I wrote printer code for 10+ years. I appreciate how hard the technical problems are but vendors make it so much worse. I loathe printers. Printers peaked with the LaserJet III.
Agreed, I ran several busy printers for a large department. The ljet IIIs were work houses and ran nearly forever if you used the recommended part replacement schedule.
We had a ljet III that outlasted ljet 4, ljet 5, and ljet 4000. Ljet 3 was the last with the HP print engine, afterwards they used Canon print engines.
The network interface was brittle, even a nmap would hang the printer. So we firewalled it off and used CUPS to handle postscript -> PCL. Sending only PCL to the printer (postscript memory and CPU is unbounded) made them faster and MUCH more reliable.
IIRC the Laserjet 4 had a much better warm-up time (and lower power consumption) by switching to a thin ceramic heating element rather than heating half the printer. But yeah anything after that is downhill.
do you mind lightly summarizing what technical problems make it more difficult? I'm assuming there are all sorts of things web-devs never even think about from that world.
Poor status, often a 1 line LCD says "processing..." and hangs infinitely.
Different handling of duplex, monitoring ink levels, file formats (PS? EPS? PNG? PCL? Which versions? Etc).
Issues with ink that expire by date, reduced functionality with 3rd party inks, not being able to print black even when only yellow is out of ink.
Different postscript versions and the nature of a language where CPU and memory use is unbounded means you get a nightmare of which files can print to which printers.
Most of our printer nightmares, at least the software issues, ended when we handled postscript -> PCL (a raster based format) on the server side.
We had a ljet III that outlasted ljet 4, ljet 5, and ljet 4000. Ljet 3 was the last with the HP print engine, afterwards they used Canon print engines.
The network interface was brittle, even a nmap would hang the printer. So we firewalled it off and used CUPS to handle postscript -> PCL. Sending only PCL to the printer (postscript memory and CPU is unbounded) made them faster and MUCH more reliable.