Modern home office printers are a blight on technology

For fourteen years, my family owned a Canon printer-scanner-copier-fax unit as our home office print unit. It was one of the first generations of Canons to have wi-fi connectivity. It almost never failed us, and when it did, the issues were easy to solve. The ink cartridges rarely needed replacing, and the refills were reasonably priced and easy to get at Costco. It printed consistently and well.

But when we moved, we figured it was time for a change. Why not get a new printer? (A good reason why not to: like the rest of the world, we barely print stuff anymore. Like less than once a month. Also, our printer still worked fine.) But we decided to buy a new one, a compact HP unit.

Anybody who’s dealt with a piece of HP electronics made in the past 24 years probably grimaced when they read that.

HP makes complete garbage and none of their electronics are as bad as their printers. This printer was a pain in the ass straight out of the box and only got more annoying.

It ran out of ink every like 25-30 pages and the HP Instant Ink scam was so dumb we cancelled it and just went to buying our own ink. Plus, inkjet cartridges dry up if unused for long periods of time, which didn’t help. The printer wouldn’t connect to our devices half the time and needed resets. The little tiny 1-square inch screen didn’t provide any useful information during an error. The lights just blinked, indicating nothing of value. Every other time you had to print something, something would go wrong. And for the past year, the printer can’t even grab the pages on its own, no matter how well-situated in the tray they are! You have to reload the same stack of paper every time and slightly push down the front

page and hold it down until the thing actually grabbed the paper!!! What kind of device is this??

We’re finally buying a new printer. Gonna try out a Brother, which by all reviews seems to be the only reliable and decent printer brand left. Avoid HP and Epson like the freaking plague. Buy Brother or Canon.

We literally have space travel and AI but home office printers are cheap, poorly-made scams. What a world.