Technology

I can add that we have two Bother multifunction laser machines at work (in addition to three of the venerable HL-2360's) and the fucking things will lose scanner association with the PC's in our office at the drop of a hat, all the time, for no identifiable reason. And there is no way to reassociate a printer with a computer short of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver package, after which point it'll inevitably cack itself in a week or two anyway.

The things print just fine but getting them to scan is like pulling teeth. Everyone in our office but me is afraid of the scanners on top of the things now, they can never figure out how to make them work, and even when they do it right we invariably found that their computer has magically and silently lost connection with the scanner component -- and only the scanner component. The software side of these things is garbage.

The software side of all printers is probably garbage, as you say. For instance, my Canon ImageClass at home scans just fine, but there's no way to make it do double sided scanning through the sheet feeder by default, or from any preset or option the screen on the printer itself. You have to set up a custom preset via the driver tool on a PC, it can only remember two presets, and you can't rename them. So you just have to know that "Custom 1" is double-sided-scan-from-sheet-feeder-and-make-it-into-a-pdf. You can set it up to do a different thing in "Custom 2," and then just fuck you I guess if you ever need to do a third thing.

Etc., etc.