Why All Printers Suck (Even the Best Ones)

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and stop expecting printers to “just work” because that would make sense in a world where a touchscreen supercomputer fits in your shirt pocket. Like most things in life that you have no control over, you’ll be happier if you accept printers for the janky money pits that they really are.

Most of you are going to hate something about any printer that you buy, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Instead of fighting it, try to reframe the issue in your mind: You’re not buying a printer because you’re supposed to have one at home. You’re buying a printer because it’s (just barely) less inconvenient than going to a copy center.

Common pain points for anyone buying a home printer include:

• Sky-high ink or toner costs
• The feeling that ink or toner constantly needs to be replaced and always seems to run out at the worst times
• Wireless (or wired) networking that never seems to connect correctly
• Drivers that go out of date, never to be refreshed, and seem to disappear whenever you update your computer’s operating system
• A cryptic interface that makes it almost impossible to troubleshoot problems without the help of customer support
• Unhelpful customer support, making it impossible to troubleshoot problems anyway

Unfortunately, we can’t solve all of these problems. But our years of experience covering these apparent boxes of junk give us a better understanding of why they exist. Here are some other general truths that you may have never considered (or willingly ignore when you feel like throwing a tantrum about your printer). Assume that these apply to all printers from all manufacturers unless we say otherwise:

• Your printer is worth a lot more than you’re paying for it. Seriously, there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds. You’re probably buying the printer for the cost of parts and distribution, which means the manufacturer is effectively subsidizing the thing on the premise that they’ll recoup their research and development costs (and the rest of their overhead) from your ink purchases.
• You should not expect a good experience if you use knockoff ink cartridges. See above. Part of R&D is designing ink to have the right physical properties to work with the printheads. Knockoff ink might not have those properties, and, as a result, may not work very well. Also, as we learned recently, most inkjet printers designed for home use actually have the printhead built into the cartridge itself. There is no permanent printhead in most cheap printers. So you might be buying crap ink and a crap printhead. And if you try to refill a genuine cartridge with knockoff ink, you’re probably putting subpar ink into a container with a burnt-out printhead.
• Also, back to the subsidy thing. We’ve read that some manufacturers purposely design their printers to basically shut down if you try to use third-party cartridges. You may not like it, but from their perspective, they’re protecting their investment in their "ink futures," which subsidizes their dirt-cheap hardware.
• Knockoff toner cartridges, on the other hand, are okay! Toner is just an electrostatically charged powder (part polymer, part carbon), and the cartridge itself is just a simple plastic container. There are no fancy printheads or circuitry. Manufacturers don’t fight as hard to protect toner cartridges because there’s not a lot of intellectual property in these things. However, they tend to charge a higher markup on the printers themselves to make up for the cheaper toner costs.
• If an ink cartridge is missing, you shouldn’t expect your printer to print, and it may not even scan. Some models will still do either or both, many will not. Yeah, it feels like a shakedown when they employ this stand-and-deliver style of ink management, but it’s not uncommon across the industry.
• If your home network is more complex than just a modem, a router, and your PC, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll run into network connectivity problems. There’s not a good reason for this, but the state of networking in the printer industry is abysmal. A printer that works well in one network might need five hours of troubleshooting in another. Unfortunately, this means we can’t say for certain that any given printer will definitely work well on your home network.
• At some point you’ll need to manually download new drivers for your printer when you update your operating system. Yeah, this should happen automatically, but it usually doesn’t. Some companies are better than others at issuing new drivers in a timely manner. In our experience, Brother is very diligent and Canon is the most likely to leave behind printers that are more than a couple of years old.

Basically, printers are a dismal product category. But doesn’t it feel better to know why? With that in mind, we realize you still need to use them now and then, and thus we still spend dozens of hours researching and testing in order to make a few recommendations for printers that rise above the (admittedly low) bar:

The Bare Minimum

If you just need something to put words on paper, then simpler is better. You want a cheap laser printer. This thing will cost less than $100 to buy and less than 2¢ per page to operate and can take care of any black-and-white printing you need. Because it’s a laser printer, it uses toner instead of ink, which has two benefits: The toner cartridge will never dry out and become ineffective no matter how infrequently you print, and you can safely use cheaper, third-party toner if you want to save money. However, because it prints in black-and-white only, you’ll still have to make a trip to the copy center for color prints. And the LCD screens on these printers tend to be small and hard to navigate. But for most people that’s still preferable to being unable to print your black-and-white tax returns because your cyan cartridge dried up.

Home Office

If you need more out of your printer, look into getting an all-in-one inkjet printer. These are best suited for home offices that occasionally use color printing, scanning, copying, or faxing, but don’t require any particular one of these tasks on a daily basis (CPAs need not apply). Like the cheap laser printer, an all-in-one inkjet printer is also affordable up front (less than $200) and cheap to operate (expect 2¢ to 4¢ per page for black-and-white, 7¢ to 10¢ per page for color). However, unlike a laser printer, you have to use the ink regularly or lose it, though these printers automatically perform periodic purges to keep their nozzles clean and ready to print.

Have other needs?

Those two printer types should cover most home users, but if what we currently recommend does not seem like it’s going to fit your needs, we suggest that you check out the libraries of individual printer reviews at Computer Shopper and Consumer Reports (subscription required for the latter). These are the most thorough professional sources of information about this category. But you must also read the user reviews of any printer that you think you want to buy. Some printers may test well in controlled settings when used by experienced testers, but fail the take-home test. User reviews considered in the aggregate will alert you to trends in long-term reliability, and individual reviews can reveal a lot of little details that the pro reviews sometimes overlook: poorly written owner’s manuals, whether it jams on card stock, the fax machine doesn’t work, etc.

If all else fails, there’s always the local copy center.