Not true at all. Buy a good management solution (we use PrinterLogic) and buy good printers.
By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.
Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.
Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees, etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're shipping a lot of printers back.
The problem is that you can only afford to do that if you're a moderately large business. For home users or small schools (where I have worked), that's simply not an option moneywise...
Also, printer user interfaces are consistently incomprehensible. I had a Brother 5070N for a long time, ended up giving it away. It was almost impossible to tell what the few problems it had were. I made the mistake of getting a Canon Pixma 3520. 5 LEDs and 4 buttons as a user interface for something that hooks up to a wireless network, and has all kinds of physical things to do to it? You've got to be kidding. Unfortunately, that's typical for printer state-of-the-art. LEDs and push buttons. What a joke.
By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.
Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.
Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees, etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're shipping a lot of printers back.