OSNews

if you can do lock-in, you do lock-in, that seems to be the mantra for every industry as far back as the industrial revolution. only when customers, be them other industries that need their parts, or end users, rise up and cry for standards, will they show up. and then only for that single industry.

yes, its a practice thats officially frowned upon by economists as they are monopolistic. but as its a cheap, and effective, way to increase income, it will be done for the foreseeable future...

hell, just like printer brands talk about the need to use same brand ink and similar parts, car brands tells you to use their own car parts. and its a much older industry. but i dont think they ever had, or tried to misuse, a law like the DMCA...

if you can do lock-in, you do lock-in, that seems to be the mantra for every industry as far back as the industrial revolution. only when customers, be them other industries that need their parts, or end users, rise up and cry for standards, will they show up. and then only for that single industry.

yes, its a practice thats officially frowned upon by economists as they are monopolistic. but as its a cheap, and effective, way to increase income, it will be done for the foreseeable future...

hell, just like printer brands talk about the need to use same brand ink and similar parts, car brands tells you to use their own car parts. and its a much older industry. but i dont think they ever had, or tried to misuse, a law like the DMCA... [/q]

There is a slight problem with that conclusion; these printer companies gain nothing out of using non-standard protocols; I can understand the ink thing - sell the printer at a loss and make up for it via ink. They gain nothing using proproprietary protocols and raise the cost of producing these printers.

Rather than just using the 'standard' they have to employ programmers to write drivers, then test them etc. etc. What is easier; one hand you have all the bureaucracy and on the other hand, printers being made and all the software already pre-provided on the plaform?

"I'm more surprised that after 30 years, the printing industry still haven't pull their head out of their behind and come up with a standardised language which allows direct printing to their devices without the need of employing proprietary/closed source drivers."

That's why we have every application outputting Postscript for printing by default in UNIX world for decades. :-)

"Postscript is only seen on very high end printers; [...]"

I've recently seen a "cheap" Brother multifunctional device (laser printer, scanner, fax, copier) being able to understand both standard Postscript and PCL.

It seems to be normal for users: They see a shiny device, buy it, then start complaining about missing driver support. But it was cheap, at last. :-)

The buying decision usually is not lead by hardware support, but instead by the shinyness ot the device or the package, or the claims on the package, or the fantastic low price.

Compliance to existing and well proved standards seems to make printers more expensive. (You could extend this statement to digital photo and movie cameras, MP3 players and other funny devices, too.)

I've used Postscript capable printers only (HP Laserjet II, 4, now 4000, Lexmark Optra S series meanwhile) without any problems together with UNIX workstations and Apple's PowerBooks without any problems, without having to google around for strange printer drivers which need to be placed somewhere into system directories...

"[...] I hope that maybe XPS will turn into that magic silver bullet where by rather than being at the mercy of the hardware company, people can just go, purchase a printer, hook it up, and voila, it "just works"(tm)"

I really hope the situation will develop this way. Today, while most home users favour multifunctional devices (inkjet printer, scanner), sometimes it's a bit complicated to get these crappy things working. While some products are supported well both on Mac OS X and UNIX/Linux, others won't even provide basic functionalities. Most of them even aren't capable of outputting text (without driver). Hey, even cheap dotmatrix printers could do that! :-)

To come back on topic: Automated driver support would expecially be interesting to allow users buying and using (!) bleeding edge technology, e. g. printers that just occured on the market. They would not need to purchase a new OS (and a new computer) in order to benefit from new devices - after all, the system installs the correct driver (from the manufacturer of the device) automatically and lets the user "just use" the device, instead of forcing him to sit down and google around for drivers that promise to make the printer work.

Unfortunately it is a patent riddled format controlled by Adobe.



I remember having an HP printer that was meant to understand PCL but never actually worked as documented.



Price is the almighty deciding factor; for me, I have a cheap $39.95 printer; it does what I need - and it doesn't have all the added BS like 'scanners' and 'flash readers' which are surplus to the ultimate purpose of the machine - to print documents.



But when is paid $30K a year with lots of bills, its unaffordable to purchase something that maybe be superior. Its the printer manufactures who choose fail so support PCL or Postscript.



Well, most camera's and mp3 players are either PTP or MTP compliant, which *NIX can support out of the box once one compiles the respective libraries.



For me, I'm at university but if in future I purchase a printer, I'll purchase a Postscript compliant one - makes life easier, no matter what the platform is.