I love/hate my new printer

One of my pet peevs is when somebody puts together something that does exactly what I want, and then decides to cut one feature that kills much of the value of it. It really drives me nuts, and this is a story of exactly that.

So, I just got a brand new multi-function printer to replace the photo printer that died recently. It's got a lot of cool features that I really like.

• Photo capabilities (with 7 separate ink cartridges, so I have a good breadth of color and only need to replace the colors I run out of).
• Decent printing speed
• Ethernet capabilities, so I can connect it directly to the network and have several machines print to it without having to turn on a main print server machine.
• Fax and Scanning (I already had a scanner, but it's nice to be able to fax out when needed)

So, you think all would be perfect with the world. I unpacked the box, put it all together and hooked it up to the network. I had one machine I was going to use to administer the printer, so I took the CD and installed the required software and then configured it. I was impressed. Smooth sailing up until this point.

So, now I wanted to take my laptop and set it up to use the printer. The instructions said you had to use the CD to do this, but I simply could not believe that they would require me to install all sorts of software on it, when all I needed was a network identifier for the printer to connect to it. I ended up spending the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to do it (I was even able to telnet to the host name and port 9100, type in a few items, and then cause it to show up on the printer). To no avail. In their infinite wisdom, the printer manufacturer decided to create a proprietary print server. I'm sure that it has something to do with the fact that it also does scanning. I can just see the design discussions that went on:

Well, we've already built this thing that the administrator uses to configure the printer on the network. Instead of using standard protocols for sharing the printing, fax, and scanning features, let's just use what we already built. Sure, the people would have to install the administrator tool on any machine that wants to use the printer through the print server. Since this printer isn't part of our business product family, they should feel lucky this printer even has the ethernet functionality."

This is really frustrating, because the manufacturer took away a lot of the value of the print server functionality with this decision, and there really isn't a good reason for it. Whenever somebody wants to use this printer, they have to have the CD and install the software on their machine. Additionally, anybody who spends any time administering computers knows that bloatware is a problem. I don't want to install a bunch of extra crap, just to send something to the printer

With all the cool things this printer does, it's really frustrating that they overlooked such a simple requirement that has a big impact on the value of it (although not such a big impact that it would cause me to return it... in some ways, I guess that's the point regardless of my frustration, isn't it?).

P.S. I'd tell you the model number in question, but the manufacturer is a potential customer of ours (and I see this sort of thing going on with other manufacturers, so I don't necessarily want to single them out).