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."
HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors::"Never own a printer again."
Thanks! I'll never own an HP printer! Good advice!
HP anything really.
HP stands for hot paninis, because their laptops get so hot they can be used as a panini press.
I still have my HP laptop from a few years ago, and despite running like crap nowadays, it still manages to warm my legs through my desk
Dev One laptop isn’t bad, got one on eBay for less than half of its original price and it’s a solid machine. Other than that, HP can chew glass.
I will refuse to buy anything HP, even used stuff, purely out of spite for them pulling this shit.
Their OfficeJet Pro is $13 a month and offers next business day replacement. If I were to purchase out of spite, it would be with a debit/temporary card with exactly $13 on it, and claim a replacement for defective printer (since it cant print offline). I wonder if HP would still try these things if each “customer” costed them substantially more in shipping back and forth, or having to write off two “office” printers for $13.
Im at peace knowing that i bought it off the previous owner and not from the company, but that is completely fair.
Okay, I might make an exception for antique tech from the '90s or earlier, back when HP was actually good (e.g. a LaserJet 4, an HP-28C calculator, the function generator somebody posted in another thread yesterday, etc.). That's very unlikely, though.
My god, it's so bad
Remote Monitoring. Reads more like something a malware would do.
Holy shit, that’s like a step away from adding in refusal to print things that are potentially copyrighted or otherwise unacceptable
Or spend $15 more and get a Brother Laser printer.
They're getting worse too. Retroactively blocking third party toner cartridges.
Then get an epson ecotank. That being said, those toner cartridges last so long that I don’t mind paying full price for one every few years.
I've just rejected firmware updates and will continue to do so as long as possible. If it gets to where I can't do that anymore for some reason I might leverage my professional expertise into remedying the situation more permanently.
😂
You’re absolutely right but seeing this comment in any recent HP thread is just getting hilarious.
At this point, with ALL this negative press about Hp inkjet printers, who’s buying them? I certainly would never even consider one at this point. Well I’d never buy an inkjet but I digress.
Honestly. How do they still have customers?? Are the majority of consumers just accepting this?
Own an old HP.
Daaaamn this printer good!
Need new one. Get HP cuz gud, reliable and known.
Get betrayed
HP hasn't been good in over 20 years though. Seriously, they've been bottom tier for a long time now.
For people who know their stuff, sure. But for people who use printers cadually? Decade old still good.
With this sort of mentality I wonder. I’m in IT and I would never suggeet any HP equipment (desktops, laptops, servers, monitors, etc).
My corpo masters are moving us to HP because it's cheaper....
As per usual they are targeting companies. Just how Windows despite its flaws, high price and security issues remains a dominant force, through retailers and OEMs. HP will sign a contract with a company, they will replace toners and provide all kinds of services for X$ a month. Then you don't care it's garbage that keeps messing things up. Also people higher up who sign these deals have things printed for them, they don't mess with drivers.
People buy them because they are cheap. Ecotanks and Laser printers with good features cost a lot more upfront. Not everyone thinks things through long term.
The toner in my laser printer has lasted longer than my need for hard copy.
$36/mo is 144 pages printed at my local library. If I needed to print that many pages, I'd get an enterprise MFP.
I had to print something yesterday... I submitted it to staples and went and picked it up.
Cost me $2
I expect that 10 pages will be all I'll have to print in 2024.
In the last 5 years I've spent less than $10 on printing.
If I had to actually print items.. I'd get a inexpensive brother laser printer
Last thing I had to print was in 2022, so I'm also content to just use printing services.
Not from HP, I hope...
Controversial opinion, but I like Kyocera's enterprise offerings. Xerox is always solid too.
HP can pay me monthly to suck my balls. First month is free
where do I sign up?
Excuse me Sir, there's a line.
Sir this is a Wend-- oh it's the same price all day?
Fuck HP, I will definitely never own one of their printers ever again because I have a Brother laser printer that is fucking great, never breaks, and definitely never tries to rip me off.
Really nice to see other people showing the brother printers love. I have a little laser printer I bought years ago at best buy when I was running a printing business and has well over a million copies on it. I no longer have the business but that printer is still working.
Team Brother!
I promote Brother because HP is so so bad. Product, business model, service. So bad. I want to save others from the nightmare of dealing with HP. I willingly exchanged my money for a good and service: a Brother printer. The $4 bil company didn't raid my village and burn my house down. They offered me a printer at a reasonable price and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. So: Team Brother!
On top of that, their products work forever. Yes, I buy Brother printers. The last time I bought one was at least 20 years ago and it still works.
How many other tech companies make hardware that lasts that long? I try to use my tech as long as possible, but 20 years? My notebook just conked out at 9 years and I was amazed it lasted that long.
I'll just point out that I have a 20 year old Dell business class color laser printer. Got it off Craigslist a few years ago for 40 bucks. It has Ethernet, with a webui. You can disable the toner chips if you want and only lose toner amount estimates and then use any toner you want. We even got the duplex attachment for it a few years ago.
It is literally at least 3 feet tall and weighs at least 50 lbs.
It literally makes all the lights in my house flick when we turn it on. We once blew a circuit when it turned on.
We lovingly call it the Old Ding Dong Printer.
As long as it works, why would I ever replace it? Products have gone downhill.
In part that's why they keep adding these anti-consumer features. They don't want you to buy something lasting 40 years. That said I will buy original toner when the time comes from Brother, because they deserve the income for not being assholes. I only wish they had recycling services in my country so I could keep the e-trash to a minimum.
At this point I know I will never buy a printer, period.
Get a black and white laser printer from brother... It's all you ever really "need"
That's what I got, years later still haven't changed the ink and it runs smoothly. Not sure whose buying HP
People who don't keep up with things like this, which is honestly a lot of people. I was the electronics guys at walmart for years. Just quit a few months back. So many people would be stunned when I tell them about all the bullshit HP pulls. And so many more would hit me with 'well ive heard good things' and buy it anyways.
Good on you for giving them fair warning
Yeah I honestly tried with a lot of the shit there lol. oh well.
You know, I think this is one of those "some people just want to get scammed" moments.
That's a whole other can of worms. I would get so many old fucks coming in for gift cards, mostly iTunes of course, and when the amount seemed fishy I would ask what it was for and, predictably, quite often it was some obvious bullshit. some would believe me right away, some would take some convincing, some would get mad. I remember one in particular called me a 'fucking moron who doesn't know shit' and insisted i sell him the 1k iTunes so he could pay is taxes. Had fun selling that one.
Others really stick out though. I had more then a few of the 'love scams' over the years. The military online BF who was discharged but has to pay his own trip home. This one in particualar is gonna stick with me till the day I die. She was there with a friend, and when i brought up how obvious the bullshit was, her friend was like 'SEE!?' We talked to her about this for a half hour or so before she believed us and holy fuck did she break down.
To be fair it's always a crapshoot whether the person at Walmart or BestBuy or wherever really knows their stuff or just has a personal bias.
Sounds like you're doing good by folks but for a lot of people you're going to have an uphill credibility battle mostly because they don't know you.
I'm a professional software engineer that has done all sorts of things involving computers over the years ... I'll always hear people out and some do have some genuinely great advice/say things I would've said if somebody asked me (and almost definitely aren't getting paid what they're worth by these places). Others are just kinda blowing smoke ... and I fear for the customers that listen to them lol.
lol don't get me started on the stupid shit i heard from my coworkers. one time I was just coming back from break and this new girl had been helping a customer while I was gone. They had just finished up the sale.
IT WAS A FUCKING MONITOR
Big oof...
People who don't know any better.
That's what happened to me. Needed a printer in the middle of covid, ASAP. Nothing I researched was there, so I had a limited time to just pick a printer. Hmmm, this HP seems ok...
3 months later, there was no way I used all the ink. WTF. Go to buy more, and thats when I realized my mistake. !@#☆$%^&*
I've heard good things about the tank printers
I picked up an Epson eco tank printer for my wife a couple years ago, and it's been fantastic! My wife, being a kindergarten teacher has a knack for absolutely killing printers... And this little Epson has been a work horse!!! I have nothing but good things to say about it!
just get a small laser printer. i got a Pantum Laser Printer, on sale, for like $40. Its on its 3rd refill after years and years of heavy printing for my wife while in school.
Costs $.10 to print at the library.
I’m fortunate to have a library just down the street so I go over there.
I also don’t have to print anything very often so I’ve only had to do that a couple of times in as many years.
I bought an HP m281 mfp printer 3-4 years ago and disabled automatic firmware updates when I was setting it up. Not too long after that I read that a new firmware release prevented 3rd party cartridges from working.
Anyway I bought new ink cartridges a couple of years ago after getting pop-ups saying the ink was getting low. Thing is, I haven't had to install them yet because despite the warnings the printer has been printing just fine with the original cartridges.
So in addition to blocking 3rd party cartridges HP is also lying about how much ink their cartridges contain.
F.U. HP.
All printers do this to some extent, I think. A combination of never wanting to report a false negative plus manufacturers making most of their money on consumables.
One of the cheapie monochrome Brother printers we have at work has been bitching about replacing the imaging drum for about four years now. We just dismiss the message and it's been printing just fine this whole time. It still is.
Right, my thought has always been I'd rather change the ink when the print quality bothers me, not because the company that sold me the printer is forcing me to.
HP was dead to me 15+ years ago.
Fuckin' shit-merchants.
HP was dead to me as soon as I bought a Brother
I'll never own an HP printer again.
But not in the way they want...
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".
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
managed to record
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I paid $100 for my Brother printer and I've spent...maybe $100 on toner cartridges since 2010.
So, yeah, HP can fuck off.
HP becoming Facebook soon
One of my fondest memories was beating our old HP printer to death with the baseball bat we keep for potential intruders. I now print at the local library and regret the beating incident less and less every year.
office space printer beatdown
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
office space printer beatdown
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Really shitty management over at HP.
They've been trying to make people sign up this for a while. Their drivers are pretty much malware that attempts to trick the user to sign up.
I doubt that it is a successful model for HP. They don't offer anything other than a stupid way to pay. Who the hell wants that.
Are there any open source paper printers around? Like there are with 3D printers such as the Voron?
I don't know of any open source printers, but Brother laser printers are good. Brother is a 116-year-old Japanese industrial manufacturer. Their printers are simple, reliable, they support their printers for a very long time, and they make linux drivers. AND as far as I know they haven't tried any HP-style fuckery.
I also own a Brother printer since I ragequit HP last year. While playing with the settings last week i manually checked the firmware and noticed a possible update. When searching online for the release notes, i found thread after thread of people wanting to revert the update because it blocked third party toners? I hope Brother doesn't go the HP way...
Build a Voron, swap the toolhead for a ballpoint pen, ???, profit!
To my knowledge, no—the type of person who would be able to create such a printer usually isn't interested in making printouts. Theoretically, an impact character printer (daisy wheel) is within the range of an enthusiastic hobbyist with enough programming knowledge to write the driver. A laser printer of modest resolution should be within the reach of a skilled team. Inkjet I think requires too many specialized parts.
Fortunately laser printers are better in basically every way. Unfortunately don’t hold your breath.
HP can die in a fiery flameout.
Even the low end is insane. $8 a month for 20 pages? You can go to a place like Staples or FedEx Office with a USB drive and get that printed out for less than a dollar.
It's actually 20c per page for about 4 bucks. Then there is tax for another 40c then 35c of gas and possibly 15 minutes of your time over and over and over again.
The right answer is a black and white laser. spend $199 once in the next 10-15 years
You could also go to the library.
This is what we did, sometimes we print, sometimes we don't, toner doesn't dry. Multi function 200 dollars. So far 5 years later, off brand toner and all is well.
In a lot of densely populated Asian cities, you can print to the shared printer of a local convenience store through the network without bringing a USB drive. You submit the job, it gets stored in the queue of the device, you go to the store (usually just downstairs from your apartment), scan a QR code, and the job prints. You can even pay online - it's great!
People don't seem to realize this kind of thing will be really popular. If you have a small office or you don't do your own tech support, these deals sound awesome. Small fee and thing is always working when you need it. They don't think about how better laser is and how longer toner can last without being used, etc. They don't care, what they see is 36$ a month not to deal with any printer related issues. Kind of a brilliant move on HPs side. Make printers evil, then offer solution to evil via subscription. And you can bet your ass this one will magically have significantly better drivers and lower maintenance than others because those would bite into all that sweet income.
this is already a thing in the corporate world though and has been for over a decade, probably longer. what we don't want is this shit in our houses
I'd totally go for such a deal for a fridge or washing machine. It would also have the nice side-effect that suddenly the company is interested in making products that actually last decades, if they don't, they have to come and fix or replace it on their dime and the money I give them I would've had to set aside for replacements, anyway.
Not for a printer, though: I use that thing very rarely, doesn't make sense to pay a monthly fee, and if it breaks down I can just go to the post office with an USB stick. Which btw is the perfect place for a public printer because letters is practically the only thing I print and while I'm there I can also buy postage because buying stamps doesn't make sense because they appear to change postage more frequently than I send letters.
I'd expect that if HP goes that way they'll use even more home customers to Brother, people just don't print enough these days to make subscriptions make sense. Also let fucking inkjets fucking die, already.
You can go to Rent-a-center if you want to rent appliances.
Something tells me it will go the same way as with other less user friendly services. Us tech-savy users will avoid this and advise people against it, and yet many will buy thinking it's great they don't have to deal with their printers not realizing they were forced into such position.
Yes and HP is kind of the king in those circles.
We FOSS users may not like it, but it is kind of a good deal for small businesses.
CEO Enrique is delusional
No, a ruthless evil genius. I think loads of people are going to subscribe, and they can therefore be categorised as delusional.
No home customer is going to find this worthwhile. Businesses might, but B2B already operates under different business model assumptions than B2C. This would cost more in 6 months than an average home user is likely to spend on printing over 5 years.
If you want to get customers to sign up for your subscription service, it has to at least appear like a win for them. This one is so blatantly a loss that it'll never take. At $10 it might work, and at $6 I can see a lot of people ending up doing it. The only thing I can think of is that this is designed to attract the negative attention before getting positive attention when they inevitably decide to drop the price to something that is actually viable.
You’re too optimistic. This is simply to prey on your grandmother
Honestly, I hope you’re right. I’m a frayed knot though.
1 - buy one of those refillable ink tank printers that are now actually common and not expensive;
2 - buy ink bottles at aliexpress for $10 4x200ml ink or around that;
3 - years of ink for a few bucks.
If you have a cartridge printer, search on aliexpress for refillable cartridges for your printer and do step 2 anyway (you can usually refill those easily with a seringe).
Don't feed their greed.
I wouldn't pay half that if it was the only source to feed HP employees. Fuck HP in the ass with a gasoline soaked pickle.
But then again Brother was founded by known racist Hulk Hogan, so....
How out of touch is HP? Every year I print less than the previous year. The use case for printers is dwindling. I lived quite happily without a printer for a decade. They need to find another business.
Let's not let them find another business to ruin... Stick with printers and fade into obscurity please HP :)
i had one of the cheapest versions of this plan; it seems nice, but the cheap ones have such low limits that you're always a bit paranoid to print too freely or joyfully. plus the bullshit how they software lock the ink if you don't pay and would rather pay shipping / recycling back just so you can't have it for 'free'
LOL, no, it really doesn't. Even just at first glance, the entire concept of a home user renting a printer is blatantly exploitative and obviously terrible.
Weird thought, printing "freely or joyfully."
I hate printing documents and do everything I can to avoid it, even with my little Epson inkjet that is free of most of that garbage (it does bitch at you if you use off-brand cartridges but will allow it).
Other than the occasional form or whatever that HAS to be on paper, about the only thing I print is CAD drawings so I can carry them to the wood shop with me. And I'd like to eliminate even that if I could find the right electronic device to run it on, which I'm not sure exists. (I'd like to have an ARM tablet or maybe convertible laptop running desktop Linux and FreeCAD, but there's some mutual exclusivity in there).
Run the FreeCAD on your main machine. Put a remote desktop server on it as well, and run Remmina or some other client on the tablet. Drops the requirements considerably, and should be good enough for the application you have in mind.
I still own a HP laser printer (older model from 5-10 years ago) which does not have the online connectivity requirement and the third party cartridges could last for ages.
As long as the printer dies I will forget HP and its bullshit exists and never touch their products again.
$36 a month for something I would use maybe 2 or 3 times a year? That's $432 I would pay for those 2-3 prints. Subscription based printer accessibility (not ownership) is a lossing strategy for normies like me. Maybe it may work for b2b segment. Aslo, Fuck you, HP. Thanks for convincing me not to buy your other products.
My last HP printer had a serial port. It was all down hill from there.
I recently trashed my HP and bought a really old Dell LaserJet from government auction. $25 and it came with a 60% full toner. Been using it for 2 months and still have 54% toner left.
I'll probably never replace this thing and keep fixing it until I can't find parts anymore.
I have a Samsung laser printer and same.
I bought a Brother laser printer some years back for like $120 and am still working on the starter toner cartridge. HP can fuck right off with this.
My laser printer is so old that it's USB 1.0.
It's on its second toner cartridge and I have no plans to get rid of it.
Same here. BW Brother printer and I can get 3 toner cartridges for about $25. At about a dozen pages a day, those cartridges last me a whole year.
Meanwhile, physical media is on the decline.
That's an insane price. It would literally be cheaper to buy a new HP printer when the ink runs out.
I'd hate to defend this ridiculous company but the price is "up to" so cheaper plans are available, and the one you're quoting includes ink for 700 pages a month which I doubt a new printer for $35 will do.
Why should I care about company X launching Y, where Y is uninnovative? I percieve this post as an ad
HP can go fuck themselves
I wouldn't pay $36 for an HP printer that they didn't monitor much less per month
I'll just print off the odd thing I need a paper copy of from work and continue as I've done for a dexade by puposefully denying myself from the sincere privilege of paying HP another god damned red cent for as long as draw breath, kthxbai. 🖕
Too bad my old employer stopped allowing employees to access the printers. You have to email your document to a printer admin and they will print it for you.
We had that happen too after someone "accidentally" printed 3000 copies of all black.
They literally hired a person to gatekeep the printers? That is such a waste time time. One of the many reasons why corporate sucks.
Oh, they also did the same thing with a nextcloud server. There was some plugin for word or something that they needed for their workflow. But they weren't going pay the $10 for the plugin for every every user. So they licensed it for a few clerical admins (might even be the same as the printer people) and if you needed to share a file with a customer, you emailed it to them and they stuck it on the nextcloud server and emailed the customer.
And another one is Zoom. Again, we had meeting admins with a paid zoom license. So if you wanted a meeting that wouldn't get cut off after 40 minutes, you email the meeting admins and they would schedule it.
My last printer was an hp , the ink only lasted a few months. I’m done with it. At most I print a few items per month so we now go to fedex office and have it printed there for $0.20
HP, Hilarious Proposition. Corperate guillotine Here Please, HP.
Yup dawg, we heard you like economic rent…
Apart from this printer nonsense, why do people hate HP so much?
They sell ink for higher prices than champagne. And make it impossible to use third party ink.
Their products have become pretty junk as of recent, at least on the consumer side. I hear good things about their enterprise devices.
HP was making garbage in the 2000s. Always has been, always will be.
Absolutely hate the fact that their drivers and firmware updates (for servers) are stashed away behind ludacris support contracts.
Have a simplivity stack at work, and for two nodes with an off site DR, needed an $8,000 support contract just to get the latest drivers and firmware to upgrade to the latest VMware version simplivity supports.
One shot deal, as we are already planning the move away from VMware and getting plans together for budgets to do so...
Maybe they all do this...? Admittedly I've not had to go looking for drivers or firmware updates on the few dells we have as they are air gapped systems that just run for a very specific purpose... So I honestly am not sure. But HP absolutely sucks in this regard as far as Im concerned.
I got one for you: You're on a tightrope of balancing security and your pocketbook, because a firmware update might also include DRM to brick any aftermarket toners you might have purchased.
Oh, you don't wanna pay out the nose for gEnUiNe HP?? What's your threat model look like?
Ridiculous.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee.
HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment.
Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages.
A web connection can also concern users about security or HP-issued firmware updates that make printers stop functioning with non-HP ink.
HP says it enforces a constant connection so that the company can monitor things that make sense for the subscription, like ink cartridge statuses, page count, and "to prevent unauthorized use of Your account."
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.
The original article contains 471 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Everybody it's going nuts nowadays..
Oh yeah? I want Kojima to make more MGS games...
Sir, this is Wen... I mean HP
What hinders HP to open a top tier games division, hire Kojima, buy the MGS IP from Konami, and fulfill my want? Then maybe I'll consider renting a printer from them.
Do you want another EA?
It wouldn't be because it's acronym would be "HP".
Helectronic Parts?
Printing is dead removed. Die with it and scrabble for your final pennies
Printing will never die, there will always be a need to put stuff on paper. What needs to die is the shady practices like this.
Fair comment. I'd just love to see those sleezy evil evilcorps burn.
Luckily there are a few printer companies who are moving in the right direction. Epson started selling printers a while back where you can just refill the ink without the need of a cartridge and brands like lexmark and brother also make printers that aren’t manufactured landfill like hp‘s offerings.
I recently had to buy a printer. I do civil engineering for a utility company and need the ability to print in color on 11"x17" paper. I looked into the Epson Eco-Tank printers but they are very expensive. Based on my printing volume it would take me years to make up the cost difference between the lower end printers that use cartridges vs the eco-tank. It might have made more sense if I didn't need the 11"x17" capability. Unfortunately, I think this is where all printer companies will end up going. Hopefully I'll be retired and no longer need to print by the time this mentality takes over the entire business.
The reason for that is, that printers are usually sold via the razor blade principle: gift them the razor, sell them the blades at twice the price. With no overpriced cartridges to substitute the printers they usually make a loss on, they have to increase the price of the printer.
For A4 paper, the Eco-Tank printers actually aren’t much more expensive than regular printers though.
Though honestly, if I had to buy a printer, it would be a laser printer for sure. Yes, they are a little more expensive but I print very little and every inkjet I’ve owned has dried up between using them and having to buy new ink cartridges for every print job is wasteful and expensive…
If I only needed black and white without 11x17 capability I would definitely have gotten a laser printer. A color laser printer with 11x17 capability start north of $700. The only Epson eco-tank model I could find in stock with 11x17 was over $1000. I bought the workforce model that did what I needed for $200. I know I'm going to be gouged on the ink but I just couldn't swing the upfront cost. Plus with my low volume of printing an $80 set of cartridges will last about 6-9 months.