The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place inside your printer

Unfortunately, I don't think there are drivers for it for any current OS. We have it connected to an iBook of similar vintage which more or less is only used to use the printer.

Instead of calling it "hand wringing" think of it as "educating potential buyers of HP's past abuses so they don't make the mistake of buying one"

EG. you: "I hate smart TVs! I'll keep my old dumb TV!" --> them: "Our smart TVs aren't doing well, maybe we should make them smarter?"

Hand wringing has a good chance of at least delivering your message.

The 'ultra-high capacity' black ink bottle (T542) used by many of these printers is only 127ml. Further, from the user guide it appears that Epson recommends using the entire bottle to refill the printer (truthfully, I have not been able to find specs on the actual ink capacity of any of the ecotank or supertank printers) and does not recommend storing the bottle after having been opened. This doesn't really seem like bulk ink to me.

If you want to get the most out of an inkjet printer, the best thing to do with it is to load fresh cartridges into the printer and then print continuously until it runs out. Leaving it sit around with partial ink cartridges causes the printer to repeatedly waste ink on cleaning cycles in order to prevent the nozzles from clogging up with dried out ink.

Personally, I think inkjet printers are really only viable for people who do volume photo and other graphics printing, as you would in a commercial printing business.

If you print sporratically and don't need to print pictures, then it's perfect.

The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.

At $1/mo, it's going to 6 years (thanks Ansil) for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.

And to the people saying brothers last forever: they don't. I've owned 3. When the drum wears out, the printer is trash because brother charges almost the cost of the printer for a replacement. That $100 brother has a drum that costs $89 and lasts for 12000 pages. So 12000 pages is the life of that printer.

Edit: Re: ink drying out. HP doesn't consider printer cleaning and maintenance pages in their page count. So you can actually clean the printer regularly so the ink doesnt dry out, and they'll keep sending you new cartridges.

The inexpensive Brother model that we have at home is permanently out of stock everywhere. I've been looking for one so my daughter (college music student) can print sheet music from her apartment.

All I use my printer for is shipping labels for my home business.

Okay, that and Sudoku. ;-)

It would not have been difficult for them to provide CUPS drivers...

I didn't manage to get it to work, but my investigation led me to suspect it was because of some networking shenanigans it was doing (some kind of broadcast packet IIRC). At some point, it started working, maybe a firmware update fixed the issue. Might also have been a Windows issue to be honest.

For my situation I would never buy an inket type printer. When I need to print photos I send them to Costco, which is maybe every couple years.

Logged into the printer and see that I have only printed 3370 pages in all that time. I probably use the scanner feature more than the printer :)

Also my brother printer claims the cartridge is empty even though it is half full. I get around this by putting a sticker on the little window it uses to peek into the cartridge so it thinks it is full.

Insane.

Will they do it? We don’t know, but they absolutely can. And this article literally talks about them doing an even uglier bait and switch making something that was promised to be free, paid for.

If you have any volume, thermal printers are worth the premium. The paper is the ink, they're lightning fast, and they never die.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721

The issue is that hobbyists can't achieve the resolution necessary for printing texts or images, no matter how many axes the machine has. A $30 inkjet printer at Walmart has easily 10x or 20x the resolution of a desktop 3d printer. That kind of precision is hard to do without specialized machinery. The people with that ability are, well, printer manufacturers.

With that being said, when we did buy a printer about 5 years ago we bought a monochrome Brother laser printer and it's a way better investment than inkjet printers (if you don't need to print pictures or something)

You can Doxygen your code into a .pdf, and then print off a reference copy of your API. Use a 2-hole punch with standard prong fasteners: and you've got a decent binding system (far superior to staples).

Just $15 for a 2-hole punch, $5 for 100x prong fasteners. From there, double-sided print from a laser-printer is pretty efficient.

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A Booklet of 100 pages can hold a surprising amount of information, and practically works as a 2nd (or 3rd) monitor for your productivity.

Learning to make __books__ out of your printer, by using a basic binding system (comb binders, 2-hole punch, or 3-hole binders) is a good skill to have. It really does improve your productivity.

I have a recipe binder. When I cook something new, I print it off, If I like it I put it in a plastic sleeve and into the binder.

I also like it for printing out instructions when working on my car or building stuff. Last year I replaced the intake manifold on my car with a tune up. It was so nice to have a paper instructions with check list that I could get greasy.

Finally, I sometimes print off code to take notes and edit offline, so I can get away from distractions and really think about things.

School-supplied Chromebook + Google Classroom, no paper at all!

The status quo - like in the classroom - is to still just use ___________'s and whitespace on printouts. Some teachers even print the students completed work, just because "grading is easier that way" (read: they're unaware that computer based solutions for this problem exist, or they're not very computer savvy to begin with.).

Science and math classes are a different ball game. A HS chem teacher I know wants to use all the fancy modern teaching, assignment, and grading tools, but the district disallows it. Since the student's work involves drawing chemical structures, stoichiometry , and "showing your work" it's far easier to just have students print, handwrite, and scan/photograph their work than to persuade the district to buy software to perform the task. However, several students have been using iPads and drawing tablets to avoid printing and scanning, and a few overachievers use their own science/math drawing/graphing software, even LaTeX, to produce actual graphics and formatted equations.

I can imagine the same is true for math classes, where it's a huge PITA to properly format algebra, long division tables, etc on computers without expensive proprietary software (that includes MS office!).

My 1st grade kid is working on handwriting, drawing, art projects, and other "pencil work". Being in a hybrid model, at home we need to do the print-work-photograph-upload dance every day. I think even if we get the rest of our life down to 0.001% paperless, there's always going to be something that needs a printer...

These practices are unfortunately widespread among printer makers.

They can get away with it because and only because there's a huge void in the field of OSHW printers. I imagine a decent effort to make an OSHW laser printer would gather a lot of interest. Even if the first printer were to be slow, expensive and had poor resolution.

I'd easily recommend such a printer to everybody. It'd be a really easy sell. Everybody hates dealing with printers.

If you need a printer now, by all means, avoid the bad brands, and go for a laser, preferably monochrome, with an ethernet port, postscript support and IPP support.

I can imagine HP printing to have 0 fans, though.

And I've certainly heard good things about their Laserjets back in the day :)

The current budget consumer inkjets seem to be pretty awful; though I wonder how much that's the fault/state of entire category - I notice that whenever we talk about HP Inkjets being awful, the counter-recommendation is not e.g. Epson or Canon budget Inkjet, but a laser printer. Specifically, almost exclusively, a Brother laser :). Which is a different category.

There are professional photographers who are happy with Epson & Canon fancy Inkjets; but the loss-leader el-cheapo printers do indeed seem to be generating ill-will.

But their consumer inkjet people are awful.

The old HP made great printers. Before that, they made great test equipment, calculators, etc.

They still make pretty good servers and networking equipment, but their storage is a mixed bag.

The funny thing about the customer relations team is that they don't have an inbound phone number. If they aren't answering your emails, not only can you not get anything that way, but even if you phone the customer support team, they're internally segregated so they can't see what's going on either.

I've been trying to get a working laptop out of HP since the third week of September, and as far as I can tell that's just not something they're capable of.

compaq bought DEC, HP bought compaq. The things "left" from those veins in the company have been praised, but they have been drying out for a long time by now.

Windows 10 managed to break itself so that the tablet wouldn't boot within a couple of weeks of getting it and HP reinstalled it under warranty.

The part of HP that was widely considered praise-worthy is their test equipment branch. Which, naturally, isn't HP anymore but is now Keysight after HP spun them out as Agilent in the late 90s.

The whole "ink as a service" debacle is ridiculous, but their normal printers with normal ink cartridges work perfectly.

There's a huge void in the field of OSHW printers. I imagine a decent effort to make an OSHW laser printer would gather a lot of interest. Even if the first printer were to be slow, expensive and had poor resolution.

If you need a printer now, by all means, avoid the bad brands, and go for a laser, preferably monochrome, with an ethernet port, postscript support and IPP support.

Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. As you approach photo-quality, you can probably get very good photos from a $500 inkjet, and commercial quality photos from a $1000 inkjet.

I don't know of any laserjet that approaches that quality. Instead, laserjets main advantage is the simpler and cheaper to use toner. At the $300 price point, laser jets are just cheaper to maintain and use over ink.

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Now there's a bunch of $100 to $200 ink printers (and laser printers) which have even worse attributes. Since most $100 printers seem to be inkjet, I think people rightfully give them a bad reputation.

But at higher price points, a 11-ink printer is the only way you're going to get anything near photo-quality. (Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000).

But consumers are short-sighted and irrational. They'll buy the cheap HP inkjet printer rather than a laser printer because all they look at is the upfront cost.

The free market makes this worse. Ideally, HP should be sued for false advertising when they sell you something with the promise something is free for life, then take it away in less than a year.

Another example of the same problem probably more familiar to HN audience (we have more network hackers here than printer hackers) is routers and other internet of shit: standard firmware tends to be very insecure because people who understand how bad it is tend to ignore the security of firmware in their buying decisions as they just want a hardware compatible with software they will install themself.

As there is a term "lemon market" for information asymmetry between buyers and sellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ) I think we need to choose some other fruit as a term for that kind of information asymmetry between buyers that I am talking about.

This was the website that started it all. Before HN, before Reddit.

Slashdot used to crash web servers with all the traffic it sent. Good times...