Posted on 11/06/2020 5:21:59 AM PST by ptsal
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a "deal" and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.
The company's just beat its own record, converting its "Free ink for life" plan into a "Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working" plan.
Plenty of businesses offer some of their products on the cheap in the hopes of stimulating sales of their higher-margin items: you've probably heard of the "razors and blades" model (falsely) attributed to Gillette, but the same goes for cheap Vegas hotel rooms and buffets that you can only reach by running a gauntlet of casino "games," and cheap cell phones that come locked into a punishing, eternally recurring monthly plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at eff.org ...
[snip] HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month;
The printer a useful tool...no more.
Another reason to avoid Has Problems stuff.
Laser printers are the better way to go.
I’m not a paper addict. A toner cartridge lasts me several years.
Printers are evil incarnate.
“Print is dead.”
(Egon - Ghostbusters 1984)
I stopped using HP products about 10 years ago.
Their hardware (PCs, printers, scanners, etc.) is really good, but they abandon driver support a year or two after you buy their crap and you can’t use the stuff without current drivers.
I use Brother printers and scanners now.
“The printer a useful tool...no more.”
Yes.
Get a laser printer. It’s ink is a powder and doesn’t dry and clog the orfices. Cartridges are cheap and last a long time.
For color you’re own your own. It’s going to be more expensive. I have shutterfly or a copy center do my color printing.
Regarding laser printers, my cheap one is ok but the expensive one at work does a much better with lower-contrast originals and does beautiful color.
My last HP printer would not recognize the ink cartridges I loaded, and they were official HP cartridges (I only ever loaded HP cartridges). Their system for detecting non-HP ink was a little too aggressive, I guess. I now have two Canon printers, and they take 3rd party cartridges.
+1 Brother
I really tried to like HP, but their software is unusable.
HP driver software has gotten worse with each newer version.
Brother does well by me and the spouse addicted to printing.
Printers are the cheapest thing we buy. Heck buy a new one every two years. Fifty bucks at most. The ink is where they make their money.
Thankfully Brother doesn't play any of the stupid games that HP and other printer makers do.
I liked the Canon stuff, but longterm they don't seem to last. Have had two different ones fail. Now testing an Epson (ink comes in bottles (Ecotank), not cartridges). I agree about HP's software...terrible. Brother is about the only brand I have not yet tried.
All my printers eventually fail. One thing I like is the ability to print directly on to discs (CD, DVD, Blu-ray). I had an Epson that had a tray that would slide out for the disc. That printer eventually wore out. One of my Canon printers comes with an additional tray that you slide in when printing discs. I bought the second Canon so as to also have a scanner, but the software/interface for the scanner is not very intuitive.
Brother inkjet. <$1 per ink cartridges on ebay. Similar on Amazon.
I always buy printers based on cost of ink cartridges. If brother blocks the ink cartridge resellers then I’ll move to the next manufacturer who doesn’t.
Yeah, but I kind of expect them to last more than two years.
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