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Printers (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by 3h5Hne7t1K@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Throughout my life i have set up a multitude of different printers. None of them have been a pleasant experience. Why is this, and is there a printer that is actually good?

Order of priorities:

Free/open software and hardware
Available ink/toner and spares
No connectivity "dumb as a rock"

Print quality really doesent matter unless it is really bad. Of course, im willing to make sacrifices on all of these points, but you get the gist.

Any suggestions for models that comes even close to any of these requirements?

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[–] imaradio@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

People who run printer companies should be incarcerated and forced to hand copy the source code of the linux kernel with a very small pencil.

Several years ago, I decided to finally buy an all-in-one so I could print my favorite photos and do some scanning. I did what I thought to be pretty adequate research to find a model where the ink wasn't too expensive. It was Epson x-something.

Printed a few pictures but then, foolishly allowed to update software.

After that, it doesn't scan (scan!!) if one of the inks is low. When I bought it I thought, if nothing else I will have a scanner. Wrong!

It turned out to be impossible to obtain the epson ink cartridges. No retail location near me sold them. Not on amazon. They sold it on the epson website. I ordered some. When the delivery came I was at work. So what this shipping company does is leaves a note saying "you can pick up your parcel at our facility" with an address that was miles away from my house in an industrial park hardly served by public transit. They were only open during business hours so I would have had to book a day off work and the google maps estimate was >3 hours round trip. I don't even think I ever got a refund for the package which sat at the courier for 2 weeks and got returned to epson.

At the time I bought the printer, it was possible to use 3rd party ink. However their "security update" robustly protected against this. I had intended to buy the epson ink but I was never able to. So I tried 3rd party. It didn't work, the printer wouldn't use it because it could tell it was not epson brand.

There was no way to do a factory reset on the device, which IMHO is crazy for all kinds of reasons. The ink vendors had stuff up about how you could use some closed-source hack tool to force it to down grade. It primarily ran on windows which I don't have. Also it seemed to me that the application could be doing literally anything to the printer, it was mysterious. I tried some things I read about how to force it to return to original hardware but it never worked.

I spent sooo much time researching, troubleshooting, reading on forums, shopping etc. And some money, I think about $100-150. What I got for it was a half dozen prints, mostly testing out how the printer worked. 2 of these were worth keeping in any respect so I have 2 photos that costed >$50 and many hours of work each. After a few years I gave up and threw it out.