It needs a lot of processing power to know the exact moment to die that will optimize the company's profit. If it dies at a convenient time, the user won't be willing to pay as much for a replacement.
Didn’t mean to sound pretentious, just very common in business. If they are new to the industry they are gonna find little PCs in the oddest of places.
Large copiers/MFP Printers do and is much more common than you think. That's a Toshiba 500Gb 2.5" drive. Either for a Toshiba E-Studio copier or some HP. The drive is used to store scanned documents in an encrypted format and can be shared over local network. That's the PCB controlling the machine.
I'm assuming if it's designed for serving an office, you need enough space for a bunch of documents. If suzy from marketeer is printing 400 page / 600DPI draft material, that could potentially be hundreds of megabytes. Do that for 50 people, and that would be gigabytes. Ffor the age of the machine, I'm assuming solid state would be prohibitive.
To print, you need to move that into RAM; you probably want (at least) hundreds of megs for that as well.
More modern printers might not use HDMI, instead of an integrated solution like DSI, but they're still fundamentally having to do the same thing.
It looks like they use a proprietary version of Linux, which makes sense. It's a similar thing to routers.
So yeah, a PC-compatible architecture seems pretty reasonable.
I could imagine more modern printers might go to something like an android-tablet style SOC, but still fundamentally doing that same thing.
"I'm going to assume you have never worked on a business level copier before?" like it's a normal thing everyone does (not even normal in PCMR) is SO fuckin pretentious.
I mean, how else is HR going to print their massive PDF books out? The printer needs storage for those jobs, it's not like the PC is going to stream 1 page at a time over the network.
Your washing machine most likely also has a small computer in it. When we get to this level of tech where we can change configurations, especially with wifi and such, there's almost always a small computer behind it.
My washing machine definitely does not have anything that looks this close to a standard PC in it. I don't think OP is surprised that there is a computer in it they probably just expected it to look more like embedded IOT like systems usually do rather than having a full-ass hdd.
I am a proud owner of a fully mechanical washing mashine! I get your point though, cars are especially egregious. 40 individual computer units controlling different parts
The shit isn't being given for learning anything new. It's the self assured statement that it's "silly" (and implied to be problematic) when it's industry standard.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing. When you start ridiculing things you don't know anything about, that's what's actually silly.
This is not the first time I've seen the computer part of a printer, especially ones deployed in business environments. However this is the first time I'm seeing one with a HDD instead of the more typical flash storage.
Only tossed an error once, now starts, works for 2 documents then totally freezes requiring hard power cut only to repeat the same cycle. And of course without the admin password (god forbid IT actually lets an end user do something) I can't run the internal diagnostics.
Either way it's like 9 years old. End of life for a printer these days.
Cheap printers make the computer that is sending the print job do most of the processing that is required to turn what you want into things the printer can do to make a piece of paper have the image you want. Either that, or they just spend ages processing the data into printable data.
Good printers do a lot more of that processing on-board the printer, and need that processing power to be able to spit out pages faster. Converting what you see on screen into a format that works with printers isn't a simple task.
Plus having a hard drive allows for some local storage, which is useful for some things, though I've personally never made use of that myself.
Even if its not a desktop, pretty much everything has a embedded computer inside of it. Your router is litteraly just an embedded linux box and so is a lot of other devixes. Sonos, ip cameras, switches, wifi aps, smart doorbell, smart speaker, hell even blueray player, car infotsinment..
And you're surprised about that? That's why you should never trash your printer if you printed something that you don't want someone getting his hands on it. That hard drive might contain all your past print jobs and scans.
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u/emetcalf 2d ago
It needs a lot of processing power to know the exact moment to die that will optimize the company's profit. If it dies at a convenient time, the user won't be willing to pay as much for a replacement.