Trouble free printers are great except...

When they actually have a problem, you've forgotten how to fix them.

Witness the recent paper jam of the last sheet in the tray. The paper light comes on and I load more paper but the light stays on. R&R tray, more paper, less paper, other paper, inspect the tray, the tray cavity, several times each.

Finally start opening every door, r&r the consumables, and finally a crumbled piece of paper shows, OH YES! That dumb paper lamp doubles for jam.

Yeah, I don't understand that part of electronic device design: Using a single indicator to show more than one different condition.

I mean, I'm all for simplifying displays and making them attractive, but would it have killed them, price-wise, to have used a second LED to indicate a paper jam? Are LED's really that expensive to source?

And when you use a single LED but have different blink patterns or colors to indicate different conditions... That's painful. For instance, I've got a few different chargers for various cameras batteries and R/C toys. They all have a completely different way of indicating when the charge cycle is complete, and they all have only the single LED labeled "charge". For each one, I have to look up in the manual what it means. One of them, the green light goes out when it's charged, another, the red light goes out when it's charged, another, the light changes color when it's charged (changes to red rather than the expected green as a matter of fact), another, the light (colored yellow) stops blinking when it's charged, etc. How tough would it have been to design the product to have two LEDs, A red one labeled "charging" and a green one labeled "charge complete"?

When those designers die and go to hell, they shall forever be forced to carry an ever growing backpack of product manuals until they are crushed beneath the weight.

As bad: access card readers that beep once to tell you they've read your card successfully, and beep once to tell you that they've not read your card correctly, meaning that you look like an ass when the revolving door spits you back out again.

At least beep twice for a failure, you stupid device.

To be fair, this particular device does have red and green lights on it, but you can't see them once you're halfway into the revolving door and waving your card at the reader.

I've always found the blink while charging, solid when finished pretty easy to remember. Seems somewhat intuitive and pretty standardized over many different types of products, not just chargers.

Equally easy is red (or amber) for charging, green for finished. Single 2-colour or tricolor LED.

But that's state display. 1 LED is also fine to display functioning versus error state. But using the same LED for two different functions or errors is completely different.

With my current and last printers, I've gotten a report back on the computer indicating what the issue is - load paper, jam, etc. And an LCD on the printer itself explains the problem as well. Thankfully my printer wasn't designed by Google.

PC LOAD LETTER

Had to Google that one... Funny. I don't watch television, so didn't have the benefit of "The Office" for background reference.

tanstaafl.

You don't need to watch TV, just needed to own an HP-brand printer in the 90's. :-)

Don't get me started on color coded LEDs - I'm color blind. Tech support: "What color is the LED?" Beats me! What color might it be?

Argh!

-jk

I'm going to replace all LED status lights on all my gadgets with a small speaker and Samuel L. Jackson sound-bites.

I'll leave what happens when a battery is done charging up to your imagination.