Let me prefix this by saying that I hope this little rant will be brief. Bear in mind that it was late when I wrote it (started at 11:30pm GMT), and was fairly tired, so it probably lacks in structure/has missing details - feel free to comment in the usual way (via Drupal's comment form, coComment, Disqus or FriendFeed).

I've been wondering for a while about when printer manufacturers and developers of printing-related software will start making products that don't suck.

Every single printer (I've owned several from Epson and HP, so far) I've had has caused me nothing but problems - random issues that are next to impossible to troubleshoot (and are represented only by a bank of perplexing blinkenlights), complete failure, and phantom paper and head jams (usually after the offending machine has been unused for a while, and of course hasn't actually had paper stored in it).

Having to remove duplexing units and pull pieces of paper out of them, trying to dislodge paper deeply embedded underneath spring-loaded flaps near the print head, and getting mucky fingers frankly don't do anything for me. (Although I'm more of a software person, than a hardware person, for what it's worth). Adding paper when notified, only to find that pressing the "Enter" button on the device displays another message nagging for even more paper immediately afterwards (when the tray is full) only adds insult to injury.

Not to mention having perfectly working, well-maintained printers suddenly completely fail for unfathomable reasons (usually reduced to a show of flashing lights and a refusal to accept paper, move the print head or accept data on buses from the host system) after a year or so of usage.

I'm tired of fighting against flaky and unreliable printing infrastructure, as well as heisenbugs, limitations and downright strangeness that have persisted through time, and platforms.

Ranging from having the whole of Mac OS Classic hang when printing to a serial port printer fails (although cooperative multitasking may have been partially to blame), to weird CUPS glitches that cause print job handling to cease functioning until the CUPS process is restarted, or the system itself is rebooted - where CUPS suddenly springs into life and starts spewing stuff at the printer.

To make things even more fun, network printing (especially on Windows machines with restrictive policies enforced through Active Directory or Novell eDirectory/ZENworks) "works" even better when you can't access the print queue viewer to kill off jobs when a problem arises.

Of course, if you're lucky enough to have an under-spec laser printer on your LAN (there are several HP units at college), there's even a chance of getting a PCL/PJL "Out of Memory" page printed, instead of the stuff you actually wanted to print in the mad rush for everyone to get stuff printed in about 5 minutes or so. Oh joy!

Anyway, to wrap things up, I believe that the printing experience could be greatly improved, especially in the areas of reliability, software usability and serviceability. Note -INAPT (I Am Not A Printer Technician) ;).