this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it's mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.

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[–] [email protected] 130 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Do printers count? I fucking HATE printers.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

After some half a century of existing they are somehow still annoying to use.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

Try industrial label printers. They are like printers on hard mode.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Printers are a given, I figure.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I have a black and white samsung printer that is like a decade old with the only maintenance being adding the powdered ink and replacing the roller thingy a couple of times. Always works, never had an issue, printed thousands of pages over time in spurts of hundreds at a time and even not printing for like two years.

On the opposite end inkjet printers are the fucking worst computer accessory I've ever dealt with. They have always been a shitshow even before they started the ink pricing shenanigans because they are finicky and unreliable to start with.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

mine has said that all the ink is critically low and I've just ignored it for the past few months and it just keeps going.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Nearly same here, but mine is from 2010 and all I've ever done is replace the original starter cartridge of toner with a generic one once, and that was 12ish years ago and 2 cross-country moves. I've maybe printed a thousand pages ever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Came here to say this. F all printers ever made.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Stop buying shitty ink jet printers and get a laser printer. Pretty sure the Brother MFC my dad purchased a decade ago will outlive him.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I do think that most people would be happier with lasers, especially on the "clogged nozzle and requires regular use" front (though now there are also lasers that also do the "razor and blades" sales model, with a cheap printer and more-expensive toner).

However, there are legitimately some people who do need inkjets for one reason or another.

  • Lasers, and especially inexpensive lasers where the manufacturer wants to shave down power supply costs, have a brief period of very high electrical draw when they are powered on. This is why you'll typically see UPSes with warnings saying "don't plug laser printers into this device". This probably isn't more than a minor irritation for most people, but I bet that it can overwhelm small inverters; there are probably people living full-time in RVs or something for whom this a problem.

  • Even relatively-inexpensive inkjet printers today can produce what I'd call pretty impressive photograph prints if paired with fancy photo paper. Color lasers


and I've never bothered to even get a color laser


do not print photos that look remotely as nice as inkjets do. I don't print photos


I have screens that can display photos perfectly well


and if I really wanted to do so, I'd go to one of the many stores around that do have the ability to do really fancy photo prints. But if someone were into that, they can't really substitute a laser printer or most other types of printers for that. Maybe dye-sublimation printers, if those are still a thing. kagis Appears so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah some laser printers can for sure pop a circuit breaker in older houses

[–] [email protected] 1 points 47 minutes ago

hPLJ4 gobbled 600w when firing up. You better believe it popped some breakers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Inkjet printers clogging and requiring ink refills aside, I don't think I've ever been unhappy with (2D) printers. I've used....continuous-feed dot-matrix printers, a thermal wax printer, laser printers, a text-only line printer, and a continuous-feed plotter. They all worked pretty well.

And honestly, I'm still kind of impressed at what inkjet printers can turn out on photo paper, even if I wouldn't buy one for my own uses.

I had one very elderly Apple laser printer that I picked up once that someone was throwing out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, laser printers were wonder printers that business users might have, but home users mostly didn't have in their price range


fast output, sharp text, but expensive; always wanted one, but I wasn't going to buy one. It didn't have much memory, so there were some limitations on the complexity of what it could print. I rigged up the lpd on my computer to do all the rendering of vector Postscript images and convert it into a fax-compressed raster image and hand it off to the printer, so aside from taking a while to transfer the resulting image to the printer, it could pretty much handle anything. It served for something like ten years, with the remainder of the original toner cartridge lasting something like five of that, and I only tossed it because I wanted a higher-resolution printer, not because it had any problems functioning. I could probably still be using that thing. Kinda have some warm fuzzies remembering that ancient thing still soldiering on.