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I’ve singlehandedly caused hp to lose thousands of dollars. People trust my advice and I’ve lost all trust in hp so I tell people not to waste their money on it.
When I got hired to take charge of the IT department, the first thing I did was phase out ALL HP products and then implemented an “Unacceptable and Barred Brands for purchasing” policy with HP right at top.
Thank you for your service
Unfathomably Based
Anyone have recommendations for MICR compatible printers that AREN’T HP? It’s the last HP product we have in my office.
Don’t buy a smart printer. Buy a dumb printer, then plug it into a raspberry pi.
I haven’t bought a printer recently. Wtf is a smart printer?
Most newer models that automatically make themselves available to all the devices connected to the network they are connected to, and manage the printer queue internally. Usually comes with a ton of shitty “features” e.g preventing you from printing black & white when you’re out of yellow ink.
Somehow they found a way to make me miss having to boot the “printer PC” and wrangling windows’ god awful printer queue system.
It’s a printer that, when you tell it to print, tries its best to find a reason to refuse to do so.
What’s a smart printer?
A printer that supports network print, typically through an Internet service.
Okay I made my previous comment before seeing this one. Please disregard it.
I’d like to second the opinion of the other replies here. I love the fact that my printer is networked. I could never go back to having a printer that needs to be connected to the computer I’m printing from.
But it’s also just a basic device attached to my local network. I could maybe get behind a printer with optional cloud connectivity, but absolutely do not buy a printer that requires a cloud connection to work.
Why did you need the internet for network printing? You’ve been able to print over network for decades without needing the internet. I stopped using printers 15 years ago both at home and at work so had no idea this had happened. In a rare situation where I do need to print I use the work MFP or go to the library and pay 20c a page. Happens once every 2 or 3 years.
The ones you plug to your intranet with an Ethernet cable, and which talk the common lpr protocol. Those are really good. E.g. the Brother laser printers.
Who sells dumb printers though? I would buy that in a heartbeat.
Brother sells some
Brother is the only printer company I like. I’ve had a workhorse for ages and it is still going strong.
I’ve been using them for 20ish years and never had any more trouble than routine maintenance.
Estate sales, yard sales, and tech scrappers/recyclers tend to have em as well.
I have had one printer bricked and my dad had 2 bricked by hooking up to the internet. I didn’t realize that was what was happening until it was too late.
I’m pretty sure you can still get brother, Canon, and Epson ones
Canon bricks their printers, only replaces full cartridges and is super touchy about hooking up to the internet.
Canon is 100% as evil as HP
I love their cameras, but yeah, their printers are evil.
I’m going to be in the market for a camera soon, and I’ll never touch a Canon because of their printers. If they want good brand recognition they have to earn it and they have not for me
The only Canon printer I ever owned was a piece of garbage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t just select my home wifi from a list like literally any other network-enabled device. I instead had to select an option buried several layers deep in the menus to have it try to automatically connect to an open network. Only after waiting 5 minutes for this to fail would it show a list of available networks.
Of course, it also forgot the network and password settings every time it lost power, so I had to go through the whole process again after time I unplugged the thing to clean behind the shelf.
I’ve never had much luck with the consumer level canon printers, absolute pieces of shit. I used to sell printers and would steer people towards brother or Epson. However last I saw, canon did still have printers that could be used entirely offline.
we need an easily flashed prerolled Printer OS that makes this easy to make work
Buy brother laser. It’s more expensive, but it’s worth it long term. They last a real long time and the cartridges last bananas and they don’t care about “official” ink
Straight up when I bought my black and white brother laser printer I got an extra cartridge with it because I didn’t expect it to last very long
By the time I finally had to swap it out I couldn’t find the extra cartridge I bought with it because it had been so long
Needless to say I’m 3 years and 500+ pages into the second cartridge and happy to have this clunky little printer
Unfortunately someone snuck someone from HP into Brother’s executive chain. They’re starting the fuckery now too.
Sadly this is true and even on updated software for old printers. I’m rolling back though. The old versions worked fine.
Nooooooooooo!
I guess the only right thing to do is to buy used Brother laser printers until they all break… Such warhorses.
NGL everytime I move I pack my Brother Laser like fine artwork
Laser printers are especially handy if you rarely ever need to print anything, because they don’t dry up and get clogged.
Yeah I tend to either not print anything for years, or print huge amounts in a short span of time. Lasers are brilliant for this use case, because they also print really really quickly when they are printing, in addition to not drying up.
My Dell mono laser is also going strong. Haven’t had a single issue in over 10 years. Ink printers have been and still are a scam
Laser printers don’t use ink.
It’s not even more expensive. You can get a full duplex wifi printer for under $200. I want one, but my 20 year old Brother printer is still going strong.
This is what i own. Amazing printer
I thought the latest update to the new laser colors added cartridge DRM?
So far, on my 5 year old brother it annoys me to but toner from them but had a “do not show this message again” choice to click. Happened with two messages and no more so far. They also added a thing in status monitor when it tells you your toner levels wether it’s official or not and that you should not official. So far it hasn’t stopped me from using it, but like every corporation I fully expect them to go full stupid soon.
And this is why I use laser printers
HP: “LOL, you think we can’t enshittify laser printing???”
HP can do whatever they want, never going back to them. Currently use Brother, and have been happy with their lasers for - I think - 15 years now.
Yeah, Brother are the only sane choice at this point.
What are my fellow lemmy users’ thoughts on Sharp MFPs? Those are what we have at my org. They are smart but seem to work well with our print service
I have literally filed a BBB complaint in the past for HP over their stupid ink subscription being fucky
From what I’ve heard the BBB is as much a BS organization as HP, companies can pay to have the complaints removed.
I’ve had good results using them, but the company you’re complaining against has to care about the rating they’re. I’ve even gotten Scamazon to replace valid reviews they removed. If the business isn’t a member and doesn’t care there’s nothing they can do but send a letter to be ignored. Not endorsing them, but just sharing my experience so far.
It’s basically a business owner guild, right?
It’s Boomer Yelp.
I honestly don’t know enough to say, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard from others many times over the last decade or so.
They are useless, as anyone who’s ever tried to get redress through them knows. Don’t trust their ratings.
I love my current Canon Printer as a budget option but I would really like to get a nice Ink Tank printer. I would never even accept an HP printer under any circumstance, I’m disturbed by the idea of even having one on my network.
Laughs in Brother’s Ink Tank system
there’s not a single thing radical about wanting these fuckers out of our homes and out of our lives. Kill em all as far as I’m concerned.
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I made the mistake of buying an HP printer. Fortunately I only spent $70 on it.
Then the ink cartridge ran out as I used all the ink up. So instead of buying more ink I purchased a new printer. This time it was a color inkjet from Brother that will last me years on the first ink cartridge.
Funny how it works. Fuck you HP.
And this is why things like pirating are not only acceptable but necessary. When companies lock services behind paywalls for products we should legally own, we are left with no recourse but to obtain the services we are owed illegally.
Agreed. Piracy, aka the sharing of information freely (see also: libraries), is a fundamentally ethically correct course of action. Always.
Withholding knowledge for personal profit on the other hand is obviously not.
HP execs seething every time I use my old ass HP printer that takes refills and doesn’t complain. The ink never dries out either. This thing got no internet access, they can’t disable anything without literally breaking down first my door and then the printer itself. I hope they use sleep over this.
Shoutout to the real OGs doing those refills, they fill them more than new ones and sell them for half the price.Why nobody has made an open source ink jet printer design like reprap, I will never understand. The printer industry seems primed for disruption with all their bullshit and their half century old technology.
Hmmm we don’t need to build a new printer, just new firmware. More like ddwrt or tomato
Right? Why buy a paper printer for less than $100 when you can spend $2000 on a 3D printer + materials and time spent learning and fucking up! Wish I thought of that!
Ya, the abacus industry is also ripe for disruption. Legacy industries would love your pro insight.
The accuracy required for the ink droplets just isn’t there for prosumers.
I can (and have!) built multiple extruders for a variety of 3D printers. Some of my own design.
Sadly, the tolerances for an inkjet are at least an order of magnitude greater.
I have zero doubt that a few clever hardware hackers could design an open source inkjet printer. But A: They’d get sued back to the mesolithic by every printer company with a patent. And B: the process would likely involve micro machining your own hardware.
I’ve just said, “fuck it” to the entire industry. I’m in my early 40s and I’m reasonably sure that my Brother laser will outlive me. And possibly the heat death of the universe.
Patents expire after, what, 20 years? I’d be happy with an open source printer based on 20 year old technology.
I’d take a tractor fed dot-matrix printer over my current one just so I could play with the paper thingies on the edges.
You’ll pay an arm and a leg for tractor feed paper though.
My guess. They couldn’t get the printer to work. My 3D printer has a lower problem count than my ink jet regular printed at this point.
Probably because they wouldn’t be as profitable.
HP could sell like a tenth the printers and still make more money
Time to invent dd-lpt
Because when someone wants a printer, they want a tool, not a hobby.
…and now they get chains.
Or they buy a product that actually works and isn’t shit?
Until a big company realizes the most profitable thing to do is take that option off the table
i’m not sure if the fact that the image won’t load is on purpose, but the effect is hilarious nonetheless
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Or just buy a cheap laser printer, probably a brother, that doesn’t have any of that bullshit.
Also AFAIK this is some HP program where you sign up for it as a service and they send you ink cartridges. It’s as dystopian as you’d expect:
Sign up & pick a plan. Choose a plan based on how often you print, not how much ink you use. Plans start as low as $0.99/month. Every page costs the same, so you can print high resolution photos for the same price as black and color documents.
Your printer detects when you’re low on ink or toner and automatically ships more when you need it.
Change or cancel your plan anytime with unused pages rolling over each month and extra pages cost just $1.
Are they not large format commercial printers that cost several thousand dollars (or vinyl cutters)?
What’s wrong with grabbing $100, buying a brother laser printer, and using the change to buy a hammer to obliterate it in case it starts getting any ideas?
Do you realize a plotter is basically a large-format printer? And they don’t usually go below $1000?
Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, the first story there called “Authorized Bread” is VERY relevant to this topic. Thats the future we might be heading into. Ugh.
bUt ThE FrEe MaRkEt WiLl TaKe CaRe Of It!
Love Cory, thanks for sharing!
