We hate printers as much as you do. Printer Week is here to help.

The Help Desk’s series of stories and investigations into the state of printers is happening July 10 to 14.

Updated July 11, 2023 at 11:54 a.m. EDT|Published July 10, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

(Video: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post)

3 min

It’s the shark in your sea of gadgets. No other device inspires more fear and loathing than the printer.

Welcome to Help Desk’s Printer Week. It’s like TV’s Shark Week, but for a technology that has become far too hostile toward its users. There’s ink in the water.

Each day this week, we’re publishing a new story about where printers went wrong and what you can do about it.

Four decades after we were first promised a “paperless office,” nearly half of Americans still own a printer. Shipping labels, official forms and school projects still all have to get made somewhere.

Humans have sent people to the moon. So why can’t we make a decent printer?

The hardware is inherently hard: there are moving parts and the unpredictability of supplies like ink that dries up or paper that jams. It is a true marvel that a box on your desk can spray thousands of microdroplets per second to re-create a lifelike image.

But hardware screw-ups aren’t the main reason people hate their printers. The bigger problem is that the printer industry has embraced some of the tech industry’s absolutely worst ideas about exerting control over consumers.

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