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• Need new drivers (Score:2)

  by bart (450)

  BTW, why is it that printers need new drivers?

  Because the printers are brought out too soon, with still buggy drivers. It's as if the debugging still has to be completed while the printer has already started shipping.
  
  Am I the only one who gets tired of being a guinea pig for manufacturers? Where al we seem to get are betas?
  • Re:Need new drivers (Score:2)

    by lachoy (1663)

    I agree with you about being a guinea pig (although I think people implicitly demand it). But more fundamentally I mean this: has external interface to printers really changed in the last five years such that every new printer needs a new driver at all? Didn't postscript solve this problem a few decades ago?
    • Re:Need new drivers (Score:1)

      by chromatic (983) on 2005.11.25 14:12 (#44833) Homepage Journal

      PostScript costs money, not just in licensing an implementation or writing your own, but in shipping enough processor and memory in the printer to support it. If you want to build a printer for $20 or less, you have to put a lot of the smarts on the computer -- in the driver!

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      • Re:Need new drivers (Score:2)

        by jmm (276)

        The Apple LaserWriter that was the first popular Postscript printer used a 68000 processor, running probably around 5 MHz, and perhaps 512 Kbytes of memory. While that huge amount of computational horsepower cost a lot more than $20 in the 80's it can be had nowadays for 2 bottlecaps and a self addressed stamped envelope.
        • Re:Need new drivers (Score:1)

          by chromatic (983)

          Meanwhile, PostScript has marched on too. I'm not sure that that version supported color, for example.