Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That’s mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn’t come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it’s too big anyway sadly
I’m just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that’s a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
There also used to be network printer adapters in the past. For example, the Belkin F8T030 Bluetooth AP. Yes, Bluetooth AP. I’d like something like that just for fun. Perhaps not this one specifically, as it only supports BT-LAP out-of-the-box and requires firmware upgrade for BT-PAN. Good luck finding firmware for a niche product from 2003.
But anyway, perhaps something like that (the printer part) is still made.
The old Apple AirPort Express could turn any USB printer into a networked printer.
Absolutely this. Find them online for $10 all day.
I’m a systems engineer, so it would be a short project for me. My homelab router could run the print server, but the USB port is currently powering my pi hole.
I feel like there would be some way to rig an esp32 or similar micro controller to do the same thing (pis can be scarce atm
A powered plugin usb hub would likely be easier.
But not as fun as making my own.
Entertainment always wins over efficiency.
Have you looked into printers that accept refillable containers of ink rather than cartridges? I haven’t looked too closely, but I see Epson makes some too, and the prices are pretty reasonable.
I haven’t had any reason to print in color for like 20 years. I’m sure many consumers are the same.
If I do need to print color, I’ll pay $0.10 at UPS or the library or whatever to print it off.
Every inkjet printer on this planet has a choice. Cheap ink, accessible printheads, expensive. You have to pick one.
Certain Hp? Expensive cartridges but new print heads with every cart. Epson ecotank? Cheap ink but non replaceable printheads. High-end printers? Insanely priced printheads and ink.
The only way out is laser.
“Pick two…”
I’m refilling stock HP cartridges for now, so I guess I’m technically getting the best of both worlds, but I wouldn’t wish the process of replacement on anybody.
But have a close look at the model you are buying. We recently noticed that the relatively cheap Epson Ecotank we bought for our daughter is a bit difficult to maintain. You simply have no access to the printheads.
2170 crowd represent!!!
Those things run forever and cost nothing to run.
I think I’ve only bought 3x toner cartridges, and one of those got lost because I shook the old one and it just kept working for a year or two.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
I know we assume they’re following the “razor blade” model but I actually find it hard to believe the printers are sold at a loss given how cheap it is to produce at this point.
Unless by “loss” we’re saying “less than HP thought it could extract.”
They want to make it a subscription that starts automatically when you buy the printer. No payment or the linked credit card expires, no more printing. Keep on paying for that subscription each month even if you don’t print a single page.
HP literally has that already. They call their dystopian product “Instant ink.”
And they’re fuming because they can’t force this down the throat of every “bad investments”. Not yet anyway.
But they’re really trying with HP+ printers that come with a 3 month trial of Instant Ink. And it’s not like you lose the ability to use 3rd party cartridges, because those HP+ printers already come locked down from factory. Those HP+ printers also have extra REQUIREMENTS: HP Account and internet connection.
Imagine if you needed internet connection and some account to control your lights. Oh, Philips Hue changed their ToS, so now you do.
Why internet of things is a bad idea for 500, Alex.
Here was I, thinking printers couldn’t get worse
The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it’s a big market, why aren’t they getting into it?
A warning: if you’ve already bought an HP printer, never subscribe to the HP ink service. If you do, your printer will only be allowed to use certified HP cartridges, and it could lead to situations where you have ink in your printer but it will not print.
There is a lot of IP that we’ve built in the inks of the printers, in the printers themselves.
I call bullshit. I haven’t delved into specific law, but plenty of companies have been around since, say, the 1860s and are still producing ink today. If you can’t make ink people want to buy, that’s a skill issue.
“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.”
As the cool kids these days say, “what the fuck is blud waffling about?” If a printer cartridge can contain a virus, I think that’s on you, not on the cartridge. A black cartridge and a color cartridge need only to conform to two unique shapes, and that should be all.
ETA: as the ashamed owner of an HP printer, I’ve learned how to fill my own cartridges, and while the process is messy and should be conducted over a kitchen sink, it is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times cheaper than buying from HP.
ETA2: Don’t buy HP though. Seriously.
HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won’t notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a “virus” to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid “instant ink” scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by… not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
I’m pretty sure the quantity of the ink is calculated through whatever’s on the cartridge, but… If filling your own, the first thing you need to do is disable that.
On the bright side, it can be done by holding a button on pretty much any HP printer. On the not so bright side, that’s only because HP lost a lawsuit about it.
People say that, but…
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you’d installed a new cartridge when you hadn’t, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don’t think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It’s not like it’s going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I’d buy any printer that doesn’t attempt to monitor the ink.
Maybe so people know to buy a cartridge so it’s on hand before the one runs out, so you’re not having to run to the office supply store in the middle of an important print job? But that’s more of a convenience thing, not necessary.
Yeah, just make it work like a car’s fuel tank. It has a gauge to say how much is in it. It has a hole so you can add more. Some cars will guess how far you can drive, give or take, based on how much fuel is in the tank. If the fuel gets very low, a more obvious warning will pop up in case you weren’t watching your gauge. But otherwise it just keeps driving in the meantime and if your car needs high octane and you give it low, it will try to run it anyways and if it fucks up the engine, then that’s on the user.
If it is visible to the user, that means light is hitting it and helping degrade it. Given how rarely people prove these days, you are more likely to end up with a gunked up cartridge.
Actually with some print heads they will be damaged if there is no ink
Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
I updated my original comment. Definitely don’t want to give the impression anybody ever should.
They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the ‘T’ part of their SWOT analysis.
That’s interesting! TIL, thanks!
I’m not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like “Fuck yeah.”
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
Why do these dumb ass CEO’s keep admitting this type of stuff in interviews? Don’t tell us your evil plans. No one is going to hear this and be more eager to buy your products. They’re so proud of coming up with ways to screw customers that they just can’t help themselves. They have to let everyone know. I don’t get it.
Because that interview is for investors. He’s looking out for the shares price, not his customers. We can always buy other products, like Canon or Epson. It’s too bad because HP printers are the best, but not enough to let us be robbed like other brands.
HP printers and the software with them sucks ass. Never again. Bought a brother laser printer and shit just works without any bullshit.
Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP’s path.
In other words: “Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it.”
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
“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.”
If the cartidges didn’t have drm chips you wouldn’t have anything to load with malware to begin with.
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Yikes, I hope you don’t have a pension.
Most people don’t
Seems like slightly more than half of American workers (56%) participate in a “workplace retirement plan” which I don’t know the definition of. Pension or 401k if I had to guess.
Not gonna lie, thought that said “inventors” and I was like, “I’d watch that.”
Later in the interview, he added: “Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire…
Don’t worry, they’ll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
And next time buy a brother printer.
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn’t make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That’s what all the cool investors care about now, right?
drank too much koolaid, retarded now
overdosed on stupid juice
“Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
They literally can’t help themselves. They’ve gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn’t perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they’re fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren’t exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an “investment,” in the employee. Nevermind the employee can’t afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
“You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more,” is what they are saying to themselves.
The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.
That’s not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Guess I’m fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation’s “bad investment”. I’ll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
Plus the work great with after market stuff.
In case anyone cares, I’m sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I’ve bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I’ve never had to buy more black). I’m extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special
rootkitsoftware in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that’s a selling point in our blighted modern age.I care, and I’ve added this to my list for when it comes time to grab a new printer.
I have my HP from about 15 years ago that has been trudging along for the two times a year that I need to print, but that thing was from another era and once it goes, there will not be another HP printer in my future.
