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Why Paper Jams Persist (newyorker.com)
A trivial problem reveals the limits of technology. Fascinating story from The New Yorker: Unsurprisingly, the engineers who specialize in paper jams see them differently. Engineers tend to work in narrow subspecialties, but solving a jam requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and interface design. "It's the ultimate challenge," Ruiz said.
"I wouldn't characterize it as annoying," Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. "I would characterize it as almost exciting." When she graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2006, her friends took jobs in trendy fields, such as automotive design. During her interview at Xerox, however, another engineer showed her the inside of a printing press. All Xerox printers look basically the same: a million-dollar printing press is like an office copier, but twenty-four feet long and eight feet high. Warner watched as the heavy, pale-gray double doors swung open to reveal a steampunk wonderland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts, and circuit boards. As in an office copier, green plastic handles offer access to the "paper path" -- the winding route, from "feeder" to "stacker," along which sheets of paper are shocked and soaked, curled and decurled, vacuumed and superheated. "Printers are essentially paper torture chambers," Warner said, smiling behind her glasses. "I thought, This is the coolest thing I've ever seen."
"I wouldn't characterize it as annoying," Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. "I would characterize it as almost exciting." When she graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2006, her friends took jobs in trendy fields, such as automotive design. During her interview at Xerox, however, another engineer showed her the inside of a printing press. All Xerox printers look basically the same: a million-dollar printing press is like an office copier, but twenty-four feet long and eight feet high. Warner watched as the heavy, pale-gray double doors swung open to reveal a steampunk wonderland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts, and circuit boards. As in an office copier, green plastic handles offer access to the "paper path" -- the winding route, from "feeder" to "stacker," along which sheets of paper are shocked and soaked, curled and decurled, vacuumed and superheated. "Printers are essentially paper torture chambers," Warner said, smiling behind her glasses. "I thought, This is the coolest thing I've ever seen."
This is Slashdot. The title invites a question, and TFS doesn't answer it.
I don't use them all that much and some have bizar/abysmal usability, but the machines themselves are a marvel of engineering IMHO. It's amazing how much of them are optimized to the T these days. And the print quality they put out is just as amazing. I remember smelling meth-spirits with purple ink of the repo machines back in primary school and I also remember the Star NL 10 dot-matrix impact printer. Noisy, ugly, dusty. I also remember the Sharp CE-126P -still have it.
Long story short, I think they are amazing and AFAICT paper jams with them have also gotten measurably less - although I do understand that those will never go away completely.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
As a former tester, I recall spending days trying to understand how and where jams occurred. My favorite paper jam issue was not one my team suffered, but another team that was working on a small laser jet printer.
One of the media ('paper types') that was suppose to be supported was transparencies. HP Printers allow you to specify the type of paper (to items like 'plain', 'cardstock', etc.), but many people would leave it at default. If the default was left, the printer needed to at least survive the print job, even if it was a bit of a mess. So those transparencies were a rather special case. The fuser, the part designed to join the bits of toner to the media, had to work in many different climates, from 65 F degrees, low humidity to 90+ F degrees, 90% humidity, and in order to make that fuser optimal, the printer had to compensate. With transparencies, as I recall, in the cold, the fuser would heat up a bit more to compensate and so with transparency, the fuser would fuse the the transparency to the fuser. We lost several million dollar prototypes's fusers and days of productivity to this issue. Ultimately, I believe HP decided it was cheaper to pay the warranty costs than it was to fix the issue.
which is probably not representative, paper jams persist because my employer buys the cheapest paper they can find. The kind that clumps and sticks to itself, that sheds paper dust like it's snowing, that has uneven edges, etc.
Couldn't this be solved by simply putting an extra strong paper roller into the printer that simply feeds into some sort of paper shredder?
Is there no market for peopel willing to spend more on a paper jam-less printer?
Amongst many jobs, I fixed copiers for a few years. You dont need a climate controlled room, for those customers who had paper dampness issues, a 20w incandscent globe in the paper cupboard worked fine keeping it dry.
The main problem was with coloured paper, where a partially used ream would be stored for some time, the standard white was used quickly enough to not have a problem. Most copy paper is in a wax lined outer wrapper to prevent moisture from getting to it.
Dampness caused the static charge used in the process to bleed away to ground thru the paper too, resulting in poor copy quality and jams.