How to revert HP printer’s ban on 3rd-party ink cartridges
kevin.deldycke.com
kevin.deldycke.com
Get yourself a <$100 Brother laser printer and never look back. They work under Linux without any configuration and you can refill the toner for like $5 on eBay.
Mine has been going strong for like 10 years now.
I always assumed this was true and the cartridge would last maybe 2-3x the initial amount of toner. I’m amazed that is 10 years! That’s awesome.
But I do wonder whether this problem will continue to be specific to ink jet printers. It's easy enough to make a laser printer refuse to print with a third party cartridge.
Many refrigerators do the same thing to prevent you from using third party water filters. I think this is a more general pattern than inkjet printers.
The best example I've heard from this was from {large-copier-manufacturer}. Someone (not an official dealer) in the middle east had purchased a truckload of copiers and cartridges in a fire sale from a business in the UK that was closing. They sold these copiers locally, of course undercutting regular local prices. Everything was fine until all the customers needed new toner, which they purchased locally, and suddenly got errors telling them the toner was incompatible.
What happened is while the copiers themselves are the same globally, the cartridges are region-encoded. The first time the copier powers on, it does a write-once setting to region-lock itself to whatever cartridge is installed. There's apparently no factory reset or software change to modify this setting (in the name of security), so the only fix was either to import cartridge from the UK (which the official dealers can't even do) or replace the mainboard to fully reset the thing back to how it comes from the factory.
Ah, and also on the newwer Brother printers one has to do a complicated configuration menu dance to get rid of "Toner cartridge empty" warnings, in order to do a "Toner Reset", which lets one continue to use a half-empty cartridge. Some kind of fools' tax, it seems.
And I'm seeing lots of printers come with native PDF/DVI support which is nice.
For printing academic research papers in reverse page order to hand staple and read, indeed you don’t need drivers.
Brother's site says my printer does support AirPrint. And through the printer's internal web server, I can see under Network -> Protocol that AirPrint is there and enabled.
I have the binary blob driver installed, so I guess this explains why two entries appear for this printer under Printer settings in Ubuntu.
So, a minor mystery is solved, and I now see that I have the option of removing this driver.
To be honest, I have no idea how. It just shows up as a network printer.
Brother's proprietary garbage driver is not needed for their older printers; there's a reverse-engineered 'brlaser' driver that you can use instead.
The major office supply chains and UPS stores offer online print services, so for the occasional color print job I just send it to one of them and pick it up the next time I’m out for lunch.
And then I discovered the paint pens my wife uses for rock painting. Now, those really work.
I just switched from a Brother printer to Lexmark. Not sure if it's Brother itself or just the model, but my particular printer only could connect over WiFi (no ethernet option), and it kept getting confused about it's IP address and dropping from our network. I bought a different printer after losing several hours of needing to use my limited network engineering skills to diagnose so I could print out worksheets for my kids. I haven't had issues since.
With IPP (AirPrint) built into CUPS now, my Brother actually works better (has a bigger range of print options) without their drivers installed.
I feel like the “black and white brother laser” attitude is like buying a car with no air conditioning because you’ll save five hundred bucks off the sticker price.
The reason to choose inkjet:
1. Black and white sucks
2. Color lasers are huge and don’t really save money on toner vs. ink for typical home users.
My current printer is an HP OfficeJet 9015, which has been excellent. Zero software needed for Windows 10, iOS (AirPrint), macOS.
Another thing those cheap brother laser printers don’t give you is, you know, features. My inkjet printer has a scanner, auto document feeder with auto duplex, and auto duplex printing.
If you want all that with a color laser you end up with a monstrosity in your house.
I, for example, have only ever used my printer to print such things as tickets and documents which must be mailed for bureaucratic reasons. My hunch is that this describes many others too.
I think most people prefer having color. The top 8 printers on Best Buy’s website are all color and/or photo printers.
Do I care about the color of the airline logo on my bording pass? Nope.
When I print driving directions, do I care about the colors? Maybe a little.
Does color matter for recipies? Not really.
I still got a color laser printer during lockdown to replace the inkjet that I can't print to with Chrome OS anymore (thanks to Google killing Cloud Print). It wasn't too much extra to support it for just in case, and color toner won't spoil by sitting like on the inkjet.
Since all the praise here has been for Brother laser printers, I went looking for the cheapest B&W and color laser printers they offer. That would be the HLL2300D and HLL3210CW respectively. The first one is 14.0" W x 14.2" D x 7.2" H, while the second one is 16.1” W x 18.1” D x 9.9” H. So it's 2 inches wider, 4 inches longer, and 3 inches taller. Doesn't seem that much bigger to me:
https://comparesizes.com/saved/CompareSizes_HLL2300D_vs_HLL3...
> and don’t really save money on toner vs. ink for typical home users.
At the very least, toner cartridges drying out isn't really a thing.
>If you want all that with a color laser you end up with a monstrosity in your house.
Your HP OfficeJet 9015 has official dimensions of 17.3" x 20.46" x 10.94". The Brother MFC9340CDW also has a scanner with ADF with auto-duplex (and does it in one pass, actually), and auto-duplex printing. Its dimensions are 16.1" x 19.0" x 16.1". So it's true that the color laser is taller. However, it has a smaller footprint, which is what matters for most people when trying to situate a printer.
One feature that your OfficeJet does not have that I appreciate (and this Brother AIO has) is a manual feed slot, which lets me skip the rigamarole of emptying the paper tray, fiddling with the tray to fit the envelope or whatever custom paper I'm using, printing, and then reversing what I previously did. That likely contributes at least a little bit to the height.
> "Unplug printer’s power cord from the back of the printer
Press and HOLD the power button
Plug power cord back in (keep holding power button)
The HP logo will appear then the screen will go blank
Hold power button for 10 seconds and then release it
Press HOME BUTTON ONCE (top left)
Press RETURN/BACK ARROW ONCE (bottom left)
Press HOME BUTTON TWICE
That should bring up the control screen
NOTE: On my printer I couldn’t see the home or back buttons lit up but if you press to the left of the display area the buttons still work.
Press MFG (Top Left)
Press NEXT (Top Right)
The screen idled with some weird looking grid design and status bar so I pressed the Power button and it went to the main printer screen on the display."
Source: https://borncity.com/win/2018/09/19/blocks-hp-firmware-updat...
And for the love of God don't let your printer out to the Internet any more, they may push a malicious update and disable this workaround in the future (or might have done it already in newer firmware?).
Otherwise, how will HP and the shops selling this crap learn?
I reckon that'll do the job. If you enable it, various features get disabled like the ability to email a pdf file to the printer for it to print.
It's far from perfect - most importantly it doesn't stop manufacturers from making printers which only work if they have an always-on internet connection, and also doesn't stop a scheme where the proprietary Windows/etc drivers send the firmware as part of a print payload, but it probably works "enough" for now.
One other problem with this approach is that it isn't easily open to anyone non-technical.
Why would your printer be set to allow print jobs from outside your network?
The above hack was useful for me, so that the already bought 3rd party ink won't go to waste.
In some places (Germany IIRC) manufacturers have to take back and dispose of e.g. refrigerators and other appliances. No reason that kind of full-lifecycle management shouldn't also be applied to printers, eh?
I've had it with inkjet cartridges drying or having to be wasted as the printer takes them through a "restoration procedure" if it was long enough since you last printed, and you have to second guess your printer whether it's really just spending your ink, or if it does indeed do only what is absolutely necessary to not have them dry up.
1) The Epson EcoTank has a fixed printhead system where if the printhead gets damaged or clogged, then replacing it can become expensive. Over time or if you do not print continuously, the printhead can become damaged and/or clogged. HP/Canon keeps the printhead on the cartridge itself so the printheads are replaced continuously.
2) There is an infamous problem "Epson Ink pad is at the end of its service life error". The Ink pad absorbs excess ink during printing and needs to be replaced after a while. Unfortunately to reset the error you need to send it back to Epson for servicing (even if you replace the inkpad itself). Epson claims that this error is also tied to the service lifetime of other parts in the system and they would need to be replaced as well (AKA: planned obsolescence).
The cost of shipping + servicing + parts replacement is more than just replacing the printer all together.
Even though the EcoTank fixes the ink refill issue it forces you to buy a whole new printer after a certain amount of use.
Are you talking about the Lexmark case? That was the Supreme Court ruling against Lexmark's claim of patent infringement by a 3rd-party ink refiller.[1]
That ruling doesn't apply to 1st-party manufacturers using electronics/software/DRM to make 3rd-party accessories incompatible. That's why it's currently legal for Apple's T2 chip to not validate 3rd-party repairs and Keurig coffee maker to check for approved K-Cups.
Tbh they're so cheap that often I'll buy one to use for a little while and give it away to some art student only to buy another later when I need one again. Just to save space.
It's still cheaper than using those horrid inkjet all in ones.
What you need if you want to print ink often is an inkjet with CISS (continuous inkjet supply system). You used to have to hack these together with third party gear (which I've done), but now the companies sell their own models. Take a look at the Epson EcoTank products. We've have one for a couple years, and it works very well. Ink is cheap and lasts a long time. And no way the printer can tell if you're using third party ink or not :)
> Most Linux distributions include HPLIP with their software, but most do not include the plug-in
Due to recommendation here on HN, I've been checking Brother laser printers. They also require installing a proprietary package from the manufacturer, and a proprietary tool for the print queue setup.
Year ago, the plugin was needed for the scanning. Today, it works out of the box with Fedora 33, no plugin (I'm using eSCL mode).
Fedora 33 ships with sane 1.0.31, sane-airscan 0.99.18 and hplip 3.20.9.
It wasn't the lowest-end model but it wasn't super-expensive either. I think the next model down was the same but wouldn't take PostScript.
Can anyone confirm, that this is not necessary and it works OOB with software shipped with distributions? (I need it to work with Ubuntu 20.04 and future LTS releases, preferably without anything that would bite me two years down the line).
Scanning is more difficult to tell but it may well work using SANE's AirScan driver, called eSCL as it looks like this model supports AirScan/AirPrint scanning. This shouldn't need the proprietary drivers as I understand it. The next models up (MFC-273x and higher) look like they support scanning and saving directly to an FTP server or CIFS/SMB share on your network which wouldn't need a driver so that might be a more surefire option.
The only thing that has worked (at all) has been the instructions and software from http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/, even if the site looks way too sketchy to my liking. Recently, though, even those drivers have started misbehaving and do not print the last centimeter or two on the page---the solution is to select upside down printing in the print settings.
Recently got a Xerox, it's better.
I do have a LaserJet at home; all I did was to connect it to the network and it popped up in the printer dialogs on Linux and Mac machines. On Linux, standard cups+hplip that's in the default package set in most distributions does the job.
Build quality has gone down a little but so have all brands.
The scanner was expensive, but really nice. And it worked perfectly with MacOS 'capture' application that existed on Snowleapard (10.6).
However, Apple removed TWAIN support in MacOs Lion (10.7), and Brother refused to release updated drivers. The only way to use the scanner was using the horribly bloated third party scanning software, that was basically useless for document scanning (but it did allow you to draw a hat on the photo of your dog!). Up to this day they still market the scanner as 'MacOS compatible'.
Ironically, my scanner is now an expensive paperweight. Which makes it double useless, since I have no paper.
It's an application that has its own (reverse-engineered) drivers for many USB scanners that doesn't depend on the system having support for it. I've used it and it works perfectly, though the UI is quite complex at first glance due to the amount of various configuration options it offers.
I remember also being quite annoyed that I had to spend more money on a VueScan license, just because Brother refused to release a compatible driver for a scanner that was then still sold as new and 'MacOS compatible'. This was not a cheap scanner, the least they could have done was to compensate the license cost of the piece of software that made their product usable.
Most scanner makers wouldn’t release new drivers, so VueScan was the only way to get often quite expensive hardware working again.
I've have old ScanJet 3600C and it's still works flawless. But no drivers for new macOS versions.
And short research found this: http://www.sane-project.org
I guess I kind of lost my sanity with SANE ;-)
Anyway, it wasn't a solution, extremely hacky at most. Not something what you want to spend your time on if you buy a scanner that is supposed to work with your OS.
My lesson: avoid consumer companies.
Lol, because a $100 printer from Amazon can just pop out sheets of cash, even though they don't have any color shifting ink, no way to do the lithograph printing.
I think these were developed before authorities realized how much power online (dis)information would have--it was all about trying to lock down speech and publication freedom, turning household printers into government minders.
Certainly, the NSA could put firmware on its own printers (as could any organization that needed it) so that is no justification for putting it in all printers with no notice to the user.
Fun story. I had a printer for a while, and then I just didn't after university. I don't print anything anymore. To no loss at all. It's either on my phone or I write things with a pen.
I generally print things on the order of single digit pages per year, but some people do things like print PDFs to read them or still live in fax land, etc. E-ink is making some inroads, but a fair portion of the population does like text on something physical and highlightable and pen-markable.
It's a pretty easy calculation, because they're not going to be forced to change anything. The race is against publicity and a loss of customer goodwill, not regulation. Who regulates businesses anymore for anything other than being owned by a Chinese person?
I wish =/ Most of the documents I have to print are documents to be printed, signed, and scanned again (or sent by mail - not email).
Some (including my employer) still don't accept anything else than signature on real paper somehow.. Luckily I have a "re-purpose device" at home (a young child with a huge appetite for drawings), but I'd still like to avoid this waste.
None the less, a company the other day insisted that I print out a form, sign it, take a picture of the signed form and send them that. It was almost enough to bin them off, but unfortunately I was deep enough in the bureaucracy by that point that sucking it up was less hassle.
convert -density 130 input.pdf -rotate 0.33 -attenuate 0.15 +noise Multiplicative -colorspace Gray output.pdf
This is sometimes referred to as the 'five monkeys with a ladder' paradigm [0] (not to be confused with the '5 monkey experiment'). It basically comes down to: we must use paper format, because we have always done it that way, though nobody knows why we still do it.
Having worked on a paperless accounting startup, I though that paper was still used for legal reasons. It turns out that (for most countries) this is mostly a misunderstanding. Digital documents are just as valid (if not higher level of assurance) as its paper counterparts. Many businesses still insist on the 'signature with a blue ink pen' thing, but again that is due to the 5 monkeys with a ladder problem.
[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...
Some of our legal documents in the Czech Republic have had to be wet ink on paper originals only, no scans or copies allowed. I’m not sure how much of that is superstition on the parts of lawyers/bankers and how much is genuine, but it’s the only jurisdiction where I frequently have to send originals.
It probably (if not certainly) is .. but with authorities systematically failing their duties on that subject, and for a long time too, don't expect much (if anything) to come from that.
The sad (and in my personal opinion: criminal) reality is that the (official) meaning/interpretation of anti-trust has been systemically eroded over the years. No doubt as a consequence of relentless lobbying (corruption?), to the point it has become pretty much a total farce.
One does not have to look far to find more examples of companies getting away with what should be punished as anti-trust behavior. HP is hardly an exception and don't expect anything to change. If anything, it might just get worse. By now, pretty much the whole system is designed to resist any change that isn't in favor of those who "invest" (lobby) into it.
Pragmatically speaking, the only mitigation here is to avoid printing as much as possible. It won't do much, and certainly won't change a thing .. but at least this criminal enterprise will not get a penny of mine.
It's likely not an anti-trust issue. No single manufacturer has anything close to a monopoly and there's no legal duty to make it the printers compatible with third party modules. At best, some consumer might argue a case that there was an expectation of third party compatibility when they purchased their printers. Even that would be difficult to prove though.
Vote with your wallet and buy something that will work with third party ink. Go a step further and avoid all HP products. That's the only way this will be solved.
Funny .. It's exactly this kind of response that illustrates what I meant with the erosion of the meaning of anti-trust.
You appear to hold a rather narrow definition of what anti-trust means. One that is not surprisingly rather convenient for a lot of companies these days, and as mentioned a result of systemic lobbying efforts (for decades). Feel free to know little about history, and go make those same mistakes all over again. Just don't even dare complain, when you end up regretting it.
> ... and there's no legal duty to make it the printers compatible with third party modules.
I never argued there is such a thing. There is a legal duty to prosecute anti-trust violations though.
> Vote with your wallet and buy something that will work with third party ink. Go a step further and avoid all HP products. That's the only way this will be solved.
Sadly, that won't solve it either (history has a way of proving that point). But it is indeed the only thing you can really do. Still, as an argument it is about as valid as saying: "don't go out on the street after dark, if you do not want to get killed".
Might be equally true, pragmatically speaking. But totally side-steps that your country has a legal duty to at least try keep you from being murdered for no reason. You know .. because it signed and ratified that pesky little document called the Universal Declaration of Human Right ;-)
This seems like HP is acting anti-competitively, such that a third party would struggle to feasibly make a part for the printer. Reasons that a third party may make a non-official part:
* It's cheaper
* It improves on HP design (flaws)
* It offers some additional functionality not provided by standard parts
* They offer support past HPs official support, preventing contribution of e-waste
It's common knowledge that ink cartridges are a racket and the real money maker for printer manufacturers. I have absolutely zero doubt that this move was only done in order to coerce their users into buying ridiculously overpriced first-party cartridges.
I believe that they are and that it's not just a feeling. Some of their printers also used to tell your cartridges were empty before they were.
Printer breaks very fast and support don't really help you: https://sebsauvage.net/streisand.me/matronix/index.php?20200... (french).
Their policy on recurring payment is also pretty damning: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-b...
Nah, that's just the marketing PR blurb they attach to this stuff.
The real reason is $$$, nothing else.
But then I realize I'm not a typical consumer, and most of us aren't, here on HN.
Do typical consumers even have the vocabulary and mental concepts in place (the basics you learn in e.g. free software philosophy, right to repair movement, etc).
I think most people don't. They just see that "Hm, the machine says this ink is bad. Damn those guys who sold it to me! I guess I can only trust genuine HP products." I don't think normal people's reaction is to suspect malevolent marketing and updates. I think when people don't have a good mental model of what is going on they will just take it at face value and therefore the HP brand won't suffer much damage even in the long term.
And most people know very well how to find their aftermarket ink, either in the shop or online. None of them think what they're buying is official. Sometimes (but rarely) really cheap ink does cause printer problems, but even then it's worth the risk. An Inkjet is pretty much "total loss" after the first ink change anyway (a full cartridge set costs close to what the printer is worth).
I always advise Epson EcoTank ones for inkjet use (though these are pretty pricey) and Brother for laser (which besides not being bound to expensive toners are actually some of the cheapest printers around too). For most people a simple B/W laser is sufficient anyway (and just to order photos online).
But they often end up falling for Canon, Lexmark or HP again because they're just cheap and fall for their marketing even though they were bitten by extremely overpriced cartridges before... <facepalm>
The obvious example is predatory MSPs where they talk their customers into certain printers and sell them ink. A 10% commission on a $600 set of toners is easy money compared to a $150 set of toners where a 10% ($15) commission isn't even possible.
The other less obvious one is franchises. Part of the franchise agreement will include having corporate be the supplier for all the lease hold improvements, all the furnishing, office supplies, etc., plus all of the ongoing consumables. It's sold as consistency to protect the brand, but a lot of it is about increasing profits for the corporate side at the expense of their franchisees. I've seen it first hand.
In the case I saw, I knew someone who bought into a franchise and asked me about some of the tech stuff. The franchise sold them cheap products with too much markup, but the most egregious was the printer. They were sold a cheap inkjet printer and they were buying 2-3 sets of cartridges per month. That's $3000-4000 per year (CAD) for printing. It may not sound like much, but this was a small business where they were hoping for $30k-$60k of (owner absent) annual profit.
The reason behind that is twofold. First, the franchises are easier to sell because the upfront costs are lower and the purchaser usually doesn't realize the trade-off is higher ongoing and total (lifetime) operating costs. The second is because the franchise supplier is making money off of those higher ongoing costs. It's awful for the franchisees and many of them don't realize what's happening until they're all-in.
TLDR; It's predators all the way down :-(
Nope; their business model is cartridges and ink, not so much printers. 3rd party cartridges impacts their bottom line. There's a few companies who have consumables as their business model, Keurig is another that added "DRM"-like features to their stuff. Juicero tried it with an extremely overbuilt, but ultimately stupid device with overpriced bags of fruit as the consumables.
You can buy original laserjet cartridges for $150 or third party cartridges for $40-60 (or $25 if you are happy with noname Chinese cartridges). So there is big money involved.
> (or $25 if you are happy with noname Chinese cartridges).
Okay so I'm not one of those '3rd party evil' people. But speaking as someone who has had to repair multiple large format Inkjet and Laser printers, I would have at least a few concerns about Hazmat; even first party toner is pretty nasty stuff.
I heard of such arrangements with Canon, I heard for Xerox, and it seemed to be pretty standard. As long as there was no manipulation errors the company had no need to care about durability, maintenance etc.
In Canada we have 123ink.ca. For my Brother printer a set of genuine high yield cartridges is $520. A completely generic set is $105. However, they also have their own (Moustache) branded set that's $130.
I suspect their branded version is just a different sticker on the generic, but I buy the branded version. If they're willing to stamp their name on it and stand behind it that's worth $25 (+24%) to me. A brand name isn't worth $415 (+495%) though.
These companies have ignored the risk of cheating their customers for a long time and now that customers are getting more informed the same companies think they should be able to force customers keep buying their garbage. No thanks. Their downfall should be swift and spectacular (in my dreams -lol).
If you ask me, this is one huge security hole waiting to be exploited.
And if anyone ever wants to play around with the Z2100 or the formatter (HP50XI/SCR or HP50XISCR)... they're x86 Linux based!
Reboot the printer in Service mode, navigate to "Service Utility", then "Enable/Disable Firewall" and upon a reboot you get a SSH root shell. Kill all processes, sync the disk, and dd it out to your computer, as the laptop PATA disk on the formatter is encrypted. If you're afraid of the PATA disk ever failing, take a CF card, a CF to 2.5in mini IDE adapter, dd the image from the previos step and replace the old disk.
I'm not saying they're not allowed to do that, but it did make me want to never buy a Samsung phone again.
Does not matter though, I got a Ricoh MP C2500 for "picking" it up, the 4 toners ( CMYK ) cost around $320, then here's toner for the rest of my life, and I get to print and scan a4 and a3 in duplex. Really nice machine, has network support and trays for multiple paper sizes.. amazing what people throw out these days. I'd never go back, this machine is even well enough built that spare parts can be bought for it and it's well documented how to service it.
I'm not sure if I turned auto updates off when I set the printer up. I did go through most of the configuration UI via a web browser and know that I switched it to "IT-managed" mode - maybe that turned off auto updates. The printer is on a VLAN that connects to the internet, but I've turned off every option that sounds like it reaches out to a cloud service.
Overall, this is a decent printer for me. It seems to meet all of my requirements - I can leave it unused for long periods and it will still wake up and print as soon as I tell it to. It's a laser printer, so no worries about clogged nozzles/dried up ink. There are four individual toner cartridges, so no need to a set of three colours because one ran out. Windows and MacOS both discovered the printer on the network and automatically figured out the drivers.
Printers generally suck, but this one doesn't seem to suck too badly.
Of course, it opens up the printer to some pretty serious security problems, but let's just ignore that...
I'm wondering how much of a market there's going to be for this and if cheaper devices could be used.
By then it would be too late. Alas it seems Brother doesn't do these things. It's HP. People should stop buying their products.
E.g. - Had a paper jam at some point. The on-device screen said "Paper jam. Open the front panel." Opened it, the message changed to "Remove the toner cartridge." Removed it, and it kept on going to tell where to look, what to pull, etc. Ditto with the driver installation - downloaded, run, clicked OK, done. No junk to "manage my printing experience", just what's needed to control all printing options, all laid out clearly, and exactly where Microsoft says it should be. Beautiful. Almost shed a tear.
I know some products blow physical fuses when updating the firmware and if you go back to the old firmware it won't run when it detects the blown fuse.
You'd need significant electrical skills to restore/replace the fuse to the original state.
That's 600 pages in the lifetime of the printer, which is less than a single cartridge.
The real mistake people make is they don't realise they'll have to buy a new cartridge every 6 months because the old one has dried out.
Now the printer before that basically never printed. I used it to scan my (postal) mail. One day it decided to upgrade its firmware, then refused to scan without ink. What a waste.
It's also not always easy to compare. Maybe I can see that a HP cartridge holds more ink than the Epson one - but do they use ink at the same rate? How much do they use for cleaning the nozzles when you're not printing? Will I be able to get unofficial cartridges, and will they affect print quality?
It's getting easier to compare, because they're getting on the subscription bandwagon, based on pages per month. But the smallest plan I see is HP's 15 pages/month, which is probably at least 3x what I actually print.
The printer companies are milking the vestigial cohort of people that just can't not use masses of paper for everything. I struggle to find a lot of sympathy for their self inflicted plight, and I'd really like to quit hearing about it.
It was caught up in the HP driver security cert error of late last month (which makes me suspicious that it wasn’t an accident, but a reinstall of Apple drivers fixed it).
Economics here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24985405
What I like:
- Build quality and the low price, the thing is huge and weighs 22kg and I paid only 100 EUR for a new one
- Availability of cheap third party toner cartridges
What I do not like:
- Every toner cartridge must include a circuit board that needs to be replaced together with the cartridge. This increases toner cart replacement price by ~4 EUR
- Third party toner quality varies a lot even from the same seller it's hard to find a cheap supplier with constantly good quality
- After 7 years and about 3k pages printed, a white vertical line / streak started to show up on the printed pages
Based on recommendations here I guess my next printer will be from Brother.
I haven't tried non-first party toner; the B/W high-capacity HP toner cartridges for my current printer, for example, are ~$200 and last for ~10,000 pages, which works fine for me; my total cost of ownership ends up at $45/year or so, and there's zero hassle involved, which is worth a lot to me personally.
I'd assume that only works once per printer - or at least it's enough of a pain to repeat it that most people would rather pay. The smallest subscription plans are pretty cheap.
If the merchant’s backend doesn’t special case them and sends them through, they will be declined.
They're also paranoid devices which re-enable auto updates by themselves, which is probably against EU law but hey :|
Guess the only option is keeping it off the internet completely.
They've been doing this since at least 2016, but whether they've gone back farther than that is of interest.
I think my age is affecting my memory. Didn't HP did this before... at least twice?
Furthermore their usage in businesses means there's an endless supply of labels in various sizes so you don't depend on the manufacturer for anything.
But with a whole new set of fresh and exciting downsides like expensive paper and fading in sunlight.
Or do you mean toner i.e. heated plastic ink
UPS, DHL and others still require us to print our own labels here. And QR codes are hard to write by hand ;)
Never spend on ink for shipping things again.
That's rather odd. Haven't tried many but Hermes and RoyalMail were both cellphone screen QRs
I would have imagined bigger companies like UPS would be a step ahead
If I bring it to the post office I can preregister and show a code and they will put a label on, but I never do that anymore due to the covid measures. There's a massive queue outside now.
Do this: look at what a printer + as many 1st party refills as you'll need for several years will cost you. Compare that number across multiple manufacturers. If the number seems high - yes, you discovered why inkjets are impopular. If the number seems OK: buy that one and use 1st party ink. Alternatively: buy a printer from a manufacturer that says they accept, and always will accept, 3rd party ink. Expect to pay more for that printer, or not find one.
The vast majority of people don't know this because HP spends tons of money on marketing to distract consumers from the fact that they do this.
Stuff like this is why consumer protection laws are so important: not everybody has the time, energy or mental capability to absorb the nuances of the business models behind the consumer products they buy. And billions are spent marketing to obscure these practices. Buying a consumer-grade printer shouldn't be such an effing minefield , but it is because they market heavily and lobby against consumer protections.
How about product categories have mandated upfront declarations, e.g. DRM / no-3rd-party printers need to state as such, in an unambiguous way on the box in some mandated-minimum font size.
Yes.
> not everybody has the time, energy or mental capability to absorb the nuances of the business models behind the consumer products they buy
Exactly. And while it could change (let's hope) - I think most people simply shouldn't.