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Comment by wduquette | Hacker News Reader

I watched this happen from the outside. I bought a Laserjet IV when it was first released; by the time it started to fail, many years later, USB had killed the older printer interfaces. It was a workhorse. I wouldn’t even look at an HP printer today.

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I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today.

Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low.

I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.

I've had many Hewlett-Packard printers over the years, and I'd never buy another one.

The most common complaint about HP is its lock-in policy and its associated gutter business practices, not with the inks per se. If you reckon HP inks are the best for high quality art then I'm not going to argue, it's your decision and your money.

On the other hand, I've now an Epson WF-4830 which I only run in draft mode because of the outrageous cost of the inks. When I've finished with this current batch of inks I will do with this printer as I've done with its predecessors which is to chuck it out the window onto concrete two stories below and buy another (that's the cheapest and most effective option for upgrading printers nowadays—I'm onto my fourth printer in about 20 months).

Incidentally, my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet IV which I bought in the 1990s is still working perfectly (these days its Centronics interface goes through a converter to the PC).

The rubber rollers were degrading on mine, or I’d have done something similar.

They're a bit iffy on mine but I'm surprised they've held out so long. Fortunately, the printer's on an ancient XP box dedicated to a single task that doesn't require much printing. There's one spare cartridge, after that I'll likely call it quits.

BTW, I've heard there was a problem with fusers in LaserJets but never experienced it myself in any I've used.

I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of.

I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through.

I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.

Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering.

We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.

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