Why Printers Never Work!?
With all of the advancements in technology, why do printers always have issues? There actually is an answer…
OCTOBER 2024
A Short History of Printers
Printers have been around for a while. The first printer was developed in 1968 by Epson. It was small, slow, and had a very specific purpose. It was developed in conjunction with the Seiko Group (yes, Seiko watches) as they were the official timekeepers of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. They needed a machine to print the times they were capturing. And the printer was born.
After that, the technology slowly advanced, and evolved into dot matrix printers. The name comes from the fact that these printers literally printed a series of tiny dots to make up whatever text or image was being printed. Some of us more well seasoned folks will remember the reems of paper with the hole-punched edges that were used to spook the paper around the printer drum.
But printers saw a boom in 80’s as “desktop publishing” became a quickly growing market. Inkjet and Laserjet printers were developed rapidly and easily forced dot matrix printers into obscurity. The new few decades basically were comprised of improvements to these two technologies.
The Change in Strategy
With those developments, as is expected in a capitalist market, came the ability for printer companies to create printers less and less expensively. Eventually, the market shifted to one of selling printers as inexpensively as possible and making real profits on the ink or toner. And that is essentially where we are today. Most home printers are manufactured and sold at bottom barrel costs with the strategy being to make money on the ink or toner.
The Real Problem
Finally, the real problem. The real problem is that printers are sophisticated devices that, when built properly, are not inexpensive. The technology behind how Injet and Laserjet printers work is pretty astounding (but that’s a topic for another post). So as market pressure causes manufacturers to build printers at lower and lower costs, something has to give - and it ends up being the quality of the machine. So you end up with printers that continually get jammed, disconnect from WiFi, have mysterious error codes, and more. Consumers are essentially pushing printer companies to keep making printers at extremely low costs rather than paying the true cost for a quality machine of that caliber. That’s why businesses that have extensive printing needs often spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month on printers, equipment an maintenance. At the end of the day, printers fail so often because they should be more expensive. And until consumers take a stand and only buy higher priced, quality printers, this trend will remain. Printer companies will continue to develop new ways to bring prices down, and consumers will continue to be frustrated with the issues — but they’ll deal with them. And that is inherently the core issue.