Yea if that was where the issues happend that would be a great explanation.
But most issues in my experience (10 years in support fos business with about 25000 users) it’s getting the data to the printer that is the issue. Drivers are unstable, the print spooler service randomly decides to just stop working and needing a restart etc etc.
And this is across lots of brands and different implementations (directly connected, network send to printer, central print server… You name it).
Somehow the complexity of this just makes it (apparently) impossible to make something that is just plain reliable. Personally I think it’s a combination of several layers of tech needed to work that compounds the issues.
You have the software that need to encode the data in one of many ways a printer can receive data, you have the windows print spooler that apparently is a complete piece of crap held together with shoestring that gets to receive this data and then use the driver (often also a unstable piece of garbage) to send the data to the printer in a way the printer now understands.
Then you get to the part that actually mostly works unless something whent wrong with the encoding (like using the wrong driver) the printer gets a stream of data and does as it is told.
Yes you might get a paper jam or an unaligned page, but that is actually pretty rare in a professional, well serviced machine.
I know it is all fun and games.
But the real reason printers are so fucky is because they convert digital to analogue, which rarely happens without complications.
In digital, everything is very neat. If something says it is 24,76%, then you can be damn well sure it is exactly 24,76%.
In analogue, the tolerance is much wider. A paper can move a whole millimetre to the side and there isn’t much we can do.
Yea if that was where the issues happend that would be a great explanation.
But most issues in my experience (10 years in support fos business with about 25000 users) it’s getting the data to the printer that is the issue. Drivers are unstable, the print spooler service randomly decides to just stop working and needing a restart etc etc.
And this is across lots of brands and different implementations (directly connected, network send to printer, central print server… You name it).
Somehow the complexity of this just makes it (apparently) impossible to make something that is just plain reliable. Personally I think it’s a combination of several layers of tech needed to work that compounds the issues.
You have the software that need to encode the data in one of many ways a printer can receive data, you have the windows print spooler that apparently is a complete piece of crap held together with shoestring that gets to receive this data and then use the driver (often also a unstable piece of garbage) to send the data to the printer in a way the printer now understands.
Then you get to the part that actually mostly works unless something whent wrong with the encoding (like using the wrong driver) the printer gets a stream of data and does as it is told.
Yes you might get a paper jam or an unaligned page, but that is actually pretty rare in a professional, well serviced machine.