Printers As Fast As Possible

Modern printers are incredibly useful, but notorious for having questionable reliability. How do laser & inkjet printers work, and why do they often give us a hard time?

[AspirationHD]

I have yet to meet anyone who had a flawless experience with an inkjet printer.

[federicocanale]

How do printers work? simple: they don't

[ToasterNinja]

You forgot to mention that printers smell fear.

[LazerLord]

Screw companies that rely on overpriced ink to sell their crap! I don't think that a Kg of 3D printer filament should be *less* than a single cartridge.

[CraigWard]

The laser explanation was very good but ONLY for a black laser printer. For colour you have another transfer medium called an "Image Transfer Belt" which transfers the toner from the drums CMYK, creates the image on the belt then transfers it to the paper.
If you were interested.
Source: I'm a Konica Minolta repair tech.

[Solstice]

My HP printer thinks it's funny to download software updates EVERY FRICKIN TIME I PRINT SOMETHING.

[AJ-kjgo]

I've watched so much Linus that whenever anyone says "speaking of" I know I can leave the room because I assume it's an ad integration.

[dogeasaurusrex]

Printers are an amazing feat of engineering. They work perfectly fine until you need something last minute, then they inexplicably stop working.

[daniel.pendzich]

My printers great, it will print half of one page then spit the other half out blank...

[amahashadow]

Actually matrix are still widely used in some company because they are extremely reliable and can print triplicates in one pass. Also, the refills (and therefore cost per page) are dirt cheap

[askhowiknow]

Those Epson EcoTank printer spit out a shit ton of that ink into the “maintenance box” for “cleaning the printer heads”

[kcvriess]

Forgetting randomly installed programmed obsolescence and programmed malfunctions when certain specific conditions are met.
I have worked for one one of the largest producers of inkjet printers can solidly confirm that this malpractice has been going on for many years.

[TheHoaxHotel]

"PC Load Letter", the fuck does that mean?!

[jakmere]

Okay Linus. I have a story about my Epson XP 320. I was printing an article from the web. I set my printer preferences to print in black and white: That did not work. The printer continued to print the document in color. So i saved the web page as a pdf file, set the preferences to black and white, then printed from adobe acrobat. the printer still printed in color. So I printed the document to a pdf file again, but set it to print in black in white. When I opened the new pdf file my screen displayed a document in black and white. "viola!" I thought...sure enough the god damn printer still - STILL printed in color! - meaning the printer is printing from memory and ignoring my preferences and the fact the document I printed is literally IN black and white. I had to open the black and white pdf file in a different pdf viewer in order to print in black and white (even then, i cant be sure the printer is not using some kind of composite that ends up using color cartridges anyway). As you know, the printer will not print if any of the cartridges are expended and will require the expended cartridge(s) to be replaced in order to continue printing. I have a new black ink cartridge, and did not want to use the color cartridges because i didn't need them. But the printer seems to be programmed to force color cartridge use for the purpose of seizing and prompting you to purchase more ink in order to continue printing. This seems a lot like a kind of ransom ware in you asked me. Clearly choosing not to print in color required using workarounds and just selecting the option to print in black in white from printer preferences is not enough. Am I missing something here?

[IIGrayfoxII]

I dont get why people will print photos at home.
they know that ink is expensive yet they do it.
You can take all your photos and get them printed at a store that does it for few cents each

And you gotta love toner which is just tiny particles of plastic

[ej_tech]

So in short, get a laser printer. They just work.

[patrickshaw]

Inkjet printer: we need to be online to print.
*Me setting it to print offline and seeing the long cord tethered to my desktop across the room.*
Printer: wE neED tO Be oNlinE!

[Snordehartet]

back when our biggest concern was the inability to print with our inkjet printer.

[Felixkeeg]

You should mention LED printers too. They work somewhat like laser printers but don't have mirrors in them, so they are sturdier. Also they don't run a line and then continue at the start of the next one, but print each line as a whole, each letter simultaneously.
We have some in the university and they are crazy fast.

[vintagestuffguy]

I'm that dot matrix guy - 1987 still rules my printing world! Really cheap to run too