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It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

calpaterson.com

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Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#281

Post by BiteCode_dev »

leokennis wrote: post #274
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period. But then, one day I decided to suck up…

Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color. I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo ( https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw ) and it's magnificent. * From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds * It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, p…

My parents does in fact talk about BW printing, hence as do I.

And I own a Brother inkjet. It was the same deal as usual.

I don't know about your experience, so can't really argue.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#282

Post by frosted-flakes »

atlgator wrote: post #110
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

AirPrint is a must for me. I do not maintain a dedicated desk. I leave the printer on an end table in one room of the house and I work from all over the place. AirPrint allows me to print from any of my devices from anywhere inside my house.

You don't need Apple Airprint for that. A regular Wi-Fi printer works fine, and it's not restricted to Apple devices.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#283

Post by justsomeuser »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

Why BRScript?

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#284

Post by valarauko »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177
zizee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have…

Even the article fell into this trap. There's a good reason to own at least a B&W printer even if there's a Staples downstairs: your home printing needs will predominantly fall outside the business hours. After all, during business hours you are most likely at work . The need to print something is usually a result of some chain of actions. You noticed an interesting paper. You have a stack of documents to sign. Your…

> Your kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow.

Genuine Q: how important is it for such school printouts to be in color?

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#285

Post by derefr »

zizee wrote: post #206
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedE…

I really didnt want to start a big discussion about this... but I just can't help myself, so i will dig in. You're actually missing my main point. It really isn't about Staples, or North American vs the world, print quality, or preferences for B&W vs colour. My main point is this: Don't fall into the trap of thinking your life experience always maps well to eveyone else you interact with in life.

I realize that. And that was the point I was trying to contradict: that you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way, without having quite a lot of it. Because sometimes, a thing that you might intuitively think is one of those "only rich North American people have it" things is actually something possessed by the vast majority of the world, and so is a very bad example — a counterexample, in fact — of people being in different life situations.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#286

Post by SavantIdiot »

labawi wrote: post #184
SavantIdiot wrote: post #58

He mentions "Smart TVs". I always thought you could just buy a SmartTV and not connect the internet and have a dumb TV. Nope. HDMI changed that. I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI. That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore. Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat. But Adobe? That smells like extortion.

It seems blocking/removing Pin 14 or cutting the wire should work [1] So yes, a simple passive HDMI ethernet filter should be possible. You can also buy cables without ethernet, but then you also need do verify it actually isn't present. I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...

Excellent point. I returned the TV and stuck with my old one, but now I wish I still had it so that I could test this. This seems like the perfect solution.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#287

Post by derefr »

matkoniecz wrote: post #168
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedE…

> They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries That does not mean that they survive. > Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. In Poland such places are mostly gone (some survive near universities) as nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work. Some are at places where people need printing (government offices) but charge mass…

Yes, but you're not addressing the thrust of the argument. Certainly print shops don't exist in Poland, but that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.

In sufficiently-developed countries like Poland, you don't need print shops, but it's not because "nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work." (That's not even true; many people don't have color printers either at home or at work!)

Print shops never existed for the sake of making one print or one copy; the way they made their money was commercial, volume printing. Sign printing; poster printing; flyer printing; etc. "Consumer" printing/copying was always a side-business.

No matter how developed your city, commercial print shops still need to exist, because consumer printers just aren't up to the task of producing thousands of pages per hour, reliably, day-in-day-out; and because there's real labor involved in collating and feeding all that paper. Especially for weird paper shapes that need cutting (e.g. business cards.)

No, the reason Poland doesn't have consumer print shops, is because the commercial printers (and package services) who used to offer walk-in consumer printing as a convenience service, have been out-competed in that space by the lower margins offered by online document/photo print-and-deliver services (who can serve Polish customers from anywhere in the EU very cheaply, and so don't need to have a local presence in Poland.)

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#288

Post by derefr »

yunohn wrote: post #188
derefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer. ————— I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something bein…

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."

I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.

Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.

People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.

Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#289

Post by yunohn »

derefr wrote: post #288
yunohn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving . Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle." I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me. Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It…

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective.

But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#290

Post by derefr »

dhosek wrote: post #75
glenngillen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have b…

I was just looking into this for while I'm on vacation next week in Wisconsin (or perhaps not, given delta), and the nearest printing place is about a 20 minute drive away. But then, because I do a lot of writing and prefer to edit on paper, I'm probably on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to printer usage.

To be clear, what we're discussing in this thread, are the options of:

• own a simple, reliable black-and-white laser printer for printing text; go to a print shop for fancy color-glossy prints

• own a fancy, unreliable color inkjet printer, and use it for both simple black-and-white text prints and photo prints

Nobody's suggesting not owning any printer at all.

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