Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
I'm just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that's a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
I know we assume they're following the "razor blade" model but I actually find it hard to believe the printers are sold at a loss given how cheap it is to produce at this point.
Unless by "loss" we're saying "less than HP thought it could extract."
A warning: if you've already bought an HP printer, never subscribe to the HP ink service. If you do, your printer will only be allowed to use certified HP cartridges, and it could lead to situations where you have ink in your printer but it will not print.
There is a lot of IP that we've built in the inks of the printers, in the printers themselves.
I call bullshit. I haven't delved into specific law, but plenty of companies have been around since, say, the 1860s and are still producing ink today. If you can't make ink people want to buy, that's a skill issue.
"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."
As the cool kids these days say, "what the fuck is blud waffling about?" If a printer cartridge can contain a virus, I think that's on you, not on the cartridge. A black cartridge and a color cartridge need only to conform to two unique shapes, and that should be all.
ETA: as the ashamed owner of an HP printer, I've learned how to fill my own cartridges, and while the process is messy and should be conducted over a kitchen sink, it is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times cheaper than buying from HP.
ETA2: Don't buy HP though. Seriously.
HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won't notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a "virus" to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid "instant ink" scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by... not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
I'm pretty sure the quantity of the ink is calculated through whatever's on the cartridge, but... If filling your own, the first thing you need to do is disable that.
On the bright side, it can be done by holding a button on pretty much any HP printer. On the not so bright side, that's only because HP lost a lawsuit about it.
People say that, but...
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you'd installed a new cartridge when you hadn't, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don't think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It's not like it's going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I'd buy any printer that doesn't attempt to monitor the ink.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the 'T' part of their SWOT analysis.
I'm not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like "Fuck yeah."
We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been "HP CEO admits company's products are platform for malware attacks."
"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 the cartidges didn't have drm chips you wouldn't have anything to load with malware to begin with.
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
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.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP's path.
In other words: "Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it."
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn't make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That's what all the cool investors care about now, right?
Later in the interview, he added: "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."
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire...
Don't worry, they'll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
This just screams that it's a bad investment to buy HP stock at the moment. No company will insult their potential customers if they aren't desperate.
That's not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Proud to be a bad investment here 😊
"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."
They literally can't help themselves. They've gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn't perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they're fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren't exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an "investment," in the employee. Nevermind the employee can't afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
"You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more," is what they are saying to themselves.
Guess I'm fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation's "bad investment". I'll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
In case anyone cares, I'm sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I've bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I've never had to buy more black). I'm extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special ~~rootkit~~ software in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that's a selling point in our blighted modern age.
Fuck HP, that simple. it's exhibit "a" for the proof of enshittification
In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
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