I was a HP customer for decades. I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend.
My mfc-l3750cdw Brother printer is a bit of a beast, but it does it's job amazingly well. It's 2x the size, weight, and price of my old HP but it's worth every penny for the peace of mind. It prints when I need it to print. It shuts down when it's not printing. It connects to wifi and doesn't try to serve me an ad while doing it. It uses ink logically. And I don't feel like I'm trying to resolve a problem that was effectively solved in 1995.
The hard fact is that printers and copiers as a market has been shrinking (outside of China) for years now [1]. It's gone from a necessity to a niche need, and even then people have kinkos / WeWork / their parents house as a backup.
HP isn't going back, just switch. Save yourself like I did.
[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/co...
They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.
In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.
I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.
Is that you can easily circumevent the way this particular brand tries to cheat you.
If so, that's unfortunate.
I queried him further & according to him its random because he's heard both positive & negative stories with the exact same model numbers (which makes me think it must be firmware updates).
Thankfully my (very new) laser didn't have this issue: print quality is perfect. Afraid to do any fw updates now though.
I was under the impression that newer Brother firmware versions had restrictions:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I have an HL-L2360D, but my firmware is from 2015 (with no plans to upgrade), so have no idea if anything has changed recently.
There was a way to turn off the low toner warnings, I did it, and seem to be ok, but it makes me wonder.
EDIT: wow, it sells for $449 on amazon. I paid $115 in 2017.
If yes, what other product categories is this applicable?
And I’m sure printers are probably a minefield of patents.
A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).
There are a handful of companies that hold all the patents necessary to build a printer. If you try to build one from scratch "taking inspiration" from consumer ones you will be sued into oblivion
The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.
The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...
It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.
The scum even introduced drm-checking printers under same model name and number so the previous good reviews stay
I'm sure it's got enough stepper motors.
Not sure about the 'legally' part though.
Hp is the worst company for any hardware needs, all their laptops/dektops sucked so much, back in the day in my electronics shop they where the ones with the worst return/faults rate, by a big margin.
I bought a brother color laser (HL-L3290CDW). She was skeptical as it was much more expensive than the HP inkjet we had. A few weeks later, she called me randomly to thank me for getting it telling me how fantastic it was and how much easier it had made her life. First time she’s done that for any tech stuff I’ve gotten her.
I’ll never but another HP product.
I now recommend friends and family to avoid HP like the plague, including laptops (which I've also had bad experiences with). Such a shame, their stuff used to be great.
I also love my Brother laser printer, and don't hate my p-touch.
No bullets to bite. My brother laser is over 12 years old and works just like it did when I bought it. I like it so much I bought another for another part of the house. Did I mention it also groks postscript for those that might want to print from a BSD machine right OOTB?
It just works.
I'm buying a Brother laser today. I've hated this HP since I bought it, but it was a necessary evil for raising elementary school-aged children.
about a year ago, the drum gave out. it cost me $40 to replace
over those 7 years, i printed about 2000 pages: somewhat less than 1 page a day
take from what that what you will
User-hostile features are created by people.
Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).
I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")
Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")
Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.
So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design
They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost.
They believe businesses want OEM.
They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.
They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product.
By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their data analysis also says on some level.
Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
> Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy which means sometimes they have to come up with insane and unconvincing excuses to justify their evils. They are bound to feel uncomfortable when someone tells them the truth by advocating for the customer. They can still take the money by screwing over other people, but it means they can't do it while pretending that it doesn't make them assholes.
this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!
We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.
The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.
Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.
PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.
Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?
At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.
And what is astounding is that we, as a society, have accepted this backwards rationale.
The only reason we should allow companies to exist is to serve the societal interests, and making the money should be the side effect.
The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.
Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.
Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."
In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."
This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.
I worked for a large Telco and wrote and maintained the software and system(s) that calculated internet usage, and charged overages monthly. (The home internet plans sold by this telco that service a massive landmass all had hard usage caps. There is no competition).
I saw many, many monthly internet overage bills that were $5k+. Hundreds a month that were $1k+. That system alone made many millions in profit per year.
Why did I do it? It was my job, I needed to pay rent and buy food.
Longer term, I decided to "stay on the inside" because I genuinely thought I could improve things. Over the years I had meetings with basically all the VPs and even the CEO, and sent many a passionate email on behalf of customers that many told me were "Career Limiting Moves".
I'm not there anymore, and it's many years later, but that Telco does now offer unlimited internet plans (introduced very recently). I was the first at the company to run the numbers on what it would look like and start to push for it at all levels, so I like to think I did actually make things better.
FWIW, there was one guy in my department who refused to work on/with that usage system, and made it clear that from a moral standpoint he would quit if they forced him to.
The inital strategy by all companies was to point out that original ink is better in some way, then most of them tried some sorts of firmware based restrictions. HP actually tried a pretty interesting approach with their ink subscription model. They have a decent price/page with that and you don't ever have to worry about running out of ink because you automatically get a replacement cartridge if you subscribe for x$/month. The downside is that the number of pages that you are "allowed" to print each month is limited which seems pretty ridiculous at first glance for a tech person. However, if you think about "normal users" I think they actually found a good way to force them back to their ink by selling "peace of mind".
So basically, while I completely disagree with the approach because I want to use a device I buy any way I please I think HP is actually making the right business call here. The average customer cares about having an ok price/page and having a printer that always prints when they need it. I think HP is targeting that with their subscription model and also making cash flows a bit more reliable.
By and large I expect most workers know and dislike that, but ultimately it's a small compromise for them personally - in most cases they may not even use the product they work on. The best they can do usually is object to it, but if people want it done then it'll be done; after all, that's what you're getting paid for.
I’m not really in a a financial position to just say fuck it and leave at a moments notice, and it feels a bit different when you’re making Adobe for example pay extra money.
I think we can all imagine the actual reason people in charge do it though: money
The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be (the PM since moved off to another team to continue innovating). This made me angry and sad, but most of my peers didn't care at all, and some even expressed interest to "work on the high impact feature" to get a promo for themselves as well :(
Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.
I'd say that's 99% of the tech workers' mentality. Especially if they need to stay employed to stay in the country, better to just lick the boot than give any impressions of opposition.
These questions should be posed to executives at shareholder meetings.
not cogs in the machine. When was an evil feature ever stopped by rank and file workers?
You'd be surprised how easy is to change your mind when it's your own work or company, yet still be outraged at others when they do it. It's very common.
> what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
The people who make the decision to implement these kinds of features are bad people. Full stop. They want to punish people, and believe a technological solution provides a fool-proof way to punish the people around them. It's about control, and spreading hurt around. It's about being able to exert control on others, without them having the ability to push back. It is evil, and I hate it.
I have implemented user-hostile features in the past because it was my job at the time, and I would be fired if I didn't.
When I've had to create this sort of anti-feature, I do a shitty job on purpose. It barely works. There are workarounds that defeat the punitive nature of the horrible thing I've had to create. It'll work on paper, but be shit in production. In every case I've had to do this, the people who ask for the anti-features are not capable of testing that they work right. They gleefully take their new pain toy and go off to hurt people with it. I never hear from them again. Then I start updating my resume and begin to look for a new job.
Could you imagine if the defense industry adopted this? Manufacturer loses follow-on contract, soon the entire inventory "Sorry, this missile will only interface with genuine <contract loser> parts"
Companies exist to make a profit. I'm sure some extra returns are caused by 3rd party laser and ink cartridges. I've personally seen a 3rd party toner cart have some kind of internal failure and strip the drive gear in the printer.
Just like the EU is requiring USB-c to charge a phone, governments should consider requiring a standard ink and toner cartridge. It would reduce inventories, increase volumes, amortize R&D over a greater number of printers, and increase competition for the standard cartridge. The standards committee (like the USB committee) could set the standards, have branding/labeling for particular features, and talk with industry about desirable features for the next generation.
I just hope they avoid doing something insanely stupid like making dozens of USB-c cables, visually identical, but incompatible.
I got paid all of $50k to be a financial analyst there. I was young and straight of out school with a shit job economy and needed to pay rent and buy food. I also took comfort in working there for a year and a half doing virtually zero work.
- In 2005, they had one printer that refused to print if the cartridge was past a certain date, even if full. Several also underestimated the volume of ink in cartridges and told you it was empty when not.
- In 2007, HP refused to honor hardware warranty if you install any other OS on their laptop.
- in 2010, HP refused to provide drivers for the new windows Vista for its old ScanJet scanners (linux worked fine though).
- in 2020 they hardcoded the path to the EFI of their laptop to be windows only.
That's just the examples I could easily google, I remember that HP was having one scandal every 6 months in 2000, and we didn't have twitter back then.
So if a brand has been very publicly misbehaving for 2 decades, how does it still have customers?
Well, Facebook has still a billion users. Microsoft is now considered the father of unicorns and rainbows. Oracle is still making banks, one of my biggest client just migrated to it.
So the so-called cancel culture seems very superficial to me: lots of noise, but very actual consumer behavioral change. The brands can get away with anything and thrive. Maybe they'll get a little bit of heat for a few months on social media, so what?
But the bottom line is: if you are a big company, just do whatever makes you money. You don't need reputation.
What are they smoking
There’s not many companies that can provide all the mundane business management tools for a huge variety of business like an ATM manufacturer, an oil and gas company, a massive hotel chain, or a financial services company. The tech is not sexy by any means but it can run businesses from top to bottom.
So you can't install Linux at all on HPs post-2020?
cp /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi 1>/dev/null 2>&1
:D
Myself I run Samsung (HP) CLP-365W for over 10 years with cracked firmware for endless refills. The hardware itself is very good, just had to rotate feeder pull rubber to fix paper problem, but that is all.
That said, a really interesting startup would be an open source inkjet printer. (All the necessary patents have expired ones that are current revolve mostly around cartridges or cleaning systems). I suspect it is a kind of niche market as my kids tell me that "nobody prints things, we have it on our phone!" which I kind of understand, but point out you don't need multiple monitors to do code development if you have listing printed out :-).
Whenever I run into an especially intractable bug, one of the first techniques I attempt to use to solve it is to print out all the relevant source code and grab a conference room where I can lay it all out on the table.
1. be using open source drivers (e.g., one of the CUPS PCL drivers, preferably on Linux or BSD) on all possible clients;
2. isolate the printer from direct network access (e.g., don't connect printer's Ethernet or WiFi, and instead run CUPS on a RasPi, which talks to the printer only via USB); and
3. consider limiting which devices can access your print server (i.e., via routing VLANs and/or authentication/authorization).
This isn't perfect:
* there are still ways that the printer can get firmware changes against your wishes;
* still ways that it can leak information to HP;
* still ways it's vulnerable to attacks by others; and
* might be awkward to explain when a visitor to your home/office needs to print something.
But I decided the headache of isolating the HP printer a bit (especially from HP), was less than the likely headache of trusting HP more.
(Which is kinda sad, since the company previously known as HP was great.)
CUPS PCL drivers for these devices are nonexistent. You're at this point forced to use HP's windows software which *emulates a Parallel port* in at least one case.
My gosh, HP what happened? You used to make great test equipment. Then great calculators. Then great printers. Now, what? What do you do? Oh, I forgot, you give the customer a printer and hold them hostage. I guess it is the new business model.
I bought it with my own money from my newspaper delivery job when in high school, along with a legitimate copy of Pagestream. The quality and value / advantage I got out of this for my school and later university work was remarkable, just about no-one else (at my age) had anything resembling the same setup.
Fond memories; sad to see this nosedive into DRM hell.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...
They make decent laptops, but with incredibly sharp, non-rounded edges, which have actually cut* some user's palms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/iioylp/just_...
edit:
* Yes I exaggerate here, but it is annoyingly sharp
My comment is currently I believe the top comment there, talking about how these things have a designed-to-fail Ink Waste Tank or Ink Waste Pad, and an internal Ink Counter that locks up the printer after a certain amount of printing. I'm not 100% absolutely certain, but I've ran into numerous semi-trustworthy reports & videos while searching for printers. (Amid many glowing reviews of people who've had theirs for 1 week to a couple of months.)
I seriously lusted after the EcoTank L1800 for a while, after @leashless posted about them being a super interesting "10x" product back in 2015 then 2018. But by then they were already only available in a couple secondary markets (ex: Brazil). For a while though they had been sold widely. It feels quite likely to me that Epson knew they built a deliberately designed-to-fail product, sold it for a bit, realized they were going to get in trouble, sold it only to a couple assorted countries, didn't change the product, & now is trying again. https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609
(The cheap Moonman M2 fountain pens leashless linked were/are indeed pretty sweet though.)
Then buy one with a replaceable pad like the Epson 5150. The replacement costs....drum roll ... $10.
My last color laser had a non serviceable fuser rated for 20,000 pages and that's what I got out of it.
I replaced it with a color ecotank and it's just a better product. Look up the price of my ink vs the price of comparible color toner and there is simply no comparison. Even color toner generics, which are not perfect, are more expensive.
It's fine to have scepticism over ink printers, or any printers. But it's not all rainbows and sunshine with other options either (other than a basic black laser I guess)
It would make sense for Ecotank users to reply to the post, given the cost savings it offers - whilst still retaining overall good print quality (according to the above review).
I'm presently on a Brother HL-L2375DW (BW laser) myself for my occasional use; love it.
Who remembers the Epson chip resetters? Those were glorified EEPROM writers and the chips on cartridges back then were simple EEPROMs. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054177 )
Now, I believe there's nontrivial crypto involved; but just like other attempts at locking them out, expect the aftermarket to already be hard at work cracking this. It's probably legal to do so, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....
I've had and installed only 5 home printers over my entire life (excluding professional printers at works)
One was an already refurbished dinosaur from Xerox. 1 was a canon (would have to look for the model). The other 3 are HP LaserJet 100 Color MFP M175nw.
All 5 have lasted over 10 years, the MFPs being the youngest at 12 years. That Xerox one was still going with after 20, it was just slow. And 1 of the HPs may be replaced for that reason, as apparently waiting 20s for a page is now too long for my family members, which I can't fathom for a single page of paper once in a while.
Not a single technical issue with any of these.
Not a huge test sample, but that makes me wonder:
1/ What do you people do with their printers?
During the most active period, I printed about 2000 pages / year, which was already too much, and was mostly because of the kids when they were younger and when someone I knew had to deal with a lot of paperwork with an administration, and maybe one year when finishing my studies where I printed a crap load of reports.
2/ What's the failure rate on these things??
3/ When did we decide that "over a decade" is an achievement to be noteworthy for any piece of equipment worth a decent amount of money?
EDIT: My only gripe was the disappearance of ChromePrint. That bugged me quite a bit. Unrelated to the printers, though. Those MFPs work fine with HP Print, default print drivers, CUPS, etc... on Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS.
It's a good tip, though. But with mobile phones now, people tend to start printing already on their way to the room and then stare at the printer and wonder if it's OFF, starting up, pending, or if for some reason it decided whatever PDF they were printing was a bit too annoying to print (I do have occasional buffering issues with some of these printers, as I suspect their available memory/disk storage isn't great).
I mostly use it to print labels for sales from my eBay store.
Does the EU have defenses against this kind of behavior? I feel like monopolistic is the wrong word. Creating captive markets?
The best way to regulate it is for people to stop buying HP printers. I haven't bought one for about 20 years.
>I haven't bought one for about 20 years.
Just the fact that you are commenting on HN shows that you aren't the average consumer when it comes to electronics. People tend to overestimate the others' knowledge on topics they themselves are familiar with. A considerable chunk of printer "consumers" don't even know the difference between an inkjet and a laser printer. We can blame them all we want because they aren't "doing their research before spending money", but we don't even know what we are wasting our money on, especially with thing we aren't that knowledgeable about. Everyone values their time differently, so they may or may not research something before purchase depending on what they are buying.
In short, no regulation means leaving sheep alone with wolves.
And to also outlaw those practices.
Some things just shouldn't be left to market forces.
The last time I checked, this was roughly the same price as buying ink refills.
Sadly, it is terrible for the environment, and probably wouldn’t correct their bad behavior.
Except that there is always a new batch of people who don't know any better:
So companies can survive on that ignorance.
The Sherman Antitrust Act would prohibit printer manufacturers from engaging in anti-competitive practices such as locking out third-party printer cartridges. Under the law, monopolistic or anti-competitive practices are illegal and may be subject to government enforcement.
To quote the sherman act "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal" (Shermanj Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 1).
Sherman anti trust act: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
I'm on an old Epson Artisan cartridge based printer currently for colour photos, but want to replace it as they are just too painful and expensive. So meanwhile I have a cheap Brother laser printer for my black and white printing, which TBH is great for the occasional use. It's on an ultra low power sleep mode most of the time, and comes to life when it needs to.
Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software?
Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing.
HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+.
Brother offering basically zero support.
Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?
Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture.
Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture.
The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers.
Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.
There's very little difference in how I use a printer today versus 10, 20 years ago, so why can't they just sell me the same basic printer?
I'm sure there's someone on the "edge" of the printer space-- maybe a firm that formerly offered laser printers but moved out of the home market (does Okidata still sell those LED-based printers?) where you could probably buy the rights to a proven design and firmware, maybe even the tooling itself, for basically scrap cost. Polish it up a little- fix the known issues on a 20-year-old design-- and restart the line with an advertised guarantee of long-term availability.
If the main cost is design, then limit the design. Don't come out with a new model every year. Don't have a dozen products. Sell a color laser printer with USB-C and wifi, that's it. Have a black and white SKU if needed. What other major innovations in printer technology do we need?
I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.
Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board.
The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home).
So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.
Worth checking out.
I've had no problem finding Linux drivers for my Brother printers (or for their scanner components, since I've had all-in-ones for some time now), and they've never given me any problems that I needed any other support for.
Yes, there are IPP/Gutenprint options out there, but sometimes I feel like the image quality of the Brother driver is slightly more superior in imperceptible ways.
I have an old HP one (8-10 years old) that works and the laser cartridge lasts a really long time. It’s even Wi-Fi enabled which works most of the time (unplug and plug back in for the times it doesn’t gets it humming along again).
Granted I only print probably 5-6 pages a month.
https://i.imgur.com/Xp4tElX.png
Apparently some printers can be downgraded via USB
https://lucatnt.com/2022/06/downgrade-hp-pagewide-pro-477dw-...
Got the shock of my life at wifi printer hardware prices. Expensive.
I've an ancient, tank like, Dell 5120cn that I bought new from Noahs Ark or was it eBay in 2005ish? Its lifetime page count has only just exceeded its monthly duty cycle. It will not die. A set of mfg. CMYB toners costs under $100 if purchased carefully. That's once every 3 years or so.
The back up laser is a donkey slow but reliable HP laser jet 2605dn. Solid, dependable. It was donated to me, free with a 1200 page count. The mfg. toner prices are still steep, so I avoid, and go for 3rd party cartridges. A set of CMYB is $60. I've only just put one set in since 2010.
I'll use these lasers till they or I die. Or I forget their lan IP address. Wifi connectivity is for the very rich.
I'm of the opinion that if printer manufacturers in the EU try pulling any 'use only my ink or toner' stunts they'll be facing a very very expensive showdown with Brussels or Strasbourg.
It was similar 10 years ago when we bought our Samsung laser. These prices seem very reasonable, especially if you subtract out the cost of included drums and toner. Am I missing something?
* Linux computer (Raspberry Pi, router, etc) talking to the printer via USB and sharing it * Linux computer with wireless & Ethernet acting as a network bridge, bridging the Ethernet to the wireless network * Powerline/MoCa/etc adapter - it will be fine as printers don't need a lot of bandwidth
Somebody needs more consumer money to pay for all that salary (cows). So, of course, they would need to milk that skinny cow even harder while making it look prettier with a lipstick. Even has a leash (software) that is too long and cumbersome to manage.
Never mind how anemic these "cows" look, they're light and still functional even when infested with bloated features that often contract virus and bacteria.
They'll keep on flogging these "cows" until it looks like a "horse", but just plain non-functional, stomach-bloated, back-arched, and ... dead.
These exec team probably knows no soul worth saving and should not be considered an asset for your budding garage company, lest they become available on labor market.
I am an old foggity whose dreams comprise of hardy folks that started these businesses out of their own home garage and a pair of ungrounded outlets.
To my garage-aspired brothers, stick with a Brothers and you can do no wrong as I've slowly replaced all my HPs with Brothers over last 2 decades.
- former faithful but disillusioned 48-year user of Hewlett Packard printers, former then roommate of former Epson device driver developer, and a device driver maintainer of the wonderful Xerox 1200 "laser" since 1987.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/hp-information/executive-team/team....
Per-page for basic black text is a lot more than you could do with a laser printer but even a very cheap printer costs more than the combined cost of what I'm likely to ever print again. If my prediction is wrong and I find myself printing vast amounts of things I can buy a printer and eat loss of a few bucks. Feels good to have one less "thing" too.
I already just use Walmart or similar for all my color needs.
I think the problem as stated in comments is money obviously. But it's the loss of the home market. The "desktop publishing" craze is gone and now it's older people who have printers. That's a big loss of revenue. Printers at home seem to be alien to anyone under the age of 40.
The issue is that there is a cat and mouse game between an handful HP "alternative cartridges" manufacturers and HP. HP is actively trying to detect and block non-HP cartridges while the manufacturers find a way to bypass it.
What probably has happened here is that HP had pushed a SW upgrade that detects non-HP cartridges a bit better. The manufacturers probably already found a way to bypass it and new cartridges will work on this firmware.
If that’s the case, is it evil to restrict cartridges to protect the image of your brand? If I was manufacturing enterprise printers, I would probably say no.
With manufacturers taking the absolute cheapest and minimum effort possible to manufacture things, and yet being nearly indistinguishable from the real deal online (think: all the dodgy portable hard drives on Amazon that are either just interfaces to SD cards or just fake), can you blame them?
Brother is probably where I'll go for my next device.
I currently have a cheap Dell I bought for $80 years ago. I was able to put in a new off brand toner cartridge recently but the driver only barely works on a modern Mac and I expect it will stop working completely in a major version or two.
You may be able to use a generic driver that comes with MacOS for your Dell.
Maybe this is only happening to home office type printers and not to enterprise?
Never ever will I personally buy a HP product again.
I feel really clueless
Stop using inkjets.
