paper and I'm still on the first cartridge!! I'll never go Ink Jet again. One black inkjet cartridge from Amazon is 42.95. The trouble I've always had with ink jets, especially when living.in the dry western States climate are the nozzles clogging shut, then it won't print. Or perhaps only partially.

[Mike Blakesley]

Well my fancy Epson printer is now 18 months old, and after countless software updates, it's performing as poorly as ever. I got a new office computer a few weeks ago, so I was hoping with the "new" Windows and a fresh printer installation it would improve things, but nope. I'm still using the original inks that came with it (they were full size bottles) so the thing doesn't get THAT much use. It prints every day, just not a lot every day. But, it now prints crappy color pictures with "bands" going across them, even after multiple "cleaning" and "heavy cleaning" cycles. It still sometimes spits out two blank sheets and then claims to be jammed, even though it isn't. Sometimes it just decides on its own what tray to draw the paper from. Sometimes it even jams for real, just to make things interesting. Its most recent stunt is, it can't seem to connect to the computer for scanning. For printing it connects fine, but for scanning, "computer not found." Even though the computer is shown in the settings.

We have a Ricoh invoice printer here at the store for which the toners cost over $300 each, and the stupid damn machine gives NO warning when it's getting low on toner. Our old HP that finally fell apart would at least light up a light when the toner was nearly out, but this thing suddenly will just stop printing with no warning and there's no way to coax it back to life except replace the toner. So you would think "keep an extra toner" on hand would be good advice, but aside from the cost of doing that, the toners only have like a 90 day warranty on them so you hate to stock up on them because they'll be out of warranty by the time you use them. I ran into that with Pitney Bowes postage meter, which is also a piece of crap. Bought a two-ink package to save a few bucks, but then the warranty ran out on the inks before I changed them, and ink Film-Tech Cinema Systems wouldn't work, but sorry, nothing we can do, it's out of warranty.

This is the kind of crap I wish the government would regulate.

Definitely going the "cheaper is better" route the next time.

[Marcel Birgelen]

My two Brother laser printers are still humming along quite nicely. I've ditched my Epson inkjet printer and I'm fine with it. While the Epson printed beautiful photo-quality pictures on very expensive paper if everything was perfectly fine, but keeping up with it was ridiculously expensive and frustrating.

If you're not into printing high quality photos, then a (color) laser printer is probably the most economical way of rolling all along, even if you don't print very much anymore, like me. The reason simply is the fact that toner will not dry up. The ink in your inkjet printer will start to dry up and ruin your printing head, which is usually unfixable even after flushing entire cartridges worth of ink down the "drain"...

Speaking of the "drain": Most inkjet printers have a sponge to capture the ink from flushing the cartridges and the printing heads. If this thing is "full" (as in, the printer decides it's full), most of the time that means: exit printer, as there is usually no replacement part for this for most printers and sending it in for service will often cost more than a new printer.

At the office, someone decided that buying a new HP printer was a good idea, until it started to refuse to print black and white prints, while one of the color cartridges was empty... My Brother Color Laser may pull the same trick, but at least that one has an override (a bit like a Mortal Kombat special move code).

[Mike Blakesley]

Most inkjet printers have a sponge to capture the ink from flushing the cartridges and the printing heads. If this thing is "full" (as in, the printer decides it's full), most of the time that means: exit printer

My printer has that.... it's called a "maintenance box" and it's actually a replaceable item. So score one for Epson on that one.

[Marcel Birgelen]

My printer has that.... it's called a "maintenance box" and it's actually a replaceable item. So score one for Epson on that one.

Ah, so you have one of those "Ecotank" or similar models then? I also was considering a similar model with bigger ink tanks, but then I heard that many of those models also suffer from printer heads clogging up after prolonged non-use... I've never had that with any of my laser printers. Those laser printers also have a "toner waste box", but that one is also replaceable. My previous Epson (a 7-cartridge model) didn't have a "maintenance box", the sponge being full would require a mandatory intervention by a service tech...

[Mike Blakesley]

Yes, it's the Eco-Tank ET-5850.

The big problem I have with the lasers is the cost of the damn toner. The HP laser machine that basically fell apart had just recently had its four toners replaced....about $400 down the drain.

This new one prints every day, but doesn't print pictures or "big color" items every day, so that's probably what's caused the banding of the colors.