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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

It's just math. If you don't print much, you can get a HP printer for $30.

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.

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Sometimes, $100 is worth not being stuck in a crappy "ink as a service" contract designed to extract the maximum amount of money from your pocket.

As an aside, for a "don't print much" point of view, 12,000 pages is a long time (I, for example, print about 100 or so pages a year, which would give me a lot of time with my hypothetical Brother printer).

I don't think that's the point of the service.

It's:

A) A way of getting people over that "How much for an official replacement cart‽" hump, which often causes them to buy 'fake' ahem carts, or a new printer

B) A way of getting people who "don't think they need a printer" to get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front.

> causes them to buy 'fake' ahem carts

A system that addresses one point is still capable of addressing a second - extracting a maximum 'value' from their customers.

> get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front

I'm sorry, but a company that changes the price of the contract is the complete - ideologically and practically - opposite of "knowing [your] costs up front".

From HP's point of view of not given them a penny for maybe 20 years - and now I'm paying them $2 a month. They can knock off the cost of making and sending me a new cart - but they're ahead from this. A transaction has occurred due to this innovation and both sides are 'happy'. Innovation/Capitalism - should be catnip to this audience.

I agree that I can't predict the costs exactly - but ballpark is good enough. Like cutting the cord. You don't know how your cable price might change, Netflix prices might increase, your provider might shift cost to your broadband to compensate - but for now it works out and presuming nothing major changes, you'll be fine with incremental stuff and maybe make another bold decision in a few years.

> Innovation/Capitalism - should be catnip to this audience.

Not when it's at the cost of a customer's rights. Between abusing the DMCA to restrict what ink cartridges can be used and actively changing a "free" ink program after advertising that it's for the lifetime of the printer.

There's absolutely nothing we should be praising HP for here.

‽, What is this monstrosity‽

It's called an interrobang. It's essentially a way to ask a question emphatically.

It's an interrobang[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=%E2%80%BD

You can type it in X11 (and Wayland too IIUC) with Compose, !, ? (or ?, !).

> No results found for ‽.

Not a glowing example of DDG there.

The Wikipedia article is in the sidebar. Maybe it doesn’t appear on mobile?

You can also search “!s ‽” and get this: https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%E2%80%BD, but then you have to click “More” to see the full first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, and only then will it reveal the link to the full article there. The rest of the page is just clutter to me.

I don't why you're being downvoted.

Programming ligatures are one thing. Your IDE manages them silently and transparently. They are client-side tech, not part of the actual data exchange. Teammates who find that they hurt code readability, rather than help it, are free to not use them in their own IDE.

But going out of one's way with escape codes or whatever, to insert a poorly-legible replacement for "?!", is simply awful.

Some websites use fonts with programming ligatures, so I'm still subjected to them in those code blocks from time to time.

Which characters are acceptable then? Only ASCII?

> poorly-legible

That's a matter of font choice, which (for HN, which doesn't go out of its way to stomp on user defaults) is, like the use of programming ligatures you have tried to distinguish on this basis, a client-side user decision.

I don't know why either, I gave him an upvote.

I put it in my post, as I quite like the interrobang and will never pass up the chance to use it.

It's entirely legible, just uncommon - and "?!"?! just seems insert new character that represents gipping.

Is it "?!" or "!?" or "!?!" to indicate outrage, query and analysis, resulting in heightened outrage. Why not just add an f'in emoticon (shaped by you gurning at your iphone) seethes :)

For English, it's always '?!'. The question mark gets priority over all other punctuation but an ellipsis (which is pretty rare).

Other countries and languages (Japanese, in particular) give the exclamation point the priority.

As a side note, I can't recall ever seeing the ligature of ?! before today. It feels like one of those typesetting relics we're better off not using.

The interrobang only dates back to 1962, didn't actually appear in a typeface until 1965, and from what I've been able to find, it didn't start routinely appearing in typefaces as a distinct character until it become part of Unicode. So don't blame old typesetters -- blame the internet. :)

I don't see anything wrong with the interrobang, although I don't think I'd go out of my way to use it, simply because it calls rather undue attention to itself. I wouldn't say that about most other ligatures, even some relatively uncommon ones; I'm sure that most people read text in set in Chaparral, for instance, without ever noticing that "Th" is a ligature in that typeface, because it looks optically correct in the same way the near-universal "fi" and "fl" ligatures do.

For the record, I can't find any supporting evidence about the ordering of punctuation marks; both "?!" and "!?" are non-standard in formal English, and the advice I've seen online -- and in the Chicago Manual of Style I have on my bookshelf I just checked -- suggest that an "exclamatory question" just uses the exclamation point. It's just that "?!" is more common when it gets used. (A question mark comes after an ellipsis not because of punctuation priority, but simply because the "..." indicates elided words, but doesn't replace the terminating punctuation mark.)

It’s James Bonds signature data mining technique as punctuation, aka “The Interrobang”

it's called an interrobang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

For that $30; you also get 1GB of software installed to your computer with all sorts of ads and telemetry sending data back to HP, and making any print operation bring your computer to it's knees, and invoke all sorts of popups.

I don't know what comes with a $30 HP printer these days but I'm using HPLIP and I'm quite happy with it. Granted, I've never audited it but it's in the Debian repos and I've never heard anything bad about it either. Or did you mean something else?

On Windows, it's pretty bad. I understand HP has acceptable Linux support, and the driver package on a Linux platform is not as intrusive as the Windows side.

Ah, I see. I suspected that but I wasn't sure. Which makes me wonder why they're even doing HPLIP in the first place. Printing is only really a thing on the desktop and in business networks but in both cases I'd guess the majority of HP's customers are using Windows.

$1/month buys you 15 pages of printing. That’s a joke. A more realistic plan is the $3/mo for 50 pages (still not much for an average printer owner, but not the joke 15 pages is). At that price your math is adding up in less than 2 years.

My highly used $30 Canon printer is in its 4th year, and 3rd cartridge. I’m well ahead of where I would have been with the HP (I print about 3-4 pages a day, so I’d probably have had to shell out for the $5 or $12 plan).

Also, much like most subscription services, even if the math works out, it only does until the next change in the pricing plan.

I probably print a page every other day at most. So 15 pages isn't a joke for me, it's perfect.

If you don't print much, your inkjet printer will probably not work when you actually need it.

This was me until a few months ago. If you don't print frequently you have two options:

1. Buy an inkjet and pray that it prints every time you need to use it.

2. Spend a little more for a lazer and never worry again.

3. Use the public library

Not such an attractive option this year.

I don't know exactly what premium I'm paying per-page to print stuff at the FedEx Office location a couple of blocks away on the rare occasions when I really need something on paper, but whenever I see a discussion like this about the endless compromises and annoyances in home printer ownership I feel like I'm really getting a bargain by comparison

Inkjets only make sense if you print a lot of photographs, which is a vanishingly tiny portion of the market.

Don’t print much != never print anything. I print approximately 20 pages a month. I have been paying $1 every two months for it. Now I’ll be paying on average $3 every two months. I hate HP for doing this but this is not enough of an impetus for me to move now. I paid $30 for the printer. I prefer inkjet because I print photos and recipes. I’ll be moving to an EPSON tank when I decide I’m done with HP. But for now it’s actually a great service for me. (It’s just my preference)

Living in a dry climate, rarely printing usually meant by the time I needed to print again my ink cartridges had dried up (or at least enough to not dispense ink anymore). Not sure if this is still true today.

I've been using cheap laser printers for many years and will never go back to inkjets! But my needs are very simple, not trying to print photos.

Depending on what you're printing photos for, you may find it more convenient/a better fit to use a laser for text based things (including recipes), and getting photos printed at a print center (better color fidelity, lots of high quality paper options, etc). That's what I do, but, again, it's rare I print photos (and when I do it's generally for display or similar, so stuff that an at home consumer printer is just subpar for).

Modern inkjet printers use ink at almost the same rate whether you are printing or not, with innovations like daily self-cleaning routines that just spray ink into a receptacle inside the machine.

Our Brother printer (inkjet circa 2014) doesn't use ink when we're not printing because we unplug it when we're not using it, as we do with all of our corded electronics. If it's been more than 2 months since we've printed a page, it only takes two minutes for the printer to run the "ink > clean" cycle, and then it prints just fine. We've had the same black cartridge for three years, no problems, and we're still using the color cartridges that came with the printer when we got it secondhand.

Recently excavated my early 2008 inkjet printer from the basement. Works fine. Even the color cartridges still work.

> It's just math. If you don't print much, you can get a HP printer for $30.

> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.

> At $1/mo, it's going to take the rest of your life for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.

What? At $1/mo, it is going to take under six years for the price to work out in favor of the Brother. Are you suggesting the person you're responding to has six years to live?

lol thanks... should have had more coffee before writing. Was thinking $1/year.

>$1/year.

At that rate of printing, ink is going to dry up in the headers. Which would require running the cleaning procedures. Which use a lot of ink.

Ink printers are a really bad proposition.

That laser printer goes on sale often, frequently for $50, and periodically for $40. [0]

Also, it comes with toner. Just a starter cartridge, granted, but if you're not printing much it will last years.

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00NQ1CLTI

Brother HL-L2300D Monochrome Laser Printer with Duplex Printing

Thank you, that's exactly what I needed: a reliable compact duplex printer (to carry most of the burden of the old color MFP that now jams every second page ...)

Edit: Seems to have been replaced by the HL-L2310D, or HL-L2350DW with WiFi

If you don't print much, 12000 pages is the lifetime of the printer. I've had a cheap laser printer for about 6 years now, and I only think about it once or twice a year when I need to print something.

I don't do any maintenance, and I don't worry about the ink drying out.

I wouldn't take a one-time payment of $70 in exchange for having to do regular printer ink maintenance for 6 years, so it makes sense to pay an extra $70 to avoid that. Paying the extra $70 makes even more sense if you factor in the fact that I'd actually have saved $72 in monthly payments over that time period.

Brother Monochrome Laser Printer, HL-L2320D $100 USD + tax, but you get a starter cartridge, so you don't need to pay for toner immediately. AND it has a duplexer so 2-sided printing is included. Toner is $40 for 1,200 pages.

https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/733081/Brother-Monoch...

I have not yet hit the drum-replacement point on my Brother color printer yet so we'll see where that goes.

I picked up that model for $80ish a few years ago on Black Friday at Best Buy. For those with the patience, it could be worth waiting a couple of weeks. (And I've been very happy with it for my needs.)

That still sounds cheaper than the HP when the cost of ink is considered. More importantly, if you don't print often, your dry toner will continue to be useful after sitting for 3 months.

>At $1/mo, it's going to take the rest of your life for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.

$1/mo = $12/y

(7 * 12) + 30 = 114

Do you know something about the rest of my life that I need to know? How much time do I actually have left!?

> it's going to 6 years (thanks Ansil) for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.

6 years is not a very long time. I've had my Brother laser printer for a decade now, am as happy as the day I bought it, and can easily imagine using it for another decade or more.

We need to rid ourselves of the mindset that electronic devices are inherently short-lived.

So far I'm still going on the 3000 page toner "starter kit" that came with my (HP) colour laser four years ago. If that $100 brother is 'only' going to last me around ten years, it's probably beating the HP inkjet on price.

That $30 HP isn't going to last forever either, and will need periodic replacement.

Huh, I see two replacement toner cartridges AND a drum for my Brother printer for $40. (Not Brother branded, but that's the point: you can use competing products because Brother doesn't stop you.) You should shop around.

> If you don't print much, you can get a HP printer for $30.

Those $30 printers either don't come with ink cartridges or they come with very small "starter" cartridges, good for a few dozen pages at the most.

> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.

Toner, actually. The $100 Brother printer does come with a "starter" cartridge but it prints 700 pages. So even if you threw the printer away after the starter cartridge ran out, you'd still be paying $0.17 per sheet as opposed to the $30 inkjet's initial cost of $1.25 per sheet for the first cartridge.

If we're talking refills then, I can buy an aftermarket toner cartridge for my laser printer for under $20 and that yields 2600 pages. ($0.008/sheet). Black HP 67XL ink (240 pages) works out to $0.10/sheet. The laser is an order of magnitude less in both scenarios.

The drum unit in mine did start going bad after 3-4 years. I bought a new drum on Amazon for $20, far less than what I originally paid for the printer. It has been going strong for a few years since.

HPs instant ink program lets you print full page prints in full color for the same price. Costco charges $2 each for 8x10 enlargements. Given that HPs base add-on rate is $0.10/pg, there are environments where that could make sense. Kinkos and Fedex routinely charge $0.50/pg for color prints.

Sure, I wouldn't print 500 pages of B&W text on instant ink, but when printing things that require color, it's not ridiculously expensive.

That's assuming they keep the price at $1/month. It was free for "life", so I'm skeptical they'll keep prices at $1/month for 6 years.

$100 for a laser printer is stupid cheap. Like, it's kinda wasteful because it will someday end up in a landfill, but I've been printing a few hundred pages a year off this Brother for ages now and it Just Works. It's noisy, the driver is not very user friendly, I don't enjoy scanning with it, but if it dies I'll probably just get another one.

12000 pages at HP’s $1 plan will cost you $800 to print assuming you actually print 15 pages a month and don’t go months where you printed less.

Their most cost effective $25/700 pages plan will cost you over $425 to print that much assuming you use up the entire quota each month.

I've had my Brother laser printer since '11 and have replaced the toner cartridge once in '15. Still works great. I probably would have gone through 5 HP printers in that span.

If you leave an HP inkjet for a few months will it still print or be clogged?

Not without it doing a substantial amount of 'self cleaning'. If you print infrequently, a laser printer is actually a better use case. Frequent printing, namely of photographs, is a good use case for inkjet.

And even then, a consumer inkjet doesn't do that great a job on photos. You're much better off having someone like Walgreens do it for you. Faster and better, still cheap.

And, many printers pick up the spilled 'self cleaning' ink in a tank, and when it's full they refuse to work any longer. It a total scam.

Although depending on the paper and ink involved, the quality and longevity of your inkjet-printed photographs may turn out to be disappointing.

HP's Instant ink does solve this problem. They charge per-page, so you can automatically run self-cleaning every few days at zero cost to the consumer.

You can get an aftermarket drum for a bit cheaper in many cases.

Yea, I've done this several times. My brother printer finally wore out at 3 years of pretty heavy use.

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