Jokes on you. HP is moving into the energy sector with their spinning bodies with magnets attached.

Was gonna say I vaguely remember when HP implied some level of quality

As someone who works extensively with the spin offs instruments, I can safely say that they would be just as outraged. They are all bad quality, fail VERY frequently, and, guess what, you have to subscribe to be able to use all the features of the hardware you bought.

“buy”

too bad. they used to be petty good

Yeah, I had a Canon BW laser printer that has chugged along and gave no complaints with a toner cartridge I paid $20 for a 3-pack. Another family member has inherited it but hearing the fact they are stepping up their DRM leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Yes and no. If you exceed that, I think they just bill you for the next tier.

If you cancel, they immediately remote disable the perfectly working cartridges already in your printer that are still full of ink. Even if you’ve fully paid for the remainder of the month.

It’s a complete scam. Just don’t buy an HP printer, Instant Ink or not.

$8.25 for a Starbucks? Man, it’s like £3.55-£4 here in UK.

probably cheaper to print with blood than to use HP printers

Or just don’t buy HP.

The correct answer, as usual, is: don’t buy HP.

In the US, if you print ~52(+) B&W pages a year, HP Instant Spyware is seemingly cheaper.

FedEx Kinko’s:

<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9977dd0c-413b-4213-8fb0-cae4019b0677.jpeg">

Non-EU- lett Packard:

<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/1bf1ceb0-7f02-4441-8a88-fe519fc1b875.jpeg">

For color, HP’s cheaper once you print two pages a month.

Printing is a good excuse to walk to the local print shop. Let’s say, though, you have to drive your Honda Civic a couple miles through Los Angeles - that adds roughly thirty cents of fuel (ignoring other vehicle costs). (That’s our bestselling car in our second largest city, because you wouldn’t give up your parking spot in NYC.)

Conventional wisdom is to buy a Brother laser printer, but there’s a bit of upfront cost for the color models, which are a little larger when comparing versions with scanners to inkjet all-in-ones. Who wants to do the math on those :)

…whoh they have their own subscription!

<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/d668beab-a253-4f51-94fe-bf72ce204661.jpeg">

Anyway I think this is more like having a printing-press-barista in your closet instead of going to the print-barista down the street. It could be anywhere from 76 cents more expensive to $5.80 less expensive a month. Compare to a Mr. Coffee which you’ll pay off right away by skipping Starbucks.

tl;dr let HP siphon your data, what’s the worst that could happen? 😈

My thing is…they can dictate how much you use YOUR OWN PRINTER??? Like…how? Why? What.

Like…

WHAT.

The cheapest plan 0.099 Cents for each page 10 pages in the month. 1500 pages per month 54.99 € respectively.

Yeah, depending on where you live, it may be cheaper to go to your local printer shop. Plus minus cost of transport and your time.

I did not check HP’s prices to Poland. Table lists 100 pages as 0.07EUR/page. Krakow, Poland, nearby printer shop takes ~0.02-0.07EUR per A4 page, and there is no subscription. Nor doing 100 pages.

Satisfying isn’t the word. We have to generally use HP for SAP purposes so unfortunately I have to buy HP for work. Guess what? Every fucking month a few clients need printer support. Just HP bullshit time and time again…

I have brothers, kyoceras and others that just work and work without any issues. But HPs are just nagging offline fucking pains in the ass.

Not advertising but I did buy a brother laser maybe two years ago for home. I rarely need color, if I need something stunning I’ll send it to Office Depot and pay .50 each. That’s maybe two time a year. $20 a year for an off brand toner cartridge otherwise.

I think it’s just wave after wave of people who are shocked to discover what a horrible mess HP printers are. Some of us learned it many years ago.

LOL, if not, Brother’s marketing should lean into it. I got an old HP laser that cranks 1,000+ pages for $20. I’ll run the wheels off it and buy a Brother.

HP is coasting on goodwill from us old folks who remember when they were the best of best.

No. It’s like bitwarden. Everyone’s praising them to shill levels because they are generally that good. Brothers just run and run without nagging or insane prices. They do tend to be a little more expensive because they don’t lose money on the hardware like HP or cannon will.

If it helps even it out for you - I'm quite happy with my Epson lol
I hate to /HailCorporate but it was affordable, takes cheap unbranded ink, and hasn't given me much trouble (I don't use it often, so the ink heads do dry, but a couple of cycles of head cleaning and they're good to go again).

I’ll shill for brother because it’s cheap, they don’t lock out generic cartridges, prints well on the network from Linux, and seem to last.

What they are missing on compared to HP is parts support. However, the comparable HP printer with parts support is twice the price and the parts are almost the cost of a new cheap printer.

Lexmark is okay too, I guess.

That’s pathetic, hopefully they go out of business soon. Just think of all the filiment that could have been made instead of e waste

I choose to use Instant Ink because I don’t print a lot and it still beats buying the carts. HP ships them to me for free and automatically before I run out and gives me return postage for the empties to be recycled.

They also don’t have different rates for B/W and Color so I just print everything in color.

I dont stress over $1/mo (or $1.50/mo if this increase hits me). I’ve had this printer for 2yrs on the cheapest plan and I’ve still not paid the full price of a set of cartridges.

I’m sure I’ll be down votes for saying anything positive about the program but whatever. It works fine for me.

We’ve had some major breakthroughs in gouging and selling things as a service at exorbitant rates.

Maybe you should think a little more about the shareholders and little less about yourself. /s

It's called capitalism, and it relies on constant and infinite growth, which is impossible, but that's not going to stop those making all the money from trying (until the whole thing collapses on us all while they hide out in their bunker).

*aas run amok.

Can't read "Cotton" without thinking of the fiddy men he traded for his shins.

I fortunately only did a inkjets for 3-4 years before I went laser. I even bought a second toner cartridge at the same time! 15 years later, I actually used the 2nd cartridge-the printer is still going (albeit it seems it may only last another 5-10 years).

.

The whole company is a scam. I’ve seen a couple of big companies get nice bulk discount contracts.

$1600 off of laptop workstations. Who the fuck can afford a bulk discount of 50%?

I don’t think they even used HP printers.

I used instant ink when I was living temporarily in Vancouver. It was actually worth the price back then. Now? Forget it.

I was highly considering a Brother, now I definitely will get one.

I’ve had my brother for 11 years, still going strong

I got a huge office printing center thing from government liquidation out of my nearby military base for $55. It came with more toner than I could ever use in my lifetime.

Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.

Who is the sewing machine company?

Yeah, until the printer engineers took over from the sewing machine engineers in around 2020. Even Brother is evil now, rolling out firmware updates that render third party toner useless or do even more evil shenanigans via firmware:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I don’t think there’s a good brand left these days, Brother was the last bastion of “not shitty” and now they, too, were enshittified.

I am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it’s a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don’t want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it’s a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don’t care if it’s a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it’s easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.

Spend a bit more and get a laser and have it last exponentially longer. That’s how I’ve been rollin.

I got one during Black Friday years ago and it came with so much extra ink that I still haven’t bought more ink for it 😅

They do it because they can get away with it. Zero consequences, and they still have a legion of customers who are happy to piss their money down the drain on egregiously overpriced ink.

I totally agree with you: Brother laser printers all the way.

People keep buying them and signing up for an ink subscription. If people are that dumb, they’d be insane NOT to milk them for cash

Corps.

companies and uninformed people who fall for the “recommendations” at the store.

Go into a store like Walmart and you will have 6 different HP printers, 1 epson, and empty spots where the 1 Lexmark sits. Once you get to rural areas you don’t have much of an option to specially when the point of purchase already limits your purchase options.

Most people will not drive 1-2+ hours to get more options.

What’s wrong with their laptops? I’ve never had any issues.

… if you live in a city

Inkjet is pretty much terrible for anyone printing very little (more ink wasted on cleaning cycles than actually printing, high chance that the ink dries up regardless) and very much (stupidly expensive and unreliable).

If you don’t need color, get a cheap b/w laser printer. Brother used to be one of the last good ones until they, too, decided to block third party cartridges via firmware updates last year.

If you can get an old, used, Brother laser printer for cheap, go for it - they were borderline indestructible and would print with any cheap toner.

If you live in or near a city, taking a USB stick with the docs to print to a print shop is probably the best option if you print very little - you even just “print to PDF” at home and take only that file to have the flexibility to print just the stuff you want the way you want it.

I have two Epson ecotank printers, one at home and one for small business. Not cheap, but the ink that comes with the printer lasts for years. That is at 30 pages a month or so. Avoid all inkjet printers with replaceable ink cartridges.

If you don’t really need color, just buy a laser printer.

if you need color, the epson ecotank line is great. they do also have a counter that stops the entire printer after around 18000 pages, but it can be reset with 3rd party software and a 10$ software key. the purge tank for cleaning the nozzle fills up, so just take it out, wash the sponge and reset the counter. idk if newer models still have that counter.

I’m in the same boat. I lost the free plan because we had to print a lot more during homeschooling that made sense to go up a couple of tiers for a month. Been on the £0.99 tier since. Didn’t mind it because we do still use it occasionally and one time the nozzels on cart dried up and it got replaced at HP’s expense.

So I don’t hate instant ink, but only at it’s current price. If it gets jacked up I’ll probably just buy ordinary carts and take my chances on it clogging again. I can still nip into the office if I need a one off print, this one is just convenient.

Edit: it’s £1.49

Any reliable recommendations for ink jets, in that case?

Thanks for the advice I am going to see if I can find one

I think they don’t make the home printers anymore.

Any laser printer is better for occasional printing. Ink doesn’t dry up, no nozzles to get clogged. It just sits there waiting to be used and prints beautifully when you do. I’m so done with ink jets.

If you were paying $60/year to print, I’d say you were printing a lot.

That’s as much as I ever paid for a printer. I have two currently, a BW laser and a color. Paid $50 for the color used…its 2 years old.

Just can’t see wasting money on inkjets with their issues, and I’ve had many. First was a 1992 HP Bubble jet, which worked great for the time, but died before it ran out of ink.

I got a Brother with the big chonker carts, I usually only print once every 5-6 months and I’m still g2g like 5-6 years in.

I gotta run a cleaning cycle each time usually but that’s perfectly understandable haha.

Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.

Go to your local goodwill/thrift store and check for laser printers.

Get a laser printer, with toner cart, for less than 20, often less than 10, bucks.

You have a scanner in your pocket, just a reminder.

I only use it for scanning now. I was mad when my parents bought a new one.

I have one of those, it won’t work with my Linux though :/

I have an ecotank, no linux support.

My FIL owns an HP with a subscription. I’ve given up on the things he wastes money on; most of them he’s not really technically savvy enough to implement anyway. (And, yes, buying a printer and getting it installed may exceed his technical abilities)

Wait till you find out it purges the lines every print, and while you can replace the purge sponge, the system doesn’t always have a “reset the purge sponge” option. And the ones that do use a rather unknown button combination that may or may not work.

laughs in off-brand toner sitting in my Brother

God, the amount of times I’ve had to explain the EcoTank vs HP math to customers in my store, and then STILL have them pick an HP is fucking baffling.

Until the software counter decides that the waste ink pad is full and the thing blows a software fuse.

Epson’s official solution to a full pad is to throw out your printer and buy a new one - literally a printer with a self destruct timer. Not very “eco”.

With all the Big Brains at HP making up all this atrocious bullshit you’d think one of them would say “why don’t we buy all the competition like the large media companies are doing? It’s not like the US will stop us, hell they’ll give us subsidies or something.”

Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit? They even have label printers which allow third party labels.

There are inkjet printers now from multiple other brands which are great too and allow full refills.

Just don’t buy HP it’s that easy.

.

This just in: Capitalism works

Isn’t that worse? It’s hard to say at these levels of corporate nastiness but I was surprised they could go lower

You don’t print out memes to put on your fridge like everyone else?

Shipping labels, legal documents, receipts, and more. Just because 99% of things can be done digitally, doesn’t mean the 1% stops existing.

Color by numbers for the kids. Got a LaserJet though and I use that website that sells bootleg yet serviceable toner cartridges.

brother

they charge you PER PAGE??!

or other printer

Do not update its firmware and disable auto-updates:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

the way you phrase it I thought your brother is a laser jet lol

No, that’s 0.99 and going up to a buck fifty.