Sort of. You're renting the ink, not the printer. If you went to Staples or Amazon and got regular ink for the printer, it would immediately start working again.
If you buy ink from the Instant Ink program, the cartridges are sent to you for far less money than a regular cartridge. They sell page based plans where they make the money back and then new ink just shows up in the mail as you go. HP DRM's these cartridges to prevent people from skipping out on the subscription and printing normally for wayyyyyyy less up front cost.
HP printers suck. And ink sucks too. So there's a lot of understandable suckiness. But most of the criticisms about HP's ink DRM are just people mixing up Instant Ink and regular ink cartridges and getting mad they can't read instructions.
I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inklessmonochrome printer.
With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I'm just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.
Back when I used to work as a cashier I would blow my employees mind by heating up random things with my lighter and pressing them onto the paper when nobody was looking. Had everyone thinking the printer was hacked
No he clearly says no ink and no toner. Toner is melted onto the paper after a laser (now mostly LEDs) heat up a drum. He's talking about burning the paper with a laser.... Which would be interesting but really hard to do where a top layer is burned black without toasting the rest of the layers.
I have an HP printer now, Epson before that. Both are dogshit. When the HP eventually kills itself, as they tend to do, should I buy a Brother? I heard a lot of good stuff about it but have 0 experience with it.
I have had no trouble with my Brother printer in ~7-8 years of use. Of course, laser vs inkjet is not a particularly fair comparison, but I am still never going back to HP, Canon, and the like.
I have a Brother HL-2365DW. It's a home printer, or maybe at most a home-office printer. I've had it nearly a decade with only two toner replacements. Being laser and networked solve the two biggest problems I've had with inkjet printers in the past, and those two categories are the main things I would strongly recommend to people when choosing a printer.
edit: I initially wrote "it's not a home printer" (emphasis added here for demonstrative purposes). This was the exact opposite of what I intended to say.
I've had a brother printer going on 10 years and it's never let me down. I've changed toner three times over that time and each cart has never cost me more than 20 ish quid. No DRM carts, no jamming, no subscriptions just a printer that does its job. Even when it's running low, it doesn't prevent me printing, it'll let me know it's low then keep on printing until you can't see the letters any more.
10 years ? Mine is around 20 years old. I slapped a Raspberry Pi on it to have it network-enabled and it still works like a champ.
Never ever will I buy another brand.
I swear, if it weren't for the fact that I've also had good experiences with Brother, I'd be thinking they have an insanely good astroturfing department. Every time there's a thread about printers, there are dozens of comments saying how good they are.
It was a long time ago, so I can't remember the specifics. But it was the ol' asking for ink when it was obviously still full, bad software, unresponsivness and gradually getting worse and worse prints as it aged.
HP reached its pinnacle in 1993 with the 4L laser printer. They were practically indestructible. I bought one and it took 15 years of heavy use to kill it.
I made the mistake of buying an HP printer. Fortunately I only spent $70 on it.
Then the ink cartridge ran out as I used all the ink up. So instead of buying more ink I purchased a new printer. This time it was a color inkjet from Brother that will last me years on the first ink cartridge.
I bought an HP Envy, one of these convertible laptop thingies, when I didn't know any better. The hinge broke about a month after the warranty expired. Repair costs (at a local repair shop, but still) were like 200€ because apparently I had to buy a whole new top cover for the damn repair to work
Anyways, I'm gonna buy a Framework laptop next because fuck going through that again
Repair technician here. Yes we get a lot of hps with bad hinges, because they screw that super stiff hinge into the most floppy wet newspaper like piece of plastic possible. 200$ is reasonable because depending which side it's one you have to completely gut the screen assembly or the keyboard assembly (you use to be able to replace keyboards by themselves now you need to completely gut the whole computer)
Fuck HP but also fuck a lot of other brands cause they all pull this bullshit (dell, apple, Lenovo, Acer, Asus)
Company I work at does HP warranty repairs on hehalf of HP and the number of fuckin shattered screens from the shitty plastic hinge screw housing being shorn off was absurd.
It seems to be the case with a lot of the bezel-less designs, since I know I've seen some other brands with the same problem.
I just hate that they seem to have decided it's more profitable to just leave the shitty design as-is and deal with the repairs than to actually design that shit better.
$200 definitely seems reasonable though on part cost alone, since HUs are typically the 2nd most expensive order able part besides the system board itself.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I've been radicalized against HP for a decade now. I bought an HP printer with the guarantee of a sizeable rebate. Of course, the rebate never showed up and every time I called about it, the customer service person would read their script, "Oh we sent that out just a few days ago should be arriving soon." Uh huh. Here it is 15 years later, no rebate check and I'm sure they never intended to send one at all. I'm not a fan of HP at all.
I recently had to set up an HP printer that literally would not function without being activated via Internet connection first, but was received with a dead NIC and no way to activate through USB connection so just another piece of plastic for the landfill due to greed 🤷🏻♂️
That's the same as the printer I recently bought, and the problem is, my Internet connection is very spotty at best, and my computer doesn't support the needed software. SIGH. My printer's a paper weight until I can afford a new computer system and better internet.
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.
I'd say network printers are fine, but ones that require a 'cloud' connection can gag on my dong. I have a brother business aio printer hooked up via network and it's been everything I wanted from it, after our Epson shit the bed a couple years ago.
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.
2-in-one scanner+printer machines are especially heinous with this, most of the ones I've used block you from scanning a document if you're out of any ink (yes, even when you're only trying to scan and not use the "copy" mode)
Somehow they found a way to make me miss having to boot the "printer PC" and wrangling windows' god awful printer queue system.
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.
