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I’ve singlehandedly caused hp to lose thousands of dollars. People trust my advice and I’ve lost all trust in hp so I tell people not to waste their money on it.
When I got hired to take charge of the IT department, the first thing I did was phase out ALL HP products and then implemented an “Unacceptable and Barred Brands for purchasing” policy with HP right at top.
Thank you for your service
Unfathomably Based
Anyone have recommendations for MICR compatible printers that AREN’T HP? It’s the last HP product we have in my office.
Don’t buy a smart printer. Buy a dumb printer, then plug it into a raspberry pi.
we need an easily flashed prerolled Printer OS that makes this easy to make work
What’s a smart printer?
A printer that supports network print, typically through an Internet service.
I’d say network printers are fine, but ones that require a ‘cloud’ connection can gag on my dong. I have a brother business aio printer hooked up via network and it’s been everything I wanted from it, after our Epson shit the bed a couple years ago.
I haven’t bought a printer recently. Wtf is a smart printer?
It’s a printer that, when you tell it to print, tries its best to find a reason to refuse to do so.
Most newer models that automatically make themselves available to all the devices connected to the network they are connected to, and manage the printer queue internally. Usually comes with a ton of shitty “features” e.g preventing you from printing black & white when you’re out of yellow ink.
2-in-one scanner+printer machines are especially heinous with this, most of the ones I’ve used block you from scanning a document if you’re out of any ink (yes, even when you’re only trying to scan and not use the “copy” mode)Somehow they found a way to make me miss having to boot the “printer PC” and wrangling windows’ god awful printer queue system.
Buy brother laser. It’s more expensive, but it’s worth it long term. They last a real long time and the cartridges last bananas and they don’t care about “official” ink
Straight up when I bought my black and white brother laser printer I got an extra cartridge with it because I didn’t expect it to last very long
By the time I finally had to swap it out I couldn’t find the extra cartridge I bought with it because it had been so long
Needless to say I’m 3 years and 500+ pages into the second cartridge and happy to have this clunky little printer
Unfortunately someone snuck someone from HP into Brother’s executive chain. They’re starting the fuckery now too.
Sadly this is true and even on updated software for old printers. I’m rolling back though. The old versions worked fine.
I guess the only right thing to do is to buy used Brother laser printers until they all break… Such warhorses.
Nooooooooooo!
I thought the latest update to the new brother color laser added cartridge DRM?
So far, on my 5 year old brother it annoys me to but toner from them but had a “do not show this message again” choice to click. Happened with two messages and no more so far. They also added a thing in status monitor when it tells you your toner levels wether it’s official or not and that you should not official. So far it hasn’t stopped me from using it, but like every corporation I fully expect them to go full stupid soon.
It’s not even more expensive. You can get a full duplex wifi printer for under $200. I want one, but my 20 year old Brother printer is still going strong.
My Dell mono laser is also going strong. Haven’t had a single issue in over 10 years. Ink printers have been and still are a scam
Laser printers are especially handy if you rarely ever need to print anything, because they don’t dry up and get clogged.
Yeah I tend to either not print anything for years, or print huge amounts in a short span of time. Lasers are brilliant for this use case, because they also print really really quickly when they are printing, in addition to not drying up.
This is what i own. Amazing printer
Laser printers don’t use ink.
HP is probably the worst big tech device company. Their products are shit, break quickly, are overpriced and econ students love them.
Spending too much money on bad products is good for the GDP!
can’t buy a good product under capitalism
contradiction in terms
Well you can while they’re building the brand and the business majors aren’t running every department
I bought an HP Envy, one of these convertible laptop thingies, when I didn’t know any better. The hinge broke about a month after the warranty expired. Repair costs (at a local repair shop, but still) were like 200€ because apparently I had to buy a whole new top cover for the damn repair to work
Anyways, I’m gonna buy a Framework laptop next because fuck going through that again
Repair technician here. Yes we get a lot of hps with bad hinges, because they screw that super stiff hinge into the most floppy wet newspaper like piece of plastic possible. 200$ is reasonable because depending which side it’s one you have to completely gut the screen assembly or the keyboard assembly (you use to be able to replace keyboards by themselves now you need to completely gut the whole computer)
Fuck HP but also fuck a lot of other brands cause they all pull this bullshit (dell, apple, Lenovo, Acer, Asus)
Company I work at does HP warranty repairs on hehalf of HP and the number of fuckin shattered screens from the shitty plastic hinge screw housing being shorn off was absurd.
It seems to be the case with a lot of the bezel-less designs, since I know I’ve seen some other brands with the same problem.
I just hate that they seem to have decided it’s more profitable to just leave the shitty design as-is and deal with the repairs than to actually design that shit better.
$200 definitely seems reasonable though on part cost alone, since HUs are typically the 2nd most expensive order able part besides the system board itself.
That’s a lot of the market right here. What would you recommend being a good laptop brand then?
econ students love them.
Why?
Consumables make economists happy because of all the repeat sales.
They love printing? I guess that’s what he’s saying
This is a real thing? I haven’t owned a printer in years. Why would they have his debit info in the first place?
yes it’s a real thing, it’s part of the HP ink program, they disable printers when your payment method rejects or you cancel the sub
So you’re basically just renting the printer then. Wow.
Nono, you buy the printer and AFTERWARDS they sell you a subscription on top.
That way they get paid twise, much better…
Buy-to-rent. Nice
Sort of. You’re renting the ink, not the printer. If you went to Staples or Amazon and got regular ink for the printer, it would immediately start working again.
If you buy ink from the Instant Ink program, the cartridges are sent to you for far less money than a regular cartridge. They sell page based plans where they make the money back and then new ink just shows up in the mail as you go. HP DRM’s these cartridges to prevent people from skipping out on the subscription and printing normally for wayyyyyyy less up front cost.
HP printers suck. And ink sucks too. So there’s a lot of understandable suckiness. But most of the criticisms about HP’s ink DRM are just people mixing up Instant Ink and regular ink cartridges and getting mad they can’t read instructions.
And this is why things like pirating are not only acceptable but necessary. When companies lock services behind paywalls for products we should legally own, we are left with no recourse but to obtain the services we are owed illegally.
Agreed. Piracy, aka the sharing of information freely (see also: libraries), is a fundamentally ethically correct course of action. Always.
Withholding knowledge for personal profit on the other hand is obviously not.
Why nobody has made an open source ink jet printer design like reprap, I will never understand. The printer industry seems primed for disruption with all their bullshit and their half century old technology.
My guess. They couldn’t get the printer to work. My 3D printer has a lower problem count than my ink jet regular printed at this point.
Probably because they wouldn’t be as profitable.
HP could sell like a tenth the printers and still make more money
Time to invent dd-lpt
Hmmm we don’t need to build a new printer, just new firmware. More like ddwrt or tomato
Right? Why buy a paper printer for less than $100 when you can spend $2000 on a 3D printer + materials and time spent learning and fucking up! Wish I thought of that!
The accuracy required for the ink droplets just isn’t there for prosumers.
I can (and have!) built multiple extruders for a variety of 3D printers. Some of my own design.
Sadly, the tolerances for an inkjet are at least an order of magnitude greater.
I have zero doubt that a few clever hardware hackers could design an open source inkjet printer. But A: They’d get sued back to the mesolithic by every printer company with a patent. And B: the process would likely involve micro machining your own hardware.
I’ve just said, “fuck it” to the entire industry. I’m in my early 40s and I’m reasonably sure that my Brother laser will outlive me. And possibly the heat death of the universe.
Patents expire after, what, 20 years? I’d be happy with an open source printer based on 20 year old technology.
I’d take a tractor fed dot-matrix printer over my current one just so I could play with the paper thingies on the edges.
I made the mistake of buying an HP printer. Fortunately I only spent $70 on it.
Then the ink cartridge ran out as I used all the ink up. So instead of buying more ink I purchased a new printer. This time it was a color inkjet from Brother that will last me years on the first ink cartridge.
Funny how it works. Fuck you HP.
Planned obsolescence iceberg when
there’s not a single thing radical about wanting these fuckers out of our homes and out of our lives. Kill em all as far as I’m concerned.
HP reached its pinnacle in 1993 with the 4L laser printer. They were practically indestructible. I bought one and it took 15 years of heavy use to kill it.
I have an HP printer now, Epson before that. Both are dogshit. When the HP eventually kills itself, as they tend to do, should I buy a Brother? I heard a lot of good stuff about it but have 0 experience with it.
In what way was the Epson dogshit? I’m mostly asking because I just bought an Epson printer a few days ago
It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember the specifics. But it was the ol’ asking for ink when it was obviously still full, bad software, unresponsivness and gradually getting worse and worse prints as it aged.
I’ve had a brother printer going on 10 years and it’s never let me down. I’ve changed toner three times over that time and each cart has never cost me more than 20 ish quid. No DRM carts, no jamming, no subscriptions just a printer that does its job. Even when it’s running low, it doesn’t prevent me printing, it’ll let me know it’s low then keep on printing until you can’t see the letters any more.
I swear, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve also had good experiences with Brother, I’d be thinking they have an insanely good astroturfing department. Every time there’s a thread about printers, there are dozens of comments saying how good they are.
I have a friend who works in the engineering department of HP designing ink jet printing heads.
He uses Brother at home. They’re actually that good.
Having a brother laser printer as well it’s honestly not even about how good brother printers are, just about how shitty the competition is.
Thanks mate. Will check it out.
10 years ? Mine is around 20 years old. I slapped a Raspberry Pi on it to have it network-enabled and it still works like a champ. Never ever will I buy another brand.
Yeah, Brother have been real good so far. Their shit is rock fucking solid reliable, and you can use third party ink with no issues.
I have a epson EcoTank printer and I really really love it.
The Ink is cheap and very good. I will never go back to cartriges.
Interesting. I will check it out. Thank you!
Can confirm. Those EcoTank printers are awesome!
I have a Brother DCP L2541DW. Bought it last year and has been working since with no hiccups nor drum change.
Regardless of brand, don’t buy “at home” printers. Those are straight up scams. Just buy office printers.
I will check it out! Thanks friend
I have a Brother HL-2365DW. It’s a home printer, or maybe at most a home-office printer. I’ve had it nearly a decade with only two toner replacements. Being laser and networked solve the two biggest problems I’ve had with inkjet printers in the past, and those two categories are the main things I would strongly recommend to people when choosing a printer.
edit: I initially wrote “it’s not a home printer” (emphasis added here for demonstrative purposes). This was the exact opposite of what I intended to say.
I need to print in colour because I do papercraft :/ any tips?
I have had no trouble with my Brother printer in ~7-8 years of use. Of course, laser vs inkjet is not a particularly fair comparison, but I am still never going back to HP, Canon, and the like.
I need to print in colour, I’m afraid. Any tips?
If you aren’t doing photography prints there are plenty of nice brother color laser printers.
If you are doing photography… I hear good things about the ecotank printers.
I’ve been radicalized against HP for a decade now. I bought an HP printer with the guarantee of a sizeable rebate. Of course, the rebate never showed up and every time I called about it, the customer service person would read their script, “Oh we sent that out just a few days ago should be arriving soon.” Uh huh. Here it is 15 years later, no rebate check and I’m sure they never intended to send one at all. I’m not a fan of HP at all.
I recently had to set up an HP printer that literally would not function without being activated via Internet connection first, but was received with a dead NIC and no way to activate through USB connection so just another piece of plastic for the landfill due to greed 🤷🏻♂️
That’s the same as the printer I recently bought, and the problem is, my Internet connection is very spotty at best, and my computer doesn’t support the needed software. SIGH. My printer’s a paper weight until I can afford a new computer system and better internet.
This should straight up be illegal
No joke, like what the fuck is this? I bought the thing, and you can just disable it ???
That’s the issue, people won’t stop buying these things and then complain - selling a scam calling it a feature should be illegal and all these practices should be called out as much as possible.
I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inkless monochrome printer.
A bit like How to Cut, Score, and Engrave Paper With a Laser but without the need to use dedicated laser cutter.
With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I’m just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.
This does exist and you can see it in almost every supermarket in the World: the ticket printer. And the tickets end up fading
Ticket printers use a special thermosensitive paper.
Back when I used to work as a cashier I would blow my employees mind by heating up random things with my lighter and pressing them onto the paper when nobody was looking. Had everyone thinking the printer was hacked
Thermal printer is the technical name.
I get the sense that everyone responding to this is completely missing the joke.
They mean laser printers, people.
Laser printers don’t burn the paper. They require toners. So it wasn’t a joke unless they also didn’t know how a laser printer works.
No he clearly says no ink and no toner. Toner is melted onto the paper after a laser (now mostly LEDs) heat up a drum. He’s talking about burning the paper with a laser… Which would be interesting but really hard to do where a top layer is burned black without toasting the rest of the layers.
Pretty sure that’s how my receipt printer works, but it’s just one color onto specialized paper.
I have literally filed a BBB complaint in the past for HP over their stupid ink subscription being fucky
From what I’ve heard the BBB is as much a BS organization as HP, companies can pay to have the complaints removed.
It’s basically a business owner guild, right?
It’s Boomer Yelp.
I honestly don’t know enough to say, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard from others many times over the last decade or so.
They are useless, as anyone who’s ever tried to get redress through them knows. Don’t trust their ratings.
I’ve had good results using them, but the company you’re complaining against has to care about the rating they’re. I’ve even gotten Scamazon to replace valid reviews they removed. If the business isn’t a member and doesn’t care there’s nothing they can do but send a letter to be ignored. Not endorsing them, but just sharing my experience so far.
