HP Wants You to Subscribe to Your Next Printer
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
1) Buy a printer if you need one, it's way cheaper than renting one.
2) Get a laser printer if you don't need color. Cheap to buy, very cheap to run. Toner is water resistant, ink is not. Might be important if you print mailing labels. Color lasers exist but color fidelity isn't quite there yet. Sufficient for business needs, not for printing photographs.
3) Don't buy an inkjet printer if you don't use it often as the print head clogs up and getting it going again uses up an astounding amount of ink.
4) If you do use it often get one that has refillable ink bottles instead of cartridges.
5) Don't buy anything from HP. This rule is not specific about printers but a general guideline.
To my defense, I bought my HP printer way back while a certain thing was going on worldwide and a HP one was literally the only model the store had on stock. (Yeah, I could have bought another one online, but I needed a printer asap. Still, bad planning on my side, tho.)
Can't complain about it as it does it's job fine, but your points made about inkjet printers are valid.
I'll do my best to keep it operational and will always buy cheap toner of course. ( I also disabled all the WiFi features.)
The people of the community on hacker news control billions of dollars of purchasing power. We have the power to stop this kind of behavior. Total boycott. Now. Or they force us into a future none of us want.
I blame Microsoft though. They strong armed HP back during the WebOS fiasco and that was end of anything good from HP.
Blaming Microsoft is always appropriate, though.
Sweet old Deskjet 500.