HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 621 points –
HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
arstechnica.com

HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors::"Never own a printer again."

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I'm running a black & white wired Brother printer through a CUPS relay & I couldn't be happier without HP's bullshit

Brother is an excellent no-bullshit company. It's was a sigh of relief when I switched from HP's bullshit to shove-a-power-cord-and-forget approach of Brother. Even their wake up and time to first page is significantly better than HP's. I still didn't use up my original toner but once I do, I'll buy original. Their almost atypical approach at this point deserves to be rewarded.

I bought an old simple HP LaserJet like 4 years ago, it's probably the worst printer I've ever used and that includes the crappy bubblejet printer we had as a kid. Shit you not, I pretty much need to hand feed the thing, it almost always fails to grab a sheet out of the tray and it's usually crooked when it does.

Wish I hadn't given my brother printer to my parents when I graduated honestly, was solid af. It'd be 16 years old now but still going strong.

Issues I experienced with my HP are hard to describe with words and have people believe you. Once it freaked out in a way where it would print exactly 2.5 pages. You give it 10 pages to print. It would print first two properly, third one comes half-way. You restart the print and offset starting page, same deal. First 2 come out perfect, third one half-way through.

I even managed to record this one. Where it would come and go from the printer list but if you were skillful enough to select it and click print it would work perfectly fine. There it was connected through network. Why it did this I don't know.

Old HPs were great, those 20yo+. 5L, 6L series and the such, since they acquired that mechanism from Canon. This new stuff, not worth its weight in plastic.

My MiL has this ancient deeply yellowed office grade HP laser printer she dug out as her document printer, it's a tank and runs like a dream. Found that driver wise it seems to be easier to setup in Linux than windows, I keep meaning to setup a print server for her with an old pi I have..

That may actually be one of the weirdest issues I've ever heard of, were you ever able to figure out why it would only give you 2.5 pages?

Nope. Power cord pull and refusal to use it for a week or so solved the issue. Different one appeared though where it would print 10 copies if you requested one. God forbid you stopped it mid print. Then whenever you decided you needed something else to print it would resume where it left then print your new thing in 3-10 copies.

Luckily I ran into some open source folk, thank you whoever you are, who mentioned that open source driver is complete for my model and I should just completely remove HPLIP. This solved the issue almost completely. It would get stubborn at waking up from time to time, but printing resumed normally after not using HP software on HP printer. Ended up giving the printer to my brother who was more optimistic than me and I just bought "that one Brother printer everyone has".