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. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts.
I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.
> 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 to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly.
Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).
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 kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow. These are things that, for most working adults, tend to happen during evenings and on weekends - because that's the only time they have to deal with personal stuff. Not having a printer available at a moment's notice tends to be a huge blocker.
+100 to this, not sure why these simple usecases are being ignored by the other commenters, most of whom think people are printing for “ignorant” purposes.
There's definitely more need for empathy (or life experience) all around :).
Having recently lived for a few years in a small town (population ~16k), I'll also add that the two or three printing shops that are in the town are absolutely not a viable option for most people either. They're always too far away, and closed when you need them.
Also, "ignorant" use cases have their value too. People underestimate the impact of trivial inconveniences[0]. My wife likes to print out interesting recipes she spots on-line. I wouldn't have eaten half of the good stuff I had over the years if she had to go to a copy shop every time she spotted something interesting to cook.
My "local" print shop allows me to email the docs and will have them ready to pick up first thing in the morning.
It's all about planning. And when -like me- you live outside urban area's everything is about planning. I can't order a pizza when I forgot to buy groceries. I can't have a Gorrilla cyclist deliver some beer when I ran out. So I need to plan (and have a larger storage).
Sure, I've been in the spot where I needed to print something at 04:50 in the morning (and could not). But that problem was really just poor planning, and not lacking a printer at that time.
I'm not dismissing. If there is a reasonable chance that you unexpectedly need full-color-prints at saturdays 03:00, or often get the material for the final prints mere hours for a deadline: sure! cover your risks by buying expensive machineries. It's what they are for.
Obviously, you'd need to cross-reference with the actual risk: are you out of a job, failing class, or kicked out of the local church when you fail to deliver full-color-prints last minute: cover your risks by buying the machines that were made for this.
My point is that most people don't have those risks. And if they do, can cover those risks with little planning just as well as with buying equipment.
You only need to print your CV minutes before the job-interview when such job-interviews are planned minutes our hours ahead (and in my experience that is literally never the case). You only need to print your dissertation last minute if you spent the first 6 months of "writing the dissertation" procastinating. I definitely did that. And I definately found that my printer jammed at 05:50 the morning before I had to turn it in at 10:00. if only I had planned just a little better...
It isn’t dismissing, it is pointing out that for things that are not incredibly important, you can plan for it, and if you don’t, there might be a situation sometime where you are out of luck. I cannot imagine a scenario will I will desperately need a full color printout at 3am, that can’t wait till the morning and a short trip to the Walgreens, Staples, CVS, whatever. Is it possible that a situation could come up? I guess. But its not really reasonable to go out and buy multi hundred-dollar pieces of equipment for random insanely unlikely scenarios.
If you are in a situation where you need to print full color at extremely odd hours, by all means, you might want to get a printer. But if you are just forgetting to do something until 3am, that’s just poor planning and likely not even a big deal, or something that couldn’t wait until 6. Edge cases exist, but pretending like the edge case is the norm is silly.
Yes, buying an expensive piece of equipment is always an option. The point is that maybe people should explore other options and think about whether you actually need it and if the purchased equipment is going to give the quality you require. Occasionally I need to move an appliance or haul a load of lumber for a house project, so buying a truck could be a plan. But is the cost, both in purchasing and in poor gas mileage, and the space it takes up worth it for the hauling ability? For me, renting a truck the occasional time I need that ability is a far better option for me, but it does require me to actually think ahead and plan and I can’t just run to the Home Depot and pickup a sheet of plywood on a whim.
If I did get a pickup, is it the best tool for the jobs I need? Would a larger moving truck serve me better? It wouldn’t be a smart move to spend the money and then have it under perform for the tasks I actually need, because buying a commercial grade version is not feasible.
Buying a b&w printer that you only use once every few months might not actually be your only option. Buying a color printer that prints lower quality than you really want and is gummed up or out of ink when you need it, might not actually be your only option. Without one, you can’t print at 3am, but just like that sheet of plywood, is that scenario really important enough to you?
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, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it.
Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them.
> It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things
Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.)
I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)
>> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing
> No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).
While there are "parcel points" in Poland, I've never seen them advertising a document printing service, and they're also being rapidly displaced by the spread of Paczkomaty - automated self-service parcel collection and sending booths.
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.)
> that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.
It is inconvenient in Poland as there is no easy to use way to get your stuff printed.
There are some print shops, but focusing on specialist/large prints - and just few of them in a city, definitely not on every corner. Printing a single A4 page would cost me about 5% of printer cost (travel cost, printing itself, time of travel).
> 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 been shrinking with every passing year.
I'm in Tasmania's second largest city, Launceston.
The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.
I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.
Six day weeks, leaves me with Saturday afternoon and Sunday.
Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.
Because this thread is about buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability, and how that removes the option of printing photos (which is something people sometimes try to do at home), but retains the option to print pretty much anything else[1] people try to print at home.
And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.
[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)
I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.
FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.
Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)
> 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 being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”
Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)
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."
But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)
It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.
If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.
20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)
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.
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.
> you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way
These two arguments are not equivalent. Mathematically speaking, one side has to find just 20+% counter examples and the "vast majority" argument crumbles.
This thread has so many different people, from different parts of the world chiming in to say "this is not my lived experience", and you are still digging in to say "I'm right, the vast majority fit this mould".
"I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).
I appreciate the correction, but the risk still seems minimal.
1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small.
2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive.
3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out
That assume it presents as a HID, and not another device profile with more direct attack surface in the hardware or kernel. Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?
I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.
> Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?
AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.
He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color? Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.
>He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color?
Nobody. Some still do out of ignorance.
The same thing can happen when you print them in black and white from a similar kiosk.
And the financial documents could be in the same usb next to documents you did want to print in color.
>Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.
He's trying to make a point, even if that wasn't the case in that particular instance, it's something that can very easily happen too.
There's a lot of losing the forrest ("people sticking usbs to commercial kiosks to print is bad security") for some less significant detail trees in those questions...
This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-)
But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this:
I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time.
If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you.
Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched.
Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.
I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $38/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price).
In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for almost 15 years of convenient printing at home. $38/year in capex and $12/yr in consumables.
There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month.
Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.
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 just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer.
Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer.
Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.
> ... put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines.
In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents.
It is not reasonable to drive 20 minutes there and back every time I need something printed. Colour printers are extremely useful, and I'm unlikely to go back to a monochrome one anytime soon.
Flash drive is entirely unnecessary and, honestly, sounds like a pain. You can simply email your print jobs to Staples.
However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.
I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.