r/pcmasterrace • u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p • 57m ago

Hardware This silly HP buisness printer has an entire dang PC in it. Yes, it broke.

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82 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

65

u/emetcalf 49m ago

It needs a lot of processing power to know the exact moment to die that will optimize the company's profit. If it dies at a convenient time, the user won't be willing to pay as much for a replacement.

7

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 37m ago

I think you're on to something. It died exactly when one of our other ones was out of toner and we don't have a replacement cartridge yet.

72

u/WesBur13 55m ago

What else do you think runs the printer?

24

u/WonderSignificant598 53m ago

Exactly lol.

To start, If it has IP networking, its a computer.

EDIT: The big boy MFP/Copiers usually have HDD and internal ports.

8

u/WesBur13 39m ago

Didn’t mean to sound pretentious, just very common in business. If they are new to the industry they are gonna find little PCs in the oddest of places.

3

u/WonderSignificant598 24m ago

This is true. I remember when I did when I started. It was like 'that's a computer??!'

17

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 54m ago

Of course printers have integrated controlboards in them, just not usually full HDDs, internal USB, HDMI, etc.

18

u/WesBur13 52m ago

I’m going to assume you have never worked on a business level copier before? This is par for the course.

8

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 51m ago

I have not, and now I know.

this thing isn't really that big though

2

u/WesBur13 34m ago

Just wait for the fun places you’ll find tiny PCs shoved haha. Weirdest for me was a controller for a fuel pump consisted of 3 X86 Intel machines.

13

u/ballsnbutt 42m ago

"I'm going to assume you have never worked on a business level copier before?" like it's a normal thing everyone does (not even normal in PCMR) is SO fuckin pretentious.

2

u/nuked24 9800X3D, 32GB, RTX 3090 32m ago

I mean, how else is HR going to print their massive PDF books out? The printer needs storage for those jobs, it's not like the PC is going to stream 1 page at a time over the network.

1

u/bigpunk157 23m ago

Your washing machine most likely also has a small computer in it. When we get to this level of tech where we can change configurations, especially with wifi and such, there's almost always a small computer behind it.

2

u/ToughDefinition2591 40m ago

Large copiers/MFP Printers do and is much more common than you think. That's a Toshiba 500Gb 2.5" drive. Either for a Toshiba E-Studio copier or some HP. The drive is used to store scanned documents in an encrypted format and can be shared over local network. That's the PCB controlling the machine.

1

u/hex4def6 35m ago

I'm assuming if it's designed for serving an office, you need enough space for a bunch of documents. If suzy from marketeer is printing 400 page / 600DPI draft material, that could potentially be hundreds of megabytes. Do that for 50 people, and that would be gigabytes. Ffor the age of the machine, I'm assuming solid state would be prohibitive.

To print, you need to move that into RAM; you probably want (at least) hundreds of megs for that as well.

More modern printers might not use HDMI, instead of an integrated solution like DSI, but they're still fundamentally having to do the same thing.

It looks like they use a proprietary version of Linux, which makes sense. It's a similar thing to routers.

So yeah, a PC-compatible architecture seems pretty reasonable.

I could imagine more modern printers might go to something like an android-tablet style SOC, but still fundamentally doing that same thing.

1

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 31m ago

funny thing is it's just a basic veterinary office. Way overkill for us.

2

u/Wyldefire6 40m ago

Everything is computer

8

u/Hsensei 50m ago

I've been upgrading ram in printers for decades

7

u/Obzen80 37m ago

Welcome to pcmasterrace where neckveards will give you shit for learning something new. How dare you not know this.

3

u/Primary_Mushroom3857 35m ago

So can it run doom?

3

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 55m ago

Probably just needs a new HDD but it's old enough to where it'll probably just get replaced entirely.

MFP E57540, for those curious

1

u/ToughDefinition2591 36m ago

It will show error codes to indicate the issue.
https://support.hp.com/za-en/product/troubleshooting/hp-color-laserjet-managed-mfp-e57540-series/20008705

1

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 33m ago

Only tossed an error once, now starts, works for 2 documents then totally freezes requiring hard power cut only to repeat the same cycle. And of course without the admin password (god forbid IT actually lets an end user do something) I can't run the internal diagnostics.

Either way it's like 9 years old. End of life for a printer these days.

1

u/iamwayycoolerthanyou 23m ago

You may be able to reset that admin password.

1

u/avboden 5600X, 5070Ti, 1440p 18m ago

yeah probably a way to do a hard reset but meh, at this point not my problem.

1

u/iamwayycoolerthanyou 16m ago

My man. Great attitude 👍

You're hired.

1

u/AdditionalMap5576 17m ago

As someone in IT, I would never order HP printers. They basically become your job. Just get some mid range brothers and call it a day

1

u/EJ_Tech 5800x • 3060 Ti • Fractal North 41m ago

This is not the first time I've seen the computer part of a printer, especially ones deployed in business environments. However this is the first time I'm seeing one with a HDD instead of the more typical flash storage.

1

u/Alfrredu Ryzen 1600 / RX 570 36m ago

Of course it does, and it runs Linux. I used to make those