Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by fencepost on Monday November 13, 2017 @11:27PM
(#15692659)
Your problem may be more your choice of vendors than anything else. HP's big printers (e.g. M600 family) are still pretty nice, but I've started to avoid them for anything smaller, and god help you if you look at the truly low print volume stuff from them.
Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by mschuster91 on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @04:33AM
(#15693773)
HP printers are excellent in terms of hardware build quality: the Z2100 plotter in my company is a decade old, of which it stood 6 years around unused - gave it a full cleaning, new cartridges and heads a new carriage belt and it was back to mint condition. Oh, and there are still new cartridges and ink tanks made, and there are still recent drivers.
And for most of the consumer gear from HP it's the same: even for really old stuff you can find new tanks/cartridges, drivers for new and old OSes and I've yet to see a HP printer fail in a way I could not fix myself with a service manual.
Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by fencepost on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @03:31PM
(#15707458)
The problem I always ran into was customers getting the consumer gear and wanting me to make it print from their server, with drivers only from HP and no support for server operating systems.
My response to anything HP that wasn't good-sized obviously-business-targeted printers became "I can probably make that work, but it's going to cost you more in my time fiddling around with it than just getting a more appropriate printer."
Have you looked at the unimaginable amount of crap a typical Windows printer driver forces upon you? It's not just the driver, it's usually also a stripped down license of some image editor, an "update agent" (because Windows 7 does not have an "app store" or a centralized driver distribution that does not phone home like Windows Update does and often enough carries fossilized drivers only), a toolbar for multifunction printers, a watcher that nags you to buy new original cartridges, a scanner agent because there is still no standard for scanning without drivers, much less so over network or cross platform, a selection of adware... and God help you if you have printers or MFDs from different vendors.
The only way to not have this ridiculous mess is buying enterprise printers - for example, the Z2100 plotter drivers are 4MB for Windows, and 16MB for the manager app, while the Photosmart printer driver can only be had as a part of a 145MB download, there is no such thing as a "driver only" package in the consumer space. In enterprise environments (or small offices) the situation sucks even more because you can't really deploy them via GPO, you have to extract the drivers by hand.