Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?
Ideally your printer advertises itself via Bonjour/Avahi/SLP or whatevs. Ideally Windows receives these adverts and connects you to your printer. One or the other gets it wrong, with monotonous regularity.
IPP is print anywhere and it sounds like its been branded "Mopria".
I ditched a thing called HPLIP at home at least five years ago which used to be the cutting edge for Linux printing on HP printers. The bloke that developed CUPS said it was a good idea and I went for it.
Now it just works - always. It sounds like Windows is catching up, finally.
I haven't seen a home router that doesn't support Bonjour in the past decade. It's a fundamental component in the Apple ecosystem and any home router that didn't allow one to wireless print from their iPhone would be considered broken.
The router doesn't really need to support anything, the mDNS packets just flood the bridge domain directly between clients like any other flooded packet.
The advantage of link-local multicast over a plain broadcast is it gives a unique address (IP and multicast) so the clients themselves can more easily filter them. That's about it. An mdns aware router just enables MORE flooding to happen (across subnet boundaries, where link-local is not supposed to go).
It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address
EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention any solutions like static IPs, nor did it spell out a general remark about how this complexity in consumer electronics is bad
You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.
If you want to have a network, someone needs to know a bit of networking. Or you need someone you can call who does.
Don't get mad at the printer for what your router is doing to its IP address. This day and age isn't as advanced as you'd like it to be, or you need a new router that does what you expect.
Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a share has too many files.
Try opening a file share with 20k+ images in the root from your latest Mac.
Seems to me, as a mixed OS business operator, that it's Apple that's behind the times.
Even out of service Chromecast devices and decades old Linux distros are better at network discovery than Bonjour.
I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once.
Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.
I don't doubt that a one computer, one printer, scenario is any problem for any OS. You'll see who the ugly one is when the kids play together.
File sharing isn't a tangent. The purpose of Bonjour is to couple printing and file sharing as a network discovery protocol.
But a one printer one computer being a problem is precisely the issue in the thread at hand. Once the router reboots the printer changes IP address (since it gets a dynamic IP by default) and then Windows can't find it, hence the need to assign it a static IP.
This specific chain is about Bonjour and, more specifically, is a response to a claim that Microsoft is behind the times.
The "Windows can't find my printer" issue is already addressed by other responses. Windows can find your printer even if the IP changes, assuming the printer wasn't installed in a way that circumvents that. (E.g. by not choosing to find it automatically and using an IP address against the on screen recommendations.)
I used to do that too because I didn’t know what it was or why I would want it. Now I intentionally have it installed without iTunes since its so handy.
Part of the commoditization process for consumer products is that they are made to be user friendly for non-experts. Most other networked devices have already done this. Nobody needs to know how to configure /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases to use an iPad on the router that Xfinity provides.
If people start using dynamic IPs as if they are static, when they really aren't, they're just setting themselves up for failure the next time the devices reboots or resets. It's better to either use static addressing if you want static addressing, or use DNS if you don't know what the IP is going to be.
I can't speak to printers (much less yours specifically) but most home routers (or more generally servers that act as both DHCP and DNS servers) will create DNS records in a locally-administered zone for each DHCP client according to the request. This same zone is then given as the DNS suffix as a DHCP option to the same set of clients. I would think that your printer does something similar, so if you add the printer by hostname (which you can probably locate by looking at DHCP leases in your router's web-based admin panel) instead of IP it should always "just work".
Linux has really piggybacked on Apple's efforts with the result that printing is way better there now. Beyond just the years of their work on CUPS, AirPrint is the big deal. Almost all printers for years now understand one of the handful of image formats Apple supports for printers, and they advertise themselves and their capabilities with DNS-SD.
The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before.
I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.
And then they made sure to follow through and make it work. Hiring people in itself doesn't lead to solutions. You have to give them the tools they need and set priorities acros teams accordingly.
Arguably if they had a half-decent team they could've done it without hiring the CUPS creator in the first place (like Apple did originally). Hiring him (which I support) simply gave them street cred and signaled to the company that this wasn't some unsupported effort.
No one says "I can't want to learn to code so I can program windows printer drivers". At the same time no company wants to pay the appropriate amount to hire people that can do this well. These two concepts come together in a fantastic display of mediocrity.
This is basically like when people say dishwashers don’t do a good job because they’ve only bought ones designed by American MBAs. HP and Epson made good products in the previous century but are now customer-milking operations and it’s better to pretend they don’t exist.
Problem is high powered industrial dishwashers can't handle decorated plates ... pardon me, I meant to say color lasers can't handle photos well. If you're primarily printing texts and diagrams on A4 copier paper, this is total non-issue. But if you're looking to print nice colors, not necessarily.
True - color laser printers aren’t great photo quality but I stopped making home prints a decade or so back because the economics were brutal and when I do want to make prints I want them to be larger which just made it worse. Outsourcing that to Costco was much cheaper and easier than fussing around with ink cartridges, clogs or smears, etc.
I really feel like the brother laser printer recommendations should all come with model numbers as not all brother laser printers are created equal. i have a DCP-L2550DW, and i'm not sure i'd recommend it.
Only as anecdata, I am using Brother (B&W) laser printers since many years in the office and almost all worked and work just fine, but I had some bad experience with DCP-8110DN and MFC-8520DN models:
It seems like all the models sharing the same printing engine suffer from the same defect (fuser heats a bit too much and the sleeve and roller fail much earlier than expected).
Interesting—out of curiosity, what is your primary complaint with the DCP-L2550DW? I have one too and use it seamlessly for printing and scanning on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. My third party toner refills have worked great and the machine itself was rather inexpensive. Not invalidating your experience, as I may have just gotten lucky, but would be interested to know what issues it’s created for you.
the main complaint is that the feeder never pulls paper in the same orientation twice. i've tried printing on labels with various levels of not success. while the print quality is fine (no complaints there), if you are printing with pre-cut media, getting it to align is tough. i've used Avery media and then used their templates as well as measuring and making my own templates. the top rows will be with in the pre-cut, but they start to "drift" off so that by the end of the page they are off a full 1/16" meaning each row is not off by the same distance. if i select all items and then "squeeze" by pushing the bottom up 1/16" in illustrator, this seems to work. if i use that modified file on other printers, they won't print the same way.
i've also tried making cards by printing on both sides. creating a 2-page file with the mirrored offset like normal print would use, they don't line up. if i remove the mirrored offset (not a professional DTP, so whatever this called), it still doesn't line up. so i had to fiddle with it to get double sided prints to line up. on a different printer, the normal mirrored offset works as expected. i can then put the print on the guillotine and cut on the crop marks, and it all works. not with the 2550.
I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.
That was fine for me until I had a special tax circumstance that couldn't be e-filed, hello gazillion pages! amongst the other random things I was printing at a library or fedex this pushed it over the edge
Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything.
They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).
i just forward everything to fedex "print and go" (an email address which will handle print jobs) and figure it's cheaper in the long run rather than owning a printer at home
I live in the Apple ecosystem and I know HP does a lot of consumer-hostile stuff but I bought my HP laser from Costco (who refuse to sell subscription printers) mostly because of it's support for AirPrint with no additional software.
And it works, the quality is great, and I'm happy. Didn't have to install anything.
HP laser printers are not on the subscription model? I sought out a Brother laser printer specifically due to several bad experiences with lockout on HP printers.
Some are. Some aren't. Some try to trick you. Costco only sell subscription-free models.
If you go to Amazon and look up Brother laser printers you'll see that most of those now also come with subscription plans called "Refresh", so, you can't win.
Costco does not sell printers that require subscriptions. I believe they get custom models from the manufacturer.
Also, the exercise equipment they sell don't require an internet account for basic functionality, and I believe this goes for the TVs sold at Costco as well.
I also have a brother printer that I specifically paid a premium for for out of box eSCL scanner support on linux (airscan). Unfortunately, the scanners still need a proprietary driver as eSCL only supports some fixed resolutions. The proprietary scanner has better/more functionality.
Did you turn off the HP "DIRECT" wifi AP that screams at the top of its lungs and hogs valuable wifi spectrum? I live in a fairly low density townhouse, and 3 of my neighbors' printers are visible..
I upgraded from a my little Brother home b&w printer with scanner to an HP laser as well. I was starting to do more than my home printer and it's very low <$100 price tag should ever be expected to do. I went with a printer suggested by the vendor of a very specific medium I was going to be using in a hobby++ product labeling. It was 4x more expensive, but it works. It's connected to an air gapped computer, so I'm unawares if it suffers from the infamous user-hostile stuff. I works for what I need, and the state of the printing world means I'm happy with it
If you've ever had to install printer drivers and fight their bundled software/adware/spyware that comes along, *and* the huge headache of getting networked printing set up (looking at you Windows), AirPrint is magic. Especially being able to print from your phone.
This is solely because HP is so terrible at updating their drivers for new operating systems. Every HP printer I've owned eventually didn't support the next version of windows. No brother printer I've ever owned has had this problem.
I’ve been able to print to the newest HP Officejet 8000 series from Windows 7 Embedded by just picking the 6000 series driver from the list. If all you wish to do is “print” there is quite a bit of backwards compatibility in the printer. Other features like scanning may be less so, and the phoning-home ink-pestering notifications aren’t there which seems like a win.
Unless you need something like duplex or multiple paper trays (or as you say scanning), you should be able to pick 'PCL5' or other generic 'HP' driver and it'll work in a pinch. Agreed that an older, well supported printer that doesn't DRM me to death is one less thing to annoy me in life.
Its a little bit more complicated than that, some drivers can handle direct line printing, some can handled the Window Meta File (WMF) and some can handle Enhanced Meta File (EMF) and now there is the new EMF+.
So a trick that some people used was the wrong driver to make some printers behave in unsupported ways for a particular programs. And if a new driver didnt work, using the HP LaserJet 4 driver usually resolved the problem if it was a HP laser printer of sorts.
Throw in Inkjet printers that routed down USB connections, and the management of the USB wasnt the best, and it became a nightmare quickly having to remove registry entries because the printer uninstaller software behaved like McAfee AV software when people attempted to uninstall it.
>Its a little bit more complicated than that, some drivers can handle direct line printing, some can handled the Window Meta File (WMF) and some can handle Enhanced Meta File (EMF) and now there is the new EMF+.
Every operating system in the house supports my nearly 20 year old HP 1022n (which I probably print to weekly) out of the box. The last time I used my 30 year old LJ4 probably 3 years ago, it worked fine (for Win7 and IOS). I bet I can still print to an LJ-II if I still had one. Did they remove PCL and Postscript from HP printers in the last decade?
On the other hand my HP color AirPrint compatible printer that I bought in 2016 works with everything from an old iPad running iOS 5 circa 2010 that I pulled out of the closet to the latest Apple devices with no drivers.
I haven't read the article or the MS release but from experience the big distinction is between inbox drivers and those you download from the vendors website.
Inbox drivers are drivers that come bundled with Windows or more recently automatically downloaded by Windows. The device manufacturers provide the drivers but Microsoft is fairly strict on what they will accept. More recently they have been forcing the manufacturers to switch to V4 (XPS based) if they want their driver included "in the box".
My guess is this is a further tightening of those rules. It indicates the general direction Microsoft wants to move with printer drivers but it's a slow process.
I expect your will be able to continue downloading the existing garbage that nearly every printer manufacturer provides.
I wonder if this is in response to the ongoing headaches caused by their PrintNightmare fix? Namely, an inability for customers using server deployed printers to print every time a driver needs to update but can’t due to lack of admin rights.
> Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.
24 years ago I worked at a library and had to manage public printers (inkjets, smaller attached lasers, large networked lasers, thermal, dot matrix, you name it). Printing and Windows then was an unmitigated nightmare, like chasing a toddler around because if you glanced away from it for a second it would stick its fingers in an electrical socket. I’d rather deal with restoring workstations, bricked by old men surfing for porn, as horrified mothers looked on. Since then I categorically refused to buy printers. I’ll do anything to avoid printing.
Then my wife bought one for her business and now it’s my fucking problem again. Wonderful to see that the printing experience has barely changed at all. Networked printing across different devices and platforms is a fucking coin toss if it’s going to work, without changing a thing, static or dynamic IP, hardwired or Wi-Fi, and connecting via USB is barely better. Every few print jobs you have to monkey with it, reinstall or reset something. It lies to you and fights with you about toner or ink, even when you have it fresh and straight from the manufacturer. I’d rather quit my job and press her customers’ receipts into clay fucking tablets than touch the damned things.
So, I hope this makes things better. I won’t hold my breath, though.
I am not able to ascertain via web searching whether or not Mopria (the new universal print driver framework) supports PostScript passthrough or if all our printed text will have the trademark blurry HP PECL look, as if you printed a jpeg just shy of being at a sharp enough enough resolution. With inkjets it doesn’t make a difference but with lasers it is a night and day difference.
My Epson printer came with a disk for Windows and MacOS. I Put it on my network and Linux and Apple machines worked out of the box with no driver disk needed. I haven't tried Windows because I just don't run that nonsense at home.
I have a Brother laser and I could not get the Microsoft driver to print PDFs at 100% scale. I tried a bunch of different PDF apps, every driver setting. Then I installed the Brother driver and it worked first try.
We have all this innovation for 3d printers but 2d printers get the suck. Really, I wish someone would come out with an open source 2d printer, hell even just a pen plotter type.
Mopria And Airprint both use the RFC standard Internet Printing Protocol. Are they not compatible with each other?
> IPP is the basis of several printer logo certification programs including AirPrint, IPP Everywhere, and Mopria Alliance, and is supported by over 98% of printers sold today.
Could they expand this to the other garbage software suites hardware companies get to auto-install? I plugged a Logitech mouse into my work laptop, and Windows helpfully installed a Logitech control utility. Lacking admin, I cannot disable this little utility, and so it is just there, sucking away CPU+RAM.
Hopefully not a potential infection vector, but the hardware industry just has an impeccable history of writing iron-clad drivers, so I am sure it is fine.
I use special printers that have weird features that require the ability to translate the data on the way to the printer, such as CYMW (W = White) printers (for printing on black or doing t-shirt transfers) or controlling the margins while printing on giant rolls of paper in my banner printer... I do a LOT of fiddling in the printer driver, and I hope that this isn't being somehow discontinued?
As far as I understand there is an industry standard solution to that problem: You put the computer you use to control the special hardware on an isolated network and never, under any circumstances, upgrade it.
You’ll still have the ability to install arbitrary drivers and support software obtained directly from the manufacturer, this change only means that Microsoft won’t automatically supply OEM driver files via Windows Update.
I'm going to say that I unironically prefer third-party drivers to Microsoft's, primarily because the print quality is better, and secondly because I can customise my print output to no end—page setup, borderless printing, DPI, etc.
I'm the opposite, I always go for the inbox driver and recommend my clients do the same (I develop print management software).
Having said that the main problems I encountered with 3rd part drivers were the additional "utilities" they include. Often the core driver was fine and in some cases you can extract that from the original software and install it directly from the .inf file.
