Hi!
58 posts
why are printers so hated? it's simple:
computers are good at computering. they are not good at the real world.
the biggest problems in computers, the ones that have had to change the most over the time they've existed, are the parts that deal with the real world. The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. every computer needs these, but they involve interacting with the real world. that's a problem. that's why they get replaced so much.
now, printers: printers have some of the most complex real-world interaction. they need to deposit ink on paper in 2 dimensions, and that results in at least three ways it can go on right from the start. (this is why 3D printers are just 2D printers that can go wrong in another whole dimension)
scanners fall into many of the same problems printers have, but fewer people have scanners, and they're not as cost-optimized. But they are nearly as annoying.
This is also why you can make a printer better by cutting down on the number of moving elements: laser printers are better than inkjets, because they only need to move in one dimension, and their ink is a powder, not a liquid. and the best-behaved printers of all are thermal printers: no ink and the head doesn't move. That's why every receipt printer is a thermal printer, because they need that shit to work all the time so they can sell shit. And thermal is the most reliable way to do that.
But yeah, cost-optimization is also a big part of why printers are such finicky unreliable bastards: you don't want to pay much for them. Who is excited for all the printing they're gonna be doing? basically nobody. But people get forced to have a printer because they gotta print something, for school or work or the government or whatever. So they want the cheapest thing that'll work. They're not shopping on features and functionality and design, they want something that costs barely anything, and can fucking PRINT. anything else is an optional bonus.
And here's the thing: there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable.
And that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone. This is why you can buy a keyboard for 20$ and a mouse for 10$ and they both work plenty fine for 90% of users. They're objectively shit compared to the ones in the 60-150$ range, but do they work? yep. So that's what people get.
Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office.
It's the same place floppy disks were in in about 2000. CD-burners were not yet cheap enough, USB flash drives didn't exist yet (but were coming), modems weren't fast enough yet to copy stuff over the internet, superfloppies hadn't taken over like some hoped, and memory cards were too expensive and not everyone had a drive for them. So we still needed floppy disks, but at the same time this was a technology that hadn't changed in nearly 20 years. So people were tired of paying out the nose for them... the only solution? cut corners. I have floppy disks from 1984 that read perfectly, but a shrinkwrapped box of disks from 1999 will have over half the disks failed. They cut corners on the material quality, the QA process, the cleaning cloth inside the disk, everything they could. And the disks were shit as a result.
So, printers are in that particular note of the death-spiral where they've reached the point of "no one likes or cares about this technology, but it's still required so it's gone to shit". That's why they are so annoying, so unreliable, so fucking crap.
So, here's the good news:
You can still buy a better printer, and it will work far better. Laser printers still exist, and LED printers work the same way but even cheaper. They're still more expensive than inkjets (especially if you need color), but if you have to print stuff, they're a godsend. Way more reliable.
This is not a stable equilibrium. Printers cannot limp along in this terrible state forever. You know why I brought up floppy disk there? (besides the fact I'm a giant floppy disk nerd) because floppy disks GOT REPLACED. Have you used one this decade? CD-Rs and USB drives and internet sharing came along and ate the lunch of floppy disks, so much so that it's been over a decade since any more have been made. The same will happen to (inkjet) printers, eventually. This kind of clearly-broken situation cannot hold. It'll push people to go paperless, for companies to build cheaper alternatives to take over from the inkjets, or someone will come up with a new, more reliable printer based on some new technology that's now cheap enough to use in printers. Yeah, it sucks right now, but it can't last.
So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minimum of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.
Random fun facts about printing of the past and their local minimums:
in the hot metal type era, not only would the whole printing process expose you to lead, the most common method of printing text was the linotype, which could go wrong in a very fun way: if the next for a line wasn't properly justified (filling out the whole row), it could "squirt", and lead would escape through gaps in the type matrix. This would result in molten lead squirting out of the machine, possibly onto the operator. Anecdotally, linotype operators would sometimes recognize each other on the street because of the telltale spots on their forearms where they had white splotches where no hair grew, because they got bad lead burns. This type of printing remained in use until the 80s.
Another fun type of now-retired printers are drum printers, a type of line printer. These work something like a typewriter or dot-matrix printer, except the elements extend across the entire width of the paper. So instead of printing a character at time by smacking it into the paper, the whole line got smacked nearly at once. The problem is that if the paper jammed and the printer continued to try to print, that line of the paper would be repeatedly struck at high speed, creating a lot of heat. This worry created the now-infamous Linux error: "lp0 on fire". This was displayed when the error signals from a parallel printer didn't make sense... and it was a real worry. A high speed printer could definitely set the paper on fire, though this was rare.
So... one thing to be grateful about current shitty inkjet printers: they are very unlikely to burn anything, especially you.
(because before they could do that they'd have to work, at least a little, first, and that's very unlikely)
edited my turtle into sonic adventure 2 battle
Still feels weird that the same band made "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" and "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)"
I'm just trying to analyze some microscopy experiments I did but it looks like I accidentally peeped the horror
TIL the brains of rats have a “random mode” that is switched on when they are in unfamiliar situations
via reddit.com
that reminds me, i've been wanting to get into postwar printing methods and what sort of print materials are being widely distributed
canonically, you've got the wasteland survival guide, farming the wastes, and water aerobics for ghouls in circulation, just to name a few, but i haven't seen a ton of discussion on this and i think it's fascinating
i imagine some folks can use terminals or printing presses to mass produce texts, but not everyone would have access to that
there's got to be a popular cartoonist working out of a casino on the strip and some famous penny dreadful author churning out serials
@zosonils
Looks majestic to me.
warning this is a post where i discuss sex. not explicit or descriptive i just feel it's worth mentioning on my blog where i rarely even reblog posts that mention sex in them as a joke
between being very very intensely sex repulsed and having grown up on an internet on which people were and still are openly disgusting about underage characters from series aimed at children i often hiss and jeer at the monolithic Horny People but like outside of the context of being subjected to sexual content against my will i do not think as a sex repulsed ace that horny people are my enemy. we may be diametrically opposite in nature but i think i have much more common ground with a kinky person who also wants to enjoy their preferred sexual experience in peace than i do with overzealous purity culture randos who declare the slightest mention of sex on the internet an act of great moral impurity y'know. shout out to horny people i might fundamentally not understand you but i hope you are all having fun
NASA putting mice in zero-g environments is one of the funniest fucking tests anyone has ever done and I hate having to hand that to them. Put those beasts in a situation.
rats can drive cars btw. if u even care
@ourplekitty
Alison Friend (British,contemporary)
a quick ren to get a feel for how i draw him! :]
If you are seeing this post, you have been blessed!
Today is your final chance to do it. You will never be able to again!
POV: mister Devon Price, PhD, telling me that I am right about everything
Source: Unmasking Autism, discovering the new faces of neurodiversity
Definitely the funniest redraw I've ever done. Obvious credit to @punkitt-is-here for the original.
Originally posted on 10 Jan 2023
Hey OP where’s Alaska?
[it's me i'm opening commissions]
commissions are priced in $AUD and taken over paypal, and can be requested via messaging me on discord [zosonils#3941], tumblr [zosonils or zosonils-art], or instagram [@zosonils_], or through email [zhartoac@gmail.com]. reblogs are massively appreciated on this, even if you don't intend on commissioning me yourself!
more details, including the plain text equivalent to all the images in this post, can be found in this document!
highly recommend clicking through these for better quality and easier reading!