Print Damn It!

As a graphic designer, one of the most important stuff in my life is a printer. Others use printers for their documents while in my profession, I use the printer to have my designs printed in an easy to hold printed form for presentation or as the actual output. Before I see my printer and give it an elbow drop because this article is giving me nightmarish flashbacks of printers being dicks, here are some of my Saturday night ramblings about ink vomiting hardware.

Heavy software
Printers in my opinion, is not be a burden to the user. Simply plug, install a few megabytes of drivers to make it acquainted with your computer and use it. Modern printers in the other hand, requires you to install heavy software around at least 100MB to make them work, wherein the installed software you are going to use  is the driver itself and forget the other software. Most of the time the bundled software is already outdated and the company being dick, requires you to download a heavier software via the Internet before you can use it.

Ink Color Incomplete? No Print!
Some of the modern printers are douchebags. They refuse to work with you if the color cartridge is empty even if you want to use black ink for black and white printing, like word documents.  On 4 ink based (CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black/Key) printers, they will slap in your face by not working with you unless if the 4 inks are complete, even if you are only using one color that is full.

Ink Cartridges are insanely expensive
Inks are excessively too much for your budget and it is imperative to sell your organs or your soul just to buy a fresh one. It is a burden to have a chunk of percentage on your earnings just to get a new cartridge. Some say you may use the draft settings for print, but in my profession, 80% of time the settings is in either normal or best options. More usage of ink means less usage of your cash to your needs.

Paper destroyer
A lot of printers are hungry for expensive papers like photo and matte variations. They will eat your paper by jamming in their mouths and chew them vigorously to the point you can only reuse it as a scratch paper or as a crumpled imaginary basketball and tossed it in a trash can while screaming "I am the best basketball player bitch!!".

Refuse to print on inappropriate times
Don't you just love to throw your printer through the window when it dicks around and refuses to work properly on times you desperately need for a print out. You tried everything except hitting it with a kitchen sink yet the printer still doesn't want to print. Later, in an unexplainable reason, the printer acts normal and lets you print wherein you have less than 5 minutes before hitting the deadline.

Just like every computer peripheral in existence, printers are assholes and provides unnecessary headaches. The ink cartridges are also need be cheaper and very accessible to common consumers because logically, without an ink, you can't use a printer, unless your printer has a built-in ink factory inside and disperse Ice cold tea. Now print, damn it!