Comment by xahrepap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xahrepap | Hacker News Reader

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I bought an HP Color Laser printer a few years ago to avoid the Ink Jet nonsense.

Turns out it’s not Ink Jet, it’s HP. Lessons learned.

The printer worked flawlessly until I went through my first toner cartridges (the carts shipped with the printer are intentionally smaller so you have to replace them)

I noticed the 3rd party replacements were $80 for a full set whereas 1st party were $200. I got the 3rd party. It’s been such a headache ever since. The MAJORITY of prints from my iMac fail. Google suggests the Mac drivers have a bug that cause OOM errors on the printer. Funny thing is it always succeeds from Windows or Linux. So I half bought it, and just put up with it.

Fast forward a few years (a week or two ago) and my wife points out that there was an HP update and the printer works perfectly! Yay! The color cartridge is basically empty and needs replacing. Worked perfectly for a week until the printer popped up an error message “non-hp chip”.

All speculation and anecdotal, but I just can’t help but feel like they’ve ended their charade and are actually being “honest” with me now…

HP is just awful. I will never buy from them. I bought a Samsung laser printer assuming they were less awful, but now support for Samsung printers is handled by HP.

My next printer is going to be Brother; that seems to be the only honest printer manufacturer out there.

I’ve replaced the mix of HPs and Canons in my house and office with Brothers. They’re like, oh, you made your own toner with crayon and coffee grounds? Ok, I can work with that.

Yeah +1 for Brother. Either they just permit third party cartridges or their protection is so minimal everyone can bypass it. Cheap toner cartridges work perfectly for me.

Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing.

PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)

You should buy a Raspberry PI and have it act as a network print server for your printers without Ethernet. This is what I do in office environments with similar situations. It works surprisingly well.

I tried that but it was one of those "Win printers" without local processing, and there were no drivers for ARM.

Someone in Germany made some open source drivers but it didn't work properly for me. Eventually I found a networked one on sale and I gave the old one away.

I had the same experience with an old HP 1200n, which was an otherwise rock solid printer, but I couldn’t get it to play nicely with AirPrint for love or money. I tried every permutation of CUPS + strange, half-baked drivers I found somewhere. I bought a little commercial print server that listed it as compatible but printed everything in 1/2 size. It was worth the price of a new printer to have one that Just Worked with my family’s devices.

Probably easily fixed with a Raspberry Pi (probably even a Zero W or something like that) and CUPS?

Tried that but it had too quirky drivers.. Just couldn't get it going properly. It was one of those $50 printers that renders everything on the client. Brother actually did provide Linux drivers (which is amazing compared to the likes of HP, Lexmark etc) but not for ARM, only intel.

Eventually someone made open source drivers but half the time the printer wouldn't respond.

It's now in the hackerspace where they use it for making overhead sheets for PCB printing. So it's still having a purpose in life, I didn't throw it away :)

Yeah, I got a Brother laser printer about 10 years ago. Still works just fine. I think it has the original toner in it.

Mine is 20 years old, it is a HL-1250 with an cheap ethernet dongle on the parallel port. I changed the drum and toner 3 years ago, third party, 30€ for both, works perfectly.

I guess my next printer will be a Brother, if I ever need a new printer.

I have a black and white Samsung laser (SCX-3200) that just went and went. It's in the garage. USB only, generic PS and PCL emulation, $5 refill kit available where the only gotcha was you need a chip that always reads full.

I was really disappointed when HP took their printers over.

We replaced it with a color laser (Canon MF632Cdw) because my wife wanted to print sewing patterns, and I'm not near as impressed with it. No real problems, though, other than the mess that seems to be UFR II on Linux.

Brother is a great choice. My wife had a black-and-white for years, and I bought a color a few years ago, replacing an HP PageWide that had been nothing but problems. Both have been fantastic.

Brothers also reject third party toners. My dad has had multiple occasions that his Brother printer rejects third party cartridges.

Epson is also passable.

My parents got an antique Epson, must have fifteen years or more. Every time I visit, I'm so impressed that thing works totally flawlessly, compared to the PITA that is our Canon which is fuzzy all the time with the inks.

i use an hp 5820 inktank printer. i just buy a squirt bottle once a year o so. never use its conected features or warranty account or wifi. just a dumb printer

Yes. I can attest to brother being nice.

If I was in the market for a printer, I would strongly consider an Epson EcoTank (no cartriges, just refillable ink tanks). If they don't have one fitting my profile, I'd consider another Epson printer because they sell the EcoTanks.

The problem with Epson is that their printers are so fragile. I've had two die from a paper jam (one never worked again, one always fed the paper at an skew).

So I ended up with lots of ink in the trash in the end.

I've heard that their ink fades to near-illegibility in only a couple of years. Anyone know if there's anything to that?

I only print a few times a year. I havent seen anything fade, but I do run the clean procedure a couple of times before I print again each time.

I really need to set up an auto job that just prints a test page once a week to save ink on cleaning. But I still haven't had to buy more ink after a purchase over a year ago, even with all that cleaning I've had it do.

I have an Epson ET-2650 printer/scanner combo. It's OK. The main problem is that if I don't print anything for a week, I have to run the cleaning procedure several times before it will print again.

As for fading, one sheet that's been outdoors for two years has faded about 75%, but nothing not exposed to bright sunlight has.

Runs OK on Linux over WiFi. Used to also work on USB, but that stopped working reliably at Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Also, on WiFi it phones home and tries to download firmware updates.

What is needed to repair this printer when they dry out? Every ink printer I had dried out some day. Is this a solved problem nowadays?

The problem with ink printers of all kinds is that they dry out. Your laser printer can sit unused for 2 years, then you turn it on and get impeccable print-outs. I'm not going to babysit my printer just to make sure there are no problems when I need a quick print-out, that's just unnecessary hassle.

The nice thing about the EcoTanks is that they come with a LOT of ink. My printer came with enough ink that if I was using it in a fine art print shop, it would have paid for itself 100x over.

... but there's still plenty of room for money-making racket unless you get one with a user-emptyable waste ink tank. (end of advice)

My ET-14000 apparently has 11 ink-absorbent pads in the base which are fed ink used when cleaning the jets. The printer kept track of how much ink was pumped away and then refused to do anything until it was emptied. I found the service manual and to reach the pads I would have had to disassemble the entire printer, including all sorts of tape and instructions as to how many Newtons tight each screw should be. Oh, and if I got Epson to do it, that wouldn't be done under warranty because I had used all sorts of non-Epson inks. Day-glo and invisible UV ink is cool!

Anyways, I got a 'printer potty' which is an external waste ink tank, and a fairly reasonable product: of course I could have made my own, but they had done all my homework for me (including telling me which way the ink flows, which is not obvious, and would have been very messy if I'd done it backwards).

Then here comes the racket: To reset the waste ink counter, which can only be done by special Epson software, I can instead pay €10 per reset per serial number to some clever Ukrainians who have reverse-engineered all that Epson software.

Fortunately I was able to pirate the Epson software and do it myself, but ... sheesh!

The fun part is I'm going to filter all of my waste ink back into the black tanks and then watercolor over wet prints, expecting some neat results there.

Oh, that's still a dick move. I guess I interpreted too much customer friendliness into it.

Still arguably better than the ink cartridge thing though, I guess.

Pretty cool what custom ink stuff you can do with it!

I've had similar experiences with HP. Buy a cartridge that is supposed to be HP, but it complains. Plus it says it's empty way before it makes sense.

HP's software is also incredibly slow. I think it asks a server for something when I open it, which is unnecessary.

Is there some brand you can buy where this doesn't happen? Happy to pay up.

Looks like several other HN readers have had the same lack of drama with Brother lasers that I have.

Yep, my Brother colour laser runs perfectly on coloured sawdust or whatever the eBay cartridges contain.

In fact, it works so well that I almost feel bad that I'm not rewarding Brother by throwing down over £250 on a set of 4 cartridges, but there are limits, when the off brand ones are £5 a throw.

I reward them sometimes by buying the original Brother TN-2320 (for ca. €60) - but this happens once a few years as I print something like 20 pages a month.

We're on our second Brother laser printer (not MFP) at home over 12 years, but I only changed the first printer because we needed colour instead of b/w - first one was otherwise perfectly fine.

Works swimmingly with Linux, mac and phones (both ios and android) without any special software.

3rd party cartridges just work.

It. Just. Works.

Brother printers are also a good "family printer" (the one you buy so you dont have to fix the printer every N months through the phone).

HP Toner Cartridges start to complain about low toner when they hit 75% capacity. We just keep printing for months and months ignoring the popups.

Only a few weeks ago, I had a total fuckup with HP. We have been using third party ink cartridges for two years without problems. Suddenly, the printer blocks, saying they have "no HP chip". So what happened? The printer (OfficeJet 7740) sits on the Wifi, since we need to access it from various computers. Apparently, it automatically updates its software (without consent, it goes without saying), and with the latest update they started blocking the ink that had always been working without problems.

I heard good things about Brother, and 2022 will be the year that we get a Brother laser printer. I refuse to buy one single more ink from HP.

The other problem with HP is the crazy EULAs and the spyware.

Right now, my favorite printer is an Epson.

Except Epson does this too. For example, they won't print black and white when the printer thinks (based on counters) that color cartridge is low. There are even "chip resetters" to circumvent this: https://eshop.inktec.cz/product-en/epson-stylus-pro/7800_-98...

Honestly, it's not HP or Epson or Samsung or Canon. The entire printing industry is a giant scam.

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