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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Over the past five years, I've bought two HP printers (based in part on recommendations from the Wirecutter) and then three Brother printers, and have also read a dozen HN posts like this.

My summary is that Brother is the way to go, period. The HP printers are constantly fighting me by, e.g., demanding internet access to print, failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down, putting up baffling errors, etc. The Brother printers just work.

The fact that Wirecutter recommended HP when Brother is so clearly superior has forever lowered my faith in their recommendations.

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I swore off HP products for a run of crap in the 2005-2010 era. What finally did it was a wireless printer. We got a new router, and I spent a couple of hours trying to get the printer to work again. I finally contacted HP support and the answer was, yeah, with that printer, you can't change the router. No way to get it to forget the old network and move to the new one.

They fell so far.

Wow. Not even a hard reset?

What model was this?

Maybe I've just been terribly unlucky with that brand, but I also swore off HP products more or less in that period, after almost everything me, my friends and my coworkers had from that brand (laptops, Palm-like pre-tablet devices, inkjet printers, etc.) failed or gave oodles of problems (the exception was an expensive laser printer at work which worked fine for a long time).

Years after that, around 2017, my SO buys a rather high-end HP laptop in spite of my discouragement (can't blame her, it was a really attractive offer in terms of specs vs. price). She had to take it for repair shortly after buying it, the WiFi card never really worked (it's unstable, with constant disconnections, so an external one is needed) and the battery totally died a few days after warranty expired.

I suppose my experience with that brand is not representative because otherwise it should have been out of business for a long time...

I won’t do business with anyone that employees Meg Whitman. She was the CEO of HP while it imploded. The damage was obviously self-inflicted and driven by upper management.

That must be the ultimate "disposable" printer.

Brother makes a basic AF black laser printer that costs $88 (back when I bought it). It's been 4 years and I have yet to replace the replaceable materials (toner). I was planning on upgrading but I don't wanna throw away useful hardware.

I have that same one. I've had it for years and years.

Here's a message for your future self: that printer has a very important, very small piece of plastic inside it that occasionally breaks and it won't grab paper internally. The part number is LY2579001 and here's how to replace it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcZ5gF0t7Kc

If you have this printer, print out this comment and then stuff it under the printer or tape it to the side or something (stuff it in the owners manual, etc.).

Home-office stuff got better when started taping shit to the side or under my printers / monitors / homelab servers. Same deal as a label maker in the data center...

I think I have the same one, but I haven't been thrilled with it. Even at the best print quality, I don't get nice, crisp letters from it. The print quality is really only good enough.

What prints better at this price range though? It's the cheapest full duplex WiFi laser you can buy.

Yep. I have this one. It was $89 before COVID WFH drove prices up on home office equipment.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZS5EEI

I have not even had to replace the toner in it. It stays asleep the vast majority of the time and wakes on WiFi. I print directly from my phone or laptop wirelessly. It is everything a home printer should be.

I am unsure how to guess how long the HP DRM'd laserjet ink cartridges will continue to be manufactured before they either jack up the price due to low production volumes or discontinue them to force people to buy new printers.

So instead I got a Brother printer. Sorry HP, not this time.

I mean if non-DRM'd cartridges work, they work on any printer you own, so third parties will manufacture cartridges and it will continue to work until it breaks.

Not that Brother isn't a wildly better experience but.

I'm saying that the currently available HP printers all have DRM that makes them potentially not work with 3rd party ink. I called them to be sure and was told that this is to ensure quality. This is doublespeak for "so that we have more control over how you use it".

I get the impression that right now they have the technical capability to disable 3rd party cartridges but do not use that capability for the most part. But they're quite upfront that they may change their mind.

So yes, non-DRM'd cartridges work on HP printers for now. That might change at any time though, at only their discretion. I don't know why you'd expect the same cartridge form factor to work in every printer you own.

I am saying that HP is making it so that third parties may be technically unable to manufacture cartridges and are left instead doing workarounds like refilling old HP cartridges.

I mean, they work with third party supplies for now on the current firmware, you could always lock onto that version to avoid updates.

Given how deeply it sounds like the HP drivers call out yeah that's going to be a problem eventually, I agree with you. Even if not with these models, maybe the next.

HP's drivers are super fucked, can't encourage people to stay away enough.

I think HP already tried to block 3rd party ink and was sued?

Either way, the DRM has been used to 1.) void your warranty as soon as a non-HP cartridge is installed and 2.) activate a kill bit in the cartridge DRM so it can’t be refilled and sold by 3rd party services. Any printer that reads a flagged cart will reject it.

I have the exact same story, and I too now mistrust the Wirecutter!

Product reviews are flawed. They are biased toward things that work well for the first month.

And furthermore, Wirecutter uses affiliate links to make money. And then they got bought by NYT.

So, they definitely aren't completely unbiased.

Me three. HP just gave me a bad feeling.

Another vote for Brother here. A simple, no bullshit printing appliance. Plug in, and forget it's there until the toner warning appears.

Thanks, I was looking to get a cheap home laser printer. Seems you and everyone recommends them, so it's ordered. Pleasingly, at least on the website I bought it from, the OS compatibility is listed as "Linux, Windows, iOS, macOS", which suits me quite well.

...and when the toner warning appears, stick a piece of electric tape over the sensor and keep going! I printed for literally years after the toner warning appeared with no decline in quality (I didn't print often, but still!).

https://i.imgur.com/3tjKV.png

> failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down

Excuse me, why are your printouts being uploaded to someone's server?! How did you not return this junk immediately after finding out?

I don't think it's sending my printouts, because I don't think they have any use for them. But I do think it's phoning home as a precondition to print in order to get me to buy more ink at the right times. I've never bought anything from HP since that happened.

That's probably the HP Instant Ink service, which sends your ink levels to HP every freaking time so they can send a new set of cartridges if it's running low. You can set it up without that.

HP printers will still look for updates and take their time installing them even when you need to urgently print 2 sheets, as I found out myself :/

I got a HP 477 or something. Network connection works well, printer shows up on all machines at home immediately, there was a bit of setup required on Android (I think I had to install some hp print plugin). However I regularly get smears on the prints - even after shaking the toner, or printing a "clean up" page. I mean the rest is nice, but print quality is the most important thing...

Also have the 477. Print quality and speed is great for my use. Scanning-to-file over the network... refuses to work. I'm forced to use the USB thumb drive for that. It also seems to forget it's network connection if it sleeps for too long. The single-page feeder on the top is also very fussy... but I don't use it much.

For scanning over the network, I switched to let it save scans on my NAS, that works reliably.

I’ve had mostly good experiences with HP laser printers.

My wife bought an HP printer about 15 years ago, and I've never had problems with it, but they wanted something like $500 for a memory upgrade, which was something like 128MB or 256MB, whatever was max for the printer. Even at that time, that was an absurd price. I was eventually able to find a third-party compatible memory module for about a 1/3 of the price.

But the printer has always worked well for us. Maybe this is from the days before HP got bad.

I had an HP LaserJet 6L from the 1990s and it was built like a tank. I'm sure it is still working (I don't have a PC with a parallel port to test it).

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