Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That's mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn't come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it's too big anyway sadly
There's a huge world of clone printers, aftermarket mainboards, hotends, extruders etc. that doesn't look like it's going away.
Some manufacturers may go closed but it's way too easy to build your own printer for it to be a big concern in the FDM world.
Resin on the other hand already has lots of custom slicers, firmware etc. probably because there's a lot less mechanics and a lot more screen. But I'm not sure of the future of consumer resin anyways, a lot of people are realizing how toxic that unlabelled Chinese product really is.
I had someone a while back arguing that FDM printers were hopelessly toxic and resin printers would be the only ones on the market within a year. Naturally, this was well over a year ago.
Resin printers have their uses, but man, they are a mess to use.
It sorta did, but pulled back. DaVinci tried selling printers that had chips in the filament spools and used the same razer blade business model as low end inkjets. Anet also sold printers that cut too many corners and they often caught fire.
Then Creality made the Ender 3. I unironically think it's a brilliant design. It cuts corners just enough to be cheap, but not so much that it's useless garbage. They had two issues early on: lack of thermal runaway protection in the firmware, and a bad connector to the power supply. Both were fixable by end users, and both have long been fixed in shipping models.
At the same time, companies like Prusa refused to join in that race to the bottom. Good for them. If you're an established player like that and already have a reputation for quality, never get involved in a race to the bottom. That's how you become what HP is now.
I'm just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that's a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
There also used to be network printer adapters in the past. For example, the Belkin F8T030 Bluetooth AP. Yes, Bluetooth AP. I'd like something like that just for fun. Perhaps not this one specifically, as it only supports BT-LAP out-of-the-box and requires firmware upgrade for BT-PAN. Good luck finding firmware for a niche product from 2003.
But anyway, perhaps something like that (the printer part) is still made.
The old Apple AirPort Express could turn any USB printer into a networked printer.
Absolutely this. Find them online for $10 all day.
I'm a systems engineer, so it would be a short project for me. My homelab router could run the print server, but the USB port is currently powering my pi hole.
I feel like there would be some way to rig an esp32 or similar micro controller to do the same thing (pis can be scarce atm
A powered plugin usb hub would likely be easier.
But not as fun as making my own.
Entertainment also wins over efficiency.
Security too. I dont trust 90% of internet connected devices.
Rpi stock issues are well behind us. You can buy them straight up now. Even the 1GB RPi4.
Esp32 may not have enough RAM to buffer large prints, especially if there's a lot of graphics. It is possible to give it up to 4MB of external RAM, but that's still not much.
Pi Pico can do a 16MB external RAM chip. That's starting to be adaqute.
I had an HP 5si for a while with 20MB of internal RAM. It struggled with Postscript printing--could only buffer and print one page at a time. Did fine with HP's own PDL drivers, though.
I still had some trouble getting the Zero 2Ws, but a lot of sellers still have a limit of 1 per order.
I'll probably use my Zero W for the print server once I replace the controller for my snake's enclosure with a 2.
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I haven't had any reason to print in color for like 20 years. I'm sure many consumers are the same.
If I do need to print color, I'll pay $0.10 at UPS or the library or whatever to print it off.
Every inkjet printer on this planet has a choice. Cheap ink, accessible printheads, expensive. You have to pick one.
Certain Hp? Expensive cartridges but new print heads with every cart. Epson ecotank? Cheap ink but non replaceable printheads. High-end printers? Insanely priced printheads and ink.
The only way out is laser.
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But have a close look at the model you are buying. We recently noticed that the relatively cheap Epson Ecotank we bought for our daughter is a bit difficult to maintain. You simply have no access to the printheads.
2170 crowd represent!!!
Those things run forever and cost nothing to run.
I think I've only bought 3x toner cartridges, and one of those got lost because I shook the old one and it just kept working for a year or two.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
They want to make it a subscription that starts automatically when you buy the printer. No payment or the linked credit card expires, no more printing. Keep on paying for that subscription each month even if you don't print a single page.
And they're fuming because they can't force this down the throat of every "bad investments". Not yet anyway.
But they're really trying with HP+ printers that come with a 3 month trial of Instant Ink. And it's not like you lose the ability to use 3rd party cartridges, because those HP+ printers already come locked down from factory. Those HP+ printers also have extra REQUIREMENTS: HP Account and internet connection.
The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it's a big market, why aren't they getting into it?
It's really hard to break into it. Being accurate enough to print at 300dpi is very difficult, and that's not particularly impressive. If it's color, then the problems are multiplied. You have to precisely align four different print heads (minimum), and the ink needs to be mixed just right for accurate colors.
This is also why you don't see open source 2d printers like you do for 3d printers. On the surface, adding a third dimension seems like it'd make things more complicated, but 3d printers don't need the level of accuracy that 2d printers do.
But I would think TVs and microchips are more complicated than printers. And those two have been cracked by the Chinese.
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HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won't notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a "virus" to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid "instant ink" scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by... not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
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People say that, but...
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you'd installed a new cartridge when you hadn't, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don't think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It's not like it's going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I'd buy any printer that doesn't attempt to monitor the ink.
Maybe so people know to buy a cartridge so it’s on hand before the one runs out, so you’re not having to run to the office supply store in the middle of an important print job? But that’s more of a convenience thing, not necessary.
Yeah, just make it work like a car's fuel tank. It has a gauge to say how much is in it. It has a hole so you can add more. Some cars will guess how far you can drive, give or take, based on how much fuel is in the tank. If the fuel gets very low, a more obvious warning will pop up in case you weren't watching your gauge. But otherwise it just keeps driving in the meantime and if your car needs high octane and you give it low, it will try to run it anyways and if it fucks up the engine, then that's on the user.
Actually with some print heads they will be damaged if there is no ink
If it is visible to the user, that means light is hitting it and helping degrade it. Given how rarely people prove these days, you are more likely to end up with a gunked up cartridge.
Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
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They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the 'T' part of their SWOT analysis.
I'm not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like "Fuck yeah."
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been "HP CEO admits company's products are platform for malware attacks."
"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."
If the cartidges didn't have drm chips you wouldn't have anything to load with malware to begin with.
Buying HP products are a very bad investment, period.
I would never own a printer other than a Canon or an Ink Tank printer and I'm very reluctant to use the Canon Printer.
If you laser brother printers are great
I've heard good things about Brother, they also make some affordable Ink Tank models.
Thats fair I prefer laser personally
Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP's path.
In other words: "Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it."
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don't make as much on ink sales so they don't really care about third party ink cartridges.
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it's not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I've had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don't print a lot at home so I've only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you're happy with your megatank? I might look into that... I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
Wait, I thought the counter can be reset with some specific button presses only. I've seen the video guides on YouTube.
w00t? I will really have to look into that. There's a reasonably priced 2nd hand A3 ecotank in my vicinity, and I've been avoiding it because of this.
Do you have sources?
Dang, I can't find it anymore. I swear I watched a video about an ecotank counter reset once, since I was also interested in buying it one time. I'll have to dig into my YouTube history.
I'll have to dig into my YouTube history.
That can be quite the adventure, which I won't ask you to undertake. Because google returned a result from the site with the subs, where someone has gotten a copy of the original epson maintenance software ;)
Oh nice, so no more sketchy Russian software?
I don't know, it's in an encrypted zip-file, so it doesn't bode well. I'll have to put it on a VM on an old host, and see what happens when I upload it to virustotal. But it should be the original piece of software at least.
Yeah the Canon has been pretty good. I've had it for around a year now. I sort of print in batches, like I'll have a week where I print a few photos then nothing for a month or so. When I had a long break once (2-3 months), the printer started printing streaks so I had to run some sort of fixing cleanup cycle which fixed the issue although it wasted some ink. I haven't had to buy any replacement ink yet because again I don't print a lot, but I'm sure if I was using a traditional inkjet I would've had to buy replacement ink cartridges a few times already.
You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don't lock you out of your own printer for doing it.
On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can't print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
It's funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.
I'm not sure, but I think part of the problem is that the votes are "real". Since every instance has to have the same number of up/down votes they can't get away with fudging the numbers. I have no hard evidence that reddit does, but I suspect they do to increase engagement.
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Yikes, I hope you don't have a pension.
Most people don't
Seems like slightly more than half of American workers (56%) participate in a "workplace retirement plan" which I don't know the definition of. Pension or 401k if I had to guess.
Why research, post a statistical number, and completely abandon reading anything else in the article for context? Stating a number that you have no idea what it's defining? You're spreading misinformation for some weird "I was right" gotcha comment. The literal next line where you got 56% from,
Percentage of workers participating in a pension plan: 19
This includes all types of employment, for just private it's a measly 11%. State and local government employees bump up all of the stats. Nice little tidbit at the end: "A pension plan is a traditional or hybrid defined benefit plan. In 2022 forty one percent of workers in private-sector pension plans were in plans that were closed to new entrants.
How does this vary from previous years? What are the different types of definitions and actual "benefits" that the employee may see. What are the differences in private and public sector "retirement plans" (or contribution vs defined benefits). I've been reading through the BLS.gov website in regards to all of this and it's one sad fact after another. But sure, put a healthy untrue spin on it to win some internet points while completely missing the context, skewed facts have never caused any harm.
Yeah, I stopped researching it. Perhaps we should go back to the more measured approach from earlier in the thread.
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Well instead of forming emotional opinions we can try an educated opinion next? You really do yourself a disservice by saying you have no idea what you're talking about.
I understand your point, and I would typically do more research, however the people I was replying to have seemingly abandoned the thread after making their kind of insane statements, and made even less effort than I did to prove their point.
There's not much reason to drag this out now. I'd rather spend my time on threads with more purpose, or just not online at all. :-)
Man, I want to appreciate your attitude but you're just wrong and possibly the worse type of person to be on social media. I'm replying to you (me a commenter), they made a factual statement and you provided false statistics which I replied to. It doesn't matter "Who", unless this is just a competition to you versus "Them". Please run off to things with more purpose like "Threads" lol. Lemmy doesn't need more disinformation or uneducated guesses from bottom feeders who don't care about anything but their imaginary pensions.
Sure, I should either agree to the death of everyone who ever invested any money into anything, or I should spend my time researching exactly how many people that is.
Not gonna lie, thought that said "inventors" and I was like, "I'd watch that."
This just screams that it's a bad investment to buy HP stock at the moment. No company will insult their potential customers if they aren't desperate.
Later in the interview, he added: "Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire...
Don't worry, they'll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
And next time buy a brother printer.
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn't make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That's what all the cool investors care about now, right?
Proud to be a bad investment here 😊
drank too much koolaid, retarded now
overdosed on stupid juice
"Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."
They literally can't help themselves. They've gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn't perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they're fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren't exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an "investment," in the employee. Nevermind the employee can't afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
"You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more," is what they are saying to themselves.
The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.
That's not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Guess I'm fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation's "bad investment". I'll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
Plus the work great with after market stuff.
In case anyone cares, I'm sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I've bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I've never had to buy more black). I'm extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special rootkit software in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that's a selling point in our blighted modern age.
I care, and I’ve added this to my list for when it comes time to grab a new printer.
I have my HP from about 15 years ago that has been trudging along for the two times a year that I need to print, but that thing was from another era and once it goes, there will not be another HP printer in my future.
In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
Imagine working high up in this company and not wanting to jump off a bridge every time you get off of work. Psychos.
Do not buy inkjet printers, it is a scam! I dumped mine long ago even with after market ink, it is just a hassle to upkeep it.
They used to not be, in the early years of ink jet there were some fantastic ones.
One of them accompanied me through school where I would print full color on 1 meter long heavy grain paper like it was nothing. It worked so good and never clogged even on not official ink
I have always had a conspiracy theory that the ink management requirements are set by national security input. All printers have a yellow dot pattern added to every print to identify the printer by a forensics team. I wonder if this is why the ink landscape is so shifty. They want to make sure those dots get printed. My thought on why you can't print black and white when you are only missing colored ink.
The conspiracy theory falls apart with black only printers. 🤷
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Fuck HP, that simple. it's exhibit "a" for the proof of enshittification
EnshAtification
I'm not an investment, I'm a single purchase customer. I buy a thing from you and then I get on with my life.
HP is a bad investment
How has HP not gone out of business? Their products are overpriced pieces of trash.
Other Businesses. They love the subscription models.
HP wants to pay employees in company scrip.
How small and shriveled this man’s soul must be. He should take a lesson from Ferdinand the Bull, and enjoy smelling the flowers for a while.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The PC and print biz is currently facing a class-action lawsuit (from 2.42 in the video below) regarding allegations that the company deliberately prevented its hardware from accepting non-HP branded replacement cartridges via a firmware update.
When asked about the case in a CNBC interview, Lores said: "I think for us it is important for us to protect our IP.
And what we are doing is when we identify cartridges that are violating our IP, we stop the printers from work[ing]."
Lores said of customers who use a third-party cartridge: "In many cases, it can create all sorts of issues from the printer stopping working because the ink has not been designed to be used in our printer, to even creat[ing] security issues.
HP has long banged the drum [PDF] about the potential for malware to be introduced via print cartridges, and in 2022, its bug bounty program confirmed that third-party cartridges with reprogrammable chips could deliver malware into printers.
Sadly, Lores's protestations were somewhat undermined by the admission that the company's business model depends – at least in part – on customers selecting HP supplies for their devices.
The original article contains 438 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That's mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn't come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it's too big anyway sadly
There's a huge world of clone printers, aftermarket mainboards, hotends, extruders etc. that doesn't look like it's going away.
Some manufacturers may go closed but it's way too easy to build your own printer for it to be a big concern in the FDM world.
Resin on the other hand already has lots of custom slicers, firmware etc. probably because there's a lot less mechanics and a lot more screen. But I'm not sure of the future of consumer resin anyways, a lot of people are realizing how toxic that unlabelled Chinese product really is.
I had someone a while back arguing that FDM printers were hopelessly toxic and resin printers would be the only ones on the market within a year. Naturally, this was well over a year ago.
Resin printers have their uses, but man, they are a mess to use.
It sorta did, but pulled back. DaVinci tried selling printers that had chips in the filament spools and used the same razer blade business model as low end inkjets. Anet also sold printers that cut too many corners and they often caught fire.
Then Creality made the Ender 3. I unironically think it's a brilliant design. It cuts corners just enough to be cheap, but not so much that it's useless garbage. They had two issues early on: lack of thermal runaway protection in the firmware, and a bad connector to the power supply. Both were fixable by end users, and both have long been fixed in shipping models.
At the same time, companies like Prusa refused to join in that race to the bottom. Good for them. If you're an established player like that and already have a reputation for quality, never get involved in a race to the bottom. That's how you become what HP is now.
I'm just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that's a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
There also used to be network printer adapters in the past. For example, the Belkin F8T030 Bluetooth AP. Yes, Bluetooth AP. I'd like something like that just for fun. Perhaps not this one specifically, as it only supports BT-LAP out-of-the-box and requires firmware upgrade for BT-PAN. Good luck finding firmware for a niche product from 2003.
But anyway, perhaps something like that (the printer part) is still made.
The old Apple AirPort Express could turn any USB printer into a networked printer.
Absolutely this. Find them online for $10 all day.
I'm a systems engineer, so it would be a short project for me. My homelab router could run the print server, but the USB port is currently powering my pi hole.
I feel like there would be some way to rig an esp32 or similar micro controller to do the same thing (pis can be scarce atm
A powered plugin usb hub would likely be easier.
But not as fun as making my own.
Entertainment also wins over efficiency.
Security too. I dont trust 90% of internet connected devices.
Rpi stock issues are well behind us. You can buy them straight up now. Even the 1GB RPi4.
Esp32 may not have enough RAM to buffer large prints, especially if there's a lot of graphics. It is possible to give it up to 4MB of external RAM, but that's still not much.
Pi Pico can do a 16MB external RAM chip. That's starting to be adaqute.
I had an HP 5si for a while with 20MB of internal RAM. It struggled with Postscript printing--could only buffer and print one page at a time. Did fine with HP's own PDL drivers, though.
I still had some trouble getting the Zero 2Ws, but a lot of sellers still have a limit of 1 per order.
I'll probably use my Zero W for the print server once I replace the controller for my snake's enclosure with a 2.
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I haven't had any reason to print in color for like 20 years. I'm sure many consumers are the same.
If I do need to print color, I'll pay $0.10 at UPS or the library or whatever to print it off.
Every inkjet printer on this planet has a choice. Cheap ink, accessible printheads, expensive. You have to pick one.
Certain Hp? Expensive cartridges but new print heads with every cart. Epson ecotank? Cheap ink but non replaceable printheads. High-end printers? Insanely priced printheads and ink.
The only way out is laser.
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But have a close look at the model you are buying. We recently noticed that the relatively cheap Epson Ecotank we bought for our daughter is a bit difficult to maintain. You simply have no access to the printheads.
2170 crowd represent!!!
Those things run forever and cost nothing to run.
I think I've only bought 3x toner cartridges, and one of those got lost because I shook the old one and it just kept working for a year or two.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
They want to make it a subscription that starts automatically when you buy the printer. No payment or the linked credit card expires, no more printing. Keep on paying for that subscription each month even if you don't print a single page.
HP literally has that already. They call their dystopian product "Instant ink."
And they're fuming because they can't force this down the throat of every "bad investments". Not yet anyway.
But they're really trying with HP+ printers that come with a 3 month trial of Instant Ink. And it's not like you lose the ability to use 3rd party cartridges, because those HP+ printers already come locked down from factory. Those HP+ printers also have extra REQUIREMENTS: HP Account and internet connection.
Imagine if you needed internet connection and some account to control your lights. Oh, Philips Hue changed their ToS, so now you do.
Here was I, thinking printers couldn’t get worse
The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it's a big market, why aren't they getting into it?
It's really hard to break into it. Being accurate enough to print at 300dpi is very difficult, and that's not particularly impressive. If it's color, then the problems are multiplied. You have to precisely align four different print heads (minimum), and the ink needs to be mixed just right for accurate colors.
This is also why you don't see open source 2d printers like you do for 3d printers. On the surface, adding a third dimension seems like it'd make things more complicated, but 3d printers don't need the level of accuracy that 2d printers do.
But I would think TVs and microchips are more complicated than printers. And those two have been cracked by the Chinese.
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HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won't notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a "virus" to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid "instant ink" scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by... not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
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People say that, but...
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you'd installed a new cartridge when you hadn't, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don't think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It's not like it's going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I'd buy any printer that doesn't attempt to monitor the ink.
Maybe so people know to buy a cartridge so it’s on hand before the one runs out, so you’re not having to run to the office supply store in the middle of an important print job? But that’s more of a convenience thing, not necessary.
Yeah, just make it work like a car's fuel tank. It has a gauge to say how much is in it. It has a hole so you can add more. Some cars will guess how far you can drive, give or take, based on how much fuel is in the tank. If the fuel gets very low, a more obvious warning will pop up in case you weren't watching your gauge. But otherwise it just keeps driving in the meantime and if your car needs high octane and you give it low, it will try to run it anyways and if it fucks up the engine, then that's on the user.
Actually with some print heads they will be damaged if there is no ink
If it is visible to the user, that means light is hitting it and helping degrade it. Given how rarely people prove these days, you are more likely to end up with a gunked up cartridge.
Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
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They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the 'T' part of their SWOT analysis.
That's interesting! TIL, thanks!
I'm not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like "Fuck yeah."
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been "HP CEO admits company's products are platform for malware attacks."
If the cartidges didn't have drm chips you wouldn't have anything to load with malware to begin with.
Buying HP products are a very bad investment, period.
I would never own a printer other than a Canon or an Ink Tank printer and I'm very reluctant to use the Canon Printer.
If you laser brother printers are great
I've heard good things about Brother, they also make some affordable Ink Tank models.
Thats fair I prefer laser personally
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP's path.
In other words: "Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it."
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don't make as much on ink sales so they don't really care about third party ink cartridges.
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it's not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I've had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don't print a lot at home so I've only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you're happy with your megatank? I might look into that... I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
Wait, I thought the counter can be reset with some specific button presses only. I've seen the video guides on YouTube.
w00t? I will really have to look into that. There's a reasonably priced 2nd hand A3 ecotank in my vicinity, and I've been avoiding it because of this.
Do you have sources?
Dang, I can't find it anymore. I swear I watched a video about an ecotank counter reset once, since I was also interested in buying it one time. I'll have to dig into my YouTube history.
That can be quite the adventure, which I won't ask you to undertake. Because google returned a result from the site with the subs, where someone has gotten a copy of the original epson maintenance software ;)
Oh nice, so no more sketchy Russian software?
I don't know, it's in an encrypted zip-file, so it doesn't bode well. I'll have to put it on a VM on an old host, and see what happens when I upload it to virustotal. But it should be the original piece of software at least.
Yeah the Canon has been pretty good. I've had it for around a year now. I sort of print in batches, like I'll have a week where I print a few photos then nothing for a month or so. When I had a long break once (2-3 months), the printer started printing streaks so I had to run some sort of fixing cleanup cycle which fixed the issue although it wasted some ink. I haven't had to buy any replacement ink yet because again I don't print a lot, but I'm sure if I was using a traditional inkjet I would've had to buy replacement ink cartridges a few times already.
You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don't lock you out of your own printer for doing it.
On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can't print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
It's funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.
I'm not sure, but I think part of the problem is that the votes are "real". Since every instance has to have the same number of up/down votes they can't get away with fudging the numbers. I have no hard evidence that reddit does, but I suspect they do to increase engagement.
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Yikes, I hope you don't have a pension.
Most people don't
Seems like slightly more than half of American workers (56%) participate in a "workplace retirement plan" which I don't know the definition of. Pension or 401k if I had to guess.
Why research, post a statistical number, and completely abandon reading anything else in the article for context? Stating a number that you have no idea what it's defining? You're spreading misinformation for some weird "I was right" gotcha comment. The literal next line where you got 56% from,
This includes all types of employment, for just private it's a measly 11%. State and local government employees bump up all of the stats. Nice little tidbit at the end: "A pension plan is a traditional or hybrid defined benefit plan. In 2022 forty one percent of workers in private-sector pension plans were in plans that were closed to new entrants.
How does this vary from previous years? What are the different types of definitions and actual "benefits" that the employee may see. What are the differences in private and public sector "retirement plans" (or contribution vs defined benefits). I've been reading through the BLS.gov website in regards to all of this and it's one sad fact after another. But sure, put a healthy untrue spin on it to win some internet points while completely missing the context, skewed facts have never caused any harm.
Yeah, I stopped researching it. Perhaps we should go back to the more measured approach from earlier in the thread.
Well instead of forming emotional opinions we can try an educated opinion next? You really do yourself a disservice by saying you have no idea what you're talking about.
I understand your point, and I would typically do more research, however the people I was replying to have seemingly abandoned the thread after making their kind of insane statements, and made even less effort than I did to prove their point.
There's not much reason to drag this out now. I'd rather spend my time on threads with more purpose, or just not online at all. :-)
Man, I want to appreciate your attitude but you're just wrong and possibly the worse type of person to be on social media. I'm replying to you (me a commenter), they made a factual statement and you provided false statistics which I replied to. It doesn't matter "Who", unless this is just a competition to you versus "Them". Please run off to things with more purpose like "Threads" lol. Lemmy doesn't need more disinformation or uneducated guesses from bottom feeders who don't care about anything but their imaginary pensions.
Sure, I should either agree to the death of everyone who ever invested any money into anything, or I should spend my time researching exactly how many people that is.
Not gonna lie, thought that said "inventors" and I was like, "I'd watch that."
This just screams that it's a bad investment to buy HP stock at the moment. No company will insult their potential customers if they aren't desperate.
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire...
Don't worry, they'll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
And next time buy a brother printer.
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn't make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That's what all the cool investors care about now, right?
Proud to be a bad investment here 😊
drank too much koolaid, retarded now
overdosed on stupid juice
They literally can't help themselves. They've gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn't perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they're fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren't exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an "investment," in the employee. Nevermind the employee can't afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
"You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more," is what they are saying to themselves.
The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.
That's not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Guess I'm fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation's "bad investment". I'll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
Plus the work great with after market stuff.
In case anyone cares, I'm sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I've bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I've never had to buy more black). I'm extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special
rootkitsoftware in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that's a selling point in our blighted modern age.I care, and I’ve added this to my list for when it comes time to grab a new printer.
I have my HP from about 15 years ago that has been trudging along for the two times a year that I need to print, but that thing was from another era and once it goes, there will not be another HP printer in my future.
In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
Imagine working high up in this company and not wanting to jump off a bridge every time you get off of work. Psychos.
Do not buy inkjet printers, it is a scam! I dumped mine long ago even with after market ink, it is just a hassle to upkeep it.
They used to not be, in the early years of ink jet there were some fantastic ones.
One of them accompanied me through school where I would print full color on 1 meter long heavy grain paper like it was nothing. It worked so good and never clogged even on not official ink
I have always had a conspiracy theory that the ink management requirements are set by national security input. All printers have a yellow dot pattern added to every print to identify the printer by a forensics team. I wonder if this is why the ink landscape is so shifty. They want to make sure those dots get printed. My thought on why you can't print black and white when you are only missing colored ink.
The conspiracy theory falls apart with black only printers. 🤷
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Fuck HP, that simple. it's exhibit "a" for the proof of enshittification
EnshAtification
I'm not an investment, I'm a single purchase customer. I buy a thing from you and then I get on with my life.
HP is a bad investment
How has HP not gone out of business? Their products are overpriced pieces of trash.
Other Businesses. They love the subscription models.
HP wants to pay employees in company scrip.
How small and shriveled this man’s soul must be. He should take a lesson from Ferdinand the Bull, and enjoy smelling the flowers for a while.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The PC and print biz is currently facing a class-action lawsuit (from 2.42 in the video below) regarding allegations that the company deliberately prevented its hardware from accepting non-HP branded replacement cartridges via a firmware update.
When asked about the case in a CNBC interview, Lores said: "I think for us it is important for us to protect our IP.
And what we are doing is when we identify cartridges that are violating our IP, we stop the printers from work[ing]."
Lores said of customers who use a third-party cartridge: "In many cases, it can create all sorts of issues from the printer stopping working because the ink has not been designed to be used in our printer, to even creat[ing] security issues.
HP has long banged the drum [PDF] about the potential for malware to be introduced via print cartridges, and in 2022, its bug bounty program confirmed that third-party cartridges with reprogrammable chips could deliver malware into printers.
Sadly, Lores's protestations were somewhat undermined by the admission that the company's business model depends – at least in part – on customers selecting HP supplies for their devices.
The original article contains 438 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
Almost 20.