HP sued (again) for blocking third-party ink from printers, accused of monopoly

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@beehaw.org – 196 points –
HP sued (again) for blocking third-party ink from printers, accused of monopoly
arstechnica.com
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I've had a fine experience with a Brother black and white laser printer. Just a big ugly gray block that prints my documents and my shipping labels fine. It doesn't die regularly like those cursed HP contraptions. The cartridge goes on forever and it doesn't blotch, wretch, coagulate or whatever the fuck inkjet cartridges do whenever you let them be for a month. I don't miss the colors. Apparently it's not good to print photos lol.

@luciole @tesseract I agree with this. Our light office grade Brother printer works pretty good most of the time. Sometimes it disconnects from the WiFi and needs to be reset but the ink is never an issue.

Thirded. Get an Brother inkvestment model. No bullshit, it just does your bidding, like a printer should. And the ink lasts a very long time.

Yes, everyone says get a B&W laser printer. If that fits your needs do so. We have kids that want or need to print in color fairly often, and color laser was out of the question last time we purchased.

Brother is the now only brand I look at after decades of buying consumer printers. If absolutely forced not to buy Brother, I'd go with Epson. I used to love Canon, but each model started incorporating more and more bullshit, and I found their ink to be both expensive and short lived. HP is the king of printer bullshit, but Canon seems to want to sit on their court in recent years.

Inkvestment sounds like another scam.

OK man. Doesn't bother me if you don't buy one. This is the longest I've kept a printer without throwing it away in disgust in a long time. Companies like to brand things with catchy names. shrug

Epson definitely isn’t as bad as HP but they’re easily as bad as Canon.

My last epson experience was about 5 years ago, (edit: holy cow maybe more like 10+ years ago. why does time go so fast?) so they may have gone downhill, appreciate the update. I had 2 in a row and both were good with Linux support and general lack of fussiness.

Unless they're really into arts and crafts, there's no good reason for a home user to buy an inkjet anymore.

If every once in a while they want a nice photo print or to print up some flyers in color or something, it's cheaper and less overall hassle to just pay per page at a drug store or office store on those occasions.

I've had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn't seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don't force the issue, and the printer doesn't care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it's just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.