Perhaps home printers are a wasteland, but the copy/printers and plotters at my work are pretty dang reliable, considering they do thousands of pages or thousands of linear feet a day sometimes.
Indeed, but this is the "easy" case, and I suspect your IT guys/gals spent a considerable amount of time setting up and shaking the bugs out of this setup.
It's not that printers are physically unreliable, although they certainly can be. It's the logical complexity of getting an image (or text) from one device via the myriad protocols, connectors (or wireless), page layout languages, etc., correctly onto the printer. And for added fun, even after RMSs long trek, some printers still aren't open enough to drive without secret software.
