Forgive the self-indulgence, but it’s 20 years since I first inserted a printer’s driver CD, connected its USB cable, and hit it with a suite of demanding tests. That sentence alone tells you quite how much has changed. These days there’s rarely a disc in the box – my test PC doesn’t even have an optical drive – and virtually every printer comes with some kind of network interface.
While colleagues have gone on to review more glamorous devices, I’m still here, timing print runs, measuring power consumption, and poring over the fine print with an eyeglass inherited from an old art editor. I’ve reviewed several hundred printers, in which time I must have printed at least 50,000 sheets of paper. My Computer Shopper leaving cover pointed out the contrast between my “tree-hugging” beliefs and the forest-killing reality. And that was in 2007.
Little changes in the world of printers, but in this test I found myself thinking not about new technology, but about the strange backward steps manufacturers sometimes take. This was triggered by HP’s new touchscreen interface which, while not awful, is less easy to use than the previous generation. Most noticeably, a couple of things that previously required one tap now take two or three.