[xemoka]

This isn't just consumer grade printers. At work we have a number of large scale plotters and they all stink. Our main is a HP DesignJet T1300 44-inch wide plotter. Even it refuses to print if any of the 6 inks are too low or the heads are 'needing to be replaced'.

The software on it is absolutely brutal too, it has a resistive touch screen as it's primary input and it's incredibly slow to page through. On top of that, if you try to speed things along (for example, pre-opening the paper roll cover before manually paging through to the 'replace paper' menu link) it will complain and refuse to do what you ask until you start back at the beginning.

I have had nothing but trouble, and these are multi-thousand dollar printers.