Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That’s mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn’t come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it’s too big anyway sadly
I’m just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that’s a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
There also used to be network printer adapters in the past. For example, the Belkin F8T030 Bluetooth AP. Yes, Bluetooth AP. I’d like something like that just for fun. Perhaps not this one specifically, as it only supports BT-LAP out-of-the-box and requires firmware upgrade for BT-PAN. Good luck finding firmware for a niche product from 2003.
But anyway, perhaps something like that (the printer part) is still made.
I’m a systems engineer, so it would be a short project for me. My homelab router could run the print server, but the USB port is currently powering my pi hole.
I feel like there would be some way to rig an esp32 or similar micro controller to do the same thing (pis can be scarce atm
A powered plugin usb hub would likely be easier.
But not as fun as making my own.
Entertainment always wins over efficiency.
Security too. I dont trust 90% of internet connected devices.
Have you looked into printers that accept refillable containers of ink rather than cartridges? I haven’t looked too closely, but I see Epson makes some too, and the prices are pretty reasonable.
I haven’t had any reason to print in color for like 20 years. I’m sure many consumers are the same.
If I do need to print color, I’ll pay $0.10 at UPS or the library or whatever to print it off.
Every inkjet printer on this planet has a choice. Cheap ink, accessible printheads, expensive. You have to pick one.
Certain Hp? Expensive cartridges but new print heads with every cart. Epson ecotank? Cheap ink but non replaceable printheads. High-end printers? Insanely priced printheads and ink.
The only way out is laser.
“Pick two…”
I’m refilling stock HP cartridges for now, so I guess I’m technically getting the best of both worlds, but I wouldn’t wish the process of replacement on anybody.
But have a close look at the model you are buying. We recently noticed that the relatively cheap Epson Ecotank we bought for our daughter is a bit difficult to maintain. You simply have no access to the printheads.
2170 crowd represent!!!
Those things run forever and cost nothing to run.
I think I’ve only bought 3x toner cartridges, and one of those got lost because I shook the old one and it just kept working for a year or two.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the ‘T’ part of their SWOT analysis.
That’s interesting! TIL, thanks!
I’m not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like “Fuck yeah.”
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
A warning: if you’ve already bought an HP printer, never subscribe to the HP ink service. If you do, your printer will only be allowed to use certified HP cartridges, and it could lead to situations where you have ink in your printer but it will not print.
There is a lot of IP that we’ve built in the inks of the printers, in the printers themselves.
I call bullshit. I haven’t delved into specific law, but plenty of companies have been around since, say, the 1860s and are still producing ink today. If you can’t make ink people want to buy, that’s a skill issue.
“We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers.”
As the cool kids these days say, “what the fuck is blud waffling about?” If a printer cartridge can contain a virus, I think that’s on you, not on the cartridge. A black cartridge and a color cartridge need only to conform to two unique shapes, and that should be all.
ETA: as the ashamed owner of an HP printer, I’ve learned how to fill my own cartridges, and while the process is messy and should be conducted over a kitchen sink, it is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times cheaper than buying from HP.
ETA2: Don’t buy HP though. Seriously.
HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won’t notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a “virus” to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid “instant ink” scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by… not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
I’m pretty sure the quantity of the ink is calculated through whatever’s on the cartridge, but… If filling your own, the first thing you need to do is disable that.
On the bright side, it can be done by holding a button on pretty much any HP printer. On the not so bright side, that’s only because HP lost a lawsuit about it.
People say that, but…
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you’d installed a new cartridge when you hadn’t, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don’t think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It’s not like it’s going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I’d buy any printer that doesn’t attempt to monitor the ink.
Maybe so people know to buy a cartridge so it’s on hand before the one runs out, so you’re not having to run to the office supply store in the middle of an important print job? But that’s more of a convenience thing, not necessary.
If it is visible to the user, that means light is hitting it and helping degrade it. Given how rarely people prove these days, you are more likely to end up with a gunked up cartridge.
Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
I updated my original comment. Definitely don’t want to give the impression anybody ever should.
They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
Why do these dumb ass CEO’s keep admitting this type of stuff in interviews? Don’t tell us your evil plans. No one is going to hear this and be more eager to buy your products. They’re so proud of coming up with ways to screw customers that they just can’t help themselves. They have to let everyone know. I don’t get it.
Because that interview is for investors. He’s looking out for the shares price, not his customers. We can always buy other products, like Canon or Epson. It’s too bad because HP printers are the best, but not enough to let us be robbed like other brands.
HP printers and the software with them sucks ass. Never again. Bought a brother laser printer and shit just works without any bullshit.
“We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers.”
If the cartidges didn’t have drm chips you wouldn’t have anything to load with malware to begin with.
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
They were acquired some years ago
Almost 20.
I know. Still, that’s the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.
Inkjet printers as a whole are a bad investment.
Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP’s path.
In other words: “Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it.”
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it’s not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I’ve had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don’t print a lot at home so I’ve only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you’re happy with your megatank? I might look into that… I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
Wait, I thought the counter can be reset with some specific button presses only. I’ve seen the video guides on YouTube.
w00t? I will really have to look into that. There’s a reasonably priced 2nd hand A3 ecotank in my vicinity, and I’ve been avoiding it because of this.
Do you have sources?
Brother printers aren’t even that much more expensive than HP. I think you break even by the time you have to buy like 2 HP ink cartridges. Even the toner cartridges that the brother printers come with last what feels like forever and they’re not even filled up all the way.
For home usage, a later printer toner cartridge will last you years and won’t go bad. Ink jet printer cartridges are way more expensive and dry out which is why they constantly need replacing. Brother is a much better brand than HP.
It’s funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.
Later in the interview, he added: “Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire…
Don’t worry, they’ll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
And next time buy a brother printer.
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn’t make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That’s what all the cool investors care about now, right?
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Yikes, I hope you don’t have a pension.
Most people don’t
Seems like slightly more than half of American workers (56%) participate in a “workplace retirement plan” which I don’t know the definition of. Pension or 401k if I had to guess.
Why research, post a statistical number, and completely abandon reading anything else in the article for context? Stating a number that you have no idea what it’s defining? You’re spreading misinformation for some weird “I was right” gotcha comment. The literal next line where you got 56% from,
Percentage of workers participating in a pension plan: 19
This includes all types of employment, for just private it’s a measly 11%. State and local government employees bump up all of the stats. Nice little tidbit at the end: "A pension plan is a traditional or hybrid defined benefit plan. In 2022 forty one percent of workers in private-sector pension plans were in plans that were closed to new entrants.
How does this vary from previous years? What are the different types of definitions and actual “benefits” that the employee may see. What are the differences in private and public sector “retirement plans” (or contribution vs defined benefits). I’ve been reading through the BLS.gov website in regards to all of this and it’s one sad fact after another. But sure, put a healthy untrue spin on it to win some internet points while completely missing the context, skewed facts have never caused any harm.
Yeah, I stopped researching it. Perhaps we should go back to the more measured approach from earlier in the thread.
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Not gonna lie, thought that said “inventors” and I was like, “I’d watch that.”
drank too much koolaid, retarded now
overdosed on stupid juice
“Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
They literally can’t help themselves. They’ve gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn’t perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they’re fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren’t exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an “investment,” in the employee. Nevermind the employee can’t afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
“You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more,” is what they are saying to themselves.
The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.
Guess I’m fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation’s “bad investment”. I’ll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
Plus the work great with after market stuff.
That’s not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
