Peripherals forum: Printer w/o computer

While some of the newer printers can access data from flash devices, don't count on that alone. It's provided for ease from items like cameras or similar. While that may work it still counts on the actual device that such memory was data stored onto. You're not going to get away from a PC all together, but maybe reduce its use. The printer itself will become a mini-PC is that's it amounts to. But surely over time these added options become a cost factor too until they're offered so cheaply its a std. option, but so far I haven't seen that, yet that can change.

tada -----Willy

If the printer could print a set of generic formats, I'd be happy. PDF, TIF, maybe EPS. Heck, if I had to make everything PDF I could live with that too.

I have a Canon MF4150, which rarely works with my Mac OSX 10.6.7. It's a multifuction printer, but the scanning won't work, and the printing is iffy at best. It comes down to Canon and drivers for this thing. I'd hate to buy another printer and down the road end up with yet another out of date driver that won't be updated for months, all because of one OS update (not even a major upgrade).

It really is sort of ridiculous that these manufacturers can't create one standard for printers to work over time. Why drivers need to be updated with OS updates is beyond me.

It's pretty simple really. Consumers demanded low cost. Such as these 49 buck (or less) to 99 buck printers. To reach such lows, life span was sacrificed.

Now that we have the consumer printers at about 2 year life spans we have Microsoft (the gorilla in the room?) with changing systems for drivers and more.

If you think back to the days of early print languages you see PostScript had a good run but since it was pretty expensive to put into printers, CONSUMERS were rare and so it passed the print processing back to the computer.

Sorry there is more to the story but all is well known, discussed but once in a while we need to refresh the memory cells.
Bob