HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly
ghacks.net
ghacks.net
Source, because I am surprised by this.
But the Brotherly love might also seem misplaced, at least according to one HN thread from last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
That said, I have a Brother laser printer + fancy scanner that can upload direct to Google Drive and I’m very happy with it. And from my research other brand toner seems to be allowed on mine (L8895CDW).
So… shrug?
Who wouldn't want to buy a cheap printer that can use HP's industrial print heads but the firmware just asks you - the owner - how much ink you put in and it doesn't bother with any kind of DRM? By now, some of these Chinese knock-off products are truly superior to the original design they were once trying to imitate. And mostly that's just because the "original" keeps getting worse.
EDIT: just to give an example, here's the link to purchase an authentic 731 print head directly from HP in the US for $116: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-731-designjet-printhead
They go for about $30 in authentic but used or $20 for a good factory-new counterfeit. And that printhead can also dispense UV ink like what you use for printing on plastic packaging and cans.
It's brilliant technology, made/designed in the US, and highly valued all around the world. But the HP printer that you usually buy together with this HP printhead, that's been fully enshittified.
EDIT2: this being hacker news, you might also be interested about this talk where someone builds a tiny esp32-based printer using HP print heads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717022
Any idea if they can print without having internet connectivity?
aka "lets not open the security can of worms here" :)
That said, I wonder if US-made printers phoning home is truly that much better than Chinese-made printers phoning home ...
Plays any region? Check Plays VCD's? Check Plays DVD-R's/CD-R's? Check Plays MP3's burned to a CD/DVD? Check
The price difference was huge IIRC, like 80-100 less. All this while supporting all the fancier DVD features.
Jesus Christ that was obnoxious. I recall back then buying some DVD's and then pirating the movie so I didn't have to sit through that nonsense. There's no hard and fast rules about it, but today it's even more relevant - if you pay good money for a product, you shouldn't have to sit through the ads.
The 4096 resolution of the microled imaging can be a bit blocky on smaller details compared to laser, but for 10-12pt spaced documents it works quite well.
The business is razors and blades, build the printer, take a loss on it and make it up on the back end with toner/ink sales. As soon as cheap 3rd party ink/toner became ubiquitous all of the printer manufacturers were put into an existential crisis. The most popular solution, DRM. The big boys got to it quicker than the little guys, but every one of them knew this was 100% necessary or they'd get their lunch eaten at either end (upfront sales from DRM'd devices because they are cheap and backend toner sales from remans). Ever since its been a cat/mouse game of breaking DRM for 3rd party toner suppliers and print manufacturers trying to stay ahead. Instant Ink is a play by HP to get out of this game.
Also, I feel like lot's of other product categories are doing the same thing, but get far less hate (e.g. Keurig, video game consoles). Not sure if printers are just easy targets or what.
Source - SW Engineer @ HP for 10+ years.
People trusted HP printers at the high-end of the market, where words like "TCO" and "duty cycle" matter. That could scale that down to the "prosumer" end of the market very easily. They were pretty close to that already, with the LaserJet 6P and similar. I can recall my first job used two big networked HPs for the bulk printing, and a 6P for a special case (a few dozen sheets per day printing cheques with MICR toner). Despite the hundreds of pages per day volume we ran, the printers were pretty bulletproof.
They also missed the opportunity to take control of a new market: the "second printer" buyer. Target the people who took the "free" or dirt-cheap inkjet printer that came with a PC bundle. When they're fed up with 25 pages per cartridge, using three colours to print black, and drivers that are clearly a less whimsical GlaDOS, you can be there to say "now that you've learned why a $300 printer is worth it, here's one explicitly engineered to solve your pain points." Brother has now successfully captured this market entirely through word of mouth.
One would expect that's the long-term play: selling $49 inkjets was like deciding to double-down on manufacturing 56k winmodems: it might do well in 1998, when the market is flooded with first-time customers taking the cheapest thing they can get, but it doesn't provide you a place to take your brand as customer expectations march upwards.
I really don't know what you'd expect from a publicly traded company other than to go after where the profit is at. At least in the 2000's through 2010's HP consumer products made the most money off of low end devices via toner sales. I'd argue that they were following the market and the tech savvy consumer is not their target audience anymore.
An established brand like HP had options. They had profitable product lines in the business and high-end consumer market segments, so it was a specific effort to start aiming for the low-end. It's not like they were a new kid in town, who couldn't sell to businesses without a proven track record, so they HAD to sell $50 inkjet printers to consumers who didn't worry about the brand.
HP used to be one of the great companies of the world, with great guiding principles. I learned how to use a calculator with my dad’s HP Reverse Polish Notation calculator. Now it’s a nothing company that somehow stays alive tricking their customers and treating them like idiots. It’s truly sad.
No, that's the business now. It wasn't like that back in the 80s. The printer companies chose to adopt that shitty business model.
>The most popular solution, DRM. The big boys got to it quicker than the little guys, but every one of them knew this was 100% necessary or they'd get their lunch eaten at either end
Yet some printer makers don't bother with this and are still in business, like Brother.
The entire industries hand was forced to adopt this model. Let me spell it out a bit.
1. Firs step, companies started to heavily discount device costs so that they could reap the profit on the backend from supplies sales.
2. 3rd party companies began to sell ink/toner for their devices eating into their supplies profits.
3. They couldn't go back to raising device prices or they'd lose market share. Consumers had gotten used to $500 devices being priced at $200 or less.
4. They add DRM to cartridges to force devices to use their supplies.
5. DRM is routinely cracked by 3rd party sellers or they just rely on refilling 1st party cartridges.
6. New and increasingly consumer hostile DRM tactics are introduced that are harder to crack.
7. HP and others are attempting to shift to a subscription model to get out of this game all together.
Brother and other small brands are catching up and implementing similar DRM tactics on their new devices.
Thermal printers have far fewer moving parts, no non-paper consumable, barely any maintenance duty, and much simpler construction. By extension, they are much more compact, capable of going long periods of not operating without issue, and are just obviously easier to manage. For most of my purposes in-printing, the negatives of thermal paper (namely, that it will warp with significant temperature fluctuation) are irrelevant; and the negative of ascorbic acid thermal paper specifically (that it's a bit yellow) is wildly outweighed by the benefit that it's dramatically less environmentally worrisome than the phenol-based options which are more common (both to the people handling it and everything else that exists).
I looked into this a while ago, and I'm pretty sure I could buy one thermal printer, with maybe 10 rolls of letter and 10 rolls of A4, and probably be set for my printing needs for the rest of my life (with occasional use of a print shop or library for in-color things or larger prints, etc.). And yet, no one makes ascorbic acid thermal paper in this form factor. It makes perfect sense that they would aim for receipt rolls first (because that's where it'll have the greatest societal impact and safety benefit, and unsurprisingly market), but please! This seems like such a no-brainer to me…
/rant
All the best,
-HG
[edit]: s/citric/ascorbic/
[edit]: s/phalate/phenol/ (… what?)Also the fact that thermal prints fade very quickly. Perhaps that may also be why no one makes rolls of them in larger than for receipts.
But looks like the price is going up between 0.5 EUR (for the 10 page plan), 3 EUR for the 700 page plan, and 5 EUR for the 1500 page plan.
I looked at Brother printers just now - looks like CAD 500-1000 for a good one, with dubious AirPrint support.
Instant ink is still well worth it for people like me who print < 1000 pages per year, sometimes from my phone.
I fall into this bucket, but it would never occur to me that I should want to sign up for a service that charges me per page printed. I feel like it would have negligible benefits over paying for ink as I use it, and it would make me think about whether/how much I need to print something every time I go to print. Most importantly, it would make me uncomfortable because I'd be at the mercy of unilateral price increases, like this one.
What sold you on the service? Was it when you bought a new printer that you signed up, or when you went to buy more ink/toner?
Instead of instant ink, I opted for getting a bazillion pages out of a toner cartridge. This Brother is the first printer I owned I didn't need to setup on anything. The first time I went to print from my phone it was there. Which was kind of weird but certainly welcome.
Not affiliated, just a happy user.
It was clearanced at Walmart for $50.
I had a HP Deskjet 500 that ran perfectly for 15 years across multiple PCs.
Now I would never buy or recommend HP printers to anyone. They have been fully enshittified to boost HP's profits.
Other than that, the only things I didn't like about it were: (1) didn't seem to have an idle mode, so I had to turn on the power switch every time I wanted to use it, and manually turn it off after; (2) I like my electronics black.
When a fan (which seemed hard to replace) failed completely, I decided to part out the LJ 5. I netted money on eBay for some of the easy-to-ship parts, so at least it lived on.
I wonder whether the lights-dimming was original behavior. I don't know power circuits, but naively wondering whether some component had gone out of spec (resulting in, say, it charging a capacitor more quickly than it was supposed to), and so the unit was drawing more than it should've from the wall for an instant.
I have an old B&W MFC that I was thinking of maybe upgrading but to be honest I have to real reason to other than to get colour and maybe document feeding for scanning but I print so rarely that I probably won't now as Brother was going to be my one and only port of call for this.
When did this happen?! Can we get older versions still maybe?
No, new Brothers are fine. A while back where were a very few models that got a questionable firmware release. As I recall, they weren't common retail models. The firmware might have been a beta.
Brother got some crap for it, people circulated the IPs of their update servers (for blocking) and that was the end of it.
I regularly buy new Brothers for customers. They're fully fine.
During and after Carly's tenure, they made some dumb M&A moves, like spinning off their scientific instruments division, acquiring Compaq, and going all in on consumer electronics. Thus began their slow, but steady, enshittification.