[kevstev]

What kind of patents? I had tank of an HP laserjet 3 in the 90s, and patent life is 20 years. For the basic functionality, they should all be expired at this point, and the limiting factor at the time was the high cost of memory and compute.

Shouldn't anything relevant have expired years ago? The first laserjet came out in 1984 it seems. Prices have come down, but I haven't seen any real innovation in printers (not that I really need any- I just want them to print)- since 2000.

[Nbox9]

Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you.

The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page.

Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic. I know this isn’t about toner on page, but having wifi connection, an LCD touchscreen interface, and them generally being a little smaller has made the experience better.

The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful because so many people wanted paper copies.

[michaelt]

> Do you remember printing in 2000?

The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)

[paledot]

The fallacy of "they don't build them like they used to" applies equally to bridges from 1850, cars from 1970, and printers from 2000: the poorly built bridges fell down, the cars with inferior parts rusted, and the printers with chronic issues got Office Spaced. So of course only the well-made examples survived.

[tinus_hn]

Actually the printers they are upset about in Office Space (with the ‘PC LOAD LETTER’ message, not the prop they smash) are the practically indestructible early HP LaserJets.

[pmontra]

Seconded, however I don't expect our best aqueducts to last 2000+ years

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...

[jfengel]

There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin.

Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a fraction of the cost. They'll fall down in 100 years, but we'll rebuild them with something even stronger and even cheaper.

[Jon_Lowtek]

Tell that to the cities who see their infrastructure fall apart after 20 years and can't finance rebuilding it stronger and cheaper.

[_liww]

Got any evidence/examples for that, where the cost of building for 100 vs 1000 years has been worked out?

[zdw]

If you have a basically bulletproof monochrome HP 4000 series or similar that has cheap cartridges that last 5-10k pages, easy/cheap maintenance (a whole new set of rubber rollers costs $30-50, and is basically the only part that wears out), and a low printing volume, I can totally see having a printer for 20 years.

[ryandrake]

Same here. Happy HP 4000 owner. 1999 technology and it never fails. Maybe get a paper jam once a year. The only trouble I have is the plastic is getting kind of brittle and little odds and ends snap off but the printer still functions exactly the way it did 20 years ago.

[tinus_hn]

A sneaky issue with these printers though is that they use an excessive amount of power even when doing nothing.

[NoSorryCannot]

I've got a current model monochrome laser printer and I'm very satisfied with it.

[cpach]

Same here. Mine is from Brother, probably their cheapest laser printer. No hi-res colour display or any fancy stuff like that. But it just works.

[redisman]

Exactly. Works amazing, no 3rd rate touchscreen experience. No badly made apps I have to install on all my devices. Just does what I want it to and nothing else.

My previous HP inkjet thing that this replaced was a complete nightmare and is in some kind of purgatory state now where it boots properly maybe 5% of the time.

[blablabla123]

In the 90s I used an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. I think it was created in the early 80s. The thing used paper with holes on the perforated sides, so the sides could be easily removed but also moving the paper along is much easier like this. Actually it worked quite reliably as far as I can remember and some people actually appreciated the unique style of the printings in letters. Eventually I got a more modern printer though but not because it broke. It did support printing of arbitrary files but also supported printing console characters. Therefore it basically needed no drivers for default monospace font printing.

At least for the fun factor it might make sense to start with dot matrix printing. (I think it's still far superior to thermo printers ;-))

Really no comparison to modern printers in terms of reliability. I bought my last printer with 5 years guaranty upgrade. I'd ditch the printer completely if it wasn't still required for some official paperwork :/

[pwinnski]

I use a monochrome laser printer from 2012, and I'm very happy with it, so you're not far off. :)

[stevehawk]

I'm running on the same business color laserjet from Dell (relabeled Brother MFC I think) from ~2013. It's never failed me. I feel like every consumer printer I've ever owned was a giant p.o.s. . I regret not going business level on printers much much earlier.

[enobrev]

I have a monochrome home laser printer from about 5 years ago that I'm happy with.

[coldtea]

>Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page.

All of that, including the interfacing are not related to patents.

It's not like there's some patent issue for using USB or wifi in your printer over whatever interface used in 2000 compared.

Or like there's a patent on using faster processor or more RAM in your printer (two things you've mentioned also).

[jancsika]

Are you stating your last two sentences as the result of researching these issues?

Because as a layperson, I would not have thought a company could get a patent on clicking a button to purchase an item online.

[coldtea]

>Are you stating your last two sentences as the result of researching these issues?

Do you really believe "researching" is needed?

Like, in every other domain and product category, a company can slap a faster processor and more RAM to the next iteration - as they do -, but this is somehow prevented in printers by patents?

I'd say the extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence is not mine...

[ryanmarsh]

When you read HN comments it helps to preface them with “I feel like...”

[jancsika]

I upvoted you out of greyness because I feel like that is generally correct here. :)

Now that I've helped you out of the quicksand, let's do battle:

"[I feel like] it's not like there's some patent issue for using USB or wifi in your printer over whatever interface used in 2000 compared."

I could certainly try harder to finesse it, but I don't see any sensible place to insert a "YMMV" into any part of that sentence.

[moonbug]

Emphasis on "feeling", because there's seldom any thinking going on.

[COGlory]

Or at least, you feel like there isn't

[ska]

>> as suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions.

> All of that, including the interfacing are not related to patents.

This seems like a pretty strong statement, can you elaborate as to why solving paper jams wouldn't involve patented IP ?

[coldtea]

The paper jam might be. The rest (speed of processor, amount of ram, interface used) certainly aren't.

[alanbernstein]

I feel like you may not be familiar with how patents work in the US: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040137855A1/en. This is a patent for "Wireless Mobile Printing", which is more specific than just "Wireless Printing". Both of these concepts are, arguably, obvious combinations of existing technology.

[dimitrios1]

I'm finding myself printing out code more and more these days, highlighting it and marking it up. There's just a different part of my brain that kicks in when I am able to get tactile with something.

[PaulHoule]

I have gotten into the hobby/habit of printing at least one "thing" a day with artistic intent. That could be:

* an anime character printed with a thermal receipt printer * a 4x6 card with an information graphic I rendered with CSS Grid * a shutterfly envelope to family in New England, etc.

most of the time I am starting with an image somebody else made, but there is a lot of judgement involved with fitting the image to paper and process -- it is a bridge between the world of digital images that I work and play in and the real world.

I go through printers the way rock stars go through guitars and what to do with the e-Waste is already part of the product.

I am amazed the the HP Officejet 6600 which just failed on me -- despite the expensive ink, the quality of the work it could do is astonishing.

It stopped picking up paper because something (like a little plastic gear) broke in the drive chain for the pick roller. To be fair all the rollers looked pretty worn -- the printer had been heavily used by a college professor. It's possible we could have fixed it but considering the cost of the next ink refill, I chose to get another printer.

If I were going to salvage the old printer I think I would go for the stepper motors, which would be great for robotics and other mechatronic projects.

---

I badly want to hack an inkjet printer to print white ink onto transparencies and then put it into a second printer to take a PNG with alpha like

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:793Nihilego.png

and make a sticker that could go in a window. Commercial kits to do this cost about as much as a good DSLR lens and they are a business expense to people who are making large quantities of swag.

It's a good market case for the "open source 2d printer" however. It's one thing to get white ink compatible with the printer, it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain.

[a1369209993]

> it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain.

Assuming the printer has sufficient color resolution/depth, you could do gamma correction as a preprocessing step on the host computer. Still obnoxious, though.

[scoutt]

While I am not printing much code lately, I do print a lot of datasheet sections that usually force me to go back and forth through a PDF, like complicated clock trees and memory maps (embedded development).

[dylan604]

that brings back memories of the school lab in the early 90s. didn't get enough time in the chair on a shared terminal to debug completely, so everyone printed to greenbar and would debug from there. i even got to the point of writing code on college ruled paper by hand, and then transcribing it once i got to the lab. taking typing early in high school definitely paid off. people made fun of me for being the only male student in the class, but i knew it would be a useful skill and put up with the jokes.

[quercusa]

I've found the same thing. It's also a great excuse to get the rainbow pack of highlighters!

[Nbox9]

I’m going to make a note to try that this week.

[jaywalk]

Make sure you print that note out.

[DoomedAbacus]

On an abacus running Doom. As the operating system, I mean, you can choose your own printer.

[xorcist]

Not at all. Things like the Laserjet 4 were workhorses. No planned obsolescence in sight.

[floatingatoll]

I do still call them the Laserjet 41.3, though.

[bb611]

> In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you.

That's just not accurate. I've personally dealt with truly unreasonable numbers of service calls for high end business models over the last 8 years, jams aren't frequent but they are definitely not rare.

[Spooky23]

Usually in big companies that’s more about the garbage recycled paper that procurement idiots like to buy.

[scoutt]

> Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic.

Still in the year of our Lord 2020, once a document hits the Windows Printer Spooler, good luck trying to cancel/abort it.

[zrobotics]

From an elevated powershell/cmd:

  net stop spooler
  cd *:\windows\system32\spool\printers
  (remove all files in this directory) 
  net start spooler

Stupid, but this fixes like 80% of windows printer problems, most of which IME are random one-off issues with a document getting spooled and the printer not being activated

[xxs]

HP Laserjet were pretty good even pre-2000. I spent some time in publishing. And I'd compare it to nowadays paper feed on a $100-250 ink jet, that has couple of springs (id 3mm, L=15mm) that would just fail and the printer won't take paper any longer. Virtually no printer in that price range has replaceable rubber paper rollers.

[kevstev]

Indeed- I only used 2000 as its now the last year for any patents to have been around. But all-in-ones, network printing, duplex, color-laser, were all around in 2000 and any fundamental patents on them should have expired. Wifi integration maybe not, but this seems pretty trivial to "clean room" in this day and age if this is somehow patented functionality.

[ho_schi]

I remember the paper jams but currently most consumer printers die through built-in obsolesce before the paper jams happen often.

We're trained to spent much more money for business laptops and probably we should for printers, too? Well handled ThinkPads last for many years and when the hardware struggles to execute the software in decent speed they - remain to work. Lenovo (and IBM) make money with reliable hardware.

[ppg677]

I still use a 1995-manufactured HP LaserJet 5P. It rarely jams. Works great with a USB->Parallel adapter. The cartridge in there right now is probably a decade old.

[kazinator]

I did IT work in a big law firm in 1989. The company had a fleet of HP LaserJet Series II printers (that having been introduced in 1987). They worked fine, same as anything today, with regard to jams and whatever. (Mostly, they were used for cranking out documents written in WordPerfect.) Though modern printers are more affordable and capable, the basic physical user experience is about the same. Modern printers don't even look all that different: vanilla boxes with some slanted aperture on top where paper comes out; drawer for blank paper. If I walked into, say, an insurance agency or whatever and they had a HP LJ II from 1989 sitting on a counter in a corner, I probably wouldn't even notice the antique. :)

[bayindirh]

> Do you remember printing in 2000...

Yes, and?

> Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions.

No. I have gone through 7 personal printers and used countless business printers. Total number of jams I've cleared from my personal printers are probably less than 10 in 20+ years.

I've cleared much more paper jams from top of the line printers regardless of their build year. Reliability of a business printer is a function of its maintenance quality it seems.

My most stubborn printer wouldn't feed some papers since they're too smooth but, it started to happen after 7 years and its feed rollers were dry and worn down at that time.

One of my HP printers started to lose cartridge calibration, made funny noises and gave strange error messages after 6 years. Looks like I've worn down its internals. It was a "disposable" model it seems. I've probably used it three times its expected lifetime.

> The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful

It's still very useful at a personal scale. I've also cut back my printing to save the trees but, reading articles, academic stuff and a good old technical documentation is vastly better on paper, hands down.

[oalae5niMiel7qu]

> Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you.

A cheap consumer printer will jam on you and tear the paper to shreds, yet the drivers are still proprietary and you still get ripped off on cartridges.

[UncleEntity]

> ...and you still get ripped off on cartridges.

Yep, it's cheaper to buy a new crappy printer from, say, Fry's Electronics than it is to buy refill cartridges for the last crappy printer you bought that ran out of ink.

[mmcgaha]

In the late 90s we bought two laserjet 8000 printers that were still in use when I left the company in 2014. Outside of the regular service schedule they never required maintenance.

[mpweiher]

> Do you remember printing in 2000?

I remember printing on my NeXT Laser Printer in 1992 or so. Great experience, fast, reliable, high quality output.

Rare the pages that did not come out at rated engine speed.

Canon engine, tweaked to 400 dpi instead of 300, with the host doing the rendering in DPS (anyone remember machportdevice?) and a custom DMA interface delivering the bitmap directly to the engine IIRC.

No interfaces on the printer itself, no ports, no Wifi, no LCDs, no memory, nada. And none needed. Printer is for printing.

[WWLink]

To be fair, my home printer is a Canon MX860. I bought mine around 2009 or 2010 and it has wifi, an LCD (albeit not touchscreen) and the only time I've experienced a jam, I was trying to print on sketchy paper anyway.

The best part is, the ink tanks for it are dirt cheap. Like $20 for 4 complete sets of ink tanks on amazon.

[fizixer]

> Do you remember printing in 2000?

Yes I do. No there were no "literally every printer was suffering".

1995-2000 was a perfectly fine era of B&W desktop laser printing (others can chime in about how it was before 1995). Go get some computer history education, or ask an adult in the room.

[zrobotics]

I'll just point out the existence of the movie "office space" in here as evidence that yes, people were frustrated with printers. That movie came out in 1999, and the most iconic scene is the printer being smashed. That resonated for very good reasons, printers (and drivers) were almost more obnoxious back then than they are now. Please lose the superior "adult in the room" tone.

[toast0]

I mean, they were made because the printer was asking the player character to load letter paper, and they couldn't figure that out.

Ok, I don't know what PC stands for, but load letter means you're out of paper, please fill me up. It's not a blinking clock on a VCR.

[dpryden]

"PC LOAD LETTER" was a very common message on the old HP LaserJet Series II printers. This cryptic message on the tiny LCD display was short for:

PC: "Paper Cassette" Load: "out of paper, please load more" Letter: "US Letter size (8.5"x11")"

In some offices you'd be equally likely to see similar codes like "PC LOAD A4" or "PC LOAD LEGAL".

The LaserJet Series II and III didn't have paper drawers, but rather paper cassettes, which you could load with a stack of paper (maybe a few hundred sheets? less than half a ream IIRC), and then swap in and out of the machine as a unit.

Some models (I think it might have been an add-on peripheral for the Series II?) had two cassette slots, so you could load two supplies of paper at the same time. Either you could load the same size twice, in which case it would perform like a backup: if you ran out of paper in the first cassette, it would switch to the second cassette automatically but start flashing a light to tell you that it was time to reload the first one. Or you could load two different sizes, and it would select the right cassette to draw from based on the size of the document being printed.

The Series II didn't have a way to measure the size of the paper, so each cassette was designed for only one paper size. There was an interface where the cassette plugged into the printer which indicated which size paper it contained.

Due to the design of the paper cassette, it was very hard to tell from the outside how much paper was left. There was a tiny window but it was nearly opaque. IIRC later versions of the cassette improved this.

So if you had a model with only one cassette (which was fairly common, I think) and you loaded a "US Letter" size cassette, and it ran out of paper, the printer would refuse to print anymore until you gave it more paper. In the meantime the tiny LCD screen would flash "PC LOAD LETTER".

The printer was a workhorse and I can testify that many offices in my area were using 1980s-era Series II printers daily in 1999, when I had a part-time IT job that among other things involved doing maintenance on said printers. Replacing the rubber paper pickup roller and clearing paper jams out of the fusing unit were probably the two most common trouble cases, IIRC.

[john61]

My HP Laserjet 4L does not jam at all but instead prints and prints and prints and prints and .... since the 90ies till today and probably years to come.

[ngold]

Screams into void...

Where's my open source dot matrix?

[DanBC]

> Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions.

Paper has a right-side-up, and your printing life improves drastically if you just look at the little arrow before putting the paper in the printer.

https://www.xerox.com/downloads/gbr/en/p/Paper_Guide.pdf

> As the front and back surfaces of the paper, as determined during the papermaking process, differ slightly, one side is preferred as the side to image first. The primary determinant of which side to print first is the paper’s curl characteristics.

> If you are using a quality paper intended for digital printing, the ream wrapper will be marked with an arrow that points to the preferred printing side. Print on this side when printing one side only; print this side first when printing on both sides of a sheet.

> Whether this side is to be loaded UP or DOWN in the paper tray has to be determined for each machine (and sometimes for each paper tray) by reading the system's operator guide. Once you've determined the correct orientation, marking each paper tray with a label indicating the correct loading direction helps avoid operator error and lost productivity.

> Determining Curl

> In the event a paper ream is not marked for correct print-side orientation, it may be necessary to determine the curl direction yourself. Do this by holding a 1/2-inch stack of paper by one of its short edges (refer to figure 4-2). Let the paper hang with the long edge parallel to your body. Either the lower edge or the two side edges will be curling slightly toward the center. Observe which way the edge(s) curl. This is the curl side. Load the paper into the tray such that the side opposite the direction of curl is imaged first.

> Note: If the ream had an arrow marking, it would point to the OPPOSITE side. Load into the paper tray in the appropriate direction

> Built-in Curl

> Xerox papers are manufactured with a small amount of “reverse curl,” so that they will be very close to flat after processing – this will facilitate any post-processing that needs to occur, such as binding, trimming or folding. Load according to the arrow direction for best results.

> Loading The Paper Tray

> Carefully unwrap the reams of paper to be loaded, taking care not to bend any of the sheets or otherwise damage the paper. Inspect the paper for any obvious signs of damage (bends, folds, crumpled or wavy edges, tight edges), or defects. Fan the paper as necessary to avoid sticking edges. Do not handle the paper any more than necessary.

> Load the reams into the paper tray one at a time, taking care to observe the correct orientation, as indicated by the ream wrapper arrow.

> When more than one ream is being loaded, it is important to make certain the reams are aligned atop one another. It is easy to wrinkle, bend, or otherwise alter the top sheet of a lower ream when placing another one on top of it. The interface between reams in the paper tray is a frequent source of jams. It is particularly important to avoid loading successive reams inconsistently (some arrow up, some arrow down).

> Observe the paper fill line marked on all paper trays and do not load paper above this line.

There's a bunch more there about correct storage.