How to hate your printer a little bit less
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2023
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Decades after we were first promised a “paperless office,” nearly half of Americans still own a printer. But most aren’t happy with them, and that might be by design.
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The Washington Post’s Help Desk is here to discuss all things printers. Tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler rounds up a series of investigations he and his colleagues conducted into most people’s least favorite piece of personal tech.
Many people still need to print shipping labels, school projects, legal documents and medical forms, so printers aren’t going away anytime soon. The printer industry seems to be taking advantage of this reality – by jacking up the price of ink and convincing you to update your equipment more often than might be necessary.
But there are ways you can make owning a printer cheaper and less frustrating. There are also alternatives to buying a home printer, but make sure to protect your privacy when using a third-party printing service. Listen to find out how.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I was just searching online a minute ago, why do printers and the search bar finished |
| 0:10.0 | the sentence for me with why do printers go offline, why do printers break so often, why |
| 0:14.8 | do printers jam randomly make noise and why do printers suck? |
| 0:19.3 | I am not alone. |
| 0:20.3 | In fact, they're designed. |
| 0:21.4 | It seems to frustrate us. |
| 0:23.6 | And while so many other aspects of technology and our lives have gotten better over time, |
| 0:28.2 | they just seem to get worse and worse and worse. |
| 0:31.9 | This is Jeffrey Fowler, a tech columnist for the post and a writer on the help desk. |
| 0:37.0 | The help desk is a team of journalists at the post who take a really strong point of |
| 0:43.1 | view on writing about tech. |
| 0:44.6 | And that is we're always on your side. |
| 0:47.1 | So we give you advice on how to better live with tech and we raise an angry fist into |
| 0:52.0 | the air when something isn't designed or working our way. |
| 0:55.7 | And this week, the help desk tackled printers. |
| 0:58.8 | We were having our regular team meeting and someone on the team brought up an idea about |
| 1:05.1 | one aspect of printers that really sucks. |
| 1:07.5 | And then everybody else on the team started saying, oh yeah, what about ink? |
| 1:11.8 | What about the software when we just kept going on and on and we realized, oh boy, we've |
| 1:17.6 | got a major problem and that printers may actually be the worst technology that exists |
| 1:23.6 | in consumers' lives. |
| 1:25.3 | And so printer week was born. |
... |
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