Adam Savage's Rant on Laser Printers

Adam Savage's Rant on Laser Printers

During the filming of his most recent One Day Build, Adam takes an interlude to dish out a few strong words about laser printers and his quest to find a quality large format printer for his prop building projects. If you have a recommendation for a high quality large color laser printer, please share it in the comments!

The build he was working on when he filmed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RL7EYSbc_g

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Intro bumper by Abe Dieckman

Thanks for watching!

50 Comments

  1. I’ve been using a Brother monochrome ‘laser’ printer for nearly 10 years and have had zero print defects on paper, stickers, card stock.

  2. I definitely feel like google is either lying to you or holding info back. I look up thing off the top of my head all the time and I really feel like they are making it hard to get anything on purpose..

  3. The search goal is consumer confusion. Late stage capitalism blows. Nothing to do with quality unless in the luxury category.

  4. I wonder if you’re being exposed to the people who pay the most for their website to show up on your search results

  5. For wide format to large format laser printers, you should try looking for toner digital presses or something like that. Then you’ll start finding more of what you’re looking for. Toner-based printing presses won’t be cheap, but they can handle larger sheet sizes. But for decal making the iColor series lets you print CMYKW for normal and sublimation, Direct-to-Film, fluorescent CMYKW, security toner for making credentials, embedding in art or documents for anti-fraud purposes, and can print a clear toner as well. The real kicker is hot swapping your toners while a job is being printed. The software lets you break up a large image into smaller sheets for tiling. Great for making all kinds of cool stuff. For making rolls of stickers, look into getting spoolers as your source and take-up reels. Then look at getting an automated lamination machine to help protect the toner from wear and tear.

  6. Would LED-Printers also work? Maybe check the printers from OKI. Pretty pricey, but older models can be found for quite a cheap price and they print white! Like the Pro9420WT. I don´t know temperature data though.

  7. I have been looking for a new printer and every site I go to seems like ai garbage, including the sites I used to use for technology, computer components etc. I have been looking for and not buying a new printer for several months now. Did you ever find a decent source for information and or a printer? As if you have time to even read this or look at comments.

  8. I’ve known several engineers who have worked at search before their teams got shrunken down because Google doesn’t care about search quality as much anymore now that it’s run by an ad exec. They were told that the priority was an end-to-end machine learning based system that optimizes for user click and retention preference. Because you returned to Google each time and clicked on many links, you showed that those links were high enough quality to retain their ranking. You engaged more with Google because of those results — everything is working as intended, and there is no bug.

    The problem is that the algorithm optimizes for engagement and simplicity. What they should do (and the current search engineers know this) is try to build antagonistic systems that will try to fool the algorithm into being picked up, and if they work, use that as a feedback mechanism for improving the algorithm. The problem they face is they can’t run the algorithm separately from the internet, and the executives didn’t care.

  9. It gives me much pleasure to know I wasnt using google improperly. Google was using ME improperly. What a waste of time. (edited for spells)

  10. The longer you spend on google the more money they make. Why would they give you what you want right away

  11. Re the search engine algorithm, not the printer: I post essays as ‘gaiabrain’ at the google-owned blog platform. You can copy any sentence from one of the essays and search for an exact match. You will not find the blog. [The topic of the essays is how to end poverty and promote sustainability by charging substantial fees to industries that emit pollution, deplete resources or disturb / destroy wildlife habitat, then sharing fee proceeds to all people. The effect would be to shift billions of dollars from the most harmful industries to the people at large, so there is a lot of economic incentive for vested interests to use anti-SEO tactics (e.g., massive fake traffic) to depress the likelihood that the algorithm will list the site.]

  12. You are using laser printer for something it isn’t intended for. Adam Savage is stupid!
    YOU SHOULDA JUST STUCK TO MYTHBUSTERS PRICK!

  13. Consistent laser printer quality aside, Yeah…I get it Adam. Google’s search engine is a pile of hot garbage, which is why I don’t use it anymore. Not only does it very often return search results that are completely irrelevant, it will filter the results so that you cannot find the thing(s) you’re looking for with the necessary specificity… unless you know the exact url of the site in question. And we don’t, which is why we’re doing a search in the first place. It’s absurd. And Google isn’t the only company with this problem. Although they may well be the worst. In the distant past, this wasn’t the case. But over the years almost all mainstream search engines have continued to get incrementally worse. If you want a search engine that DOES what it’s SUPPOSED to do, you’ll have to get medieval on it and find one that does the thing. There are a couple that come to mind off the top of my head. They aren’t perfect by any means, but they’re better than what most people are using. Of all the search engines I’ve tested, Yandex has come out as the best one for going out and finding whatever that thing is that you’re looking for. Quant is decent as well, but definitely not as refined as Yandex. I can type in the most obscure search keyword and Yandex will get out der and find it. Quant not so much, but it’s still better in terms of relevancy than Google. Currently I’m testing Quant more extensively, owing to Yandex’s annoying captcha feature. That’s really the only downside I’ve found to the Yandex search engine. So you might give that a go and let us know how it turns out for you. As for the laser printer issue, unfortunately I have no experience with wide format machines. Although I do use a regular Brother black and white machine that works awesomely with no issues. Good luck in your search for the perfect wide format machine.

  14. Soooo this is a video about SEO hijacking the Laser Printer topic instead of Laser printers themselves. This is the THIRD video I’ve clicked on hoping to make a decision on Laser printers only to be left with videos NOT TALKING ABOUT LASER PRINTERS!!!!! WTF is it with this subject?!?!?! You should have titled the video "Adam Savage’s Rant on The SEO Misuse of Laser Printers."

  15. Hi Adam, as a fan of typsetting I thought you’d want to know about a document called State of Text Rendering 2024 by Behdad Esfahbod. I think I can’t paste links here, so google for it and look for the paper on his website. It doesn’t come up as a first order search result for me, but it’s easy to hop to from his website or others that link to it.

  16. Look up a color laser plotter, we have a b&w KIP large format printer at my work. They also have a color option. But those are LARGE, 36" rolls for poster size prints.

  17. Its not the search engine doing it. The business website is "shoveling" every possible keyword they believe you might type into their HTML to get any hit they can. The search engines "crawl" these pages and build the indexes that you are querying. Its Garbage in – Gospel Out. This gets you back to the cardinal flaw of the Internet – no editorial filtering. Its a free-for-all and anything that can be posted will be by someone, somewhere. AI should slowly erode this garbage but for now its heavy on the "match" and not on the context.

  18. Can you use aftermarket toner with black and white laser printers and if it spells their won’t be a problem because they don’t have TB(transfer belts) like color Lazer printer that can break. How do you clean it up though?

  19. I wonder if you’re being exposed to the people who pay the most for their website to show up on your search results. Another point to consider is if you have exotic material that you’re printing on that has metals in it, this may cause electrical problems with the paper transfer roller that is responsible for transferring toner from the intermediate transfer belt to the paper.

  20. So your rant isn’t about laser printers; it’s about bad search engines and/or search optimizers and search manipulators (people gaming search engines). Your video’s title is not indicative of video content. BTW, I have a pet peeve about YouTube content providers who wrongly (deceptively?) label their videos… Touche? 😅😂

  21. in 1995 I recovered a HP LaserJet 4 when my employer asked me to take it to the recyclers so they could upgrade. I had that printer until it finally died in 2009 in my home. That was the last HP I ever worked on that was made in the USA and I weep a bit each time I visit it’s grave in my back yard.

  22. My best experiences have been with Brother and Kyocera, but holy crap printer driver software and printer firmware is so bad.
    Fuser temperature is often controllable in the firmware… but not exposed meaningfully through drivers.

  23. Hey Adam, I’ve tried a couple of searches and I believe it is a problem of data overload. Too much data flooding the algorithms. Here are a couple queries that may lead in the right direction, "commercial tabloid color laser printer", "color laser printer that prints 11×17". Some of the commercial brands like Xerox, Kyocera, and Ricoh are probably the better choice. You may end up leasing one of those big office monsters.

  24. I blame Google for this more than SEO in this case. They changed search results to not REQUIRE all your search terms in the results by default. Try putting double-quotes around "laser", and the results will improve somewhat.

  25. And its not just laser printer searchers its most searchers and it does my head in. When are these companies going to give us what we want rather than what they what us to have…??? Cheers matey.

  26. Curious whatever happened with this. Did he buy a different printer? I know this is 2 years too late, but I would like to point out that temperature specs for the labels and printers are knowable things; I wonder if any attempts to research this was done. It also seems strange to research high temperature printers without trying to research lower temperature labels.

  27. Yea this has been a problem for at least 12 years. WABAC in 2008 I did a search for a Tektronix FUSE. This fuse hadn’t been made since the mid 90s. Very specialized and had a part number of at least 9 characters. Yet every search the top two returns that said they had that was Sears (the 50cent zex worker of the internet) and Walmart ( the two dollar zex worker of the internet). When you clicked on the links each time it was a different not related product. If I type in a 12 character part number I’d better be getting the grandson of Klem’s TV shop in Peckerwood Ida-hoe with a garage sale of them or TI offering to sell me some for 9.95/1K pieces. Not Kams Klub trying to pawn off vanilla candles as precision fuses.

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