Your HP printer is one of the luckier members of its family.
You seriously have no idea what its sibling had to go through before you were able to bring your printer home.
For starters, it was dropped from three feet off the ground onto a concrete floor, shocked 12,000 times with up to 12,500 volts and had a robot open and shut its paper tray hundreds of thousands of times in a row. It was even driven into a wall.
Why does HP put its new printer designs through such grueling tests before they’re cleared to join the manufacturing line? When you sell 60 printers every minute of every day in every corner of the world, there’s no telling what conditions the device may need to excel in.
Robots and rice paper
Like a Boy Scout, HP printers need to be prepared. To ensure that, the engineers at the company’s testing laboratory in Boise, Idaho, have constructed special robots; a cavernous, multimillion-dollar soundproof chamber; and special tools with high-resolution cameras that analyze whether or not the colored inks are being perfectly placed on the page.