HP tech here. Stay FAR away from any of their consumer-grade devices. They’re cheap, poorly built, and difficult for even HP techs to work on. Save your money and get something with better build quality.
Their business-class devices are okay, because most of those actually have decent build quality and are easily repaired. But stay away from their cheap devices, especially their printers (obviously).
We are also an HP/HPE shop.
Like you said. Not the cheap shit. And definitely not the cheap printer shit!
ProDesk or EliteDesk (maybe even used?)Thanks for this, good to know. I’ve had nothing but problems with my HP and had many a day of wanting to schwing it out the window.
Any particular brand out there that’s still known for decent build quality? I feel wary of them all now.
I’ve had a Brother laser printer for years now, never given me any issues.
Funny. I was about to mention my brother laser toner printer. Have two. They are black and white but tanks
My Brother “network” laser printer is so old, it has no WiFi or Bluetooth, just an ethernet jack and a USB 1.0 port. Seriously. 1.0. It’s that old. I’ve only had to change the toner cartridge one time because I don’t print a ton, but it’s a workhorse.
Brother printers are still very decent and most importantly, not DRM ridden.
I love mine… third party toner is dirt cheap and the wireless printing actually works without a cloud service! Just make sure you update the firmware because some models ship with a bug where it won’t print after it’s been idle for a while.
Ah, I’ve been having this issue with mine. I’ll get it updated.
Would you say they’re…A bro?
They’re not heavy.
Get an older version of the HP printers if you like that brand. I’ve had Officejets 6900 and 7500 and 8500 series. Cartridges still widely available and the printers accept mortification for external tanks. I only have the 7500 now in the wide format and it’s still going strong. Easy to maintain too. I do have a laser printer as well which I only use for b/w printing. Have had experience with fixing other brands in the past and by far the Brother is the most user friendly I guess. Epsons are okay and easy to find parts for.
I saw some Epson or Canon printers with ink tanks.
If I buy any printer for a >30-40% humidity environment it will be one of those.
If it’s mostly dry it will be a toner/laser based.I have a canon with an ink tank. I love it, but it’s only about 4 months old. I’ll actually curious how I feel about it in a decade from now.
Assuming the ink won’t dry out and the driver will not dematerialize or break something I think very good.
I read somewhere that you should not mix inks so I wish you good luck with the vendor of your ink.
from what I’ve heard brother makes pretty solid laser printers
Except their printers are good awful to get hold of without the connect X here and there stuff.
Give my my god damn driver without all the other shit to connect via USB to my god damn scanner!
I have two oki mc363’s (office and home).
Cost about $600, 6 years ago. Weighs about 30kg, must have a cast iron chassis or something.
Rock solid, great printer scanner in every way. Wouldn’t change a thing.
My parents have an okidata microline 82 that still prints. One of the dots hits a little light these days.
They also have a 1994 HP LaserJet 4 plus that is still chugging along. Back from when HP made decent printers.
Brother.
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Canon, Lexmark. Good stuff.
That’s funny. When I did sales (oh god like nearly 20 years ago) Lexmark was shit tier.
Acer too, and now look at them. hugs Predator monitor
The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.
Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.
Hewlett-Packard is just an unhinged ad campaign for Brother.
I would hate and love if this were true.
🤣
The first issue was buying a cheap printer.
The second issue was buying cheap HP printer.Buy brother or do your research. If it says on some page “No USB only wireless” just don’t buy it ffs!
Brother is no longer allowing 3rd party ink and toner too so do your research there as well.
Or buy a printer that uses refillable ink, such as Epson Ecotank. No cartridges - no DRM.
I’ve had a couple of the Epson Ecotank printers crap WiFi cards, all of a sudden WiFi just stops working and no amount of resets resolves it.
Yes and no.
Allowed? Probably no 1st party vendor allows/wants it.
Can do? Yeah sure.
Will I get warranty for violating some kind of EULA (or some other equivalent) for using 3rd Party? Probably not.As an IT helpdesk we usually just tell them to get 1st party as the toner is not that expensive for that volume and just eat it. At least they have warranty for the 11k of printed papers.
I’ve seen reviews saying that a firmware update stopped 3rd party ink/toner from working. Both myself and my mom have Brother printers that we love and have used for years. It’s disappointing and they’re great printers but I don’t want to pay a premium on toner/ink just because. But yeah, as @cerberus_cat said, refillable ink is good too if you need an ink jet printer but I don’t know why anyone would want ink over laser.
Isn’t it cheaper and better for higher humidity?
Inkjet might be cheaper to buy the device but you’ll pay out the ass for ink. Toner just lasts so much longer. I haven’t bought toner since 2019.
I will never buy any HP product, just out of principle. Every single of their printers I’ve ever owned had broken down in elaborate ways no one understands, and what only makes it worse, is that the ink costs more than the actual hardware. Obviously it’s because they’re using only the most premium and exotic materials to make it.
What really nailed the coffin for the final time was my printer refusing to accept the black cartridge, claiming it was not a legitimate one, so it locked down the whole printer into some sort of self-repair loop that it never exited
I have never bought a new, consumer HP printer. Ancient business HP printers though, I have on several occasions. Those are pretty good actually, they work when you need them to, (third party) toners are plentiful, and they’re cheap. Much better value than a new one.
You don’t fuck with enterprise consumers. They will drop bank on anything that will just consistently work. Regular people don’t do that, so you gotta find a new way to rob them
Swore off HP many years ago when my laptop began overheating in minutes. Opened it up, looked at the video card heatsink and duct and saw LIGHT in between. Ended up bending the duct ever so slightly and ground a pre1983 penny down to act as a heatsink and fill the gap. Yeah, a penny filled the gap. This after I owned a 1990s desktop where they cooled the processor by using a case fan and plastic ducts to remove the heat. No heatsink whatsoever. They will cut every corner they can.
I guess I’m not understanding all the comments saying “why is anyone buying printers anymore? What do you need to print at home? Just buy a Brother or don’t buy one at all.”
Do you really need to understand why someone wants or needs a printer? Do people need to be explaining their purchases so we can all decide if they deserve to get scammed by HP or not? It doesn’t matter why they bought it, whether it’s a want or a need, whether it’s the “right” brand, etc. They still don’t deserve to get scammed out of their money by some bullshit company that can brick their device whenever they feel like. If you pay for something, it should belong to you. Period.
Terrible printer. Among the worst purchases I’ve ever made. Stunningly anti-customer design choices. I will never, ever buy another HP anything.
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As if any other conglomerate is any better. Just don’t buy the cheap bs and do your research before buying shit… >_>
Can someone explain why there’s a cloud printing service involved here at all? We’ve been able to print over WiFi for a decade now.
Because they want you to subscribe to their ink cartridge auto-ship service that will send you a new one and charge your credit card any time one is empty, clogged, or just because they feel like it.
I think it is just monthly, whether you printed or not
My use case is for printing things at home while I am not at home.
I haven’t really had a need to do it since I’ve been out of school but I used my all in one printer a lot while I was in school. I don’t print at home anymore because the ink/nozzles are all fucky, but I do plan on replacing it because it’s annoying having to go to the library for that
You could remote desktop in for free and do the same thing.
My own printing is so rare that the most cost effective option is to just go to Staples the rare times I do need to print something. I don’t think I’ve spent more than $5 in the last few years.
The only use I’ve found for cloud printing is how it would identify all the printers on the uni network and allow me to print on them with no hassle compared to manually adding the printer with the correct driver and IP.
Symbols on sticker from top to bottom:
- WiFi
- no USB
- peel here
Sounds more like “This printer has WiFi, no need for USB, peel here otherwise”.
But still stay away from HP consumer shit, I wouldn’t even let it connect over USB.
Just stop buying their product. Issue fixed !
Oh Brother
You need to be fired… Out of a canon
Oki dokey.
The gunpowder is made by Epson and needs a payment update to catch fire
🥰 You’re my bro too.
If only life were that simple. Whose laptops am I going to buy?
Dell: Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x (including the predatory behaviour of embedding QR codes to these in the bios to be shown in error states)
Apple: …
Lenovo: History of installing literal spyware
Microsoft: Bad products
After decades of Apple I go for Lenovo without OS +Linux nowadays, really good experience.
The correct answer to that question is currently Framework.
Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x
You know you can just pop in a Crucial MX500, right?
And I did. The issue is they put in a QR code for their own $800 500 GB SSD in the bios error message for when your SSD breaks.
My non-technical friend had no idea it’s an obscene price and may have bought it just to get his laptop working.
How often do you guys need to print anything anyway? When my last printer broke I just bought a dedicated scanner and have been going to my local library on the rare occasions when I need to print something. If you’re pissed off at HP (and other printer companies) for doing stuff like this, just ask yourself if you really need a printer at all. There’s a good chance you don’t.
I humbly think the reasons other people have to print something is none of your business. And your personal story is no one else’s. Many people, myself included, need to print stuff on a regular basis, for work, school or whatever. The post is not about that, but the scummy practices of a shitty company.
i do fairly often. just because you personally don’t need to print stuff doesn’t mean no one has to.
College students still need to print stuff, some more than others. Especially if you’re like me and the only way you can retain information is to take handwritten notes, physically highlight, and write in the margins. I don’t know why, but ebooks and PDFs just don’t stick in my brain. There’s a printer in my department, but not that convenient when you don’t live on campus, and the library charges you like you’re at a Kinkos.
I’m amazed that these printer companies feel they can pull this kind of shit though. You’d think they’d be doing everything they can to keep the 10 people who still need home printers and scanners.
I sell stuff on eBay enough that having a printer is worth it so I can buy and print shipping labels at home, that way I can use USPS package pickup to ship stuff from my front door without needing to leave the house.
i need things to be in physical form so that i can write on it. it’s the only way that i can organize information and learn.
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This is what I do. On the rare occasions I need to print something, I just pop down the street to the library and do it there.
I print stuff all the time, I also send people personal letters to their mailbox so maybe I’m just old.
I just got like 2 mi to the local fedex office and print from there. That said in the last decade the most common thing I print off is D&D sheets for a con I go to
I mean the sticker has a peel up icon on the corner. They’re obviously not trying to hide this, they’re just pushing the user towards wifi.
Also a custom firmware bound by serial number ranges would be even cheaper than the sticker. Logic doesn’t hold up
You are absolutely correct.
It’s not very expensive not to populate the USB receptacle on the the PCB.
Sealing the hole in the case would be easy. You could have an removable insert in the case’s injection mold so there’s the option not to have the hole.
If they thought two case parts were too logistically complicated, or they already made the mold and don’t want to mill it out to make space for the insert, they could insert plastic plugs with permanent snaps.
If they really didn’t care, they could even just put they sticker over the hole in front of an unpopulated port.
Yeah, but we can’t be angry about that.
I had a customer come in on Friday because they couldn’t get their brand new printer to work. When I pulled the sticker off a new hp hater was born.
Can’t wait for either open source community, or the pirate community, for starting to jailbreak HP printers. To be honest, if I was more savvy with tech, I’d probably start taking that as a fun little challenging hobby.
The open source community would tell you to get an ancient LaserJet 4 (or, more likely at this point, a Brother printer) instead.
Aside from that, there’s a worrying increasing trend in the amount of stuff that ought to be getting jailbroken, but isn’t for some reason. Smart TVs, for example. I think that the community of people with the skills and willingness to do that sort of thing is too small, and is getting spread too thin to keep up with the fire hose of Tivoized products coming out these days.
If you want a solution for this nonsense, call your congressman and ask for consumer protection legislation, 'cause I don’t think the hackers are going to be able to save us from the prevailing trend of the entire consumer electronics industry.
Man, this isnt just evil, that’s stupid and lazy evil
They’re all as bad. Brother just sent an update to my laser jet and now third part cartridges won’t work.
