[ThinkBeat]

Is this some conspiracy with printer vendors to drastically increase sales?

I have two old photo printers that work quite well and replacing them would be extremely expensive. The driver among other things contains features to match up color profiles.

I have label printers that are old that also work well.

All rely on custom printer drivers.

I hope this new system is going to be phased in over a long timeframe, so I can keep using old printers. Even if writing software to integrate these printers with the new system no printer manufacturer is going to revisit 10 - 15-year-old printeres with a new set of drivers.

[tonyedgecombe]

You really need to blame the printer manufacturers. Microsoft released XPS based drivers with Windows Vista in 2007. It was back ported to XP and in beta for a long time before release. Despite that the printer manufacturers are still releasing V3 drivers (GDI based) today.

It seems they won't move forward unless they are forced to. It's about time.