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Was gonna say I vaguely remember when HP implied some level of quality
HP was indeed affordable and good. They made good laptops and laser printers for many years.
Emphasis on the past tense.
Strong emphasis. I had an HP laptop in college in 2006. I believe I took good care of it. It freezes one day in the middle of homework, I pull the battery out in frustration. It never turned on again. No idea what I did but it died.
Did you pay for the antifreeze? That’s probably why
It pays to have a good antifreeze.
I think my Mcovfee subscription had just expired. Should have known better!
Back in my day…
I remember Carly Fiorina getting hired and almost immediately things started turning to shit.
I don’t know, it often seems that the prior ceo (often with the help of the board) sets a company up for quick profits, but long term doom. Then he leaves and they miraculously hit their first female CEO (see GM, Yahoo, Reddit, Blizzard, Twitter (currently)).
I don’t disagree with that, but she knew exactly what she was brought in to do and jumped in with both feet. Would it have been someone else if she turned the gig down? Of course. But she said yes so it was her.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add that Carly specifically does is probably a pretty terrible person (hard not to be when vying for republican office). Good point.
HP is still plenty serviceable as long as you’re getting HP Enterprise. The consumer stuff has been trash for almost 20 years now.
HP and HPE are two separate companies.
I suppose that explains the difference in quality and usability
Ooooooooh
that explains a lot
Actually, they are still ahead of the competition in industrial printing, their indigo and pagewide web presses are very good and reliable, but of course those products belongs to a whole different market segment
Running Linux on a HP Victus desktop. The hardware is fine (I got it at a good price when my last home built PC crapped out and graphics cards were overpriced - it was simply the best deal at the time)… Bloat. Bloat everywhere in windows.
As someone who works extensively with the spin offs instruments, I can safely say that they would be just as outraged. They are all bad quality, fail VERY frequently, and, guess what, you have to subscribe to be able to use all the features of the hardware you bought.
At their “cheapest” 0.099 euro / $0.11 USD tier it is already literally cheaper per page (albeit certainly not faster) for me to print documents as 8.5x11" 0.1mm thick single layer slabs of plastic on my 3D printer.
An entire “blank” page, i.e. no cutouts for text or anything, would be about 0.754 grams of plastic. That’s about $0.0143 per page at a not-too-exorbitant retail cost of PLA filament ($18.99 USD for a kilo) and the material usage would be even less once the negative space for text is subtracted. And I don’t even have to buy the paper.
That’s mind boggling. Apparently I’m in the wrong racket.
That’s pathetic, hopefully they go out of business soon. Just think of all the filiment that could have been made instead of e waste
Get a Brother laserjet.
I was highly considering a Brother, now I definitely will get one.
Epson Eco Tank is the cheapest best printer I’ve ever had.
Do you use a model with pigment inks or dye inks? I currently use a pigment based hp inkjet. I thought about switching to ecotank but the pigment refills are comparable to hp pigment cost. I assume the ecotank would get a higher page count from the same cost of ink? The pigment based ecotank models I shopped around were quite a bit more expensive than the entry level dye based models.
I use the cheap Eko tank that doesn’t auto feed…wish I had done the auto feed. It just takes a 15 dollar bottle of ink for each color. In 4 years I’ve used one black bottle and 1/2 the colors.
I’ve had two in the span of about 16 years. Only reason I got a new one was because I couldn’t find decent drivers for it for Windows 8. Considering with HP and Epson inkjets they wouldn’t even last 2 years, 8+ years is a good deal. Brother printers are excellent.
Mines been good. Light to medium duty use.
I’ve had my brother for 11 years, still going strong
I’m at five years for ours. We used the included ‘teaser’ toner cartridge for almost three years. After the first year, it warned us the toner was low. We laughed and turned the warning off and it just continued to provide toner for nearly another two years.
We now have an “extra large” toner cartridge. Like owning a parrot, my wife and I expect it’ll outlast both of us and our children or grandchildren will get stuck with it. We’re both 35.
I got a huge office printing center thing from government liquidation out of my nearby military base for $55. It came with more toner than I could ever use in my lifetime.
Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.
Holy shit, .15 euros per page? Why not just run to der Kinkos? I haven’t checked but I imagine it’s cheaper there. I get the convenience of having a printer at home but this is like if every cup of coffee you make at home cost you the Starbucks $8.25.
Or just don’t buy HP.
The correct answer, as usual, is: don’t buy HP.
In the US, if you print ~52(+) B&W pages a year, HP Instant Spyware is seemingly cheaper.
FedEx Kinko’s:
Non-EU- lett Packard:
For color, HP’s cheaper once you print two pages a month.
Printing is a good excuse to walk to the local print shop. Let’s say, though, you have to drive your Honda Civic a couple miles through Los Angeles - that adds roughly thirty cents of fuel (ignoring other vehicle costs). (That’s our bestselling car in our second largest city, because you wouldn’t give up your parking spot in NYC.)
Conventional wisdom is to buy a Brother laser printer, but there’s a bit of upfront cost for the color models, which are a little larger when comparing versions with scanners to inkjet all-in-ones. Who wants to do the math on those :)
…whoh they have their own subscription!
Anyway I think this is more like having a printing-press-barista in your closet instead of going to the print-barista down the street. It could be anywhere from 76 cents more expensive to $5.80 less expensive a month. Compare to a Mr. Coffee which you’ll pay off right away by skipping Starbucks.
tl;dr let HP siphon your data, what’s the worst that could happen? 😈
Does that include the price of the printer?
Oops yeah add in $45!! That’s 67 color pages worth of cheddar if you walk to Kinko’s - that I forgot about.
You forgot about that beautiful thing also known as your local library!
Mine is around 2 miles away from my home and only charges me 10¢ per b&w sheet. Its absolutely perfect for any printing needs I may have.
Unfortunately my city’s library system was hacked a few months ago and all of their computer services are down until January while they un-fuck things. In the meantime I go to Staples when I want to print.
Great point!
In San Francisco, it’s ten cents AND you get two bucks worth a day free.
You reminded me: sometimes local politicians will let you fax (and thus perhaps print) free at their offices.
My thing is…they can dictate how much you use YOUR OWN PRINTER??? Like…how? Why? What.
Like…
WHAT.
$8.25 for a Starbucks? Man, it’s like £3.55-£4 here in UK.
Depends on the drink. Get a super-frappa-extrashot-sugar bomb and yeah, it’ll be $8-9 easy. A regular medium coffee is $3 or so.
Depends on location too. I live in Seattle, I don’t know the last time I’ve seen a cup for less than $6 on anything other than drip
I’ve got a whole 0.5kg bag of coffee for that much in Germany, and that’ll last me almost a month (~25 cups). What’s so good about Starbucks that it costs as much per cup?
Nothing really. I just can’t make that when traveling. Unfortunately when out and about in the UK you either have Costa, Starbucks or Nero around the same price or McDonald’s and Greggs which is cheaper. It’s very hard to find any local coffee shops.
The cheapest plan 0.099 Cents for each page 10 pages in the month. 1500 pages per month 54.99 € respectively.
Yeah, depending on where you live, it may be cheaper to go to your local printer shop. Plus minus cost of transport and your time.
I did not check HP’s prices to Poland. Table lists 100 pages as 0.07EUR/page. Krakow, Poland, nearby printer shop takes ~0.02-0.07EUR per A4 page, and there is no subscription. Nor doing 100 pages.
Brother printer gang printing with their tears of joy.
I got a Brother with the big chonker carts, I usually only print once every 5-6 months and I’m still g2g like 5-6 years in.
I gotta run a cleaning cycle each time usually but that’s perfectly understandable haha.
Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
What !! Really? That’s sad
Easy. Never buy HP. Their printers are shit and so are their laptops.
What’s wrong with their laptops? I’ve never had any issues.
For starters you don’t need a heating unit if you keep their laptop running inside
I’ve never had that problem. But I’ve never had a particularly high end HP laptop so maybe those are different.
Also their batteries get pregnant every other year and if you don’t fix it, it sets your house on fire.
Damn it, people need to stop fucking batteries or use protection.
🤣🤣🤣
Hahahahaja
Thanks for the laugh, and the vision.
Also, I’ll be stealing the “getting pregnant” line
Source?
Anecdotal.
There’s someone to say something bad about every computer brand.
Their consumer line has very poor build quality. Cheap everything. All of the plastic is flimsy and breaks easily, inadequate cooling, etc. They’re built about as good as Acer, but at a price that you’d expect from a much, much better brand.
Then there’s how dedicated they are to screwing you. I won’t touch them again for any reason after how malicious they were with the nVidia failures.
Jesus fuckin Christ I was today years old when I learned about HP Instant Ink. Good gracious what a scam
The whole company is a scam. I’ve seen a couple of big companies get nice bulk discount contracts.
$1600 off of laptop workstations. Who the fuck can afford a bulk discount of 50%?
I don’t think they even used HP printers.
The whole company is a scam
HP laptops also come with spyware installed. Hp touchpoint analytics, that you can’t remove.
You can always reinstall windows
While I do agree that HP is a very scummy + awful company, their pricing system is not worse than that of many other companies. Many many companies use an inflated listed price system in combination with very large discounts, often fixed discounts per customer.
There’s several benefits to this. One of the biggest is that it allows their vendors to give nice “discounts” to entice ignorant customers. Ignorant people are more likely to buy a $2000 computer with 50% discount than a $1000 with 0% discount. And occasionally someone will come along and be scammed out of paying full listed price.
Inflating the list price is just very common and 50% is not even one of the worst offenders, just look at American health insurance prices for a much more egregious example. Construction building suppliers also systematically use it and “discounts” of 40 to 70% are common.
The big companies like that get the laptops at cost because they sign up for juicy support contracts, which is where the real money is
I used instant ink when I was living temporarily in Vancouver. It was actually worth the price back then. Now? Forget it.
If you still own a HP printer, it’s your own fault. Sorry. Got an Canon with liquid refill, loved it, equipped my company with it & recommended it to everyone I know. It’s not even expensive & the quality is impeccable. Plus: no problems whatsoever over Linux.
EDIT: CANON, not Epson. I’m distracted sometimes. Canon PIXMA G4511, sub 300 Eur.
Wait till you find out it purges the lines every print, and while you can replace the purge sponge, the system doesn’t always have a “reset the purge sponge” option. And the ones that do use a rather unknown button combination that may or may not work.
I have an ecotank, no linux support.
Sorry, that happens when I do too many things at the same time. Canon. I’m talking of the Canon G4511 liquid refill.
My epson ecotank l6490 works like charm with Linux…
For me too with wifi, and the standarised network printing 🤣 but not when directly connected to pc with usb.
My FIL owns an HP with a subscription. I’ve given up on the things he wastes money on; most of them he’s not really technically savvy enough to implement anyway. (And, yes, buying a printer and getting it installed may exceed his technical abilities)
I have one of those, it won’t work with my Linux though :/
Now I fucked it up, my finger wrote "Epson x while my brain thought “Canon”… I was talking the Canon G4511.
I only use it for scanning now. I was mad when my parents bought a new one.
Education is the key.
It amazes me that there are so many people who buy a printer, are offered this “pay $x a month for Y pages” type of plan, and say yes. I mean, sure, HP sucks, but they wouldn’t be able to get away with such slimy business practices if there weren’t so many people willing to pay.
I am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it’s a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don’t want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it’s a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don’t care if it’s a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it’s easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.
Spend a bit more and get a laser and have it last exponentially longer. That’s how I’ve been rollin.
I keep saying it around here - my 1996 Lexmark laser just died in July.
Almost 30 years old. And I think I can fix it.
My cheap 300$ laser died after 8 years, so replaced it with a 600 better one. Let’s see how this goes 😂
Breaking news: Printer company behaves like printer companies always have. User hostile.
This just in: Capitalism works
So the plan dictates how many pages you can print each month? Feck no! I own a Brother laser printer and I’m so glad I escaped the HP madness years ago.
Yes and no. If you exceed that, I think they just bill you for the next tier.
If you cancel, they immediately remote disable the perfectly working cartridges already in your printer that are still full of ink. Even if you’ve fully paid for the remainder of the month.
It’s a complete scam. Just don’t buy an HP printer, Instant Ink or not.
Of course they disable the cartridge. You’re paying for ink on a subscription. If you didn’t pay for cart in full, why should you be able to use the rest of it? That’s literally what you signed up for. Otherwise everyone would get a full cartridge for $1.
If you don’t want to do ink-cart-layaway, don’t sign up and buy the cartridge.
Disabling mid-month is a scam though.
Me: writes whole reply about why mid month canceling is a scam, and then realizing I didn’t read your last line and writing this instead.
They could have made this subscription far easier and fairer if they wanted to. A service that simply buys a new cartridge once your existing one reaches a threshold (say 20% left) would be simple to implement, simple to understand and even be quite useful. Instead this Instant Ink thing is an abomination of multiple tiers and price gouging.
Just making it easier not to buy one!
“buy”
hahahaa i recently dumped them for a big, sturdy, traditional, offline Brother laser. it’s ridiculous how much more satisfying it is to print, especially without HP breathing over your shoulder counting how many pages you’ve printed in the last billing period
Satisfying isn’t the word. We have to generally use HP for SAP purposes so unfortunately I have to buy HP for work. Guess what? Every fucking month a few clients need printer support. Just HP bullshit time and time again…
I have brothers, kyoceras and others that just work and work without any issues. But HPs are just nagging offline fucking pains in the ass.
Being boycotting this shitstain company since Carly Fiorina turned it into a perfect example of peak 1990’s MBA management style (the kind that killed companies like GE) and, once again, I get to pat myself on the back for it.
Almost 20 years of regular smug self-satisfaction for free is a pretty good investment.
Any reliable recommendations for ink jets, in that case?
Last time around I needed a new printer a couple of years ago, I looked around for decent inkjets and couldn’t really find any brands which weren’t undergoing enshittification, so as I only really need B&W I decided to pony up the extra money and bought a “cheap” Brother laser printer instead.
Thanks, I share the same opinion, but don’t want a particle source at home for small/mid-volume printing.
None.
Go laser. It’s worth the difference in price.
I have a 1996 Lexmark laser that just quit on me in July. It’s 14" wide, about 9" tall and 9" deep.
I prefer lasers in special ventilated environments, but not at my home 😀
If like me you don’t print much but still need a printer occasionally, get a laser printer (possibly a scanner multifunction, since it can be handy to scan your receipts), and just buy your cartridges normally. Laser toner won’t dry up like ink does, so you end up paying less for your infrequent prints in the long run.
Go to your local goodwill/thrift store and check for laser printers.
Get a laser printer, with toner cart, for less than 20, often less than 10, bucks.
Yeah but, how big are they?
Old ones can be big, yeah.
Depends.
Though I suspect what you can find used for a good price will generally be larger.
You have a scanner in your pocket, just a reminder.
It doesn’t do as good a job, unless there’s something I could be doing better.
It’s probably down to the scanner app. I’m using CamScanner.
Tiny Scanner for Android
Adobe Scan works as good as a scanner if you use their cropping system to square up the page afterwards.
