HP has new incentive to stop blocking third-party ink in its printers | Hacker News Reader

HP has new incentive to stop blocking third-party ink in its printers

arstechnica.com

14 pointstartoran17 comments

Epson EcoTank has been a great system for my personal needs. They sell devices for full price but will ink that is distributed via bottle that fill a visible tank. If you’re using one color more than others you only have to buy that one. I’m sure the print head will eventually need replacement but it’s been going strong for 5 years so far.

How well do these work when infrequently used?

I can go months between needing to print, maybe even over a year. It is infrequent enough that the Brother laser printer I bought a little over 7 years is still on the toner cartridge that came with it and has maybe 1/4th or 1/5th left and still works perfectly.

Before that I had several inkjet printers (one I bought, and at least 3 that came bundled when I bought computers), and on every one I got maybe 5 pages per cartridge.

One particularly annoying time I went to print and the cartridge was dried out, I bought a new cartridge which the store only had in a two pack, and printed what I needed to print. Next time I needed to print that cartridge was dead, and the unopened one I had bought at the same was also dead.

No inkjet printers work well when they are infrequently used. Every inkjet printer will spray ink into absorbent padding inside the printer when it goes a few days without printing in order to stop dried ink from clogging the print heads. On high end inkjets the padding is user replaceable (printer manufacturers refer to it as a “maintenance box”), and on low end models it’s sealed inside the printer and you have to throw the whole printer out when it becomes saturated with ink. This is why people who print infrequently will only get a few pages out of a cartridge. There’s a baseline consumption of ink that happens whether or not you use the printer. The smarter move for people who print infrequently is doing what you do, having a B&W laser printer (which doesn’t suffer from this problem) and getting color prints done at Kinko’s or something when you need them.

I know that if you print infrequently, spending a lot of money on a printer is probably a bad investment in general, but theoretically a color laser printer would work well even if you printed sporadically, right?

After having a few built-in printheads get messed up from non-use, aftermarket ink, planned obsolescence (or who knows what else), I regressed to a 20+ year old Deskjet 1220C which has the printheads in the ink cartridges themselves. It has been working fine with aftermarket cartridges, sometimes only printing a few times per year. But I know that if it does start having problems due to ink drying out, I won't have to mess with trying to clean built-in printheads and that getting a new cartridge will fix the problem completely.

Does ink still cost an arm and a leg though?

No they are actually quite cheap considering how many pages you can get from a refill bottle.

Use a Brother Laser Printer. You’ll be happier!

Didn't Brother start pulling this same stuff? I recall hearing something along those lines and blocking mine from talking to the Internet.

I bought one recently and I don't have any problems.

Brother is just so much more consumer friendly. They release drivers for new operating systems compatible with the oldest machines, etc etc.

HP is like... Microsoft released a new version of Windows or Apple released a new version or MacOS. Your printer is no longer compatible buy a new one.

I recently had to throw away a perfectly good HP printer which was working for many years without problems because after an update I didn't ask for no ink cartridge worked anymore. I bought from different shops and still the printer refused to validate them as genuine.

Bought an Epson ecotank and been happy since.

After one year and half of service, my HP printer updated (without my consent) and blocked the third-party ink cartridge I’ve been using for months without troubles. Luckily, I bought it on Amazon so I just returned it and bought a Brother printer that has been working fine since then. The best way to stop a brand from doing bullshit practices is showing your friends how easy it is to avoid them. Just buy a Brother and HP won’t have any cent more from me.

Years ago I bought a printer from a manufacturer that wasn't HP. HP then bought the brand and migrated everything into their platforms. Thankfully I'm still going through the toner I purchased beforehand a decade later.

> Trade group callls out HP for latest Dynamic Security firmware update.

Are they not even running basic spell checks at Ars Technica anymore? That’s right under the title. Does no one read the articles?

At least we know it's not AI-generated

Or is that the latest tactic in appearing human-written?

Better calll and telll them!

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