My Nexus 6P went into a boot loop on Monday and I got an RMA issued. UPS emailed me the return shipping label last night and when I went to print it this morning I couldn't because my Epson WorkForce 845 was in a boot loop.
1) Create enough bad publicity (be "important" enough, or lucky enough) to invoke an actual, human response.
2) Make an end-run around the Google support wall-of-silence. As another commenter here mentions, sometimes posts/comments on HN gain attention. Apparently not as much as they used to. But, a month or two after I finally complained in an HN comment about months-long problem with very frequent Nexus 5x camera app crashes on zoom-out, the problem finally, silently went away.
P.S. Yes, I'd used the in-app/Android problem reporting prompt/feature... countless times, including my own optional comment as to exactly what was happening. I eventually gave up on repeatedly taking that extra time and just started canceling out of it, as the error reports seemed to just be disappearing into a black hole of silence and inaction.
They are no doubt the best printers in your company's facility. Most printers for enterprises are garbage now without a service contract or managed print deal.
For personal use, the brother laser devices <$100. Are the best bet. Simple, reliable and most of the things that break are either field replaceable or you can ditch the device.
> For personal use, the brother laser devices <$100.
Rarely do I fanboy over a piece of electronic device, but this rings so incredibly true. I get thousands of pages out of my Brother laser printer per toner cartridge, it duplexes, the wireless just works. If you absolutely need a printer, get the sub-$100 brother laser printer.
I have two HL-2040s and they've been bullet proof. What I'd really like now is a simple way to make them IPP Everywhere or Google Cloud Print printers to make all the cross platform usage identical.
Yes. Those things would survive a nuclear war and still print. Realistically, you need to replace the drum every year or two, depending on how much you print, and then just fill it up with the cheapest toner you can find - it will work no matter what.
You laugh but I only buy laserjet 5500 or 4700 printers now for home and work. They're cheaper to own and operate than most new inkjets if you are patient for toner deals on Amazon or ebay.
GPIB plotters. I still have one of those. It still works. It is the only "printer" I never had a single problem with. It runs on a now over 50 years old computer bus.
Canon 6030 was surprisingly good. It didn't have any driver issues (unlike other Canon printers that dropped support after 2000/XP) it just works on any Windows version, it doesn't need to reset chip in the cartridge to simulate new cartridge. And it worked for 1.5 years in hellish environment and is still going on - in extremely dusty tent (amount of dust that accumulates in an apartment in several months in one day), in plus 30 and in minus 20, in very high humidity. Basically field army conditions. And it continuously prints about 500 pages per week, sometimes up to 1000 per week. Personally I was amazed with its performance, taking into account that it is a budget printer. We just bought several cans of toner to refill manually and changed photo-drum every 2-3 months.
Printers are a bit like cars, not enough genericity. It used to be worth it in the 90s when there was innovation but now it's going backward every time. Everything is coupled where it shouldn't. Fat proprietary drivers, bad interfaces physical and software, coupled network links, cheap tricks to ensure regular costs (ink drm etc); bad mechanics (HP printers are more and more noisy)...
It's mostly a social problem, maybe it's useless since the printing industry is a remain of the xerox administrative era. The amount of prints is very low nowadays.
I'm sure there a nice void for a more humane printer kit, cheaper ink, acceptable open drivers, and more creative usage.
I'm sure there a nice void for a more humane printer kit, cheaper ink, acceptable open drivers, and more creative usage.
Industrial/commercial printers qualify at least for the "cheaper ink" part, and you can actually buy individual parts like printheads, complete with documentation; however, they cost at least an order of magnitude more and tend to have much lower resolutions.
Understood, maybe it's time for something or someone to put that market at rest so everybody can use their time for better thing, users and companies engineers ?
My HP inkjet multifunction printer of 9 years still works great but it always has given me issues with re-filled cartridges and it loves wasting ink when you install a new cartridge by printing a test page.
I have a non wireless brother laser printer (hooked to a raspberry pi for wireless printing). I can't say enough good things about my brother printer.
I have though about buying a scanner and a color laser and wiring up a copier through the pi (scan then print at the push of a button) --- but finding a stand alone scanner that will do 11 by 17 has been a chalenge
I was dreading to buy a printer for a few years but a month ago I finally bought a small Brother HL-1110 laser printer. The instalation on Linix was completely hassle free and it worked perfectly fine. At least until I tried to print a gray-scale picture... For some reason tje printer refuses to print if the image covers more than roughly 50-60% of the page. Instead of giving any error it just blinks a few times and does nothing.
People just don't seem to realise that moving parts are hard. Phones are incredibly complex but (mostly) just keep working until you drop them on a hard floor. Cars have lots of moving parts and need maintenance. Screens use complicated technology and (mostly) just keep working. Printers have moving parts and break a lot.
Moving parts are inherently unreliable. We've just got really used to the incredible reliability that you get from solid state electronics.
My point is that you may well be right. Fusion power is an easier challenge than mechanical things not breaking because you can do it without moving parts (give or take a turbine).
My iPhone 4S has 0 moving parts, yet it had failed WiFi after 1 year. My Macbook has 0 moving parts, yet it had failed SSD. My Renault Logan has quite a lot of moving parts, yet I use it for a few years and almost 100 000 kilometers (and that's quite a lot of movement in extremely different weather conditions, from -40 to +40) and I had very minimal maintenance outside of regular oil change.
While I generally agree, the point is, even when there are no moving parts, there's a lot of failure points (temperature, vibrations) and manufacturers will create faulty devices, no matter what. If device is too good, they will cut expenses, until it'll be "good enough".
The MTBF is way lower. I've done this analysis for racks of server equipment and client devices. Failure rates are way lower -- low enough at scale to spend extra money on desktop SSD for low end use cases.
That said, environmentals are important. Hot solid state electronics fail.
The iPhone has a home button, power button, and volume buttons that all move. The Macbook's keyboard is comprised of moving parts. There's also the screen hinge which used to be a very common point of failure in laptops.
I didn't meant it as a mean time before failure. I don't mind thing breaking with usage, at all. I meant it as headache free tools. These products are bending backward to provide useless crap while ignoring more basic features. Also driver support is short lived now, I had to do ninja stuff to make a 2014 HP printer work on Win10. This kind of things.
To get back on the build solidity point, I've yet to have a mechanical failure on a printer. Problems are often fluid dynamics (clogged pipes, heads). Outside of these parts, a printer is pretty simple device, geometrically speaking.
It's often connecting to the printer that's the hard part. In my office we have two printers because some pcs can't connect to one but can the other. It's inconsistent as to who can connect to which.
Airprint actually works really great. I have a Samsung printer with Airprint + Google Cloud Printing - set it up once, and it just works all the time. Just have to do your research.
Good point, that said forgive me for not including Apple things in my quick research since I have zero Apple device. I always assume anything Apple is Apple only.
I am having this problem on an Epson Workforce 645. It stays in a continual boot loop. To fix it, I logged into Cloud Print to delete the printer and also unplugged my access point. This stopped the boot loop. I then did a 'reset all settings' from the printer's touch screen menus. After that, I plugged in my AP again and joined the printer to my WiFi network. I really needed something printed so I enabled Cloud Print again on the printer unaware of the consequences. The boot loop started again. :-(
I was actually thinking it was going to be time to buy a new printer as my WF 645 is very old. I thought the WiFi adapter had gone bad and was causing the boot loop. Apparently this is not the case.
I've had the same thing happen with my Epson WF-3540. It's been a totally solid printer up until this point.
To fix it I started it up and immediately disabled the Wi-Fi. Then I "suspended" Google Cloud Print and Epson Connect Services. It's working fine now - albeit with no cloud services for our phones/tablets.
On first glance Google Cloud Print looks like nothing more than an Internet version of networking printing, a technology which has been around for a long time; so one is naturally a bit surprised that Epson could get something like this wrong, but then I dug a little deeper...
...and the protocol involves HTTPS, OAuth, JSON, and XMPP(!), so rather more complex than existing protocols like IPP; although much can be said for having simple-to-parse protocols especially for embedded devices like these, some error occurring in the GCP part of the firmware shouldn't cause the whole printer to become unusable.
IPP's got a few problems, especially when it comes to phones/tablets or other mobile devices:
- IPP requires unique drivers for each printer. Some mobile devices (Chromebooks and iOS, I believe) don't allow installing drivers.
- IPP requires that you're on the same LAN segment, or that you punch a hole through your router. That doesn't work very well when interacting with foreign printers, and punching a hole through a router is too complex for many home users.
- IPP is limited to HTTP Basic/Digest auth, which isn't user friendly or secure. The traffic's also unencrypted. (And SSH isn't user friendly enough for home users.)
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Cloud Print.)
Oh wow, this happened to me last night when I was trying to scan something! I was sure that I had broken it somehow but I guess not. Super surprising to me to see the reason my printer is broken on HN anyway.
"""
Using Google Cloud Print, you can make your home and work printers available to you and anyone you choose, from the applications you use every day. Google Cloud Print works on your phone, tablet, Chromebook, PC, and any other web-connected device you want to print from.
"""
Ok, so my printer is supposed to be registered to google cloud to make me print from anywhere. Ok. But my files?
"""
When you print through Google Cloud Print, your file is securely sent to your printer over the web. Because it’s the web, Google Cloud Print works whether you’re in the same room as your printer, or on another continent. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re on a phone, a traditional desktop, or anything in between (like a tablet).
"""
So if I'm in my room, on my laptop, at 3 meters from my ubersupercloudenabled printer, I can send my file to it via the web. Securely. Ok.
"""
Documents are transferred over a secure HTTPS web connection. After a job is completed, the associated document is deleted from our servers.
"""
The file is sent via HTTPS. But the file itself...is it encrypted? (Maybe the printer generates a keypair upon registration, and the same does every devices, etc etc...?)
Google Cloud Print jobs are submitted and retrieved over a secure connection (https), and are only available to you and the printer you’re using.
"""
"""
Any document you send for printing is kept strictly confidential. Google does not access the documents you print for any purpose other than to improve printing.
"""
"to improve printing" may be the "metaphor" behind the functioning of Google Cloud Print itself. This can be read, after removing the double negations and the other usual tricks as "Google access the documents you print to give to you the comfort to print your files while staying 3 meters away from your printer, by passing them to the cloud and our automatic eyes and godknowswhat".
>So if I'm in my room, on my laptop, at 3 meters from my ubersupercloudenabled printer, I can send my file to it via the web. Securely. Ok.
Conversely, if you are NOT within a few meters of your printer, resetting the machine, managing paper jams, cartridge or toner replacement (i.e. solve the issues that invariably happen every single time you really need to print something, particularly if you are in a hurry) is tricky.
Exactly. I don't know why this GCP seems so "irreplaceable" to people using it, given the implications of "sending your files to google just to print them".
I can do the same using a wifi/eth enabled printer and my router plus maybe using a firewall to block the printer to go out on the internet and to be called from outside.
> I can do the same using a wifi/eth enabled printer and my router plus maybe using a firewall to block the printer to go out on the internet and to be called from outside.
Gmail? I can do the same thing with a VPS, qmail, dspam, courier, and roundcube. Why does gmail even exist?
Congratulations - you're very smart. But you're not the target market.
I can print schoolwork and concert tickets from my tablet already using my wifi LAN and my wifi/eth printer (with firewall rules that block traffic to/from the printer to/from the internet), without sending them to google.
I don't care which type of file I print, I simply want to print them privately. As it it's already possible without GCP, I don't catch why people use it.
Some people like to print things without being on a wifi network for various reasons. Or be able to print something on the go or when working outside.
Another use case are people who are living in a Google Docs world. It's easy to print "natively" out of that environment and not be aware of where you are from a network POV.
I agree with your POV btw, just pointing out where many people come from when they use this solution.
This is the definition of FUD. I see claims like this all the time, but never find any substance. Does anyone have any data to demonstrate that statements such as "to improve printing" is intentionally misleading? Seriously, I'd love to know.
This happened to my WorkForce 545 after sending a print job to it last night. Ended up in an endless reset loop until I was able to reset it to factory settings.
Maybe EPSON does not know how to update their printer's firmware.
Maybe google noticed a botnet of EPSON printer trying to knock them down. Or a poorly setup of uPnP/network that helps penetrate (THEIR) networks...
Maybe they just shut down the printers because nothing else can be done to suppress the threat.
Maybe they don't publicized it because :
1) this is called illegal penetration of someone else system (hacking...) and is a penal offense in many countries
2) it would give IoT a bad name (Google's kind of prospective beneficial market)
3) it would be illegal for them/very costly to give the information (libel, NDA...)
4) there is NO solutions...
This is pure speculation, because since I don't think google throw their printer in the trash, no one can go to their office and check if they are actually throwing away some EPSON printers.