For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs.
I was a HP customer for decades. I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend.
My mfc-l3750cdw Brother printer is a bit of a beast, but it does it's job amazingly well. It's 2x the size, weight, and price of my old HP but it's worth every penny for the peace of mind. It prints when I need it to print. It shuts down when it's not printing. It connects to wifi and doesn't try to serve me an ad while doing it. It uses ink logically. And I don't feel like I'm trying to resolve a problem that was effectively solved in 1995.
The hard fact is that printers and copiers as a market has been shrinking (outside of China) for years now [1]. It's gone from a necessity to a niche need, and even then people have kinkos / WeWork / their parents house as a backup.
HP isn't going back, just switch. Save yourself like I did.
I agree on the Brother printers, I’ve only had two Brothers in the past 13 years, and the only reason I upgraded was to go from Black and White Laser, to Color Laser, it was still going strong. The best part about it was you would buy a toner cartridge and when it would tell you it’s getting low, put some electrical tape over the clear hole in the side and it would continue to print for another 1.5k. On top of that I just press the reset button for the toner life and it resets it just like I put in a brand new one. Then I print till it starts getting light. This last round of color toners I bought an off brand from Amazon that came with all the colors plus two black for half the price of the name brand set. I typically don’t buy off brand, but figured I would give it a shot. Still going good since last year.
I still have an LCD screen Brother color laser printer that works great. The LCD is one or two lines. Works with any toner and paper and linux and wifi and I think AirDrop too (untried). It definitely is a beast but I think all color laser printers are big because they need 5 toner cartridges.
I have a 15 year old Brother black and white laser all-in-one and a 6 year old black and white laser with Wi-Fi still on the starter toner in my office.
They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.
In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.
I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.
I recently bought a Brother laser (the linked commenter bought an inkjet, not sure if it matters) & have replaced the toner with non-OEMs from a local shop: when I was buying, the (very helpful & generous) shop-owner warned me there was a reasonable chance it might not work & offered a full refund if it didn't.
I queried him further & according to him its random because he's heard both positive & negative stories with the exact same model numbers (which makes me think it must be firmware updates).
Thankfully my (very new) laser didn't have this issue: print quality is perfect. Afraid to do any fw updates now though.
I also like my brother, but it will attempt to detect and reject non-authentic ink. I don't update mine anymore because the last time I did, it rejected my cartridges.
I have a brother HL-2360DW circa 2017, with a new brother large-size authentic toner cartridge. I never hooked it to the internet, never updated the firmware. And it started saying low toner even though I've put (far?) less than 250 sheets through it.
There was a way to turn off the low toner warnings, I did it, and seem to be ok, but it makes me wonder.
EDIT: wow, it sells for $449 on amazon. I paid $115 in 2017.
I have an old 3170cdw that I got 2nd hand. At least all the consumables and parts that eventually need replacing are easy to get and seem readily available.
Printers are pretty difficult to manufacture compared to a laptop. They have specialized high precision parts and a lot of mechanical parts that have to work together for a particular design. A laptop can be pretty much made from off the shelf parts aside from the chassis and PCB, which you can easily have made by any number of contractors.
And I’m sure printers are probably a minefield of patents.
If the market weren’t in decline, maybe. But to pipedream a little:
A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).
Absolutely not because printer patents will kill you.
There are a handful of companies that hold all the patents necessary to build a printer. If you try to build one from scratch "taking inspiration" from consumer ones you will be sued into oblivion
I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist.
The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.
The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...
I have a Ethernet only Epson WP4515 that I plan to keep until it dies since it works perfectly with 3rd party cartridges. In order to add WiFi, years ago I took a TP-Link TL-MR3020 mini router I got for €5 at a flea market, put OpenWRT into it and set it up as a wireless bridge. Worked perfectly for years until I could finally put the printer in a place to connect it through Ethernet.
Any piece of hardware with the necessary features (compatible with OpenWRT or any other Linux, Ethernet, WiFi) can be used, therefore many *Pi-like boards will also work, but repurposing an old router/AP will be the cheapest solution since they're often literally thrown away.
A RaspberryPi sharing the printer over the network would do the trick. Stick it to the back of the printer, the LAN port connected to it, while sharing overthe WiFi.
It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.
Do you need it to be available over wireless for direct printing, or just on the network without making holes? If it's the latter, are you aware of Ethernet over power (aka powerline networking)?
I also like Canon. Bought one several years ago, ready to take it back if it did not play nice with Linux. I was pleasantly surprised that the drivers worked. I had to fiddle with them initially to get the needed dependencies (not all were configured as dependencies in the package), but they've since fixed it. It's such a breeze. And off-brand toner works just fine, too!
They tend to be repairable as well. I had to recap the power supply last year in my Brother HL-5250DN which is probably nearing the age where it's able to legally drive in the US, and after the output voltages were right again it fired right up and has been working great since.
This is the key answer here, i switched from a HP to a brother everything just works now, and i dont have to download 1gb "driver packages".
Hp is the worst company for any hardware needs, all their laptops/dektops sucked so much, back in the day in my electronics shop they where the ones with the worst return/faults rate, by a big margin.
What HP actually shines is their "FreeDOS" (i.e. Linux) workstations. They're like the total opposite of their printers, since they grant the owner a reasonable amount of control and outstanding performance at rock bottom prices. Google buys these things for all their employees, which is all the proof I needed that HP as an OEM isn't doing anything creepy to these workstations before shipping them from the factory. You really can't do better, unless you're willing to shell out at least twice the money.
Totally agree! HP back in the day were rock solid. I had one that would print onto virtually anything I stuffed into it (I exaggerate but you get my point). All it wants to do now is download 'updates' or some other crap. Finally I switched to Brother, not perfect but guess what... It just prints!!!!
I have fought so much with Brother (multi purpose machines) back in the early 2000s that I can still get reminded about it by ex-colleagues or users I helped back then, so this is certainly a huge change, but I have seen the recommendations for Brother so many times now I am seriously considering it.
I have a brother printer/scanner as well (model HL-L2395DW). I've been using at home since 2020 to supplement at-home office and school work once the pandemic started. It takes third-party black toner cartridges that you can buy from amazon/office stores. It's never jammed, I've replaced the starter toner cartridge, and have fed it several reams of paper.
Scanning works well with a USB cable to PC and wireless printing works well from Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. I expect it to last 10-20 years, overall a good product. I would not worry about getting this exact model, I'd expect any brother toner printer to work well.
A year ago I came home to find my wife on the verge of tears. She needed to print something for our child’s school and the printer was out of ink. Again. After having only printed 50 pages since the last time.
I bought a brother color laser (HL-L3290CDW). She was skeptical as it was much more expensive than the HP inkjet we had. A few weeks later, she called me randomly to thank me for getting it telling me how fantastic it was and how much easier it had made her life. First time she’s done that for any tech stuff I’ve gotten her.
Just want to make another suggestion. Ink tank printers are also good, can print coloured prints for cheap. We have one and just need to buy the inks and pour the ink into the tanks of printer.
I did exactly this. After one too many bad experiences with HP, I said as soon as this printer dies, I'm getting a Brother. Then I gave up waiting, and switched as soon as the cartridge ran out, and I am so happy I did.
I now recommend friends and family to avoid HP like the plague, including laptops (which I've also had bad experiences with). Such a shame, their stuff used to be great.
For as long as I can remember, HP has hated their customers, and I'm nearly middle-aged. It's been a loooong time since HP has been great (but it was true at one point, just not in the last 25-30 years).
I also love my Brother laser printer, and don't hate my p-touch.
> ...I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching ... to Brother...
No bullets to bite. My brother laser is over 12 years old and works just like it did when I bought it. I like it so much I bought another for another part of the house. Did I mention it also groks postscript for those that might want to print from a BSD machine right OOTB?
The InkJet ones are still not perfect though. E.g. mine needs to clean itself all the time, wasting my ink every 4-5 months. I understand that it regularly needs to print so it doesn't clog up, but it's going at it for minutes at a time and is horribly loud...
Been with a laser Brothers for 10 years. Switched to a newer one 5 years ago but it’s only because I needed the wifi feature. Works great, no bullshit update software, stays connected to my wifi, never had to fight drivers or anything to get a new Mac connected to it.
Been using Brother printers for years, never had any issues. Surprisingly, in our times, they just keep making printers that work. I don't know how long this would last, but I am planning on staying with them while it does.
I bought a Brother inkjet printer last year. It was a bit expensive but it just works flawlessly. I don't even use it that often but it doesn't betray me when I need it, I press print and it works.
What I find notable whenever something like this is in the news, is that these user-hostile features don't just manifest through abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation.
User-hostile features are created by people.
Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).
I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")
Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")
Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.
I had an experience in another industry similar to what printers are doing. We used to use standard, easy-to-source-from-3rd-party 6-port valves on one of our instruments. Customers loved it, since the valve would need servicing now and then with replacement parts but the company president only saw lost recurring service and support revenue. To complement that perception, the VP Engineering decided "our systems should use our parts". So we embarked on "designing" our own new 6-port valves... Which consisted of putting the original 6-port in a welded box with a manifold and calling it our own. Since it was "new" we charged more, while paying less, and obviously telling people that to not use the new system was to void the warranty, and oh by the way, only we can service it. Naturally it came with a firmware that would be recognized as "official". When one of the clients discovered the truth, and provided our support team with evidence proving the new, more expensive valve system gave a slightly poorer performance, management's answer was to threaten to sue. They sold their instrument and went to the competition.
So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design
They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost.
They believe businesses want OEM.
They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.
They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product.
By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their data analysis also says on some level.
Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
Do you think they really believe those things or are those just the things they say to convince themselves and each other that what they are doing is fine while deep down they know that it's wrong and that they're acting out of greed and are making the world worse.
> Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy which means sometimes they have to come up with insane and unconvincing excuses to justify their evils. They are bound to feel uncomfortable when someone tells them the truth by advocating for the customer. They can still take the money by screwing over other people, but it means they can't do it while pretending that it doesn't make them assholes.
> They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.
this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!
> Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature
We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.
The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.
Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.
I'd argue there's still some interesting math going on there.
PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.
Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?
Taking this point even further … at the point which user hostility starts to affect their brand in a way that costs money, they’ll stop doing it and be heralded for listening to their users.
At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.
> The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.
The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.
Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.
Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."
In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."
This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.
The thing is you'd expect companies should also compete to remove such anti-features in order to claim market share from competitors. It's strange how rare that is.
> Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature
I worked for a large Telco and wrote and maintained the software and system(s) that calculated internet usage, and charged overages monthly. (The home internet plans sold by this telco that service a massive landmass all had hard usage caps. There is no competition).
I saw many, many monthly internet overage bills that were $5k+. Hundreds a month that were $1k+. That system alone made many millions in profit per year.
Why did I do it? It was my job, I needed to pay rent and buy food.
Longer term, I decided to "stay on the inside" because I genuinely thought I could improve things. Over the years I had meetings with basically all the VPs and even the CEO, and sent many a passionate email on behalf of customers that many told me were "Career Limiting Moves".
I'm not there anymore, and it's many years later, but that Telco does now offer unlimited internet plans (introduced very recently). I was the first at the company to run the numbers on what it would look like and start to push for it at all levels, so I like to think I did actually make things better.
FWIW, there was one guy in my department who refused to work on/with that usage system, and made it clear that from a moral standpoint he would quit if they forced him to.
In the case of HP, I think it makes sense from a business point of view. The "big money" in printers is not the printer but the refills. They are kind of the petroleum lamps of IT. One of the biggest problems from the POV of a printer company is the fact that refill/replace from different brands cuts into their profits.
The inital strategy by all companies was to point out that original ink is better in some way, then most of them tried some sorts of firmware based restrictions. HP actually tried a pretty interesting approach with their ink subscription model. They have a decent price/page with that and you don't ever have to worry about running out of ink because you automatically get a replacement cartridge if you subscribe for x$/month. The downside is that the number of pages that you are "allowed" to print each month is limited which seems pretty ridiculous at first glance for a tech person. However, if you think about "normal users" I think they actually found a good way to force them back to their ink by selling "peace of mind".
So basically, while I completely disagree with the approach because I want to use a device I buy any way I please I think HP is actually making the right business call here. The average customer cares about having an ok price/page and having a printer that always prints when they need it. I think HP is targeting that with their subscription model and also making cash flows a bit more reliable.
Mostly money - We're in the midst of implementing a new payment model. It makes us (the programmers etc) uncomfortable, but generally these sorts of things come from up high, usually with the intent of extracting more profit.
By and large I expect most workers know and dislike that, but ultimately it's a small compromise for them personally - in most cases they may not even use the product they work on. The best they can do usually is object to it, but if people want it done then it'll be done; after all, that's what you're getting paid for.
Haven’t been in the exact situation you describe, but I have worked at some b2b saas companies and when I didn’t like the pricing schemes and the way management was making us squeeze customers I left.
I’m not really in a a financial position to just say fuck it and leave at a moments notice, and it feels a bit different when you’re making Adobe for example pay extra money.
I think we can all imagine the actual reason people in charge do it though: money
I saw a PM during a large company meeting Q&A eagerly talking about how we're not leveraging our existing customers enough to sell more products and how we should have advertisements in product A for (largely unrelated) product B because we have a large enough user base. The VP's face lit up and our product has ads now :(
The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be (the PM since moved off to another team to continue innovating). This made me angry and sad, but most of my peers didn't care at all, and some even expressed interest to "work on the high impact feature" to get a promo for themselves as well :(
> The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be
Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.
Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate?
I'd say that's 99% of the tech workers' mentality. Especially if they need to stay employed to stay in the country, better to just lick the boot than give any impressions of opposition.
End of the day the sentiment shifts to "people are not forced to buy my products and if they do anyway, why wouldn't we extract as much from the market as we can for the work we already did", which is a fair position to have. You did some work, if you can sell it for 10 instead of 5 and make them come back to you instead of a random when they need help, why not?
You'd be surprised how easy is to change your mind when it's your own work or company, yet still be outraged at others when they do it. It's very common.
They say actions speak louder than words. Well, the corollary to that is that incentives speak louder than rationalizations. What exactly do you want to hear? Would you rather be lied to, have a window into how some poor schmuck lies to himself, or indulge that schmuck’s hand-wringing?
I'll bite. I've implemented user hostile features before.
> what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
The people who make the decision to implement these kinds of features are bad people. Full stop. They want to punish people, and believe a technological solution provides a fool-proof way to punish the people around them. It's about control, and spreading hurt around. It's about being able to exert control on others, without them having the ability to push back. It is evil, and I hate it.
I have implemented user-hostile features in the past because it was my job at the time, and I would be fired if I didn't.
When I've had to create this sort of anti-feature, I do a shitty job on purpose. It barely works. There are workarounds that defeat the punitive nature of the horrible thing I've had to create. It'll work on paper, but be shit in production. In every case I've had to do this, the people who ask for the anti-features are not capable of testing that they work right. They gleefully take their new pain toy and go off to hurt people with it. I never hear from them again. Then I start updating my resume and begin to look for a new job.
Are the user-hostile features you're talking about different than the third-party tracking that almost every Web site includes (selling out their users' privacy)?
> "Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons"
Could you imagine if the defense industry adopted this? Manufacturer loses follow-on contract, soon the entire inventory "Sorry, this missile will only interface with genuine <contract loser> parts"
Companies exist to make a profit. I'm sure some extra returns are caused by 3rd party laser and ink cartridges. I've personally seen a 3rd party toner cart have some kind of internal failure and strip the drive gear in the printer.
Just like the EU is requiring USB-c to charge a phone, governments should consider requiring a standard ink and toner cartridge. It would reduce inventories, increase volumes, amortize R&D over a greater number of printers, and increase competition for the standard cartridge. The standards committee (like the USB committee) could set the standards, have branding/labeling for particular features, and talk with industry about desirable features for the next generation.
I just hope they avoid doing something insanely stupid like making dozens of USB-c cables, visually identical, but incompatible.
I've had a job that I felt bad about - they bought old, non-collectible debt for pennies on the dollar and called and sort of tricked people into making payments on old debts to "renew" the debt so that they could legally collect on it. They did it under the guise of "here's a chance to build your credit!" but I doubt the most people who signed up realized they legally didn't have to pay.
I got paid all of $50k to be a financial analyst there. I was young and straight of out school with a shit job economy and needed to pay rent and buy food. I also took comfort in working there for a year and a half doing virtually zero work.
At least one printer that demands original ink has an option hidden in the setup menu to turn that off, which isn’t very well documented. I suspect a mole in the company (or the detection itself is bugged and tech support needs an override).
What's amazing about all it is that HP being hostile to its own customers is nothing new:
- In 2005, they had one printer that refused to print if the cartridge was past a certain date, even if full. Several also underestimated the volume of ink in cartridges and told you it was empty when not.
- In 2007, HP refused to honor hardware warranty if you install any other OS on their laptop.
- in 2010, HP refused to provide drivers for the new windows Vista for its old ScanJet scanners (linux worked fine though).
- in 2020 they hardcoded the path to the EFI of their laptop to be windows only.
That's just the examples I could easily google, I remember that HP was having one scandal every 6 months in 2000, and we didn't have twitter back then.
So if a brand has been very publicly misbehaving for 2 decades, how does it still have customers?
Well, Facebook has still a billion users. Microsoft is now considered the father of unicorns and rainbows. Oracle is still making banks, one of my biggest client just migrated to it.
So the so-called cancel culture seems very superficial to me: lots of noise, but very actual consumer behavioral change. The brands can get away with anything and thrive. Maybe they'll get a little bit of heat for a few months on social media, so what?
But the bottom line is: if you are a big company, just do whatever makes you money. You don't need reputation.
I think you drastically underestimate Oracle and SAP in the enterprise world.
There’s not many companies that can provide all the mundane business management tools for a huge variety of business like an ATM manufacturer, an oil and gas company, a massive hotel chain, or a financial services company. The tech is not sexy by any means but it can run businesses from top to bottom.
For home network printing, one way to get around such nonsense it to set a wrong gateway ip to the printer. This way, your printer is still detectable on LAN network, while it can never connect to WAN (or internet) to update any firmware
Same can be achieved with parental control settings with most routers, all new devices can be cut off from the Internet by default, especially any IoT and call-home crap.
Myself I run Samsung (HP) CLP-365W for over 10 years with cracked firmware for endless refills. The hardware itself is very good, just had to rotate feeder pull rubber to fix paper problem, but that is all.
thanks for the advice. I did as you suggested. I have an older HP LaserJet M15w (2018). I live in Europe. I don't know if that matters but my printer hasn't been turned yet so hopefully with your trick I should be safe.
I've got an Epson Ecotank ET-7750 and really like it. (I'm kind of partial to wide format printers because schematics printed on them are easier on the eyes).
That said, a really interesting startup would be an open source inkjet printer. (All the necessary patents have expired ones that are current revolve mostly around cartridges or cleaning systems). I suspect it is a kind of niche market as my kids tell me that "nobody prints things, we have it on our phone!" which I kind of understand, but point out you don't need multiple monitors to do code development if you have listing printed out :-).
ET-4750 here. So far (after ~two years) it has been great. We had one issue, but they repaired it quickly. But it's insanely cheap ink-wise and it's nice that we can use it to print both papers and photos. My only worry is long-time reliability, because it is very... plasticy.
I’ve had an ecotank since 2015 when they were first introduced. We’ve printed tens of thousands of pages. And I’ve probably spent less than $70 in ink. It’s on its last legs, and at the time it was an expensive purchase at $500, but we’ve gotten our money’s worth and we’ll be buying another ecotank soon.
> you don't need multiple monitors to do code development if you have listing printed out
Whenever I run into an especially intractable bug, one of the first techniques I attempt to use to solve it is to print out all the relevant source code and grab a conference room where I can lay it all out on the table.
If you have a modern HP printer that currently works fine, and you want to delay buying a different brand, you might want to:
1. be using open source drivers (e.g., one of the CUPS PCL drivers, preferably on Linux or BSD) on all possible clients;
2. isolate the printer from direct network access (e.g., don't connect printer's Ethernet or WiFi, and instead run CUPS on a RasPi, which talks to the printer only via USB); and
3. consider limiting which devices can access your print server (i.e., via routing VLANs and/or authentication/authorization).
This isn't perfect:
* there are still ways that the printer can get firmware changes against your wishes;
* still ways that it can leak information to HP;
* still ways it's vulnerable to attacks by others; and
* might be awkward to explain when a visitor to your home/office needs to print something.
But I decided the headache of isolating the HP printer a bit (especially from HP), was less than the likely headache of trusting HP more.
(Which is kinda sad, since the company previously known as HP was great.)
Newer HP printers are also beginning to simply refuse to work without first being connected to wifi, even if there's a USB connection. I've seen it happen to two friends of mine. Outright refuses to not connect to a wifi network, uses its own DNS and all.
CUPS PCL drivers for these devices are nonexistent. You're at this point forced to use HP's windows software which *emulates a Parallel port* in at least one case.
With the right firewall rules it doesn’t have to be a headache. You can have the printer usable from local networks only and not get internet at all. What does it need it for anyway?
17 mentions of Ecotank on the 1st page of comments is a little bit sus. That said it's hard to beat older pre chip Brother laser printers for home use. Can often find a used one for around $50.
I am amazed no one talks about older HPs. I had a 4 with like 5million pages put through it, worked great. I am on a 4300DN now, in my house, got it used. Great printer. I would never buy any of their new stuff.
My gosh, HP what happened? You used to make great test equipment. Then great calculators. Then great printers. Now, what? What do you do? Oh, I forgot, you give the customer a printer and hold them hostage. I guess it is the new business model.
I had a HP LaserJet 4L back in the very early 90s, which I used with my Amiga. It was amazing. Still regret not taking it with me as I crossed the continents.
I bought it with my own money from my newspaper delivery job when in high school, along with a legitimate copy of Pagestream. The quality and value / advantage I got out of this for my school and later university work was remarkable, just about no-one else (at my age) had anything resembling the same setup.
Fond memories; sad to see this nosedive into DRM hell.
RIP HP Laserjet 4L. These were beasts and they worked for 20 years. Even then all they needed was maintenance but the newer ones were more economical, quieter, and faster to run.
My comment is currently I believe the top comment there, talking about how these things have a designed-to-fail Ink Waste Tank or Ink Waste Pad, and an internal Ink Counter that locks up the printer after a certain amount of printing. I'm not 100% absolutely certain, but I've ran into numerous semi-trustworthy reports & videos while searching for printers. (Amid many glowing reviews of people who've had theirs for 1 week to a couple of months.)
I seriously lusted after the EcoTank L1800 for a while, after @leashless posted about them being a super interesting "10x" product back in 2015 then 2018. But by then they were already only available in a couple secondary markets (ex: Brazil). For a while though they had been sold widely. It feels quite likely to me that Epson knew they built a deliberately designed-to-fail product, sold it for a bit, realized they were going to get in trouble, sold it only to a couple assorted countries, didn't change the product, & now is trying again. https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609
> designed-to-fail Ink Waste Tank or Ink Waste Pad
Then buy one with a replaceable pad like the Epson 5150. The replacement costs....drum roll
... $10.
My last color laser had a non serviceable fuser rated for 20,000 pages and that's what I got out of it.
I replaced it with a color ecotank and it's just a better product. Look up the price of my ink vs the price of comparible color toner and there is simply no comparison. Even color toner generics, which are not perfect, are more expensive.
It's fine to have scepticism over ink printers, or any printers. But it's not all rainbows and sunshine with other options either (other than a basic black laser I guess)
I just upgraded my computer and now my older Brother can’t scan anymore because Brother isn’t supporting it anymore. (And the app they point you to for scanning also doesn’t support it.) There are some 3rd party tools you can install apparently, but I don’t know if I want to be bothered with how much time that’s likely to take. I don’t want to support them anymore now that they’ve added a chip to their newer models, and I don’t want to have to buy another used one every few years because I keep hitting the end of the support timeframe for those models. It’s a bit frustrating. I’ll probably try the 3rd party software, but that comes with its own issues.
It would make sense for Ecotank users to reply to the post, given the cost savings it offers - whilst still retaining overall good print quality (according to the above review).
I'm presently on a Brother HL-L2375DW (BW laser) myself for my occasional use; love it.
Is brother doing the same thing? I have an old brother wireless printer that takes generic cartridges. I'm not looking forward to the day it dies if so.
Who remembers the Epson chip resetters? Those were glorified EEPROM writers and the chips on cartridges back then were simple EEPROMs. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054177 )
Now, I believe there's nontrivial crypto involved; but just like other attempts at locking them out, expect the aftermarket to already be hard at work cracking this. It's probably legal to do so, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....
Readit News
I was a HP customer for decades. I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend.
My mfc-l3750cdw Brother printer is a bit of a beast, but it does it's job amazingly well. It's 2x the size, weight, and price of my old HP but it's worth every penny for the peace of mind. It prints when I need it to print. It shuts down when it's not printing. It connects to wifi and doesn't try to serve me an ad while doing it. It uses ink logically. And I don't feel like I'm trying to resolve a problem that was effectively solved in 1995.
The hard fact is that printers and copiers as a market has been shrinking (outside of China) for years now [1]. It's gone from a necessity to a niche need, and even then people have kinkos / WeWork / their parents house as a backup.
HP isn't going back, just switch. Save yourself like I did.
[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/co...
They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.
In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.
I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.
Is that you can easily circumevent the way this particular brand tries to cheat you.
If so, that's unfortunate.
I queried him further & according to him its random because he's heard both positive & negative stories with the exact same model numbers (which makes me think it must be firmware updates).
Thankfully my (very new) laser didn't have this issue: print quality is perfect. Afraid to do any fw updates now though.
I was under the impression that newer Brother firmware versions had restrictions:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
I have an HL-L2360D, but my firmware is from 2015 (with no plans to upgrade), so have no idea if anything has changed recently.
I think that was the initial push RMS needed to start his open source movement, printer drivers. Firmware sould be next :)
There was a way to turn off the low toner warnings, I did it, and seem to be ok, but it makes me wonder.
EDIT: wow, it sells for $449 on amazon. I paid $115 in 2017.
If yes, what other product categories is this applicable?
And I’m sure printers are probably a minefield of patents.
A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).
There are a handful of companies that hold all the patents necessary to build a printer. If you try to build one from scratch "taking inspiration" from consumer ones you will be sued into oblivion
The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.
The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.
The scum even introduced drm-checking printers under same model name and number so the previous good reviews stay
I'm sure it's got enough stepper motors.
Not sure about the 'legally' part though.
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Hp is the worst company for any hardware needs, all their laptops/dektops sucked so much, back in the day in my electronics shop they where the ones with the worst return/faults rate, by a big margin.
I bought a brother color laser (HL-L3290CDW). She was skeptical as it was much more expensive than the HP inkjet we had. A few weeks later, she called me randomly to thank me for getting it telling me how fantastic it was and how much easier it had made her life. First time she’s done that for any tech stuff I’ve gotten her.
I’ll never but another HP product.
I now recommend friends and family to avoid HP like the plague, including laptops (which I've also had bad experiences with). Such a shame, their stuff used to be great.
I also love my Brother laser printer, and don't hate my p-touch.
No bullets to bite. My brother laser is over 12 years old and works just like it did when I bought it. I like it so much I bought another for another part of the house. Did I mention it also groks postscript for those that might want to print from a BSD machine right OOTB?
It just works.
I'm buying a Brother laser today. I've hated this HP since I bought it, but it was a necessary evil for raising elementary school-aged children.
about a year ago, the drum gave out. it cost me $40 to replace
over those 7 years, i printed about 2000 pages: somewhat less than 1 page a day
take from what that what you will
User-hostile features are created by people.
Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).
I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")
Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")
Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.
So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design
They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost.
They believe businesses want OEM.
They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.
They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product.
By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their data analysis also says on some level.
Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
> Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.
Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy which means sometimes they have to come up with insane and unconvincing excuses to justify their evils. They are bound to feel uncomfortable when someone tells them the truth by advocating for the customer. They can still take the money by screwing over other people, but it means they can't do it while pretending that it doesn't make them assholes.
this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!
We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.
The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.
Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.
PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.
Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?
At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.
And what is astounding is that we, as a society, have accepted this backwards rationale.
The only reason we should allow companies to exist is to serve the societal interests, and making the money should be the side effect.
The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.
Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.
Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."
In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."
This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.
I worked for a large Telco and wrote and maintained the software and system(s) that calculated internet usage, and charged overages monthly. (The home internet plans sold by this telco that service a massive landmass all had hard usage caps. There is no competition).
I saw many, many monthly internet overage bills that were $5k+. Hundreds a month that were $1k+. That system alone made many millions in profit per year.
Why did I do it? It was my job, I needed to pay rent and buy food.
Longer term, I decided to "stay on the inside" because I genuinely thought I could improve things. Over the years I had meetings with basically all the VPs and even the CEO, and sent many a passionate email on behalf of customers that many told me were "Career Limiting Moves".
I'm not there anymore, and it's many years later, but that Telco does now offer unlimited internet plans (introduced very recently). I was the first at the company to run the numbers on what it would look like and start to push for it at all levels, so I like to think I did actually make things better.
FWIW, there was one guy in my department who refused to work on/with that usage system, and made it clear that from a moral standpoint he would quit if they forced him to.
The inital strategy by all companies was to point out that original ink is better in some way, then most of them tried some sorts of firmware based restrictions. HP actually tried a pretty interesting approach with their ink subscription model. They have a decent price/page with that and you don't ever have to worry about running out of ink because you automatically get a replacement cartridge if you subscribe for x$/month. The downside is that the number of pages that you are "allowed" to print each month is limited which seems pretty ridiculous at first glance for a tech person. However, if you think about "normal users" I think they actually found a good way to force them back to their ink by selling "peace of mind".
So basically, while I completely disagree with the approach because I want to use a device I buy any way I please I think HP is actually making the right business call here. The average customer cares about having an ok price/page and having a printer that always prints when they need it. I think HP is targeting that with their subscription model and also making cash flows a bit more reliable.
By and large I expect most workers know and dislike that, but ultimately it's a small compromise for them personally - in most cases they may not even use the product they work on. The best they can do usually is object to it, but if people want it done then it'll be done; after all, that's what you're getting paid for.
I’m not really in a a financial position to just say fuck it and leave at a moments notice, and it feels a bit different when you’re making Adobe for example pay extra money.
I think we can all imagine the actual reason people in charge do it though: money
The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be (the PM since moved off to another team to continue innovating). This made me angry and sad, but most of my peers didn't care at all, and some even expressed interest to "work on the high impact feature" to get a promo for themselves as well :(
Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.
I'd say that's 99% of the tech workers' mentality. Especially if they need to stay employed to stay in the country, better to just lick the boot than give any impressions of opposition.
These questions should be posed to executives at shareholder meetings.
not cogs in the machine. When was an evil feature ever stopped by rank and file workers?
You'd be surprised how easy is to change your mind when it's your own work or company, yet still be outraged at others when they do it. It's very common.
> what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.
The people who make the decision to implement these kinds of features are bad people. Full stop. They want to punish people, and believe a technological solution provides a fool-proof way to punish the people around them. It's about control, and spreading hurt around. It's about being able to exert control on others, without them having the ability to push back. It is evil, and I hate it.
I have implemented user-hostile features in the past because it was my job at the time, and I would be fired if I didn't.
When I've had to create this sort of anti-feature, I do a shitty job on purpose. It barely works. There are workarounds that defeat the punitive nature of the horrible thing I've had to create. It'll work on paper, but be shit in production. In every case I've had to do this, the people who ask for the anti-features are not capable of testing that they work right. They gleefully take their new pain toy and go off to hurt people with it. I never hear from them again. Then I start updating my resume and begin to look for a new job.
Could you imagine if the defense industry adopted this? Manufacturer loses follow-on contract, soon the entire inventory "Sorry, this missile will only interface with genuine <contract loser> parts"
Companies exist to make a profit. I'm sure some extra returns are caused by 3rd party laser and ink cartridges. I've personally seen a 3rd party toner cart have some kind of internal failure and strip the drive gear in the printer.
Just like the EU is requiring USB-c to charge a phone, governments should consider requiring a standard ink and toner cartridge. It would reduce inventories, increase volumes, amortize R&D over a greater number of printers, and increase competition for the standard cartridge. The standards committee (like the USB committee) could set the standards, have branding/labeling for particular features, and talk with industry about desirable features for the next generation.
I just hope they avoid doing something insanely stupid like making dozens of USB-c cables, visually identical, but incompatible.
I got paid all of $50k to be a financial analyst there. I was young and straight of out school with a shit job economy and needed to pay rent and buy food. I also took comfort in working there for a year and a half doing virtually zero work.
- In 2005, they had one printer that refused to print if the cartridge was past a certain date, even if full. Several also underestimated the volume of ink in cartridges and told you it was empty when not.
- In 2007, HP refused to honor hardware warranty if you install any other OS on their laptop.
- in 2010, HP refused to provide drivers for the new windows Vista for its old ScanJet scanners (linux worked fine though).
- in 2020 they hardcoded the path to the EFI of their laptop to be windows only.
That's just the examples I could easily google, I remember that HP was having one scandal every 6 months in 2000, and we didn't have twitter back then.
So if a brand has been very publicly misbehaving for 2 decades, how does it still have customers?
Well, Facebook has still a billion users. Microsoft is now considered the father of unicorns and rainbows. Oracle is still making banks, one of my biggest client just migrated to it.
So the so-called cancel culture seems very superficial to me: lots of noise, but very actual consumer behavioral change. The brands can get away with anything and thrive. Maybe they'll get a little bit of heat for a few months on social media, so what?
But the bottom line is: if you are a big company, just do whatever makes you money. You don't need reputation.
What are they smoking
There’s not many companies that can provide all the mundane business management tools for a huge variety of business like an ATM manufacturer, an oil and gas company, a massive hotel chain, or a financial services company. The tech is not sexy by any means but it can run businesses from top to bottom.
So you can't install Linux at all on HPs post-2020?
cp /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi 1>/dev/null 2>&1
:D
Myself I run Samsung (HP) CLP-365W for over 10 years with cracked firmware for endless refills. The hardware itself is very good, just had to rotate feeder pull rubber to fix paper problem, but that is all.
That said, a really interesting startup would be an open source inkjet printer. (All the necessary patents have expired ones that are current revolve mostly around cartridges or cleaning systems). I suspect it is a kind of niche market as my kids tell me that "nobody prints things, we have it on our phone!" which I kind of understand, but point out you don't need multiple monitors to do code development if you have listing printed out :-).
Whenever I run into an especially intractable bug, one of the first techniques I attempt to use to solve it is to print out all the relevant source code and grab a conference room where I can lay it all out on the table.
1. be using open source drivers (e.g., one of the CUPS PCL drivers, preferably on Linux or BSD) on all possible clients;
2. isolate the printer from direct network access (e.g., don't connect printer's Ethernet or WiFi, and instead run CUPS on a RasPi, which talks to the printer only via USB); and
3. consider limiting which devices can access your print server (i.e., via routing VLANs and/or authentication/authorization).
This isn't perfect:
* there are still ways that the printer can get firmware changes against your wishes;
* still ways that it can leak information to HP;
* still ways it's vulnerable to attacks by others; and
* might be awkward to explain when a visitor to your home/office needs to print something.
But I decided the headache of isolating the HP printer a bit (especially from HP), was less than the likely headache of trusting HP more.
(Which is kinda sad, since the company previously known as HP was great.)
CUPS PCL drivers for these devices are nonexistent. You're at this point forced to use HP's windows software which *emulates a Parallel port* in at least one case.
My gosh, HP what happened? You used to make great test equipment. Then great calculators. Then great printers. Now, what? What do you do? Oh, I forgot, you give the customer a printer and hold them hostage. I guess it is the new business model.
I bought it with my own money from my newspaper delivery job when in high school, along with a legitimate copy of Pagestream. The quality and value / advantage I got out of this for my school and later university work was remarkable, just about no-one else (at my age) had anything resembling the same setup.
Fond memories; sad to see this nosedive into DRM hell.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...
They make decent laptops, but with incredibly sharp, non-rounded edges, which have actually cut* some user's palms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/iioylp/just_...
edit:
* Yes I exaggerate here, but it is annoyingly sharp
My comment is currently I believe the top comment there, talking about how these things have a designed-to-fail Ink Waste Tank or Ink Waste Pad, and an internal Ink Counter that locks up the printer after a certain amount of printing. I'm not 100% absolutely certain, but I've ran into numerous semi-trustworthy reports & videos while searching for printers. (Amid many glowing reviews of people who've had theirs for 1 week to a couple of months.)
I seriously lusted after the EcoTank L1800 for a while, after @leashless posted about them being a super interesting "10x" product back in 2015 then 2018. But by then they were already only available in a couple secondary markets (ex: Brazil). For a while though they had been sold widely. It feels quite likely to me that Epson knew they built a deliberately designed-to-fail product, sold it for a bit, realized they were going to get in trouble, sold it only to a couple assorted countries, didn't change the product, & now is trying again. https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609
(The cheap Moonman M2 fountain pens leashless linked were/are indeed pretty sweet though.)
Then buy one with a replaceable pad like the Epson 5150. The replacement costs....drum roll ... $10.
My last color laser had a non serviceable fuser rated for 20,000 pages and that's what I got out of it.
I replaced it with a color ecotank and it's just a better product. Look up the price of my ink vs the price of comparible color toner and there is simply no comparison. Even color toner generics, which are not perfect, are more expensive.
It's fine to have scepticism over ink printers, or any printers. But it's not all rainbows and sunshine with other options either (other than a basic black laser I guess)
It would make sense for Ecotank users to reply to the post, given the cost savings it offers - whilst still retaining overall good print quality (according to the above review).
I'm presently on a Brother HL-L2375DW (BW laser) myself for my occasional use; love it.
Who remembers the Epson chip resetters? Those were glorified EEPROM writers and the chips on cartridges back then were simple EEPROMs. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054177 )
Now, I believe there's nontrivial crypto involved; but just like other attempts at locking them out, expect the aftermarket to already be hard at work cracking this. It's probably legal to do so, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....