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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

I found a simple workaround too — not buying HP printers. Nor other HP products.

I own several HP LaserJet, including the 4M+ "upgraded" with more memory / fonts / an ethernet adapter etc. Amazing machines for the time.

So I'm an "old HP printers" fan. And yet I'd never ever buy anything from HP.

FWIW I'm very happy with Brother. We've got several Brother laser printers and "laser printer + scanner" and we're very happy with these. Zero problem.

HP fell really low.

"Buy a laser printer" is maybe the best workaround. Preferably a slightly older one. Inkjet printers have little competition (3 manufacturers that hold the patents) and are sold in a "give away the razor, sell the blades" type of deal. This is creeping into some of the laser printers lately, and of course there's still differences between brands, but if you pick up a random inkjet printer and a random laser printer you will have far less trouble with the laser printer.

I own an HP 5850 inktank printer that stats show I've printed 28k pages and around 4k scans.

You just buy a bottle and pour it in the reservoir.

No chips, no updates. No firmware.

It does have the cleaning head issue that jams and says you only can do it 3 times which I suspect is based on number of pages printed and not actual health of head but not sure.

My hp laser printer is unusable right now. I can’t get it to print anything consistently. A week later, it sometimes prints half of what I asked it to print

This is gonna be a hot take, but I use an HP laser from about 2012 or something, which takes cartridges that are like $20 for 18 months’ worth for me ($20 for maybe 3 months when my wife was doing her masters degree), and for the times I need color I have a couple bucks a month HP Instant Ink subscription for my cheap inkjet thing. It’s like $2 for more pages than I need, and I never have to worry about how inefficient inkjet is. I was super skeptical of Instant Ink but at the low price they ask, it solves the problem of color printing quite well for me.

Edit: once I disabled ipv6 on the inkjet. It caused it to drop its IP connectivity completely, about 40 times an hour. Lol. Took hours on the phone with HP to discover that.

I agree on the Brother laser point. I picked one up for $160 new, just a nice compact black and white laser printer with wireless. It has a simple HTTP status page and all my wired and wireless devices can print to it without issue. Fast, too - it's usually done before I get to the printer.

That’s the “correct” direct action of course. However, other printer brands are ever hard at work to copy HP’s advances. So when buying a printer, make sure to research in depth.

I've heard that it's pointless to research, just go with Brother.

Certain newer brother printers are doing some of the things people hate about HP. According to some Reddit threads I saw last month

I've had bad luck with third-party toner cartridges on my Brother printer. Eventually it just stop detecting them at all.

That used to be true (just like it used to be true about HP, just a lot further back).

Here's Brother starting to be evil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I’ve followed this advice for years, with a 100% success rate

do they actually have any advances worth their intentional maliciousness?

I think fuzzy2 was saying other companies want to copy HPs maliciousness and also lock down their own cartridges. "advances" was referring to that maliciousness.

They are currently being manufactured, and HP occasionally acquires superior competitors, then adds this crap to their existing models’ firmware.

I guess that’s an “advance” in their ability to extract rent from 30 year old IP.

The method, which is guaranted to work always! And you might even see the ink level.

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