> "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." - HP CEO
"No HP product could possibly be a good investment for me" - Any & Every Sane Customer
Furthermore, if this were a sane analogy, HP would be paying us for the printer hardware and we would be returning the “investment” via paper and ink cartridges/toner.
The first time my consumer HP printer refused to print my black-and-white document unless I refilled its magenta or whatever, I tossed it in the dumpster and bought an $80 Brother laser printer. Zero print problems, ever, since the switch. And the original toner cartridge lasted damn near forever, with cheap replacements.
Blame the short-sighted customers that are going printer shopping and see the $50 HP printer and the $150 $OTHER_BRAND printer and buy the HP without looking at the cost of supplies.
That's the thing, isn't it? I would gladly pay $500 for "THE LAST PRINTER I WILL EVER NEED TO BUY", $650 if it came with a 10 year parts and labor guarantee.
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.
I worked at Lexmark around the time they tried this as a strategy. They sold a $300-400 inkjet printer whose (black) ink cartridges were priced at $5. It doesn't work, because the consumer is shortsighted and greedy and often self-defeating (see: the JC Penney pricing debacle).
This reminds me of tipping culture. Provide a service, charge for it, and then complain when people don't voluntarily give more money than they have to.
If my investments' success were dependent upon a bunch of people who don't have any personal interest in my investments being successful, then there's a high chance my investments won't be successful.
Seems an excellent justification for the board to fire the CEO for fiscal irresponsibility.
> HP has long banged the drum 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.
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?
The funny thing is that if this ever happened, it would be on official HP cartridges that were the subject of a supply chain attack or insider threat. And yes, the even better part is that there is zero technical reason why this needs to be the case, the cartridges themselves should be dumb except for possibly a toner level sensor that is just a simple analog device. The threat vector only exists because HP is trying to squeeze the customer.
Good. Thanks for letting me know. I want to be a bad investment to these scummy corporations. In fact I don't want my value to be merely low, I want it to be negative, they should lose money. It gives me peace of mind that I helped hasten their bankruptcy.
Are personal printers really still a thing? 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. I'd rather pay like $5 rather than have some bulky ugly thing taking up space on my desk.
There are plenty of people who have frequent printing needs, even if they're not using it for work. For instance, my wife homeschools, so she prints a lot of worksheets and such. My son plays piano, and he likes to print out sheet music. And I find myself, more often than I'd like, having to print out forms and sign them, because the company or organization hasn't figured out electronic signatures yet.
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.
They just asked the question. How would we know that something is relevant to others if we don't ask? As another person in the same boat, it shocks me people even care about printers at this point. I do the same, just run to FedEx if I need to print. That said, thanks to the parent commenter asking the question, I now know. Not sure why you feel the need to lecture.
While I admit it's possible to misread tone, I perceived the tone as dismissive, like "This doesn't matter to me, so I'm shocked that it matters to anyone else." That's a form of egocentric bias, which is not to imply that the commenter has an overinflated ego, but merely that it can lead us to make inaccurate assessments.
My wife is often printing stuff. Even though is mainly content that would be fine as a PDF on her phone or tablet, one of which is always with her. TBF I do occasionally also print things but little enough that I'd be fine going to the library to do it.
My Brother laser printer sits in a corner unobtrusively (not on my desk). I don’t print enough these days to warrant the convenience it but the toner lasts forever and not needing to make a trip to print is really nice. I’m sure there are people who use inkjets for printing photographs or have lots of paper copies they need to make for whatever reason. Statistically, ~45% of Americans own a printer [1].
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].
It is interesting to see all the people who replied to you with every-day printing needs. But just to let you know you're not completely alone, I haven't needed a printer for ten years or so.
If you do anything that involves groups of people (tabletop games, teaching students, organizing events, etc) you'll need to print hardcopies pretty regularly. I love Kinkos for large-dimension printing (though a 4'x5' color DnD map can easily run $80), but I'm not going there once a week to prep handouts for students.
Yes, personal printers are still a thing. My family uses a Brother laser printer. It sits unobtrusively in a corner. We have yet to buy more paper or toner, so we don't print in great volume, but we do regularly need it. We print tickets for events or prepaid parking, documents to sign, envelopes, and crafts for the kid.
I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I can't imagine how a typical family could get by without having a printer to handle basic educational, correspondence, and hobby needs.
Yes! There is a Staples near my house with a print center. Their prices for a job I needed done were so exorbitant that I bought a printer/scanner from the same store and broke even almost immediately. I have not returned to the store since. Their business model is pretty flawed when they sell something at low margin which makes the high margin thing they're selling obsolete.
We found that we needed one once we bought a house because banks like you to sign + email stuff, for reasons that are unclear to me. One the one hand, the iOS "scribble on the PDF with your finger" feature has almost replaced that. On the other hand, their notes app includes a good enough document scanner, so we often print, fill out, scan and file instead of just scribbling on the PDF. (We used to print, fill out, and then use a full-duplex hardware document scanner, which provided better / faster scans, but does not fit in my pocket).
Absolutely! I print off worksheets for my kids (online school) all the time. One of my hobbies(linocut) involve printing off templates.
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.
Yep. I wrote software to print grocery lists. I also print recipes. Nothing beats paper and pen for this: it's cheap and easier than futzing around with devices.
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 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.
I can't think of many other ways for a CEO to make it really, really easy for potential customers to just completely disregard their company as an option. Bravo!
I got a notification today that my HP Instant Ink subscription, which rose from $3/mo to $4/mo last year, is rising to $5/mo. this year. My subscription covers 50 pages a month, so that's 10 cents per page.
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!
Any laser printer will be significantly more reliable because toner doesn't dry out. People are very happy with Brother laser printers, but I deal with HP enterprise laser printers at work and they basically Just Work vs the nightmare consumer grade inkjets that are always clogging and breaking down
+1 for Brother. Had the same one (MFC-L3750CDW) for years now. Just works. No weird subscription push. No weird apps to manage it. Actually integrates with 3rd party software easily. Everything I need and nothing I don't.
There's a Brother HL-3170CDW behind me. I bought a $48 5-pack of toner (1 each of the colors, 2 blacks) in October. The last such back I bought got me about 2000 pages. For toner, then, my ongoing expense is about $0.024 per page.
I have an HP color laser and I have no complaints. HP M281cdw. I doubt they make it anymore though because they discontinue these things quickly.
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.
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!
If you do a consistent amount of color printing, the price per page of Instant Ink beats the price of just buying normal ink cartridges.
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.
> "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 this is true, HP's CEO just publically admitted that their printers have some serious security issue.
The article goes on to say that it is, in fact, true.
>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.
It seems that they had no incentive to prevent malware, as its existence could be used to make customers buy their ink instead. I wonder if they fixed this bug at all after the exploit was found.
HP is a shadow of how great it was. HP was an engineer company, producing products for engineers. Their measure tools were top notch. Now, it's all gone to Digilent. Their line of reverse polish notation HP series of calculators... long gone. While the HP Prime is somewhat OK, it's a POS compared to the HP48 quality level (I dont care that you integrated Erable-like inside).
It's kind of refreshing in a weird way when a CEO says something like this. Like we put soooo much value in the voice of CEOs globally, yet every now and then you actually tune into the words uttered by them and you realize they're just people. Like they have horrible ideas that they think are profound, just like everyone. So while it's somewhat scary for anyone working for HP and I've personally avoided HP products for over a decade, it just goes to show CEOs don't run their companies. They're a figure head in most cases the actual value comes from... us. The workers.
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.
Of course CEOs are just people who make mistakes. In fact, a CEO is simply a specialized worker whose role is making high-level strategic decisions for the company. (And sometimes more tactical ones, depending on the company's scale.) Some are going to be better at that than others. The leverage of that decision-making allows a CEO to add significant value if they make good decisions, or subtract value if they make poor ones. Personally I agree that the best CEOs listen to feedback from other employees (as well as from customers and other stakeholders) and try to achieve a degree of consensus, but I would argue that that too is a skill that adds value.
> they have horrible ideas that they think are profound
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.
I'll admit I could just be out of touch, but who's buying these inkjet printers? Laser printers are dirt cheap to run (Brother) and they exist in color too. Photos cost like 50¢ each at my local walgreens and they look great.
Is https://www.brother-usa.com/products/hll3280cdw too big? I wouldn't call it huge, but color lasers do require more physical space. Still, this seems to be in the range of most inkjets...
These are really good (we buy them and give them away after conferences because it's cheaper than renting a printer from the hotel) - but be aware, they are not photo printers.
Color laser printers shine when doing documents and office-style graphics with charts, etc, not photos.
There's a big upfront cost difference between inkjet and laser printers.
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.
I got an Epson inkjet with refillable ink a few years ago thinking it will be the solution for me. Turns out I seldom use my printer, and ink does clog at the printing head if you don't use it once in a while.
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).
Agreed, but I don't believe the typical inkjet buyer is an artist, or even a hobbyist with calibration needs. They'd be much better served by a laser printer and outsourcing specialty prints to a shop.
I'd imagine lots of people buying colour printers these days are parents whose kids need them for school. I can't think of many reasons an adult needs a colour printer, and home photo printing doesn't seem like a booming business these days.
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 tell anybody who asks, if you need a printer, then 1) avoid inkjet printers and 2) I recommend Brother laser printers.
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.)
Oh thanks for that. Looks like I should keep all revisions of firmware on oldest possible. I print through CUPS, so it should be quite safe to do since printer cannot require upgrade unless it's time-limited already.
Anyone have thoughts on Canon laser printer? My Brother laser printer keeps on having lines and dots despite changing the toner and fuser. I've kind of given up on them. Canon seems much lower price for a similar feature set so I'm wondering what is the catch.
I got a Canon LBP233dw, it's a bit wonky in terms of build quality (my old HP1010 is just such a tank), but it does work with 3rd party cartridges, one of which (10000 pages) I bought right away (it said "works without chip check removal"). The printer seems fine after almost 15000 pages, the only issue is that it complains about this 3rd party stuff, so you have to press "OK", when it starts up.
PS oh, and if you want super high print quality, probably you should get an LBP236dw, which adds PostScript support.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll seriously consider the Canon because the my Brother 5900DW is causing me so much problems. I don't print a lot so not too concerned about 3rd party cartridges.
I've got a lot of respect for Oki. Granted they've left the US market but still in the EU and Asia. Heck, we were getting security firmware updates 7 years after initial purchase. Of the 10 we had at work, still rocking 9 of them 9 years after purchase. The only loss was due to a power spike after a power loss restoral.
I'd throw all our worthless Xerox in the trash if I could still get Oki.
Is there any evidence for this? The HN post that you linked is sourcing a Reddit thread where the person is making that assumption based on a response from a support person from Brother and the fact that they're unable to manually calibrate the printer (which they're admitting is simply something they don't know how to do).
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.
I have had a pretty good experience with Epson Eco Tanks. They cost more than an inkjet, but the ink seems a lot more reasonable...even when buying it from Epson.
I can vouch for this. In my experience, both the printer and original ink have lasted 7 years (and counting) with very infrequent prints. Just a few head cleanings from the maintenance menu if it's been a while and it still works. It's still 3/4 full.
I’ve got one too and have been generally happy with it, though I print a lot more than you do.
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.
I bought a brother multifunction scanner inkjet. I left it to print a 20 page document while unattended, and there was a paper jam. I forgot to check when I came back, and it sat with a jam for a few days.
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.
I had a Samsung laser printer that printed maybe 300 pages before the fusor died on it. The fusor replacement part was more expensive than an entire new printer.
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.
Hopefully the Brother printer is not connected to power outlet which is connected to an AFCI circuit breaker because it will trip it all the time. I had to move mine to a different part of the house for that reason.
I swear to god I was going crazy trying to find why I randomly tripped the circuit breaker at my house. I never made the connection that it actually happens when I try to print something. Enshittification indeed.
Ours causes a "UPS is now on battery power" dialog to pop up every time it prints.[0] I have wondered if it would pop the circuit breaker if the UPS didn't buffer it, or if the UPS is just overly sensitive.
[0](Because the printer is on the UPS that has a USB connection to my desktop.)
I wouldn't put a laser printer on a typical consumer UPS. It draws a lot of current to warm up the fuser and may cause more wear than necessary to your line-interactive units. I always plug my laser printers directly into the grid.
We own two Brothers, one of which prints ~500 sheets/month for the past 3 years (model HLL2395DW). The one time we had a problem (unrecognized Brother drum or toner unit bought through Staples) support helped to diagnose and fix the problem.
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.
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.
My dad keeps an old inkjet printer of some brand I forget right now. It refuses to scan without ink. So he has some ink cartridges that he puts in when he wants to print or scan and the rest of the time they are removed and the orange plastic caps they came with reattached. They live in a bag sitting on top of the printer.
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.
Meanwhile, Epson will sell you a printer that just takes ink. Not cartridges, just ink. From a bottle. They aren't particularly cheap, but that's the deal.
Be careful to print enough. I have one and it dried out due to lack of use. There’s a deep clean that unclogs it, but you can only do it a few times before the non-replaceable ink sponges fill up.
I have an HP printer and a subscription. It's the best print setup I've had, because it works for my use case. We print a few pages a month, but sometimes we print a big stack.
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're charging you about $0.10 per page. That's an insane markup, especially if it doesn't include the paper.
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.
One great advantage of modern inkjet systems is that heads are included in the cartridges. I am cheap so I got an Epson Ecotank and the heads (which are build into the printer) are clogging months after purchase.
Say I sign up for the $0.99 / month plan (max 10 pages per month), and use it to file my taxes once a year. That means I pay $12 per year, and the heads are clogged 100% of the time I try to use the printer. They could send me a cartridge every few months, but I don't think the postage will work out in their favor if they do that.
> They're charging you about $0.10 per page. That's an insane markup, especially if it doesn't include the paper.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] thread"No HP product could possibly be a good investment for me" - Any & Every Sane Customer
Convince me they sell those printers at a loss.
The technology behind them is insane for most of them costing less than $100
I would buy ink cartridges from the vendors if they were not twice as expensive and utilizing sleezy tactics like lying about being empty.
You couldn’t pay me to use an HP printer anymore.
Can't have you printing anonymously
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
No one makes what I want to buy.
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.
If enough other people do the same, they'll be rich, right?
Seems an excellent justification for the board to fire the CEO for fiscal irresponsibility.
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?
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.
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-...
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.
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.
* 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.
> 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.
I think there's beauty in a well running machine.
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!
https://www.druckerchannel.de/
(google translate, or a equivalent, might be handy)
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.
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!
but what about Instant Ink is great? It looks like a terrible program for anyone who isn't named "HP".
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.
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.
HP will be gone, like Digital is.
I think the minimum a company should do is to show some kind of minimum respect to a potential customer.
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.
All value is created by labor.
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.
HP: "no u"
(j/k of course...i actually rather like their enterprise blade offering if you're making your own cloud)
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.
Color laser printers shine when doing documents and office-style graphics with charts, etc, not photos.
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.
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).
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'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.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0](Because the printer is on the UPS that has a USB connection to my desktop.)
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.
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.
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.
It was definitely more costly than HP or Epson, but damn it’s worth it
https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers
No need to worry about "investing" in me. I saw where it is all going and have switched to Brother long time ago.
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.
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.
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.
They know better than most what makes a bad investment.