It’s the shark in your sea of gadgets. No other device inspires more fear and loathing than the printer.
Welcome to Help Desk’s Printer Week. It’s like TV’s Shark Week, but for a technology that has become far too hostile toward its users. There’s ink in the water.
Four decades after we were first promised a “paperless office,” nearly half of Americans still own a printer. Shipping labels, official forms and school projects still all have to get made somewhere.
Humans have sent people to the moon. So why can’t we make a decent printer?
The hardware is inherently hard: there are moving parts and the unpredictability of supplies like ink that dries up or paper that jams. It is a true marvel that a box on your desk can spray thousands of microdroplets per second to re-create a lifelike image.
But hardware screw-ups aren’t the main reason people hate their printers. The bigger problem is that the printer industry has embraced some of the tech industry’s absolutely worst ideas about exerting control over consumers.
They put little chips in ink and toner cartridges to watch how you print and scare you away from buying cheaper generic brands. They send out “security” updates that make printers suddenly less capable so you’ll buy a new one. They hide what they’re doing with your sensitive documents behind obtuse privacy policies. And they push people into subscriptions that lock them into bad deals.
Too often today, printer makers aren’t even trying to compete on better software and user experiences. My own printer, a 2019 HP model, makes me punch in characters with the same type of keyboard as my cellphone from 1999. Just to make sure my printer stays compatible, I had to waste hours figuring out how to turn off its automatic software updates.
No wonder there are shops all over the United States where you can pay to destroy printers with a sledgehammer.
Our goal with Printer Week is to expose some of these problems for what they are — and to share some advice on how to fight back, fix them and hopefully save you a little money. We’ll blow up a few myths about compatible ink that costs half as much. We’ll introduce you to people who just can’t give up their printers, and expose the privacy questions printing companies refuse to answer. We’ll show you how to get things printed in a pinch without owning a printer. And while we can’t create better new options, we will name a few printers that didn’t drive us completely batty.
Printers may act like apex predators, but you don’t have to be their prey.
