I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.
If you need a inkjet printer buy one with an ink tank. Like Epson’s EcoTank line. Much cheaper in the long run, since 3rd party refill bottles are super cheap.
Hold up, HP printers don’t let you SCAN without ink? You can make up some believable bs argument about why DRM ink is necessary, but there’s no way you can convince anyone that scanning needs ink.
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
Funny, I knew it was going to be a Brother from your first post. Glad to see the confirmation. I still have am HP from like 2016 which they started doing firmware updates to lock ink to their official brand only so I couldn’t buy 3rd party. I had to roll back the firmware and removed the default gateway address to keep it from getting out to the internet and possibly updating again. I have made 1 3rd party ink purchase and been using it ever since. Printer works great still. The day it breaks will be the day I stop using HP going forward. I still can’t believe they pulled that, and now this.
Yeah, I used to have a lot of goodwill for HP. They used to be good print quality at a good price. I remember many print projects I was stupid proud of with HP, but after I fell out of printer use and saw what they had been up to, from initially shorting the included cartridges to using DRM to lock out perfectly good cartridges, I vowed I wouldn’t buy a product of theirs for myself when I did need one again.
On a side note, I just realized you said “an HP” and it made me realize that an is usually used before vowels but H isn’t a vowel, but it was grammatically correct to the ear, but ambiguously correct on ‘paper’ when it dawned on me that we say HP as “Ay-tch Pee” and it suddenly made so much sense, and I wondered if there was a name for that exception in English.
I have an old Brother that I inherited from my mother… I had to buy toner once (I use it 5 years). It just works. I am really glad to hear that the company didn’t turn evil like (almost?) all other.
+1 for Brother HL printers. 2 toner bars got me through 3 years of nursing school.
If I need something printed in color, I'll just let a professional do it.
They've got color laser printers too, just bought a HL-L3290CDW last week to replace my roommate's cheap Canon printer that I got tired troubleshooting every time we needed to print something. Absolute monster of a print device: color laser printer+scanner+copier+fax machine and a seamless printing process to boot.
And it's extremely easy. Upload the PDF, wait for your mail. Thanks. The last time I needed something printed in colour was years ago, and the money and hassle I saved myself by buying a monochrome laser printer isn't offset by this one print job I had to pay for.
I have even gone one step further I don’t have a printer at all. If I want anything printed, I will either do it when I’m at the office or get it printed by a stationary store for a small fee (like .05 USD per A4 page in local currency where I live).
I can count with one hand how many times I needed hard copies in the past couple of years.
I hate multifunction printers. They try to do everything but end up sucking at doing everything.
I ended up getting a separate, high speed Fujitsu scanner with built in auto file naming and OCR and it’s been fantastic. I can just scan in all the things and shred them. Less paperwork cluttering the place.
If you’re like me and only print something once or twice a year, check whether you can print at your local library. It may cost a few cents per sheet, but I’d sooner give my library a dollar than give a company like HP a penny
I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I’m riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.
Oh damn well if 2 people are doing it in your industry, printers must be useless to everyone!
When I worked in the field I carried a laptop but still mostly worked off of paper. Paper-sized ectronics are pretty useless on ladders and plans are too hard to read on a phone. Paper can also fold and go in a pocket
You missunderstood, one is a psychiatrist, the other a social-something. I just say it’s a thing already.
No, i don’t see how paper is a neccesity in your examples. And i did work in a company for a while, creating software for phones/tablets/notebooks for exatly those usecases, optimizing workflows in industry. Especially plans can be vastly more useful in digital form, look up IFC format.
And i did work in a company for a while, creating software for phones/tablets/notebooks for exatly those usecases, optimizing workflows in industry. Especially plans can be vastly more useful in digital form, look up IFC format.
No, they don’t. And they won’t, unless they work on a dirty construction site on top of a ladder wearing protective gloves themselves. Or have to actually use plans.
And i did work in a company for a while, creating software for phones/tablets/notebooks for exatly those usecases, optimizing workflows in industry. Especially plans can be vastly more useful in digital form, look up IFC format.
No, they don’t. And they won’t, unless they work on a dirty construction site on top of a ladder wearing protective gloves themselves. Or have to actually use plans.
i dunno. i genuinely can’t remember the last thing i had to print out. maybe some expense claim forms in 2019 before the pandemic accelerated paperless processes? can’t think of any after that.
I mean I only use my own printer once a year at most but plenty of other people still have to print things personally and professionally for various reasons. Many printed things can be replaced by technology but not everything. Fax was just a way to get information from one place to another - every single part of what it does is done better and easier with email and other tech
There is always a free and open source alternatives to this garbage. Imagine if the government funded these open source projects. Jitsi is a good open source alternative to zoom. It’s rough around the edges, but a good funding can turn it around to be better than zoom. That way, even the government can use it and doesn’t have to deal with zoom’s privacy nightmare.
It’s worse than it sounds… You’re not actually paying for ink, you’re paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped “free” when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you’re ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it’ll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you’re a member of the residual income brigade…
it will probably 'end' pretty well for them. you'd be surprised at how many home users just 'go with it' because they don't know any better.. and a lot of businesses only buy 'genuine' consumables anyway.
Probably pretty well given some companies and people will be some silly little tech sluts for the convenience of not looking up better alternatives for 10 minutes, and likely paying a bit more upfront.
That said I hope there’s gonna be some printer piracy
It seems that no matter how awful an idea is these days, it always pays off for the companies. Consumers really need to pull their heads out of their assholes.
Our Brother laser printer just ran out of toner for the 2nd time in 12+ years. We bought a new toner cartridge for $12 that will last us another 5+ years.
stallmanwasright
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