"No HP product could possibly be a good investment for me" - Any & Every Sane Customer
It's nice to see people saying what they actually believe out loud. Refreshing.
How to convince the larger masses that this is actually a reflection of HP's plain gross incompetence (and likely intentional), rather than "the inevitable natural order of things" as the HP lackeys want to imply?
This is making me more inclined to switch to a (non-HP) color laser printer, but I'm finding it challenging to find reputable information about total cost of ownership. Would love some suggestions!
If this is true, HP's CEO just publically admitted that their printers have some serious security issue.
>HP has long banged the drum [PDF] about the potential for malware to be introduced via print cartridges, and in 2022, its bug bounty program confirmed that third-party cartridges with reprogrammable chips could deliver malware into printers.
Well, you would be, if it weren't for a thousand cuts like this in the past.
I would buy ink cartridges from the vendors if they were not twice as expensive and utilizing sleezy tactics like lying about being empty.
HP will be gone, like Digital is.
But perhaps the bigger feedback I'd offer in response to your comment is that just because something doesn't apply to you or your situation doesn't mean that it's not relevant to other people.
If enough other people do the same, they'll be rich, right?
Convince me they sell those printers at a loss.
I think the minimum a company should do is to show some kind of minimum respect to a potential customer.
Be careful when you extrapolate your own personal habits onto broader market trends.
HP by itself still brings in $18B per year in printer revenue [2].
[1] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1247076/consumer-electron...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274447/hewlett-packards-...
https://www.druckerchannel.de/
(google translate, or a equivalent, might be handy)
Makes me hopeful that one day all workers will realize who produces the value in their companies and start to restructure in a way that puts their voices more near the top. Unions are obviously great for this, but we just need more of that honestly.
HP: "no u"
(j/k of course...i actually rather like their enterprise blade offering if you're making your own cloud)
I've owned 4 Brother printers since the 90s. The first one lasted more than a decade, and I put it through the wringer. The next one lasted about the same, including a stint as EIC of a magazine which meant I printed a ton of proofs on that poor thing. They all worked easily with Linux, to boot.
I currently own two, one color and one multi-function B&W. They don't actually get a ton of usage but <knocks wood> they work when I need them to and I'm not constantly buying toner for the things.
(I'm sure other folks have horror stories because somebody always does no matter what product, but they've served me well enough - and certainly Brother doesn't seem to be as customer hostile as HP.)
I finally wised up many years ago and bought a Brother laser printer after wasting far too much money on inkjets. At the time it was a bigger cost but it's more than paid for itself now compared to an inkjet.
Anybody that does not want to have toner particles (that are carcinogenic) dust in their houses' air.
No need to worry about "investing" in me. I saw where it is all going and have switched to Brother long time ago.
You couldn’t pay me to use an HP printer anymore.
Artists who want prints often buy their own inkjet printers. There are a few good reasons—you can calibrate it, you can immediately adjust and reprint something if you don't like the output, and in the long-run you’ll save money over having somebody printing it for you. I remember doing the math on this—I’ve run printing services for art students and we charged the students 0% markup, so I got a good handle on what the cost savings were compared to commercial offerings (including Wallgreens &c).
The break-even point for an artist comes really quickly, if you’re someone who prints. It’s not even a ton of photos, you can easily come out ahead as a hobbyist.
The costs are also reasonably similar across the major inkjet printer brands (HP, Canon, Epson).
I'm not so sure this is a horrible idea from the standpoint of their business. Other businesses could operate differently and if people preferred that, they wouldn't buy HP. Case in point, I haven't heard anyone recommend an HP printer recently.
We had injects before, but they would gum up because we didn't use them enough. So we switched to laser. Those lasted forever, but they don't work for any heat transfer or other "special" print jobs that we do.
Now we have the subscription. Once in a while new ink shows up, right before we run out. It's kind of magical.
I realize this won't work for everyone, but I can see it working for most people who still need a printer.
They know better than most what makes a bad investment.
This dried out the non-replaceable inkjet heads, bricking the entire thing. I think I might have gotten 10 decent non-test-page pages out of it before I recycled it.
My current printer is a samsung wifi-enabled laser that cost about $100. It's great, but HP bought the division, and the first-party toner, drums, etc, are now garbage. Fortunately, the cheap supplies work as well as the OEM supplies used to. If you see one used on craigslist, etc, it might be worth picking up.
There have been some intermittent bugs with the MacOS / iOS / Linux CUPS drivers (I think they're all the same open source stuff), but it's been trouble-free otherwise.
I agree though. For new consumer printers, I think Brother laser jets seem to be the only remaining choice worth considering.
The technology behind them is insane for most of them costing less than $100
That's barely coherent...
>"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."
Remind me whos idea was it to have any sort of electronics in cartridges? Ah yes the printer industry trying to coerce their victims eh clients into reduced choice and monopoly control of supplies.
What a sleezy industry
Works from Windows, Mac, Linux, Airprint, iPad, iPhone, etc. No driver installs needed. I use it from the command line on Mac - I use groff - and it prints those PDF or PostScript files without issue, though oddly the duplexer works from the command line only if I use a generic PostScript driver.
I use only genuine HP supplies because I know of no other reputable supplies vendor, so I can't say whether non-HP supplies work.
What happens when the heads dry out, the printer stops working, or they decide to drop windows device driver support? Do they mail you replacement hardware? I've had at least one of those things happen every year or two with 100% of the inkjets I've owned, regardless of brand, but especially with HPs.
Instant Ink is a great program that got ruined by morons that think they're geniuses.
It's so frequent to see people that paid for a month of Instant Ink, cancelled their sub after getting their cartridges, and then got a Surprised Pikachu face when their Instant Ink cartridges won't work after that. Then they post to reddit crying about how HP won't let them use the ink that they paid for without a subscription.
They think they're geniuses for figuring out how to game the system. Pay $5 for a month, get cartridges, cancel, and you'll end up with a full set of cartridges for only $5! Do they really think HP would let them get away with that?
HP makes it clear: When you subscribe to Instant Ink, you're not paying for ink, you're paying for a quota of printed pages. The ink cartridges are nothing more than a vehicle to provide those printed pages. You never own the ink!
That's a bit rich. The reason cartridges have chips in the first place is so printer manufacturers can monitor their use and try and prevent customers from using off-brand ones.
A $150 one-time purchase will result in several hours of saved time going to the print shop over a few years.
I don't print often, but when I do, I like that I don't have to make a trip out.
It's great having a Brother laser printer at home. It's saved me hours and hours going to a Kinkos. But also keep in mind that my use cases are not generalizable. If I didn't do this, I'd feel much the way you do.
[0](Because the printer is on the UPS that has a USB connection to my desktop.)
Seems an excellent justification for the board to fire the CEO for fiscal irresponsibility.
please just sell me a rock-durable/repairable, PS/PCL-compatible, easily-refillable printer (I know you can, you used to make these when I was a kid) for whatever a price which satisfies you and leave me alone with it forever. I'm not an investment, I'm a deal, a good old "right here right now" kind.
Or wait... actually I am also an investment because, if satisfied, I will convince almost every client and friend of mine to buy one or more printers of the same model (now I do so for Brother but there's room to compete in quality).
Or maybe go the Lexmark way - sell dirt-cheap printers to up-sell expensive ink cartridges. This also is a fair deal some will be happy to choose because the printer itself is so cheap. As long as the carriage head is replaceable and won't clog to death when not used often enough.
But in whatever a case - no cloud/app bullshit please, just plain drivers.
Color laser printers shine when doing documents and office-style graphics with charts, etc, not photos.
Only minor gripe is the process for getting a return label for recycling toner which requires reading a minuscule serial number to enter into a web form.
I also routinely print for work. This is how I review draft documents. This allows me to leave my desk, and I find it easier to read paper.
I don't think paper will ever be obsolete for me.
They could probably make knockoff LaserJet IIIs, but nobody wants enough to fire up an entire line.
Or is the situation that HP is trying to increase profits beyond that (and the way is to force subscriptions)?
On subscriptions, are there two angles? I'm thinking maybe (1) consumer has to get consumables from HP rather than competitors, no DRM circumvention tricks, so HP gets the revenue and fixes the price; and (2) consumer is forced to provide regularly recurring revenue, has little flexibility, and overall paying more than they would purchasing refills on-demand.
* worksheets/coloring pages for the kids
* FedEx/shipping labels for various things
* documents/forms/etc (especially legal/school/rebate)
* state taxes when not e-filing to save money
The printer is small and sits in a corner on a shelf, far from everyone.
At first, I'd be content with a manually fed dual axis flat tracer, or anything able to transpose a pdf to paper. Really, the printer companies cartel need some opposition here.
One revenue stream is not enough now, for anyone. You can't sell a widget. It seems shareholders now demand you maximize:
* original sale of hardware, sometimes loss leader
* subscription for cloud service
* subscription for supplies/refills
* advertising to end user eyeballs, direct psyops
* exfiltrate and sell end user data
* require phone app which includes more surveillance, location, etc
> I can count on 1 finger how many times I needed to print something in the past few years and FedEx Kinkos is perfect for that.
That's awesome! But there are lots of people who need to print often enough that the cost (in time and/or money) of going to a shop to do it is very hard to justify.
For my case, I print 2-4 pages monthly no matter what, and a handful of pages on average on top of that. That's not much printing, but it's more than enough to justify having a printer. Going to a shop to do that printing is a large amount of time and hassle.
Just be careful. HP has said loud and clear what they think of you and all their other customers, and their thinking is actively against you.
but what about Instant Ink is great? It looks like a terrible program for anyone who isn't named "HP".
Apparently I'm not alone wanting it. I have little idea of the market potential but I believe there is some.
Apparently there are at least some investors and makers who believe the same. For example this is how they market Matic[1] (a cloud-free smart vacuum robot). Which I'm probably going to buy (unless I discover it's not bullshit-free enough) although it's expensive. I still have no robot vacuum just because every not-horribly-dumb model depends on a cloud (even though they don't have to - some are possible to uncloud but I have no time for this).
The same applies to social networks etc - they try to reach every person in the world by offering free service at a cost of the user being made a product. Let me pay money but respect me as a customer, not a zombie.
I'm sure the same factories could make zero-margin laser or inkjet printers, but why target a shrinking, obsolete market when you could use the same employee expertise to build things for growing, high margin markets?
I'm guessing buggy whip and carriage bolt manufacturers charged crazy markups for 10-20 years after the Model T came out. I think we're witnessing something similar (especially for inkjets that target document sized printouts).
I buy very old HP LaserJet printers surplus, and max the RAM, then feed them Genuine HP supplies I get in eBay for 5% to 10% of the retail price.
Also, I tend to connect them with USB-to-parallel adapters because every old printer is exploitable.
Way higher tier item, but... Epson's EcoTank 8550 has gotten pretty glowing reviews. Very very low per-page count. Too early to tell about long term reliability, but looking ok so far! A randomly selected review: https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2022/10/12/epson-ecota...
I'd been interested in getting something big & expensive like a Canon Pro-1000 but knowing the per page price was also going to be considerable, even more so if you aren't using it constantly (it periodically cleans itself)... It was hard to justify. I haven't bought the ET-8550 yet but the idea has stayed on my mind.
Or at least not an entire printer, but something where you would buy some popular printer model and replace its motherboard.
1. Parts
2. Various cheap items without brands
3. Obvious "overruns" of a branded factory smuggled out the back door
4. Additional runs of a factory that is no longer making whatever it was for the original manufacturer
5. Supplies
You find some printer stuff in 1 and 5, and I saw a few that might be 3 or 4.
Nobody in China is bringing up ancient equipment lines (and it would likely be way more expensive).
At most, you might be able to find someone somewhere (if you have the right connections) that can get you a default firmware for some known printer that is OEM'd to everyone. I know these have been found for things like smart bulbs and other firmware'd devices.
I have had the worst luck with samsung devices, everything but their ram and ssds have failed on me in an incredibly short time (appliances failing in less than 3 years) or had issues making them nearly unusable for me, such as their TV backlights are set to like 6500k or something, far too blue and hurts to look at for me.
No one makes what I want to buy.
The important thing is that you're printing frequently, at least once per week, and using up most of your quota. If you're like me, where you print maybe 50 pages per year, it's a terrible deal. But if I was printing 50 pages per month, that's only $4/month. That's $0.08 per page. Meanwhile, a spot check of a few sets of color cartridges shows that buying your cartridges outright is around 13-15 cents per page.
If you only do black, then it's not that good of a deal.
That being said, maybe it's a lemon, but my wife has a low-end (still ~$400CAD) colour laser printer from Brother which...not great for that kind of thing. It's built well and might outlive me, but it's clearly meant for printing documents with the occasional coloured chart in them, and things get pretty ugly if you push it beyond that. The cheap inkjets I grew up with 20 years ago might have crapped out every few years, but I remember them having better colour output.
I just got a Shark XL vacuum which mostly works without its app and cloud, you just push its Clean button and it goes off and comes back to dock when it's done. But if you want schedule and mapping, you're stuck. There is a Home Assistant integration for it, but that just talks to their cloud (not well). Interestingly, that cloud saas is shared among a number of vacuum makers so it's not open, but it there's always hoping.
This would be extremely disappointing to me if Brother has gone the way of the dodo because I specifically bought a Brother printer for this reason and continued to buy their OEM cartridges and toners as a means of support. I've been voting with my dollars and would like some evidence that this is the case and possibly that this is intentional before I bring out the pitchfork on this one.
Some issues:
Mine must be connected to the network via Ethernet; if I use Wi-Fi it disappears from the network after about 5-10 minutes (goes to sleep?) and you cannot print without pressing a few buttons on the printer.
It is unable to update its own firmware (maybe this is a plus?).
There is a fair amount of thin plastic and a general feeling that it will break if I’m not gentle. But I have had it for almost 3 years with no breakage.
They don't want that done deal. They don't want your one time payment. They want you paying. They want perpetual payments from you. They want you paying constantly every year, every month, every day. They want rent. Perpetual rent seeking. Their printers are just the cheapest mechanism they managed to come up with to extract that rent from you.
I think there's beauty in a well running machine.
PS oh, and if you want super high print quality, probably you should get an LBP236dw, which adds PostScript support.
I'd throw all our worthless Xerox in the trash if I could still get Oki.
Can't have you printing anonymously
1. I'd love to be able to tell my HL-4150 to not clean itself at midnight. Or really any time anyone might be asleep. You have an NTP server connection; use it! OTOH, my dad's Lexmark had that same stupidity. (I love buying professionalish products, but they seem to do everything they can to ensure office products are unusable at home.)
2. I've never experienced toner cartridges that leaked so much as the Brother one (yes, all four.) I ended up buying cheap 3P cartridges, and haven't had the same issue. They royally screwed up the seals/spreader somehow.
That said, it does print and is fast, so as long as I don't let it sit turned on for too long, it works.
It was definitely more costly than HP or Epson, but damn it’s worth it
A place where I worked in the early 2000s used old-school HP laser printers. The one in my unit cranked through boxes and boxes of paper with no trouble at all. It was all heavy-gauge metal, and must've weighed 50 pounds at least.
Post-Carly, HP printers became the same flimsy Chinese crap as all the other brands. Carly's bright idea was to take flimsy Chinese crap, slap an HP label on it, and sell it for HP prices.
You can get away with that. Once. After that, no one is going to ever buy your overpriced junk again.
Most people get the more economical 6 cents per page plan.
> What happens when the heads dry out, the printer stops working, or they decide to drop windows device driver support?
The same thing that happens when you own the printer -- it stops working and you have to get it fixed or replaced. I'm not sure what your point is here.
Inkjets break unless they get regular use. If you're going to use it regularly, the ink subscription isn't a bad way to go.
Now they don't dry out and the printer can't sneakily squirt all the very very expensive ink into a sponge when you least expect it.