Are ALL home printers complete bastards?

[CharliesAngles]

As in, really unreliable, expensive and utterly contemptible temperamental twats?

We've had three.
All "good" brands - HP, Epson etc, and they've all been absolutely useless.
Only print come alive when they feel like it.
Refuses to connect to the WiFi.
Always running out of ink (Like, how???? When you've refused to print a damn thing ever?!)
Not even wanting to print out loads. It's just the odd thing for DCs school work now and then.

Just wondering if I'm missing something here, and all you wonderful MNs are in some secret club, and actually know of the Holy Grail of home printers?

Share please? 🙏

Ours seems to function rather like Arkwright's till in Open All Hours.

This is a downside of working from home. I work in the office and fortunately my boss is amenable to me printing DS's homework in exchange for liquorice.

God forbid you try and scan something .... it'll save it in the most obscure place on your laptop, never to be seen again.

I've always wanted to hurl an old type CRT TV off the cliff into the sea, but DH refuses to let me 😞

I had a brilliant one. Canon. It just worked - never had a single issue with it. It scanned and photocopied as well as printing. Then one day it just died - made a sound like a chainsaw being dropped down a metal fire-escape and never worked again. It was out of warranty and our local Curry's only had the newer version, next model up, so we bought that and it is a complete and utter arsehole. It's unreasonably big, it has to have paper fed into it one sheet at a time like some kind of princess, it prints everything on a very slight slope, and it only works if it's plugged into the least convenient USB slot on my laptop. Wireless? Never heard of it, mate. Git.

100% yes. They are possessed by Satan. I've had several and each has defied the laws of consumer retail by being more shit than the last. (If razors and hairdryers can keep getting better, why can't printers?!)

My Epson is an absolute bell end. The only thing it will reliably put ink onto is my fingertips when I change the cartridge.

Go at it with a baseball bat in your garden.
I think that is a scene from the film 'Office Space' 😆(with a printer anyway)

I took my old one to the tip and properly threw into the skip. Very satisfying.

YES.

In fact, thinking about it, the only time it shows the tiniest bit of liveliness is when it sparks up with the message
"INCOMPATIBLE CARTRIDGE DETECTED - THESE CHEAPO ONES FROM THE RANGE ARE NOT THE 24K GOLD PLATED ONES COSTING £95 EACH YOU CHEAPSKATE".

Oh no. Not just home printers. All printers. There are millions of memes about printers shared among our IT service/groups 😆

Lol ... I recently watched Die Hard again and this thread is making me want to stuff my printer with plastic explosive and hurl it down a lift shaft, yelling, "how ya like THEM apples, motherfucker!?"

Maybe you could consult with ChatGPT regarding humane ways to help a printer over the rainbow cartridge bridge.

They’re all fuckers. They like to make start up noises to make you think they’re doing something but nope.

I think Inkjet printers are a bad option for home use if you only print stuff occasionally as the ink cartridges clog up and dry out. They’re not designed for occasional use. We’ve kept our old inkjet for the scanner, but got a very basic laser printer instead for actually printing stuff and it works every time.

Yes.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Yes. They are all awful and printer ink is more expensive than caviar.

Ours either prints nothing or fifteen copies of every other side. Absolute fucker

@CharliesAngles 😂😂😂😂😂 I'm laughing but dear god I feel your pain 😂😂 mine turns its nose up unless it's genuine HP stuff.....sigh

Yes. The best bit is when they randomly print something you asked it to print weeks before but refused. When you are desperately trying to print something else.

The ideal home printer is (obviously) not what they want to sell you (see also cars).

15 years of long experience have shown me that a small laser printer is ideal. Anything else is a recipe for discovering the ink has either just run out from endless "cleaning" cycles or gelled in the printer and needs replacing anyway.

My last (company paid for) inkjet probably used a cartridge a page over it's life.

Unless you are scanning reams at a time, it's easy to take a photo for a page or two.

And frankly unless you are involved with the NHS, who needs a fax ?

If you know what you are doing plug the beast into your router too. That will solve the "gone to sleep and forgotten the WiFi settings" problem.

(I wonder how much there is in domestic tech support ? )

Ours was a totally unreliable git, whenever dh got it out the rest of us left the room as it was always a potentially stressful situation. 😄

get a Brother Laser printer. it connects to the wifi and just works.

Inkjets are all crappy and expensive and flaky.

Mine's like having an unpredictable toddler in the corner of the office.

Quiet and well behaved for a bit and then as soon as I'm in a hurry and desperately need it to do something it has a tantrum.

"I need ink" (You've just had ink)
"I need paper" (I've just given you paper)
"Wrong sort of ink/paper" (What else do you want?)
"I'm jammed" (How? You haven't done anything yet)
"No longer connected to the internet" (But you were fine 2 minutes ago)

Then after spewing out pages of useless stuff including boarding passes from last year's holiday(!?!) it declares itself tired out, goes to sleep and can't be roused until the next day.

I have a Canon with ink reservoirs, rather than cartridges, and it happily scans, copies and prints without issue. Every now and then though...it gets in a loop-of-doom and scrolls internally, doing nothing seemingly, until I take pity and turn it off at the wall.

Our HP laserjet works as long as it is positioned correctly within the house and approached at the precise 10 second time window between "connecting to wifi" and "deep sleep".