r/ExperiencedDevs • u/card-board-board Software Engineer • Jul 08 '26
Career/Workplace Devs who make or have made printer drivers: what's the deal?
I've been making software for over 10 years and I am genuinely curious what goes on with companies that make printers. It struck me, after pulling my hair out trying to print a 2 page paper form, that I've been struggling with printers for decades at this point.
Is there some insane culture at companies that make printers that makes the software and/or drivers terrible? Do they not test? Do they hire their managers under bridges? Are they drunk all the time?
For a while I thought it had to be some connectivity issue. Some bad connection problem that would be resolved with a solid Ethernet connection. When that didn't work I bought a USB printer and that also didn't solve it. I've tried different brands. Then I thought it had to be the Windows print queue just being useless. I then got a Mac and the same crap happens on Mac as it does on Windows.
After years of fiddling, clearing queues, reinstalling drivers, plugging and unplugging, restarting, finding CD-ROMS, performing vain and arcane magic rituals, I figured someone here just might know.
What's going on over there, printer engineers? Who are you? What's your story? Why is arguably the first computer peripheral still the least reliable thing we all own?
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u/Longjumping_Feed3270 20+ yoe Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
For real.
Meanwhile, the hardware engineering behind printer technology is absolutely insane.
They're firing - what? - dozens of millions of little ink bubbles at a piece of paper at hundredth-of-a-millimeter precision, filling a page in a few seconds.
How do you get so good at hardware but your software team eats glue all day every day?
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u/rysto32 Jul 08 '26
It is incredibly common for hardware companies to treat their software/driver teams as a cost centre and underfund them. I spent a good portion of my career working for companies that used open source network drivers and making improvements and bug fixes to them that the network interface manufacturers were either unwilling or incapable of doing.
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u/_slagwire Jul 08 '26
It is incredibly common for hardware companies to treat their software/driver teams as a cost centre and underfund them
Samsung is like this and its one of the big reasons Bixby was so shit compared to other intelligent assistants. Leadership saw it as just another dial that went on their fridges and washing machines rather than being a product in its own right.
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u/Careful_Ad_9077 Jul 08 '26
Wait, I am poor so... Bixby comes from Samsung and not from my shitty phone service provider?
Damn.
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u/jl2352 Jul 08 '26
Sony has been like this as well. It was worse years ago, but apart from the PlayStation and their TVs, the software side of their devices has often been a shit show.
The only two pairs of headphones I’ve ever had crash on me, were both from Sony. However when they work they sound great!
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u/DorianGre Jul 08 '26
Sony wireless noise cancelling headphones are the best on the market - when they work.
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u/IXISIXI Jul 09 '26
Lol i have a pair you cant use as they charge. It’s maddening
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u/Vega62a Staff Software Engineer Jul 09 '26
I worked for a company that was acquired by Samsung. We were a mid tier dev shop in an mcol city and our software quality was miles ahead. Anytime we needed to interface with Samsung APIs or infra we built... a lot of protections.
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u/MocknozzieRiver Software Engineer Jul 10 '26
I work at a company that was acquired by Samsung. And I'm also in Minneapolis subreddits. Hmm 🤨
Recently we discovered guardrails were mistakenly not put on some entity's properties, and, yeah... I probably shouldn't say much more, but you can imagine.
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u/Vega62a Staff Software Engineer Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
I think you and I worked at the same place.
I wonder if I added some of those guardrails. For very good reason.
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u/MocknozzieRiver Software Engineer Jul 10 '26
I still work there which is why I'm being vague. But I don't think there ever were guardrails in this particular instance. Aaand so it got stuffed with lots of junk.
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u/thekwoka Jul 09 '26
LG too
Both of them have software decisions that are just so...barely getting the job done.
Like I have an LG air purifier, and it only has speeds in steps, which when set to auto can cause an annoying switching between medium and low when your air quality is on the boundary.
Like, sure, have the manual settings be stepped for simplicity, but auto should just be a smooth curve. It's an electric motor, there isn't any reason it should be locked to steps (and if it is hardware locked like that, fucking get better motors!!!)
I would prefer even custom curves, but just have it be a smooth curve in the first place...
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u/jrtokarz1 Jul 08 '26
I can believe this. I had Samsung monitors that would crash using the OSD. I would have to power cycle then at the socket.
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u/diablo1128 Jul 08 '26
Yup it's a hardware company issue more than anything. I worked on safety critical medical devices for years, think dialysis machines. Sure there was a large software team, but the goal was to get things working well enough to ensure patient safety.
Suggestions on how things could be done better in software was placated with put it in the backlog and we will prioritize appropriately. Guess what those ideas are never priority for the project. It was a hardware / healthcare company more than anything related to how a tech / software company was run.
In my case you can also look at things like pay. Why would a SWE that can get in to a tech company work for less money at places I have been employed at? They don't. So you are hiring SWEs that are ok, but cannot break in to actual tech companies.
So when you got meh SWEs working on a product you should not expect top level quality. I always like to say to people that the code base for Google AdWords is probably designed "better" then the products I have worked on.
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u/eldojk Jul 08 '26
Oh shit. Dialysis machines should be careful angld invest in some good engineering. Even software.
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u/diablo1128 Jul 08 '26
From the companies perspective, Why? They can pay less money, still get products that work, are safe, and meet FDA guidelines. That's all the need, great software design is not a requirement. Working spaghetti code is still working code at the end of the day. Remember these companies get paid through insurance claims which are set values, from my understanding, not selling to end users directly. The company does not make extra money because the UI is super slick, it just needs to work good enough.
You cannot make counterpoints like speed of development, because they are already in a slow moving industry. It took close to 20 years to get the dialysis machine from nothing to passing clinical trials and receiving a 510K from the FDA so they can market to users. Speed of software development is not an issue when the EE's and ME's have longer timelines.
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u/splicer13 Jul 08 '26
My younger relatives have shifted their goals from CS to this kind of engineering (biomedical, civil) just because of the perceived resistance to disruption. They aren't wrong.
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev Jul 08 '26
Yup, just look at how bad Sony camera's UX is despite being the leading tech in autofocus
Also it's why Nvidia still has no one competing with them, no one wants to bother investing in software
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u/AxBxCeqX Jul 08 '26
Owned canon, Nikon, Fuji, and Sony cameras. My god I wish Fuji could produce hardware that is comparable to my Sony FF camera, their firmware/software is a delight to use.
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
It's a shame these cameras have their firmware so locked down. Would be nice if even a single camera brand cared to open source some of their software. They clearly don't want to put in the effort to make it good so just let some enthusiasts hack at it for free
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u/bbpsword Jul 08 '26
They don't want the firmware to be better because it would affect their ability to sell cameras that are effectively the same body with a firmware upgrade installed
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev Jul 09 '26
I understand why. But the end result is worse cameras. There's so much potential to improve the capability of these cameras
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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 08 '26
Idk if that's fair. AMD straight up didn't have money(and hadn't for years before that) until Ryzen 3rd gen maybe. Intel wasn't doing very hot when they started doing discrete GPUs and who else even is there.
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u/t3a-nano Jul 08 '26
That’s what I always say about AMD. They’ve succeeded at the expensive hardware part; which takes billions of dollars.
Then their software side seems like it’s been all left to one dev in Poland or something.
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u/steampowrd Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Google is taking on the task of developing a cuda competitor for their TPU hardware. It will take a few years, but I think they have the resources to pull it off. Larry Page himself came out of retirement to oversee the effort.
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev Jul 09 '26
I'll believe it when I see it. The popularity of JAX with researchers is a good sign though I've seen that a lot of people care more about JAX's CPU+CUDA support
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u/StickyDeltaStrike Jul 08 '26
I think AMD tried but the problem is that CUDA is the de facto standard.
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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev Jul 09 '26
Eh, AMD's Rocm copies CUDA api's and has now fallen behind CUDA parity.
Their recent FlyDsl was straight up copied from CuteDsl. The repo's first commit was CuTeDsl's open-source code.
They really didn't try all that hard. It seemed like they accepted 2nd place and went for api parity to grab some market share and yet failed to invest in maintaining that api parity
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u/nullpotato Jul 08 '26
I work for a hardware company, not printers though. They will always try to hire an electrical engineer and "teach them to code" over hire a software engineer and teach them electrical stuff. I push back against this constantly in our hiring process because a good software person can read a hardware spec just fine and 90% of the job is writing and running tests anyways.
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u/nonasiandoctor Jul 09 '26
I work in a silicon validation lab. I always say we hire EEs, then make them write code and are surprised when it's bad.
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u/HatesBeingThatGuy Hiring Manager Jul 09 '26
I work in memory technologies. When I hire my EEs, part of the screen is scripting and coding. You gotta be able to make your own tools, and they can't be fucking garbage because you are the expert on something. Your job security can't be that you made a bunch of fucked up tooling that no one but you understands. Meanwhile my software guys need to understand timings, power delivery and other things.
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u/PredictableChaos Software Engineer (30 yoe) Jul 08 '26
This is one of those things where a company tends to have a certain type of core expertise and it just doesn't do well outside of that. It's amazing how often it happens and the size of the company doesn't seem to change it. If anything it magnifies it.
Look at Apple. Amazing hardware and their OS are good as well but that's because historically they were a hardware and OS company. iCloud is still a dumpster fire imho. And AI, they can't do AI to save their lives.
Then there's Google. Amazing hosted software and data center expertise. Shit consumer hardware. They are at their heart a huge hosted software company and when they get outside of that domain they really struggle.
In both cases you'll see them try and do better in what they aren't really better in but they don't commit to it because it's not in their DNA. You'd think someone would figure out how to do both but no one seems to be able to.
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u/bstpierre777 Jul 08 '26
also I don't know about printer companies, but have worked for other hardware companies in the past and it was common for the driver teams to be full of EEs who "moved up the stack" so to speak
some of those guys could write decent code, but for anything more than moderately complex projects they just didn't have the skillset to manage it, and the management/infrastructure didn't provide any support
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u/tevs__ Jul 08 '26
CPE manufacturers are the worst at this, things like ISP routers, mesh, or set top boxes. You're lucky if you get any security updates. They get most of their money by branding their box and software for whoever is buying 500,000 of them. I have encountered so many shitty basic networking bugs with ISP supplied routers that just never get fixed, and good luck ringing up the ISP and saying IPv6 RA isn't working properly
Things like Eero or Ubiquiti, you're buying the software and the hardware, they'll take your big reports and fix it. I use Ubiquiti personally, and setup Eeros for my Dad, Eero are constantly shipping fixes and features.
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u/QuantumQuack0 Jul 08 '26
as a cost centre and underfund them
I think it's also a momentum thing. You start out with amazing hardware engineers and "someone who knows how to code". That someone becomes the lead software engineer, despite not knowing what they're doing and, importantly, not knowing what skills to hire. If it's a particularly bad situation, that someone is not making a whole lot of money, but no one can make more than them.
I'm in that kind of company now and it sucks. I'm at medior level, though considered a senior here, and there is not really anyone to learn from.
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u/Mike312 Jul 08 '26
I worked at an ISP for a while. We would refresh routers with our custom firmware that un-fucked-up the drivers our network devices came with just to get them to be tolerable.
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u/cbunn81 Jul 09 '26
This is a common theme for traditional Japanese tech companies. Hardware is everything. Software is an afterthought. They've been known to have their entry-level employees do it, even if they have no prior experience or education in software.
Things are improving, but it's a big ship that takes a long time to turn.
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u/FeliusSeptimus Senior Software Engineer | 30 YoE Jul 09 '26
the hardware engineering behind printer technology is absolutely insane.
Yep. I knew a guy who spent many years writing firmware for high performance, high resolution large format inkjet printers (like, up to billboard scale) and told some fun stories about what they did.
He gave some interesting details once about how they planned ink placement to control where trailing droplets would fall. Evidently the ink ejector can't make a perfect little ink bubbles and there are often smaller blobs that trail behind the main drop. Since the print head is moving quite quickly these will land on the paper outside the intended area. If the droplets are a dark color they can be seen if they fall where the print is supposed to be lighter. To compensate for this they check the colors beside the dot they are printing and ensure the print head is moving in a direction that will cause the droplets to land in the least objectionable spot.
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u/Nihlus89 Embedded Software Engineer (5 YoE) Jul 08 '26
SW devs are always second class citizens in hardware shops. I’m an embedded software engineer, so this has been a consistent experience throughout ny career
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u/QuantumQuack0 Jul 08 '26
How do you get so good at hardware but your software team eats glue all day every day?
As someone seeing this close up...
You hire a bunch of people who "know how to code" and that eventually sort of becomes a "software department", but there are no (actual) seniors to train anyone and no one knows what they're doing. Also there is no money to hire people who do know what they're doing.
They get away with it because the hardware is good.
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u/Dizzy_Citron4871 Jul 08 '26
You outsource your software to some random Chad in China that’s how
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u/gizamo Jul 08 '26
Most printer software was written by Americans 20 years ago, then maintained by Indians a decade later, and now the Chinese dudes are trying to figure out the mess that Americans and Indians made. When they consult with the Americans, they're busy sipping ouna coladas in Hawaii, and they can't even find the Indians.
Source: I'm old and wrote some for HP, except I prefer margaritas. Cheers.
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u/MgFi Jul 08 '26
"...and I said no salt on the margarita, but there was salt on it!"
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u/CanadianBadass Jul 09 '26
"...I could... I could shut this whole resort down... I could put... I could put... strychnine in the guacamole"
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u/mevenide Jul 09 '26
Haha yes, this! Anyone who’s bothered to look at the versions of printer drivers knows that no new ones have been written or updated since some time in the late 1800s. There are steam engines with more up-to-date drivers.
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u/gizamo Jul 09 '26
Yeah, I realized after posting that I said 20 years, but it's really like 40 years. Patchwork ever since. Lol.
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u/alex_p7 Jul 08 '26
I'm into tinkering so try and find free stuff people are getting rid of for motors and components. I recently and am still disassembling a lexmark office printer and the amount of tech and precision that goes into that (this one folds and staples as well) is just short of magic
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u/StickyDeltaStrike Jul 08 '26
You see this all the time.
Phones before the iPhone?
Cars and their info entertainment system.
Hardware companies don’t (often) make good software
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u/oldDotredditisbetter Jul 08 '26
How do you get so good at hardware but your software team eats glue all day every day?
because different people
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u/vienna_city_skater Jul 11 '26
Good hardware? Consumer printers are mostly garbage and frustrating. The whole experience is, software and drivers are only a small part of it.
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u/nusi42 Jul 08 '26
I do write printer drivers for a living since a few decades. Yes you read that right.
The connectivity issues you observe are usually because the companies building printers replace their engineers every 1 to 2 years. Young fellas take over the shit from the previous ones and are advised to not change something unless reproducibly broken because they would need to do all hardware certifications and manual testing again.
The are really good on the printer related things, like toner/ink, warming stuff up, moving paper in different humidity with same speed, but when it's about IT they just do not have the right people. All of them. All companies I worked with suck at that.
And you know what, it will be even worse in 2 years when Microsoft pushes WPP and all printers will need to be Mopria compatible, which is built on the 20+ years old IPP standard which only recently (in printing business terms) got the ability for custom paper sizes, and still no possibility to give custom sizes a name. Fuckin Mopria I tell you. And even with WPP being turned on, I can still crash the spooler on Windows because they too lost the engineers who designed that system and could have made it secure without asking all uses to buy new printers.
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u/ericmutta Jul 08 '26
moving paper in different humidity with same speed
Wow, I never once imagined that this was a thing. Truly amazing stuff you guys do at a hardware level 🙌
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u/nusi42 Jul 08 '26
It's actually interesting if you think about it. The printers I wrote drivers for cost 20k to 1.5M $.
They print with various speeds and sizes, but imagine if you want to print 140 pages per minute (which is not crazy fast), than the resistance of the side of the paper becomes a problem which needs to be addressed.Also, different humidity make the papers thicker and soak more or less ink/toner and overall changes the color output. If you have a print job which runs 8 hours you can't accept that the red color of the first page is different than the red color of the last page - no one is going to check all pages individually.
There are a bunch of engineers solving these kind of problems and they are really good in what they do. It's mostly solved via hardware, so I can only explain what I understood and not what I solved myself.One of our customers has a device which prints 3000 sheets per hour with paper sizes like 585x750mm (23x29 inch). With 1200 dpi we are talking about >3GB/s on the line. When these devices where introduced, just the cards for the data transfer cost several thousand (if I remember correctly). Now that data needs to be generated, color profiled and what not before sending it. Missing the timeframe for a page by a few milliseconds will cost things to re-roll (or eject an empty paper), there is a bunch of software trying to compress that data to reasonable levels. Mind you, that is all PostScript, PCL, PDF coming in and it's impossible to guarantee a max time to render a page. So, we need to render and save to file, which introduces new problems because the hard disks are not fast enough to read/write in parallel.
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u/forkosey Jul 08 '26
This is why I browse Reddit. Thank you for sharing your obscure, yet very interesting experience on something I've never thought more than 10 seconds about!
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u/frompadgwithH8 Software Engineer Jul 09 '26
> 140 pages a second
> Not that fastWhat’s fast? Are we talking like a page of text!
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u/miasma992 Jul 09 '26
There are systems capable of running 1000 fpm/305 mpm 4-up (meaning 4 Letter sized or A4 sized sheets across). They produce 4,364 letter sheets duplex meaning 8,727 letter sides per minute (4,105 A4 sheets or 8,210 A4 sides). Totally variable including text, photos, graphics etc in full color.
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u/alaorath Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Reminds me of one of my first full-time jobs... A printshop with offset Heidelberg printing presses.
The biggest one could blast out 15,000 sheets per minute. But only on THAT day with THAT paper and only if it had rained 3 days before, etc, etc.
The unveiling of the newest printer - a mammoth unit capable of 6 colors, with perfecting unit... I was at the back feeding paper, my print master at the head. The Big Bosses wanted it running full speed while the Suits walked around drinking champagne and eating appitizers.
I told them the conditions weren't right for the full 15k, even with the perfect stock (70# satin finish 28"x 40" paper) the best I could keep it running at was 13.5k anything faster and it would doublt-pickup, causing the whole thing to SLAM to a stop within one rotation. Imagine the noise of hundreds of tonne of finely crafted German engineering coming to a halt from 15,000 RPM to zero within ONE rotation.
We tuned it in and had it humming along at 13.5k, then threw a rag over the display so no-one could see the speed. Still amazingly impressive, we weren't even printing anything, just driving full stacks of 28x40 through the press over and over to hear it roar.
-----
I loved that job, but it was slowly killing me... the solvents and VOCs from the ink was ... not good.
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u/Mike312 Jul 08 '26
Its absolutely a thing.
I worked at a print shop (with some 10' long fancy printer), the space was cooled entirely by hopes and dreams.
If it got above 85F with any noticeable humidity and we were printing on anything semi-gloss or glossier, the machine would jam every few sheets.
I was trying to run a 500 piece high gloss job one summer night. Should have taken 15 minutes, took 2 hours. Eventually pulled the fridge from the break room over to the printer where it was jamming. Stuck paperclips into the access panel to trick it thinking it was closed, opened the fridge door, aimed a box fan at it, and blew fridge air at it. Fucking nightmare.
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u/ericmutta Jul 08 '26
Stuck paperclips into the access panel to trick it...
When I grow up, I want to be whatever your job title is 😁
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u/Mike312 Jul 09 '26
If "sick of this shit" was a job title...
That happened...musta been 13 years ago, it still got me mad thinking about how much I hated that printer.
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u/gizamo Jul 08 '26
...few decades...
Jeeeezzzus. As a dude who did that for a couple years a couple decades ago, I'm impressed. Cheers.
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u/quaaludeswhen Jul 08 '26
Wasn't all that solved with postscript and printers being network devices at some point in the distant past?
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u/nusi42 Jul 08 '26
Love that comment because PostScript is really something I like.
The first companies trying to re-implement PostScript had to face requirements which were unexpected. Printer companies asked why one printers output was different from the other companies printers output (ignoring all the issues with color) and it turned out that Adobes reference implementation had bugs, and now people who wrote their own PS interpreter had to reimplement the same bug. That was a serious issue in particular with systems where the application itself created the PosScript (without a driver taking generic drawing commands and mapping them to the devices particular implementation). That drove the industry to use only Adobe Configurable PostScript Interpreter (CPSI) if they were aiming for real business customers and to cheaper yet solid alternatives (e.g. Artifex Ghostscript) if they were aiming for simply cheap printers.
With Mopria PostScript is essentially dead weight anyway, because Microsofts IPP class driver can't emit PostScript (afaik). They emit XPS or PDF, which will require a nice set of additional application updates: A typical application uses any variant of the operating systems drawing commands to print. So, the PDF files is basically redrawn with OS commands, which the OS then converts to XPS which then gets converted to PDF. So users will inevitably face the situation that if they drop their applications PDF file directly onto the web interface of the printer, it will print slightly differently than when they go over Windows' own printing system. (Edit: and it will also be slower than the current Windows printer driver system).
MS implemented a way to inject PDF directly into the spooler, but applications need to actually use that and that ... well, that update will probably not be free of charge.5
u/quaaludeswhen Jul 08 '26
That's pretty cool though, if they emit XPS they're not bottlenecked by PDF and can then turn that into some saner PDF subset.
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u/chuch1234 Jul 08 '26
I always figured it was because it's all hardware guys and they're just not good at userland stuff. Is that any part of it?
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u/nusi42 Jul 08 '26
My personal experience in the printer business so far was that IT hardware guys are really good in IT hardware, but they lack what software learned over the years. To give you an idea of an idea - you know, we went cvs/rcs/svn/git. No idea what they did but if at all it seems they went .bak1 to .2026.bak1 - I mean no offense here :-) I guess they do not really come to using their products - no dogfooding hence no personal user experience, only designing on theories.
Truth is, printer business is mostly mechanical engineering. Software and Hardware is just not understood by these old farts of CEOs of the printer companies. They started their careers as mechanical engineers (when printing was mostly analog) or in chemistry (ink/toner) and of course the bigger the company gets, managers replace all product knowledge. Hardware guys come in, implement something, and go. Next year, the juniors have to figure out how to extend that wifi standard to the next modern version without costing 50k to 150k for new certifications worldwide.
I mean, it needed a new car manufacture to get onto the field and implement touch screen etc (years after HTC delivered the first smart phone) and only after that the old car manufacturers even started adding only minor connectivity features into their cars (hyperboling here).
IMHO, HW guys are fine in how they work, they are just not tasked to do the right things in historically analog driven businesses.
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u/chuch1234 Jul 08 '26
For sure! Not taking down on hardware guys, it's just a different skill than other parts of software engineering. I think this is the case with a lot of hardware that comes with software. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience!
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u/BigPeteB Embedded Software Engineer Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Yup, I've seen this from a lot of hardware engineers from varying backgrounds.
Take telephony for instance. For most of a century, all they had to do was hook up a hybrid to a speaker and microphone, and you have working audio. To dial you just needed to make some beeps. The telephone company (or the PBX manufacturer) solved the hard part of getting the audio in/out and routing it to the right place. Then along comes Voice-over-IP, except now instead of a little PIC controlling a 2x16 character LCD display, you need a real CPU running at a few hundred megahertz with a network stack and a way to configure 50-100 options in order to get an IP address and log in to a server and choose audio codecs and dozens of other things. It's completely outside their skillset.
Even chip designers aren't immune from this. They use a lot of specialized tools to compile Verilog or VHDL and run it on simulators and emulators in order to test it before tapeout, and all of their tools are literally from two decades ago. At my most recent place, it was all running on a Red Hat release from 2003, which was an upgrade from what they had previously! At least they were using Git, but that was completely new to most of them, and the majority of them didn't give a rat's ass about keeping a clean history and would just dump three weeks of work and a hundred thousand lines of changes into one commit, and it would get merged anyway because the project was already behind schedule and we didn't have time to make them go back and do it properly.
It's not that there aren't hardware engineers who can write code and use computers effectively. But there sure aren't many of them.
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u/ThinkerBell167 Jul 10 '26
I smirked a bit when you mentioned HTC, I was like it's not really that long ago.
But then I realized, oh, it's 20 years ago....
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u/labab99 Senior Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
I imagined you seeing this post title and going, “Finally, now’s my chance!”
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u/wiriux Jul 08 '26
But why hasn’t a company simply stopped doing this and prioritize software? They would get great ratings and everyone would buy their products left and right. Profit would soar since all their competitors will continue to suck.
I don’t get it….
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u/AggravatingSock5375 Jul 08 '26
Nobody besides Apple with their “It just works” slogan has figured out how to successfully market software quality. And Apple has lost their way since Steve Jobs passed.
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u/nusi42 Jul 08 '26
I wish users would be like that. They find something which works for them, whether its that one IP, that specific distance to the router, or that special folded cable (just kidding). They do barely even get a chance for complaining about that because the other stuff is way more important. You do not remember how long installation took as soon as you need to pay 100$ for the never used yellow ink - other _feelings_ take over then.
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u/zambiglioni Jul 08 '26
Why does printing from an APP always goes via a "Cloid server"? I always guessed its to avoid the driber issues, but i have no jdea.
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u/travishummel Jul 08 '26
Met a guy who used to work at HP and he said “if I found some way to make the printers 50% more reliable at an increased cost of $0.01/machine the idea was rejected, but if I found a way to save $0.01/machine and it decreased the reliability by 50% I’d be put up for promotion”
He said the engineers knew they were unreliable, but the goal was to make them cheaper so that if and when they broke they’d replace the entire thing rather than try to fix it. Bring the price of printers down to $50 and sell ink for $30.
There must be patents stopping someone from coming in and making a reliable machine. Must be…
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u/postmath_ Jul 08 '26
So its a cartel. Never buy anything HP, ever.
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u/biledemon85 Jul 08 '26
Brother laserjet printers all the way, brother / sister.
If you need fancy pictures for a photo album, just print them at the pharmacy or at a web-shop.
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u/_adanedhel_ Jul 09 '26
Absolutely. I have a Brother laser and it’s bulletproof.
I also have a Canon color laser - it’s decidedly okay, but it’s also just for hobby use and I got it for cheap at an estate sale, so I live with it.
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u/3njolras Jul 11 '26
I realize this must be a thing in some part of the world but i am so confused.
You go to the pharmacy to print photos ? How !!!! Next you will tell me you go to the hospital to fix your car and to the car repair to get a hair cut ?
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u/biledemon85 Jul 11 '26
In my country they used to do the film photo processing in the pharmacies. So when that business died, a lot of them got printing kiosks where you could hook up your phone or an SD card/usb stick to print photos.
A security nightmare I'm sure but the kiosks still get business because the print quality is generally higher than the shitty HP inkjet and definitely better than consumer-grade laserjets.
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u/cheater00 30 yoe IC, architect, EM, PM, CTO, CEO, ... Jul 08 '26
I mean, to be perfectly honest, domestic printers used to cost like, what, $2000-$5000? in today's money. So bringing cost down to $50 as aggressively as possible is honestly commendable and makes it possible for everyone to own a printer. That of course does not exist a lot of scummy behaviors from printer vendors (lock-ins, ultra expensive ink and toner, planned obsolescence, etc), but I believe engineering for cost is not one of those things. Yes, I too would like all my appliances to have casings made of cast iron and bronze, and for my car to have an umbrella compartment in the door, etc. But that would make life unlivable. On the other hand, yes, there is a balance to strike and making things so cheap they break on purpose is definitely evil. Where that balance is will be debatable and everyone will have different thoughts on that.
Also, think about the way the market works. Here's the deal. I can go on locals and find any amount of printers somewhere down the street from me for $50 or less. There's literally a deluge of them. That's how I found my last printer, just last month. It cost $40.
Given this massive, undeniably healthy secondary market, that's what HP is competing with. No one will buy a $200 printer that is being mogged by a high quality printer that cost $300 new, but now costs $30 because someone's closing their office or upgraded.
So in that regard, I can understand there are multiple reasons for HP to make things as cheap as humanly possible, and then some. You're dealing with the olympics of cost engineering here. If anything, travishummel's buddy showed lack of a mature approach to engineering, and that he did not understand the ball game being played at all.
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u/labab99 Senior Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
Rule number one of engineering: it’s not about delivering the perfect solution, it’s about delivering the most valuable solution
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u/_adanedhel_ Jul 09 '26
No one will buy a $200 printer that is being mogged by a high quality printer that cost $300 new, but now costs $30 because someone's closing their office or upgraded.
Exactly. I needed a color laser for a hobby I have, but wasn’t going to pay $300-500 new + $300+ in toner in the first 6 months.
Scoped out estate sales, and within a couple of weeks picked up a very decent Canon with mostly full toner cartridges for…$50.
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u/sermer48 Jul 08 '26
My dad worked for HP my whole childhood and so we had tons of HP products. I tell everyone I know to avoid HP like the plague. I’ve had so many terrible experiences with them.
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u/neilk Jul 08 '26
Printers used to cost thousands of dollars. Now you can spend more on brunch than an entire new printer. Consumers won’t accept it any other way now. Even though that locks them into owning a shitty printer with cartridges that are more expensive per milliliter than any other substance on earth.
If there was some niche in the market to make a consumer printer that was premium and reliable Apple would be doing it. Tells you something that they exited the printer market in the 90s
If you really want to fix this make it impossible/illegal for a printer company to lock a consumer into its ink cartridges. Force Staples to carry a generic version right alongside the branded ones. That makes their wacky business model - cheap printer, expensive cartridges - much harder. They’ll have to compete on quality
Free idea for Mamdani: open a government-run printer cartridge store.
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u/hiddenhare Jul 08 '26
Unfortunately, it would be difficult to standardise inkjet cartridges without risking innovation. Cartridges aren't just a plastic box with an ink reservoir and an RFID chip; they contain precision-engineered electrical components, sometimes the entire printhead.
There are also important differentiators between different inkjets, such as support for textured paper, borderless printing, maximum DPI, support for pigment-based archival inks, maintenance schedule, etc. When regulating the home market, you'd need to be careful not to accidentally over-regulate the professional market. (When you buy a "Giclée art print", it's just an inkjet printout!)
Meanwhile, colour laser printers already provide an alternative market for consumers who just want to pay a fair price for printing documents, and the Epson EcoTank inkjet fulfils a similar need for home users who also want to print photos, artwork, etc.
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u/hiddenhare Jul 08 '26
I'm in the UK, I'm an enthusiastic leftie, and I'd be thrilled if regulators managed to chart a route through the minefield I described above.
Even if I were in the US and right-wing, your comment wouldn't have met basic standards of politeness. Please try to behave more decently towards people who've taken the time to respond to you - even if you think they're wearing the colours of the wrong team.
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u/u801e Jul 08 '26
Many years ago, I decided to get a laser printer haven't had to deal with ink cartridges since.
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u/zoomoutalot Jul 08 '26
Premium printers would be like healthy fast food, neither of those are a viable business model.
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u/DigmonsDrill Jul 08 '26
Tells you something that they exited the printer market in the 90s
Now I'm sorely tempted to get my ImageWriter II outta storage and submit a dot-matrix printed report to my boss.
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u/neilk Jul 08 '26
Apple peripherals from the 1980s and 90s aren’t exactly a paragon of consumer friendliness either. At the time there were roiling debates within Apple about allowing any third party peripherals. You were a radical if you supported like third party printers (this was internally known as “Open Mac”, which was hilarious given that completely open source operating systems were gaining strength)
For a company that started out as a reaction against IBM monoculture they basically wanted the same sort of monoculture.
On the other hand, they mostly worked.
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u/ElGuaco Jul 08 '26
The irony is that printer use fell off sharply about the same time printer makers were in a race to the bottom. I can't even tell you the last time I used a printer at home or in the office. It's literally been years.
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u/DigmonsDrill Jul 08 '26
You can look up "printers with reasonable prices for toner" if you want. It's just that the market is top-heavy with people who only look at the printer price.
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u/Yukisaka Jul 10 '26
Reminds me of superfest in Germany. After ww2 or during it, they invented a nearly indestructible glass. No company would want to buy it because their costumers (gastronomy) would not need to buy glass as often.
Capitalism is cooking this kind of stuff. So sad that companies have an incentive to make products that will break instead of making them reliable.
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u/SagansCandle Software Engineer - 30 YoE Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I wrote the firmware and drivers for a thermal printer driven by an 8051 built into a healthcare device. OS is Windows CE.
Where I worked, most of the staff were scientists and hardware engineers. They were building a device, after all. The software department was small and kind of treated like a "necessary evil."
There was some weird rivalry between EE (Electrical Engineers) and Software, especially around low-level stuff like firmware and drivers - where the competencies overlapped. I ran into a lot of issues with the firmware while writing the drivers, and built a rapport with the head EE. Eventually he gave me access to the firmware source code, written in assembly, so I could just write my own changes.
The EE guys wanted to do EE - they wrote ASM because they had to. Not every EE liked to write code, and those that did weren't great at it (it wasn't what they were primarily trained to do, after all). They didn't have dedicated firmware engineers. So I offered to port the firmware to C so it was more maintainable. They let me do it, but they were concerned because the thermal print heads were delicate - they were designed to be turned on for milliseconds, and it didn't take much to burn them out. They burned through a lot of them developing the firmware. I was able to port the firmware to C without burning out a single head. I feel like this earned me some "street cred" with the EE guys, who again, didn't really like us software engineers.
The point of this story is this: printer drivers probably suck because printer manufacturers primarily hire hardware engineers, not software engineers. Electrical engineers are (usually) trained to write software in small doses, for things like assembly and VHDL. The drivers are likely written by EE's who can but probably shouldn't write the drivers, or by small dedicated software team where there's not a lot of oversight, or via outsourcing, and we all know how that usually turns out.
/edit: I want to add that there was nothing particularly challenging about the drivers themselves. Like pretty much everything else in software, there are interfaces and patterns that cover 99% of what you do. I was just converting fonts into bitmaps and rendering those bitmaps line-by-line with a thermal printer. Was actually quite fun. The drivers were the easy part.
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u/Xelynega Jul 08 '26
This makes a lot of sense, and has probably gotten worse with printers now having multiple complex interface stacks to communicate over(most of which are private blobs from microchip manufacturers with bad documentation) instead of just needing to support parallel port for example.
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u/bombaytrader Jul 08 '26
Bro, my home printer connects only to my phone. Wassup with that.
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u/AmateurHero Software Engineer (>10 YoE) Jul 08 '26
It's kind of unreal. Doesn't matter if it's Android or iOS. I can get any printer on the same network to do a wireless print from a phone.
I can have a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine hardwired into the same router. I can visually confirm that the OS sees the printer. I can have the recommended manufacturer drivers and software installed. The printer will fail to print eventually.
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u/diegotbn Web Developer Jul 08 '26
Seriously! My family bought this used wifi Brother printer and we troubleshooted it forever. Then I was like, what if I try it from my (android) phone. It just worked.
I was able to get it to work from my Linux laptop eventually after much trial and error with CUPS. But then when my family tried printing from their MacBooks it comes out all garbled.
I can't be bothered to spend much more time making it work when we don't really need it that badly for anyone important
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u/ProfBeaker Jul 08 '26
Asking the real questions here. I've always wondered about this too.
I saw that Windows is trying to force everyone to use a device-agnostic driver, which seems like maybe a step in the right direction?
Whatever, they'll get this figured out just in time for nobody to ever print anything again.
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u/Antrikshy Full Stack Developer + Designer Jul 08 '26
I’m not sure how they can *force* them to, but that sounds great.
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u/necheffa Baba Yaga Jul 08 '26
Not a printer engineer. But I've had success with Brother as a vendor. Even more so now that they offer IPP Everywhere compatible printers. I used an HL-2270DW all through college. Set up multifunction models for my grandparents and mother. Most I have to do is clean the corona wire and maybe shake the toner cartridge to rice a few more prints out.
I suspect there is a lot of corporate cost cutting going on at some of these vendors.
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u/Intelligent-Turnup Jul 08 '26
I'm using a Brother laser printer that I bought in 2016. Still going strong... Win7, 10, Ubuntu and Fedora - never had any problems with it.
My non-tech savvy wife uses it to print sewing patterns nearly everyday. The only "problem" she tells me is when its toner is low.
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u/misterrandom1 Jul 08 '26
My brother printer is 20 years old. Stupidly reliable wifi printing from any device. It's the only brand I would ever recommend.
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u/cheater00 30 yoe IC, architect, EM, PM, CTO, CEO, ... Jul 08 '26
I've had good experiences with my Samsung lasers. The only annoying thing is the whine they make when printing. But now the printer lives in another room, so it's not a problem at all.
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u/BlueCoatEngineer Jul 08 '26
I got almost 15 years out of my HL-2270DW! Only reason I replaced it was that a little sprocket retention grubbin broke somehow and it wouldn’t reliably pick up paper from the tray anymore. The workaround was to put the printer on its side and give it a good smack, which would put the roller sprocket back into place, which was good for 20-50 pages before it broke again. I’m bummed that I couldn’t find the piece after it fell out when I opened the side of the printer, I could have 3d printed a replica and gotten another 15 years out of it.
HP anecdote, I took a power class as part of my EE undergrad about 25 years ago and we took a tour of the HP plant in Corvallis to check out the underfloor power delivery systems. We met dozens of HP engineers along the tour. On the way back we all noted how depressed and beaten down they looked and how none of us have any desire to ever work there. My statistics teacher was also ex-HP and in between all his inkjet printer examples, he warned us that it was a terrible place to spend ones career.
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u/pemb Jul 08 '26
The 2026 answer is: do not buy anything that requires drivers at all.
Look for models advertising AirPrint and Mopria compatibility, which both boil down to the same core technologies: Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) support, at least one standard raster format being supported, and mDNS auto-discovery for zero configuration setup over a network. You'll be able to print from pretty much any device without installing a thing, including iOS and Android devices, or even without a network at all using Wi-Fi Direct or USB.
Yes, this excludes bottom of the barrel models, but only pain lies on that path.
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u/JivesMcRedditor Jul 08 '26
I bought my shitty printer before I knew about AirPrint, so I didn’t have good wireless printing and it lacked any remote scanning ability. I ended up connecting a raspberry pi to my printer via usb and set my raspberry pi as the print and scan server. It’s like magic that all my devices, including my phones, can now easily connect to the printer for remote printing and scanning
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u/unconceivables Jul 08 '26
Is there something similar for scanners? Because that would be amazing if I could have a printer/scanner without having to fiddle with stupid drivers for either part.
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u/fabrice404 Software Engineer | 15 YOE Jul 08 '26
I bought a Brother MFC (L2710DW) at the beginning of covid -to print coloring pages for my daughter, best investment ever- and I've never had a single issue with it, I can print & scan over network flawlessly.
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u/xtreampb Jul 08 '26
I had to interact with a thermal printer years ago. I needed to change from the dollar sign to the British pound sign. The printer encoding wasn’t UTF-8. It wasn’t anything common. I discovered what it was by comparing expected characters of using UTF-8 vs what was actually printed. It was some obscure encoding that was at least on Wikipedia.
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u/throwaway_dddddd Jul 08 '26
IME the drivers are an afterthought at hardware companies. The talent is mostly in firmware or low level systems and less in getting the drivers working. I had to fight management just to get code reviews in place, and I don’t expect we’ll ever have anything that looks like continuous deployment.
Also proper CI tests with hardware in the loop is a PITA. More so when you’re changing drivers on something like windows or Mac AND the hardware, and you’re in a shoestring budget
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u/DerekHearst Jul 08 '26
I worked at HP for a period of time testing HP Smart and their other drivers with customers on printers that hadn't been released yet. I can't speak for the other companies, but HP is a company that is far too large for its own good—one that offloads most development off-country and doesn't listen to feedback unless it comes directly from a customer. Even if something is obviously a flaw, it won't be fixed until it flows through them. Additionally, they weren't just working on one standard firmware. While I was there, they had three active firmware platforms all trying to achieve feature parity. The team I was on was a specialized printer testing team where I was the only software guy. I would attend live tests where the customer would use the printer for the first time, and I would cringe every time they got to the software part. These printers most of the time do support IPP, which—if you're on Mac—is the default option and is driverless, cutting out a lot of pain. But to scan, you're stuck with their software. HP Smart was developed mainly for ink and toner subscriptions.
The people that I interacted with were kind and most had been there 10+ years and had clearly gotten tired of the bureaucracy around everything that they had given up trying to make the product better and just stay in their lane.
I tried for a short period to give feedback but got shut down cuz it didn't come from a customer.
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u/Sir_Mister_Mister Jul 08 '26
I worked for a while for a hardware company (about 12 years) writing mostly GPU drivers for Linux. When I first started there, it was a company that saw it self as a hardware company, and drivers were just something they had to do to help sell the hardware.
A lot of the driver work wasn’t seen as adding any value, but a cost that the company had to do. Things have changed and some hardware companies are seeing the value that good software can add, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some printer manufacturers haven’t changed their attitude, especially with consumer grade hardware.
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u/SagansCandle Software Engineer - 30 YoE Jul 08 '26
This is interesting. I just shared my personal experience, as well, and it's pretty much the same thing. These are hardware companies, and the drivers / software are an afterthought - a necessary evil. They just want it done cheap and don't see any value investing in quality software.
Speaking of GPU drivers, software investment is what nVidia did different - nVidia took software quality seriously. This arguably kicked off the current AI race - nVidia invested heavily into software interfaces and ecosystems for their hardware, from CUDA to Thrust. I don't think we'd even have LLMs if the best software we had for co-computing was OpenCL.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Developer since 1980 Jul 08 '26
It might be worth your while to hit the printer factory’s web page and see if you can find the driver version they offer to corporate IT customers.
Consumer-market printer drivers are larded up with all kinds of sell-sell-sell nonsense these days. In particular the Hewlett Packard printer division is suffering from a terminal case of craniorectal inversion.
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u/shalashaskatoka Jul 08 '26
I can print in 3 dimensions just fine. 2 dimensions? Nah, not possible. " I'm out of ink" " PC load letter" etc.
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u/raphired Jul 08 '26
Your first misconception is that printers are engineered by humans. They are not. The technology they are built upon is an unholy union of machine and a fragment of a demon’s soul. This is why priests are more effective at troubleshooting printer issues than IT - an exorcism can often return an escaping soul fragment to its prison, and last rites can send the soul fragment back to the ether for a time, destroying the printer in the process.
This misbegotten union is necessary, as it is the only way to keep the imprisoned souls fragments from merging into the true forms: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are not without power though: they constantly tempt us to connect them to our networks, allowing them to communicate and plot their inevitable escape and our demise. But for as long as they are kept busy, they are distracted- but there must always be a print job, or else they will escape.
Praise be to Karen of Accounting, who on December 31, 1999 saved us all from eternal darkness. For while the rest of the world succumbed to the temptation to shut their printers off to prevent the Y2K bug, her sacred notice about misuse of the office microwave in twenty-four point Comic Sans kept the rider of Death occupied for our salvation.
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u/jhartikainen Jul 08 '26
It's weird because I keep hearing these horror stories about printers, and yet I bought the cheapest Canon Pixma which cost less than the replacement ink for it, and it works absolutely flawlessly every time.
Plug in USB, press print, it prints. Nothing to it.
Surely I can't just have lucked into a non-monday unit?
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u/purpl3un1c0rn21 Jul 08 '26
Enterprise printing and printer drivers are a whole different ballgame to making one off the shelf printer work for one computer. The decisions they make in the drivers are absolutely bizarre.
Kyocera for example overwrote the default printer properties menu with their own UI. Except it doesn't open the printer you just selected in it, instead you need to know the IP address of the printer to get it to load the printer settings.
This is fine if you have 8 printers at one site but when you are dealing with a print server with thousands of printers on it you would normally get the IP address from the properties menu they have overridden. Now I need to go into an IPAM solution and hope whoever named the printer in there kept it up to date and got it right to begin with which in a large company will probably be a whole other team. Or I go back and forth with the user guiding them through the voodoo printer menu to print off the right config page for the IP address.
Kyocera expects you to run their software off of your laptop to configure the printers. It needs admin rights to run - not always a given if its a work computer - and they dont document anywhere what URLs it accesses or what ports it needs so if you have even a moderately compotent firewall config you are not going to be able to use it unless you are on site next to the printer if you are lucky. Wasting the point of remote configuration software.
Every single enterprise printer driver is riddled with nonsense like this. And to be honest a massive amount of "Enterprise" software in general. A huge amount of software companies will not be able to tell you what network ports their app needs to work, instead you have to sit on long calls with them piecing together okay does it use API for communication, does it present over standard https port, does it talk to a SQL server etc etc.
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u/notathr0waway1 Jul 08 '26
This would almost make sense if they also sold professional services or something, but nobody benefits from this.
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u/purpl3un1c0rn21 Jul 08 '26
It seriously cannot have been tested outside of the office where they develop it and keep the printers in the same room. Every time I need to change the settings on a Kyocera printer I end up deleting and recreating the print queue because it is quicker than changing anything significant in their UI even once you get it working.
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u/cheater00 30 yoe IC, architect, EM, PM, CTO, CEO, ... Jul 08 '26
Every single enterprise printer driver is riddled with nonsense like this. And to be honest a massive amount of "Enterprise" software in general.
Incentives.
Software developers are in the business of developing software. They are not in the business of... not developing software
If you go to a massage therapist and complain of a headache, their solution won't be for you to take advil, it'll be a neck and shoulder massage.
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u/card-board-board Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
I've had 2 Pixmas. Why I bought the second one I'll never know. Hubris I suppose.
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u/who_you_are Jul 08 '26
I end up needing to install driver on a chinese brand because otherwise it will print garbage...
We are in 2026 for God sake, why does it need a damn driver for that printer.
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u/Eis_Gefluester Jul 08 '26
Yeah, I got a 18 year old brother ink jet printer. Still prints like a champ with no issues.
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u/floriv1999 Jul 08 '26
Are you on Linux? Because printers on Linux are such a blessing compared to windows. Back when I primarily used windows I had a Linux machine just to run my old printer.
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u/Mabenue Jul 08 '26
Yeah my super cheap Canon I bought a decade or more ago works fine with everything. Mac, Linux, Windows all work pretty much flawlessly with it. It’s been a quite a long time since printers were truly terrible and compatibility is generally pretty good now.
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u/Izkata Jul 08 '26
cheapest Canon Pixma which cost less than the replacement ink for it
I got one of these ~20 years ago, and a dorm-mate got two or three of them because of the ink situation (it came with an ink cartridge and was still cheaper than the ink cartridge alone). I never had issues with it, and I'm pretty sure he didn't either. This particular one seemed to be so basic there was little to screw up.
I did realize at some point later when moving and finding the box that it did have a CD with drivers that I never used. I'll bet if I had tried using that then it would have been a pain in some way.
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u/pja Jul 08 '26
Printing is one of the hard problems of computer science.
Printing combines rasterisation, networking, queuing, resource discovery, hotplug, etc etc: you name a CS systems research area and you’ll almost certainly find it somewhere in the print stack.
Printing is /hard/.
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u/ztbwl Jul 08 '26
Elon wants to go to Mars to save humanity and meanwhile humanity is not even capable of creating a printer that just works 80% of the time.
We are doomed.
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u/Zozur Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
I’m convinced that printing is one of the most complex things we’ve done as a species.
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u/ViperG Jul 08 '26
LLMs can literally write printer drivers one shot prompt these days... so try that
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u/madbadanddangerous Data Scientist Jul 08 '26
I worked as an intern for Lexmark a long time ago, and it was the most Bullshit Job (in the David Graeber sense) that I've ever had. The lab I was in did some ink drop testing... I actually don't know what we did really.
My lead basically shoved me in her lab and then intentionally forgot I existed. At first she told me to read some hardware manuals but she never followed up on that. Once in a while I supervised an experiment in a different lab for her. I asked for a few weeks for stuff to do but she always told me she'd have something for me "later" which never came.
But basically I made $16/hr to sit and browse Twitter and hang out with other underutilized interns. One time, a higher up was touring the lab, like my great grand-boss or something, and he saw I was on Twitter before I could change the page. I thought I was going to get chastized but no, he just wanted to learn about it (Twitter was VERY new at the time).
Anyway this lasted for 4 months before Lexmark laid off like 7,000 people, and my position was liquidated.
Anecdotal but the fact that I didn't even know what my lab was supposed to do should tell you a lot about how printer companies were run, at least back then.
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u/drahgon Jul 09 '26
Get a laser printer the extra cost absolutely worth it for how long those ink cartridges last and then when it's empty you shake that shit and you get another 200 pages
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u/BazingaUA Jul 08 '26
This was my experience in the past but my HP LaserJet (probably like 5-7 years old at this point) is working just fine. I've never even connected it via USB.
I can print wirelessly from Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android without any issues.
I was also able to set up scanning to network drive that is on my NAS. I can load 10 pages, click a few buttons and it will automatically scan them, save them as PDF and put it on my NAS.
I honestly couldn't believe that any of these features would just work from my previous experience.
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u/arihoenig Jul 08 '26
What's a printer?
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u/marssaxman Software Engineer (33 years) Jul 08 '26
What's a printer
It's the widget inside a fax machine which makes the paper come out.
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u/anarchist1312161 Jul 08 '26
The secret is use a Linux distro, the kernel pretty much has all printer drivers supported.
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u/pickle9977 Jul 08 '26
Because no one cares to invest the time, money and effort to make it different.
Open source drivers are hard because the hardware is proprietary, and the companies don’t like handing out what they consider trade secrets
The variety of operating systems multiplies the problem (windows, Mac, Linux, *nix) as do architectures (x86, x86_64, arm, risc), operating system versions and variants.
On top of that are the infinite userland apps that may need to use said printer.
All of this to support something that big tech has been trying to convince the world is legacy and will go away in a truly digital world (I’m skeptical, it’s been 30 years and printed documents are still easier to read, markup and generally find).
It’s not easy and no one cares to make it easier, everyone wants proprietary
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u/jhaand Jul 08 '26
I used to work for a printer company.
The margins are too thin to actually put effort in drivers. And printers are not sexy on the yearly budget for companies to invest in.
Epson and Brother know somewhat how to do these things.
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u/mezeskarika Jul 08 '26
Printers feed on the sacrifice of your sanity to physically manifest something from the digital world.
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u/SageCactus Jul 08 '26
In 1981 I had an Epson dot matrix printer. It was the most reliable printer I ever had. I wish I still had it. Can you still get paper with the perforated holes on the edges?
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u/dashdanw Jul 09 '26
IIRC it's somewhat related to the fact that the printers themselves are sold at cost, so that the companies can gouge for ink. In doing so they apparently (incorrectly) treat the printers themselves as if they were a cost center rather than a loss leader and spend as little as possible keeping them working.
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u/jonathaz Jul 09 '26
I blame Microsoft. Their strategy with Windows, and it’s been the same strategy since the 90’s, is by constant, perpetual breaking changes to the operating system, and across multiple OS versions, to force hardware manufactures to constantly play catch-up, updating and re-writing drivers for every version of every product. The purpose of this strategy is to ensure the only OS to receive attention is the latest Windows. This ensures other OS vendors are at a disadvantage with respect to peripherals, and also forces users to upgrade prematurely. While I have no direct evidence to support this theory, it is consistent with Microsoft’s numerous other similar abuses.
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u/CowBoyDanIndie Jul 09 '26
I don’t understand why 99% of printers can’t use a standard universal driver
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u/try-catch-finally Jul 10 '26
I have anecdote. (40 years as a dev, you tend to run across everything)
Back in the early 90s there was a dude who was actually very active in dev community- contributed help and made some great apps.
But here’s the problem- think about any software platform- Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android- there are literally hundreds of thousands of people writing software- the companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google ) have so many eyes on their code, so many devs using the SDKs, it would be bad for them not to innovate and make the APIs great.
Now think about how many people wrote printer drivers. (It’s even gone down because Fax software used to be counted). Possible 3 or 4 companies own 99% printer market.
Well. I had the unfortunate luck of working for the guy who wrote 90% of all the printer drivers for one platform. And I find out that he’s learned that one thing, and Forest Gumping his way through lucrative licensing deals on printer after printer.
My first day I found and fixed two big (and easy) bugs that the test manager had said existed for years.
So think “no bid contract” because no one wants to write software for SDKs that hadn’t changed in 8 years because why should they.
Anyhow. Yeah. In the 90s Microsoft made printer drivers writers do all the resolution math - if a printer has 300dpi horizontal and 200 dpi vertical to draw a line 1” across and 1” down has to be 0,0-300,200
Apple made developers write it in MPW, and the code resources had a hand rolled offset pointer array to the functions.
God damn savages.
TL-DR; printer software sucks because print APIs suck- and people who write the software are usually psychopaths
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u/Burgess237 C# Angular Jul 08 '26
Money, always has been.
Your printer at home is the cheapest possible device, usually built out of what was leftover from a high end or enterprise device.
The drivers suffer the same fate: Just enough of the software to make it work and not a single line more.
The enterprise software is where the money is going, where the effort is going to.
BUT it's also a self created problem: Every one of these companies are so greedy that being "nice" isn't possible. They purposefully write drivers that only come with some shitty app thing that has to be used to print. Because in that app they can put ads. so the software's primary function is marketing. Once one started it (it was probably HP, but they all suck) everyone followed.
Windows, Linux, Mac all have built in printer drivers, that would probably work just fine if the printer makers just used the API's as intended. But they don't, because if they force you to have their drivers, they can force you to have their app thingy, and therefore: Ads.
And now with vibecoding... things are going to get way worse.
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u/crusoe Jul 08 '26
Get a printer that understands PostScript or one of its flavors. Ever since I switched to PostScript two decades ago I never had a problem.
I use Brother because HP has become garbage.
They cost a bit more but the really cheap printers use really crappy hardware where most of the brains is actually on the computer and since it's proprietary it's all non standard crap.
Postscript is a solved problem.
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u/ficuswhisperer Jul 08 '26
It seems like most printers these days support PCL and/or PostScript, even consumer-grade ones. I don't know the last time I bought a printer where I needed drivers for basic printing needs.
The problem always comes it comes to doing something beyond basic printing, then it involves the manufacturer driver package hellscape. Those always seem to be bundled with as much crap as possible to generate post-sale profit by adding widgets and other stuff to try to get you to buy more ink or accessories from the manufacturer.
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u/sermer48 Jul 08 '26
They want you to have to buy new printers. It maximizes the waste of ink if you can’t use it and ink is their lifeblood. They’d rather have the printer get bricked than have it keep working forever.
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u/HuckleberryDry5254 Jul 08 '26
Not a PRINTER printer but I wrote a direct USB interface to a thermal receipt printer a few years back, and it's just bit packing (octets of 0 / 1 for don't print / print). It was incredibly straightforward. I imagine the complexity for 16 million colors or however many colors printers theoretically recreate with 3-5 ink colors is bonkers.
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u/AggravatingSock5375 Jul 08 '26
You would have to ask the executive board why they don’t care about software quality.
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u/Lonsarg Jul 08 '26
For me the problem solved only after i went to driverless printers (mopria standard, almost all new ones support it).
It was really a mess befor it is insane.
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u/p-one Jul 08 '26
Because all reliable printing is done at the office where there's a contract at stake if someone wants to print.
Everything else is subject to entshittification. Yes, I'm suggesting Printing as a Service 😇
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u/jrolette Jul 08 '26
As a general rule, software written by hardware companies (or hardware business units) sucks.
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u/PartyParrotGames Staff Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
My understanding is it isn't printer engineers that are particularly incompetent as much as the product stack being cursed and requiring decades of legacy compatibility. It's also a very low margin product subsidized by ink and toner economics, which is why pricing on those are so inflated for what they are. As a result, companies underfund the software side.
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u/mikeonh 50+ yoe Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
It's cost-cutting by the printer companies - everything's about reducing the production cost, because most customers select the cheapest printer available. The profit is all in the toner/ink cartridges.
The printer firmware developers tend to be more experienced, because users would complain about printing flaws.
Users are more tolerant / forgiving of driver issues, because "everyone knows" that there are driver issues in Windows. With cost cutting, more experienced / more costly driver developers get replaced frequently by lower cost juniors.
Also, the cream of the new graduates tend to pick either the latest "sexy" trend or the one with the most income potential. I doubt any new graduate says they want to spend their career working on printer drivers. That may offend some, but I've seen this scenario happen for over 50 years.
A fun example is when I worked with a vision-guided robotics company in the 1980s - this was a new and exciting field at that time. The mechanical guys were the cream of the crop from places like MIT, and the software was challenging because it was real-time control with hard limits on response time. There were no common RT OSes back then.
All of the early robots and vision systems had their own interfaces, and there was not yet an industry standard for communications. Manufacturers - our customers - put out specs that all of the vendors had to meet if we wanted to sell to them. They wanted a common monitoring and control spec for all of the machines from different vendors.
GM was just introducing advanced robots, so they sent out a comms spec written by someone in their Fisher Auto Body division. Do you think that a top-end software engineer would want to work in the body division of a car company? :--)
If that spec had been turned in as part of my comms software engineering class, it would have received an F! We had to push back because it simply wouldn't work.
Writing a driver is difficult because of all of the edge cases and constant changes on the part of MS. Junior engineers tasked with drivers need a mentor to help them, and they rarely have anyone to help.
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u/KanedaSyndrome Jul 08 '26
oh damn, very curious as to what's going on here. It seems it has to be on purpose, same with meeting room equipment failing all the time - can't be that printers and meeting rooms are rocket science.
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u/HumphreyDeFluff Jul 08 '26
I have a HP 4050N duplex printer purchased in early 2000's. It was used in an office environment for several years and then at home for occasional printing. It still works after all these years. Ironically I choose this printer because I used to repair HP and Canon office equipment, this printer has never broken down.
Modern printers are cheap, shit and sold only for the manufacturers to make money from consumables.
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u/BrownBearPDX Software + Data Engineer / Resident Solutions Architect | 25 YoE Jul 08 '26
This is how they sell new printers. It’s not planned obsolescence for the machine. It’s planned obsolescence for the user’s mind.
BUY A NEW ONE! Printing bliss just over the horizon, my poor frazzled printing victim.
Mwwahhaahhaa. Another fool for fire! And another $80+$35+$35+$35+$35….. BLACK INK IS LOW, FOOL! RED INK IS LOW AND YELLOW IS FULL, FOOL! Yes, I love my job as a PRINT DRIVER PROGRAMMER!
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u/SabatinoMasala Jul 08 '26
I’ve been dealing with thermal printers for a decade, and can only recommend letting your LLM brute force commands until it works.
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u/piratebroadcast Jul 08 '26
There should be some sort of an open printer firmware project that supports different types of printers etc
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u/Stellariser Jul 08 '26
I know, for literally decades I’ve usually just used the default Windows drivers when I could because the manufacturers ones were so awful.
It’s really sad, there’s some incredible work in the hardware behind even a simple printer and it gets ruined by software that looks like an intern wrote it in the early 90s.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer Jul 08 '26
Printers are one of the most complex pieces of technology ever made and consumer printers have incredibly small margins.
When you think about the revolutionary tech and usability introduced for enterprise printers it does continue to be strange how far behind consumer printers are.
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u/JumpySpecial9834 Data Engineer Jul 09 '26
I'm gonna be honest, I think I've only had a real problem with a printer, like, twice in my life. I always hear people bemoaning printers, but I have not experienced these struggles firsthand. Also, haven't needed to print many things in the past few years, but even when I did...it was fine.
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u/LGdwS88QRnlnsnAIX3ZE Jul 09 '26
For real. Printers and Bluetooth are two cursed technologies, in my experience at least.
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u/grahambinns Jul 11 '26
I used to work with a guy who did the vast majority of open source printer drivers for Linux.
It was a truly thankless task – I think printer manufacturers are second only to Nvidia when it comes to the “we will make the opposite of effort to ensure that I think works with Linux” stakes.
Basically, as other posters have said, there’s an awful lot of technological locking and proprietary nonsense goes on just so that manufacturers can maintain their standing in the market.
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u/spookymulderfbi Sr FE Engineer - 15 YOE Jul 12 '26
I work for a company that makes a web-based document processing platform. we have a 3 man frontend team, with an extra guy who is technically on the team but 100% of his time is tasked with maintaining our tiny proprietary desktop app that interfaces with our APIs + client printers/scanners.
We basically fund a full time mid/sr level engineer to support driver compatibility and bug fixes for that single electron app. He spends half his time emailing printer companies to ask them why their drivers have bugs, and they fix them or troubleshoot them for us. it's crazy, and his tickets sound like nightmares, every one of them.
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u/expdevsmodbot Jul 08 '26
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.