HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer | Hacker News Reader

HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

hp.com

99 pointstobiasrenger162 comments

Open articleView on HN

> Requires the HP Smart app download.

> Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries

> HP account required for full functionality

> Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner

The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

In other news one toner of a generic HP laser printer prints about 3500 pages, without apps or subscription. And then you can send them to HP and they’ll recycle it for free, if you care about the environmental impact. I don’t quite understand what is the market for this product.

The biggest problem with higher end printers are on the long tail. I have a very nice Samsung laser printer. Networked, has duplex printing, fast, 3000 page toner and 9000 page imager with all replaceable rollers and everything.

The thing is, it was built jointly with Xerox, and Samsung sold the division to HP. It's almost 10 years old, and can easily live for a decade more, but finding toners and imaging units become harder and harder.

If these kind pf printers take off with much longer lives (and HP claims 50K pages with a single drum), the companies can support all their fleets with a single sack, indefinitely (in theory). Since there is less electronics, precious metals and plastics to produce and ship, it'll be also cheaper.

I don't want to change devices because they are old. I want to use them as long as they run, and with global warming and pollution, everybody is moving to less-waste methods.

I also run a HP 4515 "Web printer". All web services are deprecated, but it has mDNS, and everything can print wirelessly with no drivers. HP app enables me to print my photos after cropping them or scan directly to my phone. Otherwise it behaves like an old USB MFP which works with all desktop apps pat.

Addenda: The unit is not used frequently, so I change toners really rarely now. Because of that, I want to stick with OEM refills as far as I can go. Knowing a little about inks and toners, their quality shows them on the long run. So, I don't trust an aftermarket toner to print archival documents. Same for the inkjet.

I, too, am fond of the Samsung laser printers of yore. They are one of the very few laser printers that have a simple paper path and the built-in provisions to print on heavy stock. At the time, perhaps 4–5 years ago, the toner cartridges were about $35–$40 and lasted a good long time. About two years ago, I went to buy toner and the price was $135 and they were out of stock.

I ended up replacing it with a Brother.

I think the idea is to reduce (its reduce, reuse, recycle in order of preference) as a bag of toner needs less resources than a cartridge.

The internet indicates a 5k page cartridge costs ~5kg of CO2 to make, and each trip to the recycling center costs ~1kg of CO2 (rough average cost of shipping a package).

A 5k page pouch in a box weighs 0.2kg, assuming a 4x weight->CO2 cost (high end of plastic production), it comes out to 0.8kg of CO2 per pouch. This is less than the CO2 cost of shipping back the cartridge for recycling.

If you assume the cost of return shipping and recycling is free, the cartridge will need to last >6 times to be worth it from a initial cost perspective. The figures I can find on cartridge lifetimes is 3-4 recycles before they are too worn to recycle again.

Even though its single use, its still a net win from a lifecycle perspective.

If you’re the kind of party that prints so much a 5000 page toner bag is worth the effort, you’re not going to be returning single toners to HP. You get a big box and send 50 at once.

Also you should be aware a lot of those toners include some other roll that has a limited life, which means you can’t recycle (or refill) them forever. But if you get toner from a bag you’d have to replace the roll separately anyway. This might be skewing your figures.

I think that's only for the Wi-Fi printing. The HP smart app is terrible and makes you sign up for features that work on a local network. I just visit my printer's internal web server with a desktop user agent to show the "remote scan" features. Printing over local Wi-Fi doesn't need the HP Smart app, just the HP print service plugin that doesn't require login (and also conveniently enables USB printing, if you want to use an OTG dongle with your phone).

My brand new HP laser printer literally won’t do anything until you use the app to set it up and agree to never disconnect it from the internet or use an unapproved cartridge. This is what the printer’s internal web server shows: https://pasteboard.co/L4AbwCTw7G3s.jpg

> Requires the HP Smart app download.

To be able to scan your documents to your phone directly.

> Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries

For some advanced, Prizmo-like scan features and OCR which are probably cloud based.

> Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner

Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good. 2 years is probably printing n 5% filled office documents every day or so.

> HP account required for full functionality.

For HP smart app and web-based functionality (like mail2print) to work, not the printer.

HP is still the best manufacturer which provides a complete driver stack which provides same quality printing in Linux. CUPS supports them in "driverless" fashion now, too.

I use an old HP 4515 web printer, which is the first generation of these devices. Many embedded web features are deprecated (like printables), but it still works great as a wireless, mobile enabled MFP.

The last 3 HP LaserJets we've bought at work have had to go back because they require an HP account to print. You can't use port 9100 unless you've got an account, it just sits at an error state. No matter what we did you couldn't sign in, their cloud service seems to be down all the time and support wouldn't help.

Strange. mine has an option called "Remove embedded web services", and it transforms to a dumb printer.

Then you can re-enable it if you prefer later.

Embedded Web Services / EWS is their name for their web configuration interface. I don't think it has anything to do with GP's concerns.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_2029438-1929621-16

After my first comment (telling that mail2print is deprecated), I wondered and removed web services from mine.

The printer disassociated from my HP account, its e-mail address is removed, all on-device "printables" functions (which is dropbox, google drive, Scan2Mail, QuickForms at this point) removed too. It completely became a dumb, networked printer with an LCD screen (which you can setup your printer and whatnot).

I'm almost sure that it addresses concerns of the GP, because the device became completely unaware that there's something called an HP account, yet stayed fully functional as a networked inkjet MFP, incl. HP's smart app.

BTW, if your printer is in working order, and discoverable over local network, you can use the smart app without any account. Scanning and printing works, at least.

I re-enabled the services and the functions I mentioned as deprecated started to work again. I think something broke configuration-wise while HP was migrating services.

I've installed a few dozen HP LaserJets recently and haven't needed any kind of account.

In my experience, the best Linux support has been from brother. Also, their printers seem more light weight (in a good way), and their compatible ink is cheaper. Good for basic documents etc, but probably not for printing photos.

OKI has absolutely the best color laser (really micro LED strip) printers, and they work flawlessly with PCs, Macs, or Linux, PCL, PS, or native, and wired or wireless (depending on model). I swore off all inkjet printing after buying my first color OKI over 20 years ago, and that decision has saved me thousands in ink and uncounted hours of frustration as I watched that ink being spewed out to clean clogged printheads. Life is too short to use inkjet printers.

OKI's toner is polymer, so in addition to looking great on paper, you can print on "weatherproof laser labels" and they will last for years outdoors. (Outdoors, colors eventually fade, especially red and blue, but the blacks are still very readable on some devices I've deployed after over a decade outside. Not bad for what were intended to be temporary prototype labels...)

What's a good model number for OKI? I'm in this market and have already had to send back a couple of printers for (among other things) dropped network connections.

Looks like OKI has pulled out of the America's market as of 2021.

https://www.oki.com/us/printing/

I miss my 1993 OKI OL-400ex, such an elegant printer for its day. Like current Brothers.

I love my Brother, but their Mac support is (was?) laughable. Their main support path is to download the Brother app to load a PDF you output to your filesystem and send it to your printer. I'm clueless about the subtleties of printer drivers on Mac's but their solution was so clunky. Works flawlessly on Windows and with some minor tweaks on Linux Mint.

In my experience, for at least the last decade Brother laser printers (B&W and color) don't need anything special to work with Macs. Our household is currently on a 4+ year old color laser printer that "just worked" with our Macs, Windows machines, iOS devices, etc.

Apple literally owns CUPS and use it on mac. If your printer works on linux without special filters, it should work on mac

My Brother experience on the Mac half a year ago was "install printer > pick out in list of visible printers > wait 2 seconds > it works"

On the phone it was just discovered by AirPrint and Just Worked™

I have an HP deskjet f4210 and it doesn't work with windows 11 at all. Gave my wife a new laptop with windows 11 and there are exactly 0 drives anywhere to be found for it. Can't even re-use windows 10 drivers. However, they will run you through about 5 different tools and HP accounts and personal information gathering while trying to "find" drivers for it. Sure, I get it, super old printer, but it works just fine for what we need it for, why upgrade just cause we are using a new OS?

Just from top of my head:

Why not connect to a Raspberry pi or an Orange Pi zero and share it via CUPS? CUPS will make it a mDNS enabled, "driverless" printer, which can be used from any device (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and your toaster)?

If you want wireless, don't use OrangePi Zero (1) though. Its wireless is not supported well under Linux.

yeah, I had an older rpi and I did that for a bit, but I couldn't get scanning work on it well or the way I wanted, plus the older PI was super slow. I'll probably revisit this in the future. However this whole thread had me track down some drivers for the printer and now it works. Seems like what HP now does on their site when you select windows 10 or 11 or even 7, is just say, windows update has the driver, you're good. However, if it's not "officially" approved by MSFT then its not in the windows update as is the case with this printer. So I found some raw bundle of drivers, extracted them and windows was able to manually locate the driver file. I just want HP to host that file so that I know it's trustworthy, and honestly, why shouldn't they host their own driver files?

How do they keep Windows 10 drivers from working? I've never heard of any Windows 10-compatible devices that don't work in 11.

> Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good.

They used to sell a 6000 page cartridge as their low end offering in this class of printers. This is what's its like to be a boiled frog.

I have used a Lexmark desktop printer with 6000 page demo toner installed. That thing's toner container (which is just a canister) is almost thrice as big than my Samsung's dispenser-integrated 3000 page toner cartridge.

IIRC, that thing is somewhere around office, and we still use its demo toner. It's a low duty device too, but well.

In other words, these devices are still there, but it's the next bigger class with respect to the Samsung printer I have. Also, Samsung has a very nice econoprint mode which injects tiny dots inside the letters which saves 20%-50% depending on the font and content you print, and there's no day and night difference in terms of the print quality between two modes.

> ...or up to 2 years...

How does that have to be interpreted? Will the printer request the toner to be changed after 2 years of ~inactivity or are they referring to the subscription?

I bought a Kyocera about 10-15 years ago and one of its toner cartriges (CMYK) is still the original one... :P

more like, the anti-consumer subscription based feature section. Two things are a sure thing post 2020, Covid and subscriptions.

Honestly, seing printers like this over the years and everything getting worse and worse makes me feel good about having an old Brother laser printer.

It's monochrome, it's now 20 years old, but it's good enough for me.

It keeps running and running, and the toner is dirt-cheap on the market. No internet, no spyware and no IoT-secured (tm) app required.

Manufacturers like Epson and HP kind of force me into keeping this old thing alive when it eventually breaks down.

I'm so glad we got CUPS and SANE as libraries. Without them, I would have to buy a newer model with current Windows support.

The only thing that was missing in daily use is smartphone support, but an mDNS-SD service running on a little raspberry pi that shares the printer can fix that.

This is mostly still valid for current brother printers. I bought one last year, and the web interface looks exactly the same on the one I bought 15 years earlier. The only difference: it can do wifi now.

AirPrint is also great.

Funnily my old printer can already do air print. I think it came with an early firmware update.

When my boss needed a printer (to print out my contract for signing lol) a year and a half ago, he asked me what to get. The answer was, like always, a cheap b/w Brother -- since the LaserJet IIp is not in production any more.

It's just like the workhorse in the old pub cellar that chugged out ream after ream of paper through the dust and moisture for years without breaking down.

But with AirPrint too!

I already stockpile particular old models of ThinkPad laptops, and now I should pick up 1-2 backup no-nonsense laser printers.

As for MS Windows, that's already giving people problems from software like we're talking about avoiding from hardware.

Mine is about 4 years old but same experience. Cheap to refill and works every time, even with Linux.

Epson EcoTank printers work well.

MBAs eating the world.

HP already asks for a login for using their app to pront or scan, wtf HP? Anyway using NAPS2 for scanning on windows, on linux works out of the box, even better than on windows (how come?).

> NOTE: The printer only works with original HP toner refill kits. If original HP toner is not installed in the printer, the printer will not work as expected.

Still vendor locked. Rather just stick with something you can refill yourself.

I wonder how they could tell though - Maybe the refill bottles themselves have electrical contacts and that's how they serialize the refills? Once it's been dumped into the printer, they burn an efuse on the refill so it's now useless to anybody?

Seems like more waste than anything.

uhh.. or maybe just chemistry? you can fill the tank with urine if you want but YMMV.

That's fine for the magenta but what about the cyan, yellow, and black?

You might be eating too many beets ;)

Methylene blue works both as a nootropic and a cyan urine ink source! (Dosing is often roughly "keep going until you pee blue all the time"...)

Seems like an interesting reverse engineering project.

My uninformed guess is an RFID tag in each refill bag. The printer will scan for Genuine Authorized Original Virtuous Toner, and only then allow the fill port to open. Once open you have one hour before that tag ID is burned and can't be used further.

Or maybe you need to use the app and do this? (https://ssl-product-images.www8-hp.com/pub/msc/C26A0B64-54DB...)

Whatever the mechanism, reviews are not good: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-143a-black-original-nev...

If this is how it works, then I don't think they'd burn a tag. People will inevitably do a partial fill or maybe even just open it up to see how it works. And if there are multiple tags, which one does it burn?

The bottles also do not appear to be one time use.

I love how they market that as protecting the end user from counterfeit.

I can't speak for this printer, but I have an HP Neverstop 1001NW which uses a similar tank-based system. The container of toner that came with it appeared to be entirely dumb.

Looking at the manual, the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication. That's just verbage to scare you into buying their refill kit instead of the inevitable generic version.

> the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication

Yet.

It seems unlikely that HP will add DRM after the fact. Even if the printer has the hardware capability to enforce DRM, it isn't upon release, so you could simply keep it VLAN-ed off of the internet so it can't update its firmware to a version that begins enforcing the DRM chips. Adding DRM would also create a subpar UX where old, DRM-less HP refills stop working because the firmware thinks they're knockoffs.

Mixing different toner particle sizes and compounds has ended in complete disaster for me in the past. I recall mixing and matching OEM with third party and then the toner not sticking to the paper properly. Guess where it goes if the toner does not end up on the paper and the printer thinks it did? It starts accumulating in the printer leading to a total disaster because now the printer never worked right after that.

Now I just buy my OEM toner used on eBay. Thats the secret. Find a semi new somewhat popular business class printer and keep an eye out for companies offloading their unused OEM toner.

Okay wanted to post "hahahahahahahahahahaha!" but that doesn't add much to the discussion. The HP printer product managers really seemed to believe "because HP" was a license to rip off people who bought their printers. I knew they were in trouble when I was forced to replace my completely functional HP inkjet because they refused to provide drivers for Windows 10. Did the research and found an Epson Ecotank printer[1] that would meet my needs and oh hey, did NOT bone my on the cost of ink or make me sign up for "subscriptions" etc. Then I went to buy it.

Out of stock everywhere with multi-week lead times, while HP printers were "ready to ship now." I put in an order with Epson directly and waited. But what I took away from this is that HP is having a harder and harder time trying to sell their product with its "great monthly recurring revenue!" which I'm sure some product manager is super proud of. Way to go dude, you killed your own product in search of more profit for your company.

[1] In case anyone wonders, its the ET-7750 (and yes the printer it replaced was a wide format printer) based on my historical usage it will be "free" (total operating cost < than the HP equivalent) in about 24 months. I don't use the scanner even.

I purchased an EcoTank ET-2760 at Costco last year. When it prints, it prints pretty good and it seems like we get good economy from the ink. BUT we go through these cycles of printing a lot then nothing for weeks. So after one of the "rest" periods, we usually have to run the cleaning routine multiple times to get a decent print.

That and my wife failed to grok how the colors were keyed to the different reservoirs and ended up spilling a lot of cyan ink trying to force it.

Maybe you dodged a bullet.

Could be. I find that if I haven't printed anything for a while it does it's cleaning thing (which takes a while) and then prints as expected. Some folks have complained that the 'dump tray' (where it puts ink as its trying to clean the nozzles) fills up to quickly but I've yet to see that issue pop up.

That said, nearly all the patents for the early inkjets have expired now so it is presumably possible for someone to build an inkjet printer, with affordable (and refillable/recyclable) cartridges without worrying about infringing. I don't know of anyone doing that but I could see it happening.

So predictable, I'll never buy inkjet.

Isn't Epson the king of user-hostile MBA stunts? If one company has forever lost my business, it would have to be them.

My HP LaserJet 6P is still running strong, almost 20 years after I bought it second-hand and almost 25 since it was released (!). I've been using nothing but unofficial toner in it and other than some streaking that developed in the last few years (too lazy to clean the toner for now), it's been flawless.

Apparently HP made things so well for so long that they've decided to correct that mistake.

No subscription required. A small JetDirect server makes it an IPP-capable PCL printer.

Running stuff well within its intended duty cycle is also a good way to get a long life out of something. I like to buy second hand enterprise gear, and I really never see failures out of anything that wasn't already worn out.

Same here. Firmware updates are often unavailable, sometimes you end up with a janky Java-requiring interface, but overall it's approximately the same as the equivalent consumer gear and it'll last 2-3x longer (that's _after_ it was discarded).

The JetDirect 600 series got a few firmware updates (and they will take any firmware you send it over PCL) and did away with the Java based interface IIRC.

The duty cycle on the regular LaserJets (not P or L) was high enough (I want to say something like 50,000 pages per month) that if you come anywhere near it you'll need to start servicing it regularly. I think most folks (even businesses) who owned them didn't come near their rated duty cycle.

As for correcting the lack of vendor lock in, HP did that with starting with the 4100 series. I think HP used an RFID chip on the cartridge itself. Eventually they backed down a bit with the 4200/4300 but they did make the various cartridges non-interchangeable which is absolutely asinine.

I'll have to take a look and see if my JetDirect 300X has new firmware.

EDIT: Nope, it's a Javapocalypse for that particular device.

Oh that's too bad. The 620N I put in my printer was new-in-box so it came with the original Java based firmware. Yuck. The other reason to look for new firmware is that there were various security issues that were resolved.

FWIW it looks like you may be able to use HP Web Jetadmin which is some sort of .net monstrosity.

TBH it's been set up and working for so long I never ended up using the Java interface. There's also a telnet interface iirc that can configure pretty much everything.

I should probably hide it behind a Pi but it works, never breaks and I can't really complain.

I bought an HP Laserjet Enterprise M601DN off Craigslist 5 years ago for ~$150 from a business that closed down. Had 250K pages printed when I bought it, and I printed tens of thousands more (law school books). Still going strong with no issues.

If you have the space, older HP Enterprise printers are absolute tanks.

I have a cheap, domestic HP1020.

Absolutely fantastic piece of kit for printing text.

It is from the before times, apparently it was so good it started eating into their low end commercial unit sales so they discontinued it.

How does it handle curling of paper? I had this model but it would start to curl paper if you printed more than a few sheets at a time.

Seems to do fine. I printed out a manual for a thing recently and the pages came out flat I think.

It _is_ weirdly muddy with images though bit noone is buying a monochrome printer for images.

How does it handle documents with complex graphics/large files? I had this exact same printer and for anything other than text, this thing took forever to "process" the document. Eventually I trashed it.

I've never had issues w/complex graphics. Are you using PCL mode + a print server? It might have also had one of the lower memory configurations.

I'm mainly using it for shipping labels and other simple print jobs, but for sure I've printed complex graphics on it and they're always pre-rasterized on the printing computer.

Yes I used a print server + PCL mode. Makes no difference between PS and PCL from from I recall. (Its been 10 years since I scrapped it). I'm talking like 20+ MB PDFs. The printer was blinking forever before it started and it would pause for another eternity between pages. Modern printers, you know...just start printing.

I just held a somber funeral for my 1999 HP LaserJet 4000n. No app, no subscription, reasonably priced toner, built like a tank, survived thousands and thousands of pages, five house moves. It was finally done in by multiple critical plastic pieces that broke and a power supply failure. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life now. I feel there are no new substitutes anymore. I heard Brother is good but I can't imagine it being the same great vibes...

Wonder if there is a 3d printing community to support older but reliable devices.

I ran an HP laserjet 5si into the ground years ago and kept it alive by picking up dead ones for parts here and there.

Thing was an absolute beast of a beast.

lol wow we had hp 4000n printers in my high school in the late 90s and they were amazing.

Glad to see they lasted so long for you. Not surprised.

I wish I could buy them today.

I had a rotten time with Brother and drivers, especially (but not limited to) on Linux. I'm currently only one year into a Xerox 6515 but it has been extremely reliable so far, and works reliably across Android cell phones, two Linux machines (with a PPD downloaded from GitHub), and a Windows machine.

My line of thinking is that hopefully their pedigree is worth something.

Avoid HP at all cost and stick to Brother, Cannon and Epson. HP is a company that had the privilege of having their logo on a iPod but is a complete turd at the end of the day.

Canon's Linux support is very poor. It has a proprietary printing language which needs a closed source daemon/filter to work, and it's finicky.

How finicky? If it doesn't like the version of something it forks itself until it borks your computer.

Used HP, Lexmark, Xerox, Samsung & Kyocera. All worked with Linux. Also, none of the HP printers I used created any problems during their lifetimes with me. One of them was very light duty, and I worn it down in 7-8 years, that's all.

On Linux I use Postscript with a PPD from https://www.canon.com.au/support/sims-content?pid=e3b6d5519f...

Most Canons also understand PCL6 too. I guess you've checked your own machine though.

The one I used understood neither PCL nor PDF. It wasn't an entry level device either. It was a networked office-class device.

This was a work endeavor, so I don't have the machine handy, so I can't provide you a model number.

Feel free to provide it if/when you can.

Would that Canon be something like the i-SENSYS MF9220Cdn [1] (who comes up with those names?) I just got for free (had to swap the black toner cartridge, for the rest it works just fine, it only has done ~12700 pages according to the counter...) which uses Canon's proprietary UFR II? There seems to be a Postscript-compatible version of the same hardware as well (i-SENSYS MF9280Cdn) so I guess I can always attempt to wrench that driver into this machine but for now it works quite well. Drivers are available for 'Linux 64-bit' and 'Linux 32-bit', x86/x64/ARM/MIPS. Everything I tried thus far - printing, copying, scanning to mail/file server using sheet feeder or flatbed, did not try the fax functions because who needs fax functions - works fine, toner for the thing is cheap (~€22 for a 6000 page cartridge) and the print quality is quite good.

[1] https://www.canon-europe.com/support/consumer_products/produ...

Linux support for Brother printers is variable. brlaser kind of works for mine, but only with a patch, and some documents still end up producing a white page...

Most of their laser printers have binary drivers available for linux

For laser printers there are always models that support PCL and Postscript. They work with any operating system and can be used with generic drivers. Usually they are a few bucks more expensive, but you will be able to still use them in 30 years, when nobody knows anymore what windows 11 was.

That's what I don't get: why is there still API "innovation" going on for printing?

Especially for a bog-standard black-and-white laser, there's nothing that needs to be done now that couldn't be done with PostScript or PCL circa 1995. (Yeah, there's a bazillion stupid ideas for mobile-device connectivity and wireless setup, but those are tangential to "here is an IP address and port, feed it PostScript and pages come out") I could see a case for a minor "reverse channel" extension to allow for feature detection and probing consumable supplies, but that's something that should have been a documented, industry-standard API, and could be optional.

I assume it represents two factors:

1. They believe there's enough "value add" in the software (enforcing accounts or consumable purchases) to carry its weight on the books. 2. The hardware is so phenomenally bad that they're relying on mountains of model-specific firmware and driver glue to make it even remotely resemble a functional printer.

I suppose we missed our chance at the USB cutover-- we seemed to get a unified standard for HID and mass storage, but nobody wrangled the printer and scanner people.

We even got standards for audio and networking over USB - printing sadly, not so much.

IPP?

I've found OKI to be pretty good too.

Apple (name also on thr ipod) does somewhat similar tactics with ram and storage pricing and storage compatibility. Maybe even more similar are iphone repair parts and the printer ink-DRM like restrictions on them.

Maybe worth mentioning the Epson EcoTank, included ink lasts forever, works offline, no weird DRM on the ink bottles that some are discussing here

Yep... plus, HP has screwed over customers so many many times.

Yes. I just bought the monochrome ecotank printer for a project and worked out with a rep from inkowl to get 3rd party mixable dye ink to print a custom mixed single color. worked pretty well.

I want to read more about this.

I picked up an HP ENVY Inspire yesterday to do some experiments to see if I can create images of modern tech but produce something that reminds me of the nostalgia of the 80’s CRT’s using the CGA palette (cyan, magenta, black, and white). So far, I’m not happy with any of my results, but the printer does give me decent color matching.

I also considered the EcoTank. I didn’t consider custom ink though and that sounds interesting.

I wasn’t able to find much info on it. I went around compared all the printers i could find then compared the third party ink options for the ones i was interested.

i’m still experimenting with ink mixing. decent results so far. the thing is there are so many ways to go about it with 8 base ink options available.

I’d be tempted to try official inks too. When you adjust the color, does the old color stick around long? Make your prints muddy?

I don’t think you can use the epson ink because it is pigment based opposed to dye. the pigment-based ink require a specific medium for suspending pigment that differs from color to color.

dyes on the other hand can mix. mixing takes experimentation.

To quantify that, I get about 2500 sheets on a bottle of black ink, which costs £9.

Tried to help my elderly relatives set up a simple HP inkjet printer/scanner/all-in-one. I discovered that they have to create a login and administer the printer through the HP Windows app just to be able to scan a document.

Fuck.that.noise. And the notion that "we'll just unlock as few pieces as necessary to just be enough to not have customers leave us".

I'll give my money to anyone who doesn't try to control and exploit every aspect of the experience. If such companies still exist. I think others have mentioned Brother/Epson as still tolerable brands.

Bad news from the Q&A section of one of the printers:

> With the enhancements giving the new drum a 50k page life it's no longer intended to be a user-serviced part and won't be sold via retail channels. That said, it is still able to be replaced through an HP Service Center or HP Parts in the event it is needed to be replaced.

It's annoying news but my Brother laser, regarded for its serviceability, needs new drums every 12-15k pages at $90/ea. That's on top of $75 toner cartridges every 5-7k pages. This $400 printer with $30 ink refills that ends up being disposable at the end of its service live has a lower TCO than anything else I've seen.

Yeah the brother magic went away, they 3x the price of first-party consumables a few years ago.

And there are reports that the 2022 firmware updates now make it harder to use 3rd party toner.

so $400+$240 every 12,000+ pages, vs $400+$300 (10 x $30) for about 2,200+ pages?

It's not even close....

What printer are the second set of numbers in reference to?

Laser vs inkjet, avg ink cartridge does 220 pages.

The printer this article is about is a laser printer. The ink refill for $30 lasts 5000 pages and the drum lasts 50,000 pages.

Yeah, look up thread.

In a $300 printer? What do you want?

In SMB environments, that's probably a 10 year device. Honestly, do you want a 2022 wifi solution running past 2032?

> What do you want?

No artificial restriction? They say the part is changeable, but then say they won't allow consumers purchase and do so because they consider 50K EOL.

So what we want is for a $300 printer to not end up in the landfill because a $50 absolutely replaceable drum cannot be replaced without a service center's unnecessary involvement.

The service life in that form factor is probably 3-4x the typical device. So at the cost of repairability, you get a more durable device that’s probably like 30-50% cheaper.

And… for the majority of customers they will likely never need toner or service.

HP got all of us to recommend brother due to HP's horrible software and customer abuse. I don't think that damage can be undone.

Brother says "hold my beer".

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

That is extremely disappointing to see as I'm in the market for a new printer and I guess Brother is no longer in consideration. :(

I just reverse engineered the firmware of my laser printer so I didn't have to buy $100 worth of chip cartridges....

Silly HP, they thought they patched out the logging and debugging functions by putting 'return true' at the start of them, but the compiler still left all the calls in...

So then it was just a matter of finding the function which called the 'TonerLowAlert', finding where it gets its data from, and patching it to always think it has a full toner tank (and full imaging unit... And full transfer roller... And full finisher... And 15 consumables any of which could make the machine stop printing!). There was the minor hitch of a custom RPC mechanism between all the components, but that was quickly overcome.

Then patching all the firmware checksums (which obviously all use custom algorithms - and the machine has 5 different firmware images!)

And finally reflashing, and we were done! I even customized the 'Ready' homescreen message so everyone knew it was modded.

I'd love to read more about this!

> 250-sheet paper input tray

nothing more annoying than having a half-empty ream of paper sitting on a shelf.

stop being so pessimistic. the ream is half full.

Well, he seems like a full-ream ahead kind of a guy.

Unless I want to make emergency office supply trips (in fact, I don't), I have to have something on the shelf. How is a half-ream worse than a ream?

The ream is wrapped and stays clean and secure until you load it in, a half ream is opened and loose and gets dirty and jams when you load it in.

If that bugs you, close it with Saran/plastic wrap. That's what we did when I was a typesetter.

I order by the case and re-order when I've loaded the last ream.

So you're happy to have one, two, three, ...{case - 1} reams of paper on the shelf, but one half ream is more annoying than any other annoying thing?

The printer space ripe for distruption. I have had really bad experiences with HP Printers, specifically related to force installing software / drivers on PCs. I consider the HP SmartPrint app to be malware as it completely locks down the printer if it detects a non-HP cartridge. Or at least it used to, before they were sued. Now it ensures you are constantly harrassed about buying genuine ink, gives false low toner messages, and flashes various warnings designed to scare consumers into overpaying for toner. I assume the same is true for all brands. I'd like to see a printer that isn't agressively marketing toner to me or at least offers it at a fair price.

> The printer space ripe for distruption. [...] I'd like to see a printer that isn't agressively marketing toner to me or at least offers it at a fair price.

Won't happen. If it does happen, they won't succeed.

The reason being that consumers are short-sighted and price sensitive. If they see two printers with identical features and specs, but one is $100 and the other is $200, they'll buy the $100 one before looking and noticing that the $100 printer requires $75 ink cartridges while the $200 printer can take $25 cartridges.

So printer manufacturers have to sell the hardware at as low a price as possible to compete with other manufacturers and they make up the difference in ink/toner. If someone tried to do what you're asking, they'd have to have a higher price to be profitable and wouldn't make any sales.

Or, if you're HP, you market something that seems like the best of both worlds, and then gouge the value in two years with a firmware update, and/or shenanigans with consumables.

That's what I expect with the machine in the OP.

Hmmm. I have learned to not trust HP any further than I can throw one of their laser printers - which is not very far!

CISS's (Continuous Ink Supply System's) have been around for decades. You can buy pretty basic printers and retrofit them with a $100 system that will hold enough ink to print 10's of thousands of pages. The problem with this system is that the ink heads dry (quickly). If you're doing a lot of printing (daily / weekly) – a CISS is pretty much your bread and butter.

Refilling the ink in a CISS is pretty simple as well, just take your time.

That's for inkjet printers though, no?

This is for a laser printer. No worrying about drying ink heads.

But now you've got me curious -- who is printing 10's of thousands of pages using an inkjet? I would have thought that anything at volume is laser, with the exception of photo printing.

companies that still deal w a lot of paper like factories or warehouses

My understanding is you can still use CISS at a smaller scale, for example here's a 'mini' setup I came across: http://new.proinkshop.com/index.php?route=product/product&pa...

I've hesitated on actually trying this though as there's usually some details about keeping an old firmware version or something to make it work.

> who is printing 10's of thousands of pages using an inkjet

Specialty applications such as large-format inkjets (eg 3ft/1m wide continuous roll paper), edible ink for baked goods applications, custom inks for branding/proofs/industrial, and so forth. My favorite was a specialty cake printer that was designed to print directly on the icing of a cake, not on an edible wax or fondant sheet (which always seem like cheating to me).

There are quite a few applications where desktop-like inkjets are used in high-throughput modes. They either don't sit idle long enough to suffer from dryout or they're built to deal with it. They do automatic light clean cycles and some models have rubber gasket head parking areas to seal the heads and prevent ink evaporation when idle. Some manufacturers also sell auto-cleaning units so the printer can do a full deep-clean automatically.

I'm not counting true industrial applications (eg packaging expiration date print heads) since those aren't usually document-centric nor do they speak desktop printing protocols like PCL.

On the contrary! Almost all books you buy are printed with ink. Companies buy ink for offset printing in bulk anyway and can use the same for jet printing. Ink is cheaper, faster and can achieve better quality, especially when color is involved.

Laser only exists for offices, : black and white printing, unsteady usage patterns, fast printing on small scale, replacing cartridges are administratively challenging.

Or, get a Brother HL-2270dw. I changed the toner twice in probably a decade. 3 moves. Toner cartridges are available from third parties for dirt cheap. No DRM. The iOS app has the "print" feature and it's all it needs. Never jammed. Never broke or failed in any way. Thought that it won't work with my new eero router... nope, the firmware update fixed the wifi. This thing will outlive me.

I have nothing but bad things to say about Brother. I will never buy another one. Last purchase was a $350 multifunction color laser printer that stopped turning on. I was just over the one year warranty and no support from Brother and their authorized service centers want to put me on a commercial support plan. I bought it for my wife, a teacher, because the school copiers were always broken or unavailable. HP makes shitty printers but they will actually help you get something replaced in my experience.

Owner of HL-2375dw here. Seems like their B&W Lasers work better. No issues with printing from Linux / iOS over wifi - has been going on since 2019 without issues (only had to replace the toner recently).

I've had great luck with both Xerox and Brother printers. Both laser and inkjet. No vendor lock in, no funny business.

FWIW, Xerox inkjets were what drove me to Oki's color lasers. They erfectly good printer that they stopped selling ink for after only about a year. Knockoff ink cartridges are just money flushed away. I'm done with Xerox.

Brother's printers are reliable, but have some of the worst setup and UIs in the industry. "Actively User-Hostile" is not going too far...

Canon and OKI for me, please. They just work.

Apparently Oki stopped selling printers to the the Americas this year :(

https://www.oki.com/us/printing/

I picked up a Xerox laser a year or so ago, it's working fine w/ Ubuntu, macOS and Windows on my home network, though it was a little squirrely to get set up (now that it is, I leave it on wifi in a spare room, but to configure it via its web interface it needed to be cabled in).

I once bought a cheap but "smart" HP Ink jet printer for home. I don't have much to print other than the yearly tax documents. I was thinking that I would buy an extra ink cartridge and I should be good for 2 years and I haven't been more wrong. One ink cartridge didn't even last for 100 pages (less than one tax return). The day I realized that my ink cartridge only had 0.2ml (!!) of ink it in, I sold the printer and bought a brother ink tank printer. Now I don't have to care about my printer extorting me.

I've got a HP Laser Colour WiFi printer/scanner/fax combo I bought from Argos (Like a British Amazon with local physical retail shops and same day delivery) 3 years ago. Wasn't exactly cheap though, around £250. Sits near a window so is often near sunlight. Still has the starter toner and prints like a charm - used it the other day to print a gig ticket. I don't even know how to change a toner. I use it very rarely but it's nice to have around whenever I need to print/scan things.

I’m not sure I understand this. Inkjets go through ink fast so they need to be refilled a fair bit and those refills are expensive and hold very little.

Toner is good practically forever. A new toner cartridge isn’t cheap (and stupid DRM exists) but it’s still way better than inkjets. So I’m not sure this provides as much value.

Also, isn’t HP the company that likes to disable your printer if the credit/debit card on your auto-refill plan expires? They’re not exactly a bastion of integrity.

The only way I could see this providing value is for larger multi-function printers that offices use - I don't see this having any benefit in the home/small office market - just seems like they're trying to ride the wave of Canon(Epson?)'s refillable inkjet tanks.

Toner is pretty toxic (fine microplastics that are easily aerosolized - they go right through a lot of vacuum filters!!!) so I could see them marketing it as "don't touch dirty disgusting toner cartridges anymore! You don't even have to _SEE_ the toner!"

This could probably also make it a LOT easier for third parties to make HP toner refills, unless HP's done something like trademark/copyright/patent the "toner delivery mechanism" to stop third parties from copying it.

> Also, isn’t HP the company that likes to disable your printer if the credit/debit card on your auto-refill plan expires? They’re not exactly a bastion of integrity.

How is that evidence of integrity or not? The subscription ink is only good when your subscription is good. Netflix doesn't let you watch movies when you don't pay either. You're not allowed to drive your car if your license or registration expires (although neither is enforced through the internet).

Afaik, all of the HP printers that work with subscription ink also work with owned ink, too. For low volume printer users who are capable of managing their account, the lowest tier subscription seems like a reasonable way to keep fresh ink on hand, but I dunno. I opted for laser color and don't have to deal with liquid supplies anymore, but at a higher capital cost and the printer only takes more volume than my previous multifunction inkjet (which I keep so I can scan).

Toner is good for a long time, toner cartridges are not. The Canon engined LaserJets integrated the drum and waste container with the toner cartridge. So the waste bin fills up, the wiper for the drum gets old and useless, etc. etc. and the cartridge will need to be replaced. I've aged out a few toner cartridges in the various LaserJets I've owned over the years.

The current crop of LaserJets are all based on Samsung engines (yuck), so HP could have started selling the pieces separately.

I like my $75 refurbished HP laser printer... never had to change the toner cartridge in 2 years printing almost daily and the replacement is cheap.

FYI HP has a recycling program for used ink cartridges. If you are going through a lot of these, you can send them back to have a second life. Heard about it on Marketplace.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/hp-information/recycling/ink-toner....

Putting aside the HP bad discussions, they've had a tank laser printer on the market for a few years now. A few of them, actually. I know because I had to sell this crap. It used a special "plunger" toner refill kit where you set it in the hole and push down. It wasn't that great of a printer, expensive, and a potential mess.

I hope someone is reading this thread and seeing the opportunity to build a printer that doesn’t suck and respects its user.

We had laser printers 20+ years ago with similar refills.. pro laser printer though.

All these scenes are just scams… How come we don’t have to put Tesla-power in, or BMW-gasoline?

Because “tech” is “magic”, and people like to be fooled or something

How does this compare with my LJ 4100N toner (6000 pages) for £33?

Laser and ink are of course not the same, but since this focuses on economy and efficiency I have to mention the Epson EcoTank, which absolutely shadows the LaserJet Tank here.

The only reason this feels good for me is that it may kick off similar products from much better consumer friendly companies like Brother or Epson.

Just had my HP PageWide 477dw refuse to use non-HP refills. It is the last HP printer I'll ever buy.

Not only that, they've released firmware that invalidates even their own older-generation cartridges after they changed the ink formulation. You may have success by downgrading the firmware (they will happily downgrade). Might have to speak nicely to your HP dealer to obtain it though.

Fool me once...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com