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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

This is solely because HP is so terrible at updating their drivers for new operating systems. Every HP printer I've owned eventually didn't support the next version of windows. No brother printer I've ever owned has had this problem.

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I’ve been able to print to the newest HP Officejet 8000 series from Windows 7 Embedded by just picking the 6000 series driver from the list. If all you wish to do is “print” there is quite a bit of backwards compatibility in the printer. Other features like scanning may be less so, and the phoning-home ink-pestering notifications aren’t there which seems like a win.

Unless you need something like duplex or multiple paper trays (or as you say scanning), you should be able to pick 'PCL5' or other generic 'HP' driver and it'll work in a pinch. Agreed that an older, well supported printer that doesn't DRM me to death is one less thing to annoy me in life.

It's too late that was a long time ago and I've been a loyal Brother network laser user for years!

Its a little bit more complicated than that, some drivers can handle direct line printing, some can handled the Window Meta File (WMF) and some can handle Enhanced Meta File (EMF) and now there is the new EMF+.

So a trick that some people used was the wrong driver to make some printers behave in unsupported ways for a particular programs. And if a new driver didnt work, using the HP LaserJet 4 driver usually resolved the problem if it was a HP laser printer of sorts.

Throw in Inkjet printers that routed down USB connections, and the management of the USB wasnt the best, and it became a nightmare quickly having to remove registry entries because the printer uninstaller software behaved like McAfee AV software when people attempted to uninstall it.

>Its a little bit more complicated than that, some drivers can handle direct line printing, some can handled the Window Meta File (WMF) and some can handle Enhanced Meta File (EMF) and now there is the new EMF+.

Most of what you said there is wrong.

How so?

Every operating system in the house supports my nearly 20 year old HP 1022n (which I probably print to weekly) out of the box. The last time I used my 30 year old LJ4 probably 3 years ago, it worked fine (for Win7 and IOS). I bet I can still print to an LJ-II if I still had one. Did they remove PCL and Postscript from HP printers in the last decade?

On the other hand my HP color AirPrint compatible printer that I bought in 2016 works with everything from an old iPad running iOS 5 circa 2010 that I pulled out of the closet to the latest Apple devices with no drivers.

The scanner combos now have broken scanners on latest macOS.

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