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.
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.
I have a canon ink tank printer and haven’t had to refill the ink tanks in 3 years. I don’t even know where they are. I print a lot of knitting patterns and workbook type stuff, but not often. Still, when I do use the printer, I use quite a bit of ink. I’ve been really happy with it! I think most printers with ink tanks are going to be a good bet, but I have never seen an HP printer function correctly after the first print or two. I won’t pay them any attention, let alone buy an HP printer. I’m convinced HP is single-handedly why printers have such a bad reputation.
If the printer costs less than or barely more than an in cartridge, it’s a scam. If you want a non scam printer, it will be more expensive. And never buy HP.
Laser printers. HP has been trash forever. I honestly look down on people who still buy inkjet printers. It shows they have no ability to think about future costs.
Depends on how good it needs to be and how often you need the color. I’ve got an old workhorse Brother color laser that has been on the same cartridges for years because I just don’t use it so often, but I still need color once in a while.
There are printer ink subscriptions? And here I thought, ink printers couldn't get more annoying (dried out every time I wanted to print, cartridges costing as much as the printer itself).
I mean that’s a really shitty thing for the environment, but I thought when you sign up for their ink subscription, you authorized them to lock any remaining ink if you ever cancel. The reasoning is probably to discourage people from cancelling right after getting a new cartridge and being able to use a full cartridge of ink. Might be unethical, but not illegal.
If the business model doesn’t allow them to have those situations written off as a loss leader then they need to reevaluate the business model.
The vast majority of the people should forget to cancel and the cost should be enough for you to manage, for some of your customers to get amazing Utility from your service, and for most of your customers to consider your service so valuable they couldn’t think to get rid of it, even if they don’t utilize it fully.
Disney offers meal plans with your vacation. Most people don’t use all the benefit, some people do, and even less people manage to eat at all the most expensive and prestigious places for their meals because they knew how to utilize their benefits to their maximum potential.
Same with game pass, Amazon prime, and basically any prepaid service. The whole thing is balanced to be enticing, convenient, and potentially a massive value prospect to keep people in that golden spot of FOMO so they buy in and not cancel, but not such a great value that you cannibalize your other monetization streams.
Here they made it apparent that it’s not a good value, there is no situation where i can come out on top, so instead of losing on my monthly sub, they also lost unit sales and any good memories and associations I had with their products and services in the past.
There are plenty of things that aren’t illegal but are counter to your intended goals.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text, you caught me with lots to say I guess.
That's a good way of putting it, and it says a lot that they would happily take a loss if it means that there's no chance you could get an edge over them.
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…
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