Why Printers Are So Terrible

Recently I participated in a discussion on Twitter started by someone who was looking for a new printer.

This prompted conversation on a subject that's both common and dismal:

"Why are printers so terrible?"

Because wow, they truly are. Like many people, I've had printers break on me in a myriad of irritating ways. Sometimes, the nozzles on inkjet cartridges started leaking or clogging, or wireless connections crapped out and never worked again. Other times, paper jams created a pile of internal confetti impossible to extract — or, conversely, the printer insisted it suffered from a paper jam that didn't exist.

Then there's the shakedown of wildly expensive, proprietary inkjet-cartridges, a substance "more expensive than vintage Champagne and even human blood".

Printers are thus weird outliers in world where most other consumer tech has gotten better over time. Processors have gotten faster; hard drives have plummeted in price. Name nearly any tech category, and it's better and cheaper than previous decades.

But not printers. They were wretched ten years ago, and they're wretched still.

Why?

It's kind of interesting, really. I've been low-key reading and researching this for years and years, and the upshot is there's no single reason printers are so lousy. It's more a constellation of interlocking and reinforcing reasons.

But the Four Big Reasons Printers Are Wretched are …

1) Printer companies sell ink, not printers

Printer companies don't make any money on their printers. They make it on the very-expensive ink.

But the only way to sell you tons of proprietary ink is to make sure you own one of their printers. So they sell the printers at very cheap prices, knowing they'll more than make it up over the months and years with ink sales.

The thing is, printers are actually super-complex pieces of precision technology that really should be kind of expensive. So, as the Wirecutter notes, printer companies sell their printers at a steep, steep discount …

Your printer is worth a lot more than you're paying for it. Seriously, there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds. You're probably buying the printer for the cost of parts and distribution …

This is the beginning of our woes. If making a good printer is a) hard and b) requires great precision, but c) the printer company doesn't want to charge you the real costs of attaining such quality, they're probably going to wind up — intentionally or otherwise — skimping on quality. (More on this later.)

And of course, if a printer company makes money by selling you ink, they're incentivized to make the printer run out of ink too quickly. As the Outline noted, this is why …

… it always seems like ink runs out too quickly. Companies have been cutting back on the amount of ink in their cartridges, designing printers to brick if you utilize off-brand cartridges (even ones sold by monks), and juking internal sensors to tell you that you need ink long before the cartridge is actually empty. It also means that the printers themselves are made as cheaply as possible, resulting in further mechanical errors and short product life spans.

Printer companies have also played all manner of tricks to get the printer to use up more ink, such as creating "calibration tests" and using swathes of ink to clean printing heads and do other maintenance chores, or selling cartridges with increasingly less and less ink.

People have long tried to fight back against wildly high ink prices. They've gone online to buy cheaper, third-party inkjet cartridges — or kits to refill cartridge themselves.

But that just meant …

2) Printer companies use software to lock users out of cheaper ink

Printer companies have gone to war with customers who try and use third-party ink — by cramming their printers with software and hardware that detects third-party cartridges and refuses to use them.

Cory Doctorow has been covering this war for a long time, and in 2020 wrote an excellent summary of printer-company shenanigans. In one typical story, HP told customers they should install a "security update …

… but this "security update" was actually a ticking bomb: a countdown timer that waited for five months before it went off in September 2016, activating a hidden feature that could detect and reject all third-party ink cartridges.

The upshot is that if your printer isn't working, it might be that you tried to use some nonapproved ink — and the printer is fighting against you.

3) Wifi networking is hard, and printer wifi software isn't top-flight

Even if you buy approved, champagne-priced ink from your printer company, you can find another problem with printers: Their wireless connections are fussy as hell.

The wifi connection on my current printer stopped working about two months after I bought it, and despite my best attempts — reinstalling updated drivers on all my computers, updating the firmware on my laptop, performing open-heart surgery on my router settings, etc. — it never worked again. To print anything I have to plug my laptop into the printer. Old school.

Why are printer wireless connections so dodgy? Well, to be fair to the printer firms, it's because wireless connectivity is pretty gnarly. A printer has to deal with tons of operating systems (often weirdly configured) and a welter of routers (ditto), as the Wall Street Journal notes. So the job is hard.

And the problem is, printer firms do not throw a lot of talent at nailing this problem. Probably partly because "printer networking" is not a sexy area of software (I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of coders, and never once has anyone told me I am totally eager to get into the world of printer drivers), and partly because they're just not paying for it, printer firms do not get seem to get top-flight talent working on their networking software, and it shows. Now, I don't want to harsh on any of the hardworking software engineers who are working in this field; I'm sure they're doing their best, with lousy resources.

But the upshot is, this part of printer technology is deeply lackluster.

4) Printers manipulate atoms — and atoms are hard

So, we can lay many of the woes of printers at the feet of the manufacturers, and the razor-head business model they've chosen. The model does not, I'd argue, prioritize producing truly rock-solid hardware.

And that's a problem, because printers are doing an incredibly physically complex task. Like I noted above, they're placing millions of dots with wild precision. They're also feeding paper through this complex mechanism, and paper can behave in strange ways, as Rachel Swaby noted …

If a printer only had to deal with a single paper type, its rollers and springs could be fine tuned to apply the perfect amount of pressure to get that variety through the system without a hitch. But instead printer trays are stuffed with paper of different thicknesses, base materials, and coatings, which can bungle up the machine. The stock used for photos, for instance, is both slick and sticky, which can make it stick to the rubber rollers. And certain kinds of recycled papers can throw off a kind of paper dandruff, which builds up on rollers and stops them from working properly. Yet printers are expected to take them all on reliably.

Paper is also influenced by the weather. Too much humidity and pages won't want to separate. But the opposite isn't good either. When it's too dry, static electricity builds up. This also makes sheets of paper cling.

The ur-point here is that printers, far more than any other type of consumer electronics we use, need to move atoms around. Most other consumer electronics don't. Smartphones have few regularly moving parts. Neither do computers (except for their keyboards, which, because they're made of atoms that constantly move around, are the things that break the most).

Atoms are much harder to work with than bits, so when you have a product that wields them, you have to make physical quality a serious thing. If you wanted printers that were more robust and lasted longer, you'd probably want a business model where the printer cost more — so the company could be incentivized to work harder on the build quality — and didn't seek to recoup the money with crepuscular ink-selling schemes.

So, given the problems inherent in the printer marketplace, what can you do about it? How can you insulate yourself and get a printer that works marginally better and marginally longer?

Here's what I'd recommend:

• if you're printing mostly black-and-white documents? Get a laserjet printer. These use a form of dry ink, which — unlike as with the wet ink in an inkjet printer — doesn't dry up or require ink-eating nozzle maintenance. The cost-per-page printing is much less. Printing only in black-and-white also means the printer is less-complex beast, and thus less finickity and likely to break. Now, black-and-white laserjet printers tend to be slightly more expensive than inkjet printers — but that's a good thing, right? The whole problem with this model is when printer companies are incentivized to charge virtually nothing for complex hardware.
• in this scheme, do your black-and-white printing at home — and when you need color prints, hit up a printshop or a Staples (if you're lucky enough to be anywhere near one)
• but what if you need color photos all the time? You're stuck with a color inkjet, alas. I don't really have any good advice in this case, man. Good luck
• as for dealing with the unreliable wifi connections — make sure you keep the USB cable that ships with your printer. When the wifi breaks, as it very well may, just use the cable. If you try fixing the wireless you may just blow hours of your life and raise your blood pressure.

(Enjoyed this grim little meditation? Why then, hustle on down to the "clap" button and go to town! It's good for 50 claps, per reader! You can pretend you're whacking your printer, each time.)

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Clive is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine_, a columnist for_ Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones_. He's the author of_ Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He's @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.