This & That: Printer's Diabolical Humor

     by Elizabeth B. Wright   April 2005

In past columns I have mentioned that computers have no soul. I have found, however, that they indeed have a diabolical sense of humor. In fact, in the quietest part of the night, if there is no ambient noise (refrigerator, air conditioning, etc.), and your computer is turned on, you probably can hear a very faint chortle emanating from it. This is because, once again, it has spent the entire day making a complete idiot out of you.

Recently a friend phoned with a desperate plea for help with her printer. She has an older model HP printer which was state-of-the-art a few years back. Her problem revolved around its failure to print anything from Microsoft Office, including her documents and spreadsheets. She could print from other programs, and she also could print a test page, but nothing from MS Office.
The only clue we had was that the ink cartridges were probably running low. But why would one program print and not another? Please, don’t bombard me with reasons why this could happen. The simple answer, after two days, was that indeed the ink cartridges needed to be replaced. It would appear that Microsoft programs are a little more unforgiving of this condition than other software, including the printer internal self-test software.

Her other decision, after deciding the ink was low, was whether to invest $60 in new cartridges and run the risk that there was indeed some other problem, or just abandon the old HP and buy a new printer. Her printing needs do not run to photo printing and high-end desktop publishing output, so the HP has always been sufficient for her very low volume of work But what to do about the possible futile outlay of $60? Obviously, once new cartridges were opened and installed, there would be no way to return them to the store. We managed to solve this problem by a little creative thinking involving my ownership of a printer in the same class as hers. But all ended happily for her. She has always liked the finished product from the HP722c and really did not want to buy a new printer, at least not at this time.

With the high cost of ink, combined with the low amount of product in the cartridges, it is difficult to know when or if to replace a printer these days. In business situations, high volume printing leads to more frequent updating of equipment. But for the home user (non-business), the decisions these days usually revolve around photo printing. Where once we were content with good inkjet quality photos, we are now getting spoiled by the much better output from specialized photo printers. And while the machines are ridiculously cheap for the most part, I don’t know how many of us can afford to frequently replace the extremely expensive ink cartridges the new machines require. I know this practice is not going to go away any time soon, due once again to the P.T. Barnum philosophy. But one thing we certainly do is learn to make sure a photo is ready to print before beginning the process. Not only do bad photos waste ink, they also waste expensive photo paper.

The interesting thing about the non-printing from MS Office is that it shows how different programs handle different chores. It has long been known that output looks slightly (and sometimes significantly) different from various software packages, especially when printing clipart and photos. To see this for yourself, try printing the same picture from several different programs if you have that many installed on your computer. For the Microsoft problem my friend had, it seems that the software codes recognized the command to send something to the printer, but somehow knew there was insufficient ink for high grade output. So while other programs continued to send the signals needed for actually ejecting ink onto the paper, Microsoft bypassed those commands and just sent the printer heads back and forth without even pausing for the various words, etc. Then after doing that for all the lines in the document, it would spit out the blank page. So I think it is perfectly understandable that we were confused.
Can you hear her computer laughing? The sound followed us all the way to the store for new ink cartridges.

Elizabeth Wright is a member of the CCOKC and a regular writer for the eMonitor