Printers are hateful machines. It is difficult to find a technological product with which so many people have become frantic (the photocopier, perhaps?), And the market does nothing to avoid it. We have internet, we have smartphones, we can store 400 GB in a microSD card … and we have printers that have barely advanced three decades later.
In fact, most current printers seem to be the solution to a problem that does not exist, because they do much more than what we actually ask them to do, and they also do it with absolutely exorbitant ink and toner prices. I have clear what would be my perfect printer. Which would be yours?
No ink, please
Either they do not work, or they do it wrong, or they do it after struggling with them for hours, or they did it well because we had just bought them and we still had not printed the first colored pages with all the illusion spending 50% of the ink cartridges.
As noted by Dash, most people do not spend their lives printing photos or presentations in full color , and for the vast majority of cases the ideal is an economic black and white print. It is important to emphasize the economic word, because that is what printers are usually in the long term, especially with something that theoretically we should have polished at this point: the cost per page.
And yet the market is dominated by ink printers, which sell us with the famous business model of razor blades and sheets. As Wikipedia always explains , the idea is simple: an item is sold at a low price (or given as a gift) to increase the sales of a complementary good. That’s exactly what happens with current inkjet printers, which look like nice items but end up turning into a bottomless (ink) well.
You may also like to read: Ink on demand: HP Instant Ink and monthly plans the future of printing ink
The perfect printer is a black and white laser
The alternative, of course, is laser printers. And I’m not talking about color lasers, which also end up having the same problem, but a simple and effective black and white laser printer that had that cost per page under control both for the consumption of the toner and for its cost for its replacement.
More doubts I have with another idea, which stated that printers should notify the manufacturer of how the toner level is for that manufacturer to send it to us automatically. That service, in fact, exists. but as soon as you are half paranoid of the privacy you end up distrusting of a provision like that. A notification on the desk would be enough to place the order.
An order, attention, that would not have to stick to the manufacturer’s toners: any other could develop more efficient spare parts to sell them freely. The original manufacturer should not block a third-party toner with some obscure mechanism, and I would not have to hack my printer with the consequent waste of time (but not money, ha!).
Then there would be the issue of connections: what about WiFi printers? Is it really that hard to make a wireless printer? I only ask for one that does not disconnect every time I use it. One that does not have to reconfigure connecting it back to the USB-B port (if I find the cable of course, you know, the “square”) because I do not remember how to get the page that tells me the network information of the printer.
Any entrepreneur in the room?
That perfect printer, in addition, should not be a contraption that took half of the desk in the office. It should be compact, elegant, simple (why a touch screen on a printer, does anyone use that feature regularly?) And, in essence, do what you end up doing with a printer. Print a boarding pass, a ticket to the cinema or a document that you prefer to read on paper and not on the screen.
And not necessarily in color or with blacks that almost seem carved on the sheet. At most, yes, it would preserve those printing qualities but unless explicit preference of the user would enable the draft mode, which is where most humans need to print.
Maybe that perfect printer does not exist, but there are not many that come close. We need a manufacturer to step forward. This is an idea for a great little product, so maybe someone wants to go for it. Makers and creators that use Kickstarter, here you have the first investor / buyer of that printer.
Tags: printer
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