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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I recall seeing this mentioned in the setup screen when they tried to sell my uncle on their stupid ink scheme. This crap is why reading the simplified terms of service matters.

It's a deviously smart trick, because people who let their subscriptions lapse probably really need to get something printed right when they find out about this restriction. You then have a choice between running to the mall and buying a new ink cartridge (or more realistically, a full printer, because those are cheaper) or paying for another year of ink subscriptions and continuing the print right away.

Friends don't let friends buy HP consumer printers. If you can get your hand on a second hand laser printer you'll probably be happy for years, but their inkjets are manufactured e-waste.

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I tell people to avoid inkjets altogether.

Inkjets are great for photos and people who print a few pages a week, but are absolutely the worst for people who rarely print anything.

Leave an inkjet alone for months and you can end up with permanently clogged print heads.

I still like to think that those inkjets using tanks you fill up yourself are better in that regard. More expensive to buy, but cheaper per page and, I hope, more tolerant to 3rd party ink (unless I miss clever way to verify the liquid itself comes from the OEM once the bottle was opened. Come think of it, I am sure there are some stupidly complex ways to do just that...). But you actually never know, do you?

I looked in to those and you can still get dried print heads. You also have the issue that all of these home ink jets have a waste pad which is not user serviceable. Once you hit a hardcoded number of pages, the printer bricks itself as the pad is full.

To resolve this you are meant to buy another printer. Or you can pull the whole thing to bits and try to replace the pad, then find some way to hack the firmware to reset the counter.

You can find service software to reset the counter, but after doing it a several times it can actually overfill and ink can start leaking from the bottom of your printer. Some more creative people are re-routing waste ink tubing into a bottle to contain it.

The vast majority of the cost-per-page for me is the cost of the printer. I reckon it's about £1 a page, or £10 a year (new printer every 5 or so years, 10 pages a year)

I've actually used printer like that (Epson). Everything was fine when I was printing frequently, but it still dried up after not using for months. No amount of "cleaning" or "deep cleaning" restored it to 100%.

They verify ink bottles by requiring you to enter CD-key like number which is printed on a bottle. However, ink is cheap and you don't have to buy 3rd party one.

> Friends don't let friends buy HP consumer printers.

A while ago, pre-subscription era, I bought their cheapest inkjet printer in a store because I needed to print/sign/scan a bunch of documents.

I fully expected to hate it... and to my surprise it is actually decent. I have it for seven years now and unlike all other inkjet printers I used in the past, its ink does not run dry. It never let me down when I needed to print something in a hurry.

For most people running to the mall/office store when they need to print is a better deal. Yes the costs per page are high, but how often do you really print - between ink going dry, and cheap printers not having a long lifespan, the actual cost per page of a printer you own is probably a lot higher than you think. Plus keeping paper in the printer, and all the other issues are not your problem.

I still own my own laser printer because the convenience of not having to leave when I want to print is worth it, but I'm not pretending this is something worth doing.

Agreed, not only are the printing services actually cheaper in the long run, you get access to better and more specialized printers. Want to print on A3? no problem. Want to print stickers and have them die cut? Easy. The commercial printer will be 100x nicer than yours. You don't have to maintain it or deal with crap and malicious firmware.

That’s always why people have bought home printers. The convenience is worth it to them.

>For most people running to the mall/office store when they need to print is a better deal.

Maybe if you don't value your time, or have perfect foresight/planning (eg. it's 10pm and you needed something printed for 9am tomorrow). The cheapest plan is $0.99/month, or $12/year. That seems like a pretty good deal to avoid having to do a 30 minute errand every time you need something printed.

Yes, our happy medium is a black-and-white laser printer that we use a few times a week. For color printing we go to the store a few times a year.

Running to a store to print definitely seem like a better deal than buying personal printers at this point. Since those printers are in fact being leased instead of being sold, might as well have them take up somebody else's space.

To be fair if you don't print much (10 pages a month), it's not such a bad offer. ~1$ a month for a worry-free printing experience? Sign me up.

Your point is fully valid. At some point tho - this feels like our lives are made so complex and we'll be so low on resources that we can only follow pre-chosen paths.

At any lower volume a print shop might be a suitable alternative.

Printers do not come with a full ink cartridge. The ink itself is a better deal if you buy it online.

Another year? In the UK at least it's a monthly subscription.

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