Rant 246 2/9/12 Subject: Printers

Rant number 246

Computers are a great way to make stuff these days. You can make nicely typed pages and chop and change bits, and you can make gorgeous photos and images. If you are more sciency, you can even make graphs and readouts and the like. My work involves thousands of spreadsheets and half the worlds businesses are just the same.

That's just great, but reading things on a computer is just not great - even if you have a pretty laptop, netbook tablet or whatever.

So how do you need to get the information out?

You need to print it.

Printing has been around for a long time - nearly as long as computers themselves. Back then it was dot matrix printers, but they've moved on to various other kinds like ink jets, ink bubble jets, lasers and the like.

That's great and all that, and printers can reproduce the screen on whatever type of paper you want.

When they work.

Which they rarely fucking do!

I've been using printers since when I was a very little kid. My mum and dad were early adopters and so I used them for my primary school work even (That would have been one of your aforementioned dot matrix 'nerrrre nerrre nerre nerre nerre' types.) Often though, the thing didn't bloody work.

And they haven't come any further!

I spent an hour today, trying to print out some music. First of all, I tried to print one page as a test.

It failed, woefully. It wouldn't take the paper.
Not to be beaten, I fed it the paper carefully. Not to be beaten, it ate the paper and chewed it up - leaving a black smear on it'

That wasn't the end of it.

I managed to get it to take the paper nicely - after some cajoling.

There was nothing on the sheet. Yay.

Guessing it was some rubbish on the print heads - I went into the utilities, to clean the print heads.
'Unable to clean print heads at this time, please contact HP customer support'

Fucking yay.

I then removed the ink cartridge and cleaned the heads manually.

After some attempts then - I got it to print some actually content.

Was it done fucking me about?

No it wasn't. It randomly cut the bottom off the sheet.

Need I go on? Please don't make me go on!

Why do these things have to be so bloody complex. It's not really that bloody difficult is it?

I really hope I don't have to print anything on that bloody printer ever again!

Rant over.

Rant 78 - 18/3/12 Subject: Printing costs

Rant number 78


Todays rant is one that has - just this minute popped into my head. Its a simple one, and something that has annoyed me since I had to begin buying things myself.

The costs of bloody printing!

Speaking from an admittedly not terribly informed perspective. I have a reason to believe that ink is not actually expensive stuff. I mean, if you go down to any pound shop - you can probably buy a pack of 20 (maybe more) biro's, which will cover a vast area (and will produce many doodles. I really like doodling, mainly penguins - but sometimes other stuff...)

Why then, does it cost so much to produce ink cartridges - or even get them refilled?

The cheapest start at around £8 (remember, for that you could buy yourself 160 biros (what a lot of doodles of penguins that could provide me with!)) and they carry on into frightening money.

Yes, I am sure there are reasons for it to be expensive, but surely there are also some truly preposterous profits that must be being made for these prices to exist.

There are some printers in fact that cost less than even one of the ink cartridges to run them. How bloody warped is that? It just doesn't make sense.

The whole thing really is a bloody rip-off.

Then there is the fact that you don't even get a full ink cartridge with a printer any more. It seems really rather bloody cheeky to me - particularly when they know that you will have to sell your first born child, just to afford to get a new cartridge.

I have in my house 2 printers (from mine & the wives university days) which we require infrequent usage of. The thing is, another scam of the printer companies is that they are not made to be used infrequently. As such, every time I want to use the bloody printer, I have to clean the heads on the cartridge, wasting yet more precious ink.

The whole thing is a scam! Surely in the modern world there is another option?

Rant over.