A couple of years ago I tossed out a perfectly good printer. It was an HP, and I had signed up for their Instant Ink "subscription" service, which allows you to print a set number of pages for a flat monthly fee. This caused some problems, so I canceled it. But that bricked my printer because I was no longer paying for continued use of the ink cartridges already in it. Then, when I tried to replace the ink cartridges with non-HP cartridges, it became permanently bricked because HP doesn't allow this. There was more to this whole sorry tale, but I'll spare you the details. In the end, I was so pissed I got rid of the printer and resolved never to buy another HP product in my life.
I'm reminded of this today because I learned about this laughable explanation for HP's policy:
Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, "We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network."
As this Ars Technica piece points out, HP's policy of prohibiting third-party cartridges started in 2016 but it wasn't until 2022 that they found this alleged vulnerability. What's more, it's a highly theoretical hack that's never been seen in the real world. And it's doubtful it could do any real damage anyway. And HP fixed the bug shortly after they found it. But they continue to claim that third-party cartridges are unsafe. This is highly unlikely—and anyway, as Ars Technica says, "Its response is to inconvenience customers rather than beef up HP printers to be invulnerable to remote code execution via ink cartridges."
What a crock of shit. I don't expect everyone to be as peeved as I am over HP's rigid ink policies, but this kind of corporate deceit displays a contempt for its customers that no one should have to put up with.
Kevin, I feel your pain. I threw out a perfectly good old printer. Don’t remember what it was but it wasn’t printing. I fiddle and fiddle to no avail. I bought an HP with the print subscription. I bought it because it was highly recommended. I was totally not aware of what I was getting into.
Here we are, like you I’ve been trying to get out of the subscription, but KNOW that it will be a nightmare to the end of my life. I’m too old to go through this anymore. I spent too much money for this, and it is working, no one wants it, so I’m stuck with it to the end. What a major rip!
It's been over a decade since I swore off HP printers and said, "Fuck you, HP".
A couple years ago I finally had enough from my stupid ink jet printer. Invariably one of the cartridges would be out and the vile thing wouldn't work unless they were all full, despite the fact that I almost never used any of the colors but they were magically going empty anyway.
So I replaced it with a black and white laser printer and I haven't had to buy a refill of anything but printer paper since. No problems, happiest tech buy ever.
A Brother, eh? They're great, they work forever and a new cartridge is reasonable. If you don't need color, they're a no brainer.
Yes, it's Brother Printer. Rarely has much to do, spends most of its' time in contemplation.
I'd say it's a no-brainer for color, too. They aren't as great with photos as inkjets, but color inkjets have 4x as many cartridges to dry out or clog. So either you rarely use it to print photos, in which case at least one cartridge is likely to go bad between uses, or you use it a bunch, in which case the ink costs quickly eclipse the initial cost of a color laser. Besides, if you care about photo quality, you should take a USB drive to a store or use an online printer.
I have a scanner/copier Brother that was $330. Oh, and Brother is the *only* printer brand to get anymore. Everyone else wants to be in the razor blade business.
I will have nothing to do with HP printers. The printers are (or were, I haven't checked recently) cheap - they made their money from inflated ink prices. Hence their predatory behavior. I use a brother workgroup B/W printer for volume printing (I have had it for years) and a canon bulk ink printer for general color printing and small print jobs. What forced me to upgrade to the bulk ink printer was that 64 bit Win 11 printers were no longer available for my older canon ink jet, which went to my daughter who is using linux and can still run it. All my cartridges and ink refil stuff went with it.
Sorry to hear about HP, but now they are off my shopping list. I had a similar beef with Epson about 10 years ago. I discovered their multi color cartridges were set to refuse "all black" even if just one color went dry. So no Epson or HP- Guessing that just leaves Brother. Crossing my fingers they don’t try the same stunt
One in awhile they cave. I had one small victory with Keurig several years ago. They quietly went to brewers that would only work with "Keurig" K-Cups, I called to order a new brewer and asked for any model that would work with all K-Cups. When they said "not available”, so I told them never mind, I’d get an older brewer on eBay”. I was asked to hold, and a moment later was told they would be shipping me a brewer that would handle "all" k-Cups. Yeah doubt I'd get HP to cave, and yeah I'll never know if it was me or sales had began falling when I called.
Thanks for the heads up!
My hack with non Keurig cups was to cut the label off a used cup and put on top of the non K. worked!!!
My daughter is a professional graphic artist, and for her, an Epson ink tank printer is da bomb.
I bought a Canon multi-function printer years ago, and had to junk it because no one makes drivers for it any more. So now, on the rare occasions when I need to print, I take a 10-minute walk to the public library and print for $0.10/side black and white, or $0.25/side for color.
I agree with you 100%!
Now I’m very happy with my Brother printer
Kevin, out of curiosity, which printer vendors do allow third party cartridges in their inkjet printers?
Both my Brother Printers do, but they are several years old.
OK with my Canon printer scanner. It may also use up the color cartridges on all black. I almost never print color.
I don't know, but I ended up getting a Canon with liquid ink. No way to screw with that!
Enshittification
On the very rare occasion when I need to print something - usually some goddam government form which they haven't got around to putting online yet - I invariably find the ink in my printer has dried up.
How did the third party cartridge vendor convince you the cartridges would work? It sounds like fraud on their part.
It's fraud by both companies.
My wife bought cartridges from what she thought was an HP site on Amazon. Turns out they were expired HP cartridges. Good news is when she called HP to complain they sent us free replacements.
HP, like Boeing, once stood for excellence in engineering and integrity. Those days are long over
Indeed and sad. I had two friends who worked in Boeing flight test. They filled me in on flight characteristics that Boeing now handles with management and no more with engineers/flight test.
I have two Brother printers, a laser and inkjet. Love both.
+1. It's the financialization of everything.
Fake financialism, GE was in trouble within a few years of when Jack Welch retired and wasn’t available to cook the books. His accolade, Jim McNerney, took over Boeing and converted it from a company that built great airplanes and made money to a company that doesn’t build great airplanes or make money. But McNerney, like Welch, knew how to cook the books and keep the stock price high.
He may have kept the stock prices high, but he's having trouble keeping Boeing planes off the ground.
Airbus is eating Boeing's lunch.
I have an HP 32S RPN scientific calculator that I got for about $80 in 1990. It still looks and works as good as new -- and still running on the original button batteries!
I see used ones on Ebay often going for more than $100.
I can remember when HP stood for high quality engineering and high quality builds. Their power supplies and signal generators were the standard, if I recall. Then they got some MBA type in charge, and it has all been downhill.
I wonder if the state of California could pass legislation putting a stop to this kind of behavior.
A free country means you are free to trash a product, even if it is your own product.
What happened to HP? Carly Fiorina. First she allegedly cooked the books at Lucent (from Wikipedia: "According to Fortune magazine, Lucent increased sales by lending money to their own customers, writing that "In a neat bit of accounting magic, money from the loans began to appear on Lucent's income statement as new revenue while the dicey debt got stashed on its balance sheet as an allegedly solid asset".", referencing http://fortune.com/2010/10/15/carly-fiorinas-troubling-telecom-past/). HP's sale of their test equipment business (Agilent Technologies) was already in progress when she got the big chair at HP, and then she had HP buy Compaq. After getting a huge signing bonus in 1999, by 2001 she was asking HP staff to take "voluntary" pay cuts. By 2005, the stock price was half of what it was when she was hired, and the board forced her out.
I had an HP 1220C that I bought for $20 that worked well for me for almost 20 years as it was old enough to be too "dumb" to support HP's ink monopoly protection racket. Now we have an Epson with no cartridges, just ink reservoirs, and it works fine without any of the cartridge nonsense.
Like junk fees on airline flights, they do this because Americans shop based on the up-front price rather than the long-term costs (and the companies hide the long-term cost) and doing it this way allows HP to keep that initial price low and nail you on the back end.
I used to beat the system because Costco used to offer a service of injecting ink into used cartridges for half the price of a new cartridge. So you had reasonably-priced ink in a genuine HP cartridge that the printer would accept. Unfortunately, Costco closed down its photographic services, where they performed this service, a year or two ago.
I had a similar experience with my old HP All-in-One color printer. In order to save on the increasingly exorbitant costs of toner, I got Costco to refill a couple at a dramatically lower price. No love there! The printer rejected them as "empty"!
Moving to an Epson All-in-One, there were a number of happy years, then it started eating colored toner like popcorn. At this point (it had been a long, long line of printers of different flavors), I checked Consumer Reports and decided to try a simple Brother b&w laser model. Back to laser, after all these decades!
The Brother has been great. Reliable. Portable: I've hauled it all around the state with no problems. I've replaced the toner bar several times and the drum unit once so far. Quality remains good; it duplexes and does envelopes without a hitch. On top of all that, Brother gives you a SASE so you can return the used toner and drum units in the boxes of their replacements, so they can recycle them!
Nobody has paid for this endorsement.
Very much right there with you. Dave & Bill are spinning in their graves.
Somehow Brother printers still don't suck. Otherwise you have to go to the professional market for a nonshitty printer.
A long time ago I knew a marketing manager at the HP printer division. They were exactly the sort of person you expect an HP printer marketing manager to be.
I wrote a really long comment documenting my frustration with inkjet printer companies and their cartridges, but I erased it before posting because who cares? Bottom line is that ripping off customers is actually the business model of makers of consumer inkjet printers. Their ink is no better than lots of third party sellers, costs two to three times as much, and they use scare tactics to sell it (aftermarket ink will void your warranty; those cheap cartridges carry viruses; print quality is inferior, etc...). Lots of people have been stung by the same subscription scam that Kevin fell victim to, and other companies are embedding chips in the cartridges so aftermarket cartridges won't work.
But I stopped decades ago using "official" ink in my inkjets, and my printers are none the worse for it. My printing needs are not great, but the aftermarket ink I'm using has saved me enough money to buy two or three new printers if anything goes wrong (so far this has not happened). Also,
it is illegal to prohibit users from putting any ink they feel like using in their printers.
So yeah, fuck you, printer companies.
This WaPo article is illuminating: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/12/cheap-printer-ink-refill-cartridges-save-money/
Why hasn't this completely cratered their printer business? Are there really that many people who don't do a modicum of research before a major purchase? I don't consult the internet before buying kitchen sponges or iodized table salt. But a printer?
Yep.
If you don't need color, buying a $120 Brother laser printer will get your printing done for cheap. I've had two in more than 20 years, the first one was replaced because there was no Windows 10 driver for the first one. Still happy as a clam.
I'm reasonably happy with my Brother printer that prints color.
Windows is like HP. I swore off both of them long ago.
Low priced printers don't cost enough to qualify as major purchases.
Customers who print in high volumes - like, say, business offices - are probably OK with the subscription purchase model. And there are an awful lot of business offices.
All office printers are laser/LED outside of specialized photo/drafting printers. The cost per page is a fraction of anything else and the speed is a multiple, which is what businesses care about.
Isn't this kind of shit precisely what capitalism and the competitive marketplace are supposed to solve?
The theoretical "competitive marketplace" assumes a bunch of things that aren't there: free entry into the market, all parties equally informed. Businesses are constantly doing their best to extract monopoly rents, by making it harder for customers to leave, like forcing you to buy their expensive, high-margin ink cartridges.
I have yet to meet anyone who is totally happy with their printers, ink cartridges, etc, of any brand. Brother seems to be the winner on this thread, but I have had those and they were a bust also.
Computer printing is a delicate operation. We are used to Asian-manufactured printers that cost next to nothing. We are spoiled and should accept the fact that we will have to replace them fairly frequently.
(That said, I've been fairly happy with the HP ink subscription I've had over the past couple of years. I think my annual cost of around 70-80 dollars is a better deal than how much I was spending on individual cartridges before.)
Printing as a subscription service. GTFO ????
True story, years ago I interviewed at HP and during the interview I discussed the remarkable quality of the Laserjet II and III printers. And the executives interviewing me started talking about how those printers were terrible for the company because they lasted too long and didn't generate any profits outside the initial sale. Kind of glad I didn't get the job.
After running dependably for about 10 years, I just tossed our HP Inkjet Pro after they doubled the cartridge prices over the past year.
I got an Epson EcoTank with refillable ink tanks as a replacement for just €100 more than what a new set of cartridges would have cost for the HP. It's clearly not quite so solidly built as the HP, but the enormous long-term savings will hopefully make up for that.
My son just ordered an ink tank printer for me so that I can throw my HP printer in the trash. Buy new ink, print 10 pages, leave it sit a few weeks, buy new ink. Repeat. The cost is ridiculous.
Everybody should stay the heck away from HP computers too. I have two (didn't learn the first time) and they are the only ones I've ever had that will randomly stop responding to the keyboard and/or mouse for indeterminate (but long) periods of time in order to do something known only to them that requires 100% of disk i/o capacity, and/or jump into a mode of responding to keypresses at random intervals, that resembles a drunken computer's impression of batch processing. Never again.
Credit, though, to my ancient mono HP laser from well before the captive toner days. It still chugs (and squeaks) along and is happy with third-party toners, a relic of the good HP days of old. But I sure can't say the same for a newer HP inkjet that's constantly wheedling about ink. I hate that hunk of junk.
Leo Laporte has a basic rule-- all printers suck. Some more than others, and HP maybe worst of all. On balance he's not wrong.
I have an HP laptop and had the issue of the keyboard randomly not working all of a sudden. After much googling, I figured out it's an overheating issue due to my leaving the laptop plugged in too long - so I unplug after fully charged and the problem has gone away.
Thanks for the tip. But the one that's much worse this way is the desktop. It can be fine for weeks at a time but then suddenly it'll act up for weeks at a time for no reason I can figure out. When it does the behavior can sometimes be stopped for a while by moving the keyboard/mouse usb dongle to a different port.
I've had Lenovos and Dells that have never done anything remotely like this so I blame HP's implementation of Windows-- most of their development time (such as it is) seems to go toward adding bloatware and HP extended-warranty reminders. Net result, I've already bought my last HP computer as well as my last HP printer.
What is this “printer” you speak of? I’m not familiar with the technology.
I haven’t had a home printer in 15 years. I’ve printed about 50 pages from work in that time. And maybe 100 more total for work. Most of that front loaded, with very little in the last few years.
I’m nearly at the paperless office grail.
Re: paperless office grail.
I was about to snark "try that in the bathroom", but your place probably has bidets...
I've had a couple of Brother machines over the years and they were both garbage. I've got a couple of Canon all-in-one laser printer/copiers which do the job. Every couple of thousand pages I get a generic toner cartridge.
We had an HP all-in-one that lasted for 15 years. We only got rid of it because the ink cartridges were getting hard to find and going up in price rapidly. I had bought a Brother black and white laser jet for our small business about 8 years ago. It was nearly perfect and I loved it. We replaced our old HP with a Brother all-in-one with color ink jet tech. It runs out of black too fast, but the cartridges are cheap and easily found.
Brother FTW.
Fuck Dell too, while you're at it.
I'm a forgetful guy. Once I left the charger at home for my XPS 13. Well, it's USB-C. I can plug pretty much anything in it that supplies power. It might charge slowly or go down slowly but maybe I'll make it through the day.
Nope. Plug any power source that does not have the secret Dell chip in it and the laptop will scold you for daring to use a non-Dell product, throttle screen brightness and cpu speed to their absolute lowest levels and not let you change them, and sit there like a goddamn toad, daring you to take umbrage.
I quit with the HP when they first chipped their ink cartridges, well before that bullshit subscription service started. And I quit Dell too. If I can't buy an Anker battery off Amazon, plug it in and have it work, Dell can kiss my taint.