Printers often feel like the bane of the entire office - from printing one day and not the next, to claiming not to recognise the new ink cartridge you just installed.
With the advancement of computing technology, why does it sometimes feel like printers are being left behind, still plagued by the same issues they’ve always had?
There are a few aspects to explore here. EPX’s “Professor” Elliot Bishop takes us through it……
A move to digital
Firstly, as the world becomes more and more digital, the need for physical paper copies of documents continues to dwindle. I don’t own a printer at home - I just don’t need one, and I can’t remember the last time I did. Like fax machines that came before them, for a lot of industries, printers are becoming less important, and it wouldn’t pay for printer manufacturers to “reinvent the wheel” when the printing technology we already have gets the job done (when it feels like it).
As the demand for printers has started to dry up, manufacturers have tried to adjust their business models to adapt.
Printer ink cartridges
Desktop printers, the sort that you’d have sitting on your desk or drawers at home, are often made cheaply and sold at only a small margin, to keep the point of entry to owning a printer accessible for those who do still need one. The “way they get you” is on ink cartridges - often a full set will cost you almost as much as the printer itself did!
What’s more, manufacturers have become all too familiar with the practices of having your cartridges re-filled or buying cheaper non-official replacements, and will often have some form of mechanism built into their device to recognise and reject cartridges that don’t match their expectations.
Multi-function Devices (MFDs)
That being said, for many of us, especially for documents where signatures are required, printing is still a daily routine. Most of our offices probably still have at least one printer, usually a large, free-standing printer with scan and photocopy capabilities built into it. These are known as Multi-Function Devices, or MFDs, and thankfully, these are generally much more robust, with an increased price tag to match. Whereas desktop printers often connect to your PC via USB or WiFi for convenience, MFDs are usually connected to the network via an Ethernet cable.
This is the best and most reliable way to connect a printer - it’s much less susceptible to interference than wireless, and any number of devices can be connected to the printer at once, unlike with a USB cable.
My PC won't connect to my printer
It’s important to make sure that a network-attached printer has a static IP address - by default, every time a device reboots or re-connects to the network, such as after taking your laptop home for the weekend, it will automatically be assigned a new IP address that might not match the one it had before.
This is known as having a dynamic IP address, which is fine for devices that don’t care what IP they have. But if this happens to your printer, any existing connections your PC has made to it will probably stop working - a bit like trying to call someone without realising they’ve changed their phone number.
By setting a printer’s IP to static, we ensure it always receives the same IP each time, meaning that we don’t need to reconnect to it every time the IP changes.
This is where we can help
Our erudite engineers know exactly which settings on your printer to adjust to get the best behaviour out of it, and our network monitoring tools can help identify if a network-attached printer has fallen offline, allowing us to get right on the case.
Reach out to our team today to help get to the bottom of your printer woes!
