I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular. They're awful in every regard. They have zero respect for their users, even after they've over paid for inferior products. They've shown time and time again that they will do everythin within their power to rip you off and screw you over.
> I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular.
You need a printer, so you go to the store.
The inkjet printer industry offers you an all-in-one printer/ scanner/ copier with 1200dpi printing for $65. It includes "3 months free instant ink".
The laser printer industry offers you a printer with 600 dpi colour printing, no scanner/copier function, and it costs $265.
You ask the nice young man in the store which is better. He tells you the inkjet gives the best quality for printing photos, and the laser printer is best for business use and people printing 500 pages per week or more.
So you buy the inkjet. Repeat 3 years later after it stops working.
The funny thing is that the laser printer is much better for people who print once a week or less, because toner doesn't dry up and clog the printer. But for the price/quality it's hard to justify buying a new one.
I know it’s the naive buying inkjets, but if you don’t have a laser printer you’re doing it wrong. It’s possible to find them between 100-300 on sale with all the features (and color on the higher end of that).
The only time I’ve bought a new one is because I didn’t buy a feature I wanted (scanning, duplex, color). Now I have all the things and toner that lasts years.
I'm really lucky because I have a good and cheap print shop close by. So I never felt the need to buy a printer. The only inconvenience is having to physically go there, but the upsides are numerous. No worrying about toner or paper. Having the shop do all the decisions for me such as what printer to use if I want color, or double-sided, or unusually large paper size. They even have a paper-cutting guillotine for me to use for free. It really outweighs the mild inconvenience of a short walk, especially if I'm already going out anyway.
I threw out my HP when it stopped recognizing it had a black cartridge installed. The complaints about using non-HP ink were annoying but at least it worked until it didn't. Replaced it with a Brother laser, never an issue. The loss of color is something I can overlook since I have an Epson photo printer (also never an issue) should I absolutely need to print in color. HP's corporate policy seems to require everything they make to be as annoying as possible.
Just stopping in to give a shout-out to Brother. The black and white laser printer I bought a few years ago (HL-2390DW) is the first reliable printer I have owned in my life.
I had a Brother Multi-Function color scanner/printer that lasted almost 15 years. In the end, the scanner started to malfunction, doing blurry scans, but the printer portion still worked great. Toward the end, it started complaining about low black toner, and I looked up when I last bought black toner: it had been 7 years earlier.
I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.
Yup. I've had a Brother for a long while now, and it replaced a previous Brother only because I reconfigured my office and needed one that would work with wifi.
I print maybe once or twice a year. In the past, my workflow was: "need to print, realize cartridge has dried out because it's been so long, go buy a ridiculously-priced new cartridge, finally print the 1 page I needed to".
For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.
It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.
I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.
If you're printing once or twice a year, is it worth owning a printer? I just go to the library or print shop when I (very rarely) need to print something.
Matter of preference of course, but I'd rather the occasional errand over the subscription/troubleshooting/physical storage.
What is this subscription deal ? It looks great. I bought HP Printer because it was the cheapest I could "throw away", because I need to print one page every X years because one stupid legacy organization accepts only paper, but in my case the ink is still drying between two pages.
Have you used an HP printer lately? I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard. The printers I've used work just fine. The output is clean and the paper handling is good.
My current printer at home is a Canon and it's good as well.
I bought a small HP laser printer a couple of years ago, not realizing that the “e” in the model number meant it’d require an HP account and an always on internet connection.
I did the initial setup and declined to create an account, after which it successfully printed 20 pages before refusing to print anything other than a sheet of paper telling me I needed to create an HP account and finish setting it up with the app.
There was absolutely no way it would print without an HP account, and, even if I’d made one, it’d actually refuse to print if it ever didn’t have an internet connection (even over USB). Naturally it’d taken me three weeks or so to print the twenty pages and it was outside the return window, but it made me so upset that I just put it away and bought a new printer from a manufacturer that’s not overtly hostile.
HP lost me as a customer for life with that thing, and actually made me a vocal critic.
The print quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for a laser printer, either.
Agreed, I have a nearly decade old HP now and it's been working fine. It's a multi-function, with duplex printing, color, scanning and Postscript. I'm a Postscript fan because it has tended to work much better with Linux than the brand-specific PCLs. We vary in printing, I average probably a couple pages per month, over the years, with kids, we've varied between no printing and lots of printing. I think we're on our third set of cartridges. I would have bought the HP carts, but they were ridiculously priced, I think $450 for a full set of replacements. So I went with an aftermarket for $100 and they've worked fine.
If had two Canon lasers and like their output and reliability, but don’t care for their drivers. AirPrint is unreliable unless the printer is awake. I gave up getting CUPS set up in FreeBSD (less necessary with AirPrint, but locked down school Chromebooks need the most generic printer interface possible).
The printers are fine but this post reminded me to cancel my ink subscription as I haven't printed anything in 6 months.
After my subscription date ends in March, they are charging me one final fee of $6.99 for the privilege of cancelling -- first time I have ever seen something like that.
> I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard.
I have too. And the printer insisting that I create an account in some "Smart" website and log into it even before I can print anything with it is beyond annoying.
I got around the problem by finding some old drivers that I had a backup of. But I suspect most people don't give old drivers around and are forced to go through this "Smart" sign up nonsense!
I helped an elderly relative install a brand new all-in-one HP printer over christmas. It was a ridiculous shit show of an experience. The printing quality is OK, but that's the only positive thing I'll say about it. It ships with a bunch of crapware, which nags her about ink subscriptions. It's all quite unpleasant.
When I moved to IT management I had a guy I didn't want to lose but whose attitude I needed to turn around. Lots of malicious compliance type stuff. When I came on board I expended a ton of goodwill capital on removing all desktop printers, just MFCs.
He threw a fit when I lost a political battle and a crappy policy got implemented. My response was to let him know I was approving Katie the HR lady's latest request for a desktop printer and I needed him spec out the lowest price HP inkjet for me. Dude realized if I wasn't on his team things would have been much worse. Slowly I brought him around thanks to HP printers :)
I asked a friend recently. They were completely sold on the subscription service thinking it was the best thing ever. I was questioning that, but I have to admit the printer that (I assume) was included with the subscription was better than I would have bought with endless consumables. It did seem to make sense for them who runs a business in their home-office. It's an in-between volume between personal ink-jet and business laser printing.
Personally, I bought the cheapest Brother laser on sale from Staples and it does all I need.
My HP 1320m Laser Printer is still printing after 20 years. No streaks or blotches. It has issues when drawing paper from the lower tray, but still printing and duplexing fine. No proper drivers for newer OSX versions, but the generic driver is working fine. I usually use 600dpi, but it's fine with 1200dpi (and so am I).
The same could be said about a lot of companies. I think most people, the vast majority, just don't realize or understand until they purchase a product and have experience with it. Maybe there needs to be more consumer education about operations, products, and corproate behavior towards consumers.
Most people don't pay attention, while marketing and availability works.
For what its worth, I bought an HP printer about 8 years ago and was pretty happy with it. It was reliable, fairly simple, the screen UI was genuinely well-designed, and the ink prices were fine with how rarely I printed.
And then I moved from the US to the EU and discovered that printer cartridges are regionally locked. After much research and many calls I learned HP can unlock the printer, but you need you buy completely new cartridges first. I gave away the printer and bought a Brother.
So, yeah, it was decent product clearly ruined by stupid business decisions.
The LaserJet was so good that its reputation is keeping the brand alive 30 years later, despite the company's best efforts to flush it down the toilet.
Who even comes up with these bizarre ideas? I cannot believe ideas like this are not only proposed in a professional setting but also approved and implemented! Are we living in a bizarro-world?
Every time I talk to an MBA grad I hear stuff like this spoken about enthusiastically. I suspect that they moved the business ethics bit to the elective part of the course.
The people who thought this up are clearly not aiming to provide the best-possible customer service. Likely, their goal is cost-saving, with delivery of a minimum-acceptable level of customer service.
Let's be honest, very little of HP's activity seems focussed on providing the best-possible anything.
They are, like the vast majority of corporate America, only providing for themselves, and not giving one shit about anyone else, especially their marks, I mean, customers.
It worked great until the information about the policy got leaked AND made headlines around the world. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is going on which doesn't make it to the HN front page and therefore goes on for years, marginall increasing profits while actively harming customers.
It’s not unusual to add a few minutes wait time for customers that didn’t input their data into the system, or for lower priority customers (ones without a support contract for example).
What HP did is just incompetent management. Anyone that works in CC would advice against his strongly. Handle time will go up as every call will start with a complaint about the long wait time, agents will disengage and have higher absenteeism, supervisors will be stressed & angry about it. Brand damage is priceless though. Bravo.
That's probably the key here. The fifteen minute minimum wasn't disclosed to customers, they were made to think there were a bunch of other customers ahead of them in the call queue. Once word got out that the waits were artificially inflated, that's when customers went from annoyed to angry.
Some companies (Ryanair) have a marketing strategy of coming up with stupid ideas once in a while just to keep people talking about them. However it appears they - unlike HP - know they are in a bizarro-world.
But seriously, how isolated and idiotic does an entire room of people need to be in order to do something like this? Did they not think the internet would go apeshit over such a policy? Was the cost-savings of people giving up on the support line worth this bad publicity? Anyone with an even slightly realistic view of being a customer would guffaw at such a suggestion. This is nothing but outright contempt for their customers.
Also, the whole notion of pushing folks to "social channels" means they want to sell things, but rely on the community to support them -- which is a terrible idea for a consumer good.
It BARELY works for very nerdy, enthusiast-based thing. It barely works for open source packages, honestly. But "community based" support for things intended for regular people are uniformly horrible. As exhibits 1 through 1,000,000, I offer any links at all to Microsoft's tech forums.
At a certain size, companies have to start publishing certain things to stay in compliance. I would welcome in the UK/EU for this to include average call wait time for support so I could let it influence my buying decision. Companies can only play games with this because there’s so little transparency and competition in the market can’t work its magic.
Readit News
You need a printer, so you go to the store.
The inkjet printer industry offers you an all-in-one printer/ scanner/ copier with 1200dpi printing for $65. It includes "3 months free instant ink".
The laser printer industry offers you a printer with 600 dpi colour printing, no scanner/copier function, and it costs $265.
You ask the nice young man in the store which is better. He tells you the inkjet gives the best quality for printing photos, and the laser printer is best for business use and people printing 500 pages per week or more.
So you buy the inkjet. Repeat 3 years later after it stops working.
The only time I’ve bought a new one is because I didn’t buy a feature I wanted (scanning, duplex, color). Now I have all the things and toner that lasts years.
I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.
For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.
It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.
I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.
Matter of preference of course, but I'd rather the occasional errand over the subscription/troubleshooting/physical storage.
My current printer at home is a Canon and it's good as well.
I did the initial setup and declined to create an account, after which it successfully printed 20 pages before refusing to print anything other than a sheet of paper telling me I needed to create an HP account and finish setting it up with the app.
There was absolutely no way it would print without an HP account, and, even if I’d made one, it’d actually refuse to print if it ever didn’t have an internet connection (even over USB). Naturally it’d taken me three weeks or so to print the twenty pages and it was outside the return window, but it made me so upset that I just put it away and bought a new printer from a manufacturer that’s not overtly hostile.
HP lost me as a customer for life with that thing, and actually made me a vocal critic.
The print quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for a laser printer, either.
After my subscription date ends in March, they are charging me one final fee of $6.99 for the privilege of cancelling -- first time I have ever seen something like that.
I have too. And the printer insisting that I create an account in some "Smart" website and log into it even before I can print anything with it is beyond annoying.
I got around the problem by finding some old drivers that I had a backup of. But I suspect most people don't give old drivers around and are forced to go through this "Smart" sign up nonsense!
He threw a fit when I lost a political battle and a crappy policy got implemented. My response was to let him know I was approving Katie the HR lady's latest request for a desktop printer and I needed him spec out the lowest price HP inkjet for me. Dude realized if I wasn't on his team things would have been much worse. Slowly I brought him around thanks to HP printers :)
Personally, I bought the cheapest Brother laser on sale from Staples and it does all I need.
The first printer I owned was a HP DeskJet 500, but those times are long gone.
For what its worth, I bought an HP printer about 8 years ago and was pretty happy with it. It was reliable, fairly simple, the screen UI was genuinely well-designed, and the ink prices were fine with how rarely I printed.
And then I moved from the US to the EU and discovered that printer cartridges are regionally locked. After much research and many calls I learned HP can unlock the printer, but you need you buy completely new cartridges first. I gave away the printer and bought a Brother.
So, yeah, it was decent product clearly ruined by stupid business decisions.
The people who thought this up are clearly not aiming to provide the best-possible customer service. Likely, their goal is cost-saving, with delivery of a minimum-acceptable level of customer service.
Let's be honest, very little of HP's activity seems focussed on providing the best-possible anything.
Shareholder "value", i.e. profit
They are, like the vast majority of corporate America, only providing for themselves, and not giving one shit about anyone else, especially their marks, I mean, customers.
Of course, probably what would happen is the savings would be cut from the customer support budget.
What HP did is just incompetent management. Anyone that works in CC would advice against his strongly. Handle time will go up as every call will start with a complaint about the long wait time, agents will disengage and have higher absenteeism, supervisors will be stressed & angry about it. Brand damage is priceless though. Bravo.
This policy was meant to make people give up, it's literally anti-support.
_Glances around everywhere, winces_
But seriously, how isolated and idiotic does an entire room of people need to be in order to do something like this? Did they not think the internet would go apeshit over such a policy? Was the cost-savings of people giving up on the support line worth this bad publicity? Anyone with an even slightly realistic view of being a customer would guffaw at such a suggestion. This is nothing but outright contempt for their customers.
Please help your family, friends and coworkers avoid getting burnt by the smoldering ashes of this once iconic brand.
It BARELY works for very nerdy, enthusiast-based thing. It barely works for open source packages, honestly. But "community based" support for things intended for regular people are uniformly horrible. As exhibits 1 through 1,000,000, I offer any links at all to Microsoft's tech forums.
I love The Register.
:-)