A Bug's Life!

36 years later, printers are still wrong

Hi,

So today I bought a printer. Not a big deal you would think, but I can remember having a lot of problems with printers since I first had one.
They’ve always been difficult to configure and you would usually get some troubles to get the driver to work correctly (well, this is an experience I had since Windows 95 - the first Windows OS I ever used). Eventually, the printer would just print some strange things instead of printing the requested document.

And let’s be honest : all printers I’ve had had the same kind of problems. All but one : a Brother DCP-750CW (all-in-one printer, scanner and copier). Configuring it to work over WiFi has been pretty easy and my MacOSX computer detected it. It’s also been quite easy to configure it on Windows. 

Since I’ve moved to London, I bought a new printer today : at first I wanted to buy a Brother one, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any at Currys. So I bought a HP Deskjet 3070A.
Do I regret it? No, not at the moment. It didn’t cost much (£49.99) does scanner, copier and printer. It seems to print things correctly at the moment and to copy correctly too (honestly, I’m not doing any photos or whatever, I just need a printer to print a few documents).

But come on HP! How comes that 36 years after the first inkjet printer was released you still didn’t get the process of setup right?! Setting-up this printer has been an horrible experience, even for me, though IT is my domain of expertise.

This is a WiFi printer, so after turning it on the first thing I did was to try to connect it to the network. Heading in the menu, going through everything there (the screen is pretty shitty because it cannot display enough thing at a time, but hey again, it is a pretty cheap printer), I couldn’t find a way to connect to my WiFi network. Sure, there is the option of using WPS but this is something I never do (and anyway the router doesn’t have any WPS button) but no way to select your SSID and enter a key.
HP : selecting an SSID and entering a key is the basic of connecting to WiFi. Virtually everyone who has been connecting a computer to WiFi understand and knows this concept.

And most important : I, as your customer, understand it. There’s no way you should force me into using this WPS thing that is now known as being insecure! Ok, to be 100% honest, it’s only been known for a few days but how dare you force me to use one way that is, in my opinion, a bad one?

So, after seeing that, I thought that there must be another way of setting things up. I then started reading the manual (yes! you read it right, I read a manual for a printer!), and figured out that the only way to setup the printer to connect to WiFi would be to install the software from the CD that was in the box!

Ok, so, printer vendors, let me state it clear : I do NOT want to install your crappy softwares on my computer. Installing a driver is fine, installing all your crap is not. I do not want hundreds of useless processes to start when my computer boots.

Ok, back to our story : I thought I would just install it and my troubles would come to an end. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

I inserted the disc in my mac running Lion, and started the installer and… TADA! The installer wouldn’t run on Lion stating that it only works for MacOS 10.6 or below.
Needless to say it was getting on my nerves.

I then went to the first URL I could find in the manual : http://www.hp.com/go/wirelessprinting and tried to find the drivers for my printer. Well unfortunately entering the name of my model did give me a beautiful “0 result”.

I had to search through Google to finally land on a page from another HP website where I’ve been able to download the software.

A bad day has to be bad until the end

Now you may ask “Ok but since the printer is not connected in any way to your computer, how is it going to help?”. Good point. Well, the thing is, HP has this technology that makes the printer create an adhoc WiFi network and your computer will then connect to it and send configuration information to the printer. While that seems like a good idea, it turned out to be a very very bad experience.

At the printer configuration point, I was informed that I would be disconnected from my current WiFi network while the computer connects to printer. Afterward, it did, and I was presenting with a screen asking me to wait. I did wait. But after a while, I decided to just quit the installer cause nothing was happening (or at least so it seemed).
I tried to turn my WiFi back to my network and… no network access anymore. It turns out that while doing his things, the installer created a “Location” in my Network Preferences and it kind of prevented me to connecting back to my network.

Fair enough. I decided to try the last solution hoping that it would work! This solution is to… rerun the installer but this time connect to the printer using… an USB cable! So, I took my laptop, moved it to my bed (my printer is on the other side of the room) and connected it to the printer. Please, read the last sentence again as it is very important. And guess what? It just worked! Well, kind of, I couldn’t get ePrint to be configured but anyway…
So, why did I say that one phrase was important? Cause when people buy a wireless printer, they do not expect to have to connect it close to the computer, and they do not always have a laptop. In fact : I couldn’t connect the printer close to my computer because I’m lacking a power plug. Thankfully, I did own a laptop.

So, HP, 36 years later, could you please looking at what a good competitor is doing and finally get that process to be fixed? Cause if you ever had screwed my father’s network configuration, I’m pretty sure I would have had a phone call stating that this printer is some crap and it even broke the computer. Not kidding there. Imagine how bad this experience can get for someone who doesn’t know anything about computers except from… well, just using them.

You’d better get this fixed, quick, cause even if your printers are cheap, anyone getting into the same troubles as me would just thing that your printers are not good (and I stress that this is not necessarily the case : now that it is set-up, I’m happy with it for the price I had to pay).

And to you, dear readers…

See you online!