Thankfully the demand for printers is fading. This will of course cause printer mfrs to double down on their lockdowns ("Sorry, your toner is too old so you'll have to go out and buy new a new cartridge"). But its their anti-consumer practices that drive people not to print.
My kiddo bought a new printer in 2015 because he had to print something for high school and the toner cartridge was empty. It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge (and it was delivered for free within the a couple of hours!). I still have it, still use it once in a while, and it's still on that same starter cartridge and maybe the same ream of paper. Two more kids have finished high school using it...hardly at all.
In the past year I can remember two printer jobs, each a single page.
> It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge...
This may not actually be the case, 'starter' cartridges often have significantly less toner than full-size. Also, Brother is among the better actors in the printer space - I believe that Louis Rossmann has one, and talks it up in [1] at around 11:30.
That they haven't gotten to the bottom of the starter cartridge doesn't mean it isn't cheaper to get cartridges than new printers.
If a new printer costs the same as a new cartridge but the cartridge contains twice the toner, then the new printer is twice as expensive per page. That's true even if they haven't gotten to the bottom of the starter yet. It just means they don't print much.
No one cares about how much ink they have, they care about being able to print what they need to. If the toner expires before you would use it, then it doesn't matter if you're left with a drop or a gallon.
Toner cartridges last for years and years - but even still, a new starter cartridge isn't going to have way way less toner. It will have enough to change the economics. Some brother FAQ pages say like 66%. 1000 pages for starter, 1500 for regular, 2600 for high-capacity. I'd link but it wasn't clear which specific printer this was for vs. the one the OP mentioned, and I didn't spend enough time to look for a trend.
Toner is just a container with little balls of plastic.
> If a new printer costs the same as a new cartridge but the cartridge contains twice the toner, then the new printer is twice as expensive per page. That's true even if they haven't gotten to the bottom of the starter yet.
Who cares? Your bank account can't see your cost per page. It can only see the money you actually spend. Paying additional money for capacity you will never use doesn't save you any money.
Sure assuming you never get to the bottom of a cartridge, but as I mentioned, the difference is about 500 pages. We're talking about buying a new printer + 1000 pages for the same price as buying just 1500 pages. One yields massive quantities of e-waste. The other should be cheaper. If the OP is already at the point of replacing one of these set-ups, then don't they logically print enough to get to the bottom of either a starter cartridge or a full cartridge?! Sorry I'm having trouble following.
Always always research ink costs before buying the printer!
Last time I bought one, Brother was the only brand I would buy, it wasn't even close. I hope they are still as consumer friendly now, because they made me very happy.
I did this for awhile with HP printers. Because I didn't print often enough to use up the starter ink before it dried, it was cheaper to get the $30 printer with starter ink than to spend $20 more on replacement ink. Now I use print services and will be getting a laser printer eventually. And now I also understand the waste problem better.
I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling.
Work stuff requires offline archives for contracts and legal stuff
Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
> I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling.
Lifehack: you can annotate a PDF with a signature and just send it to the receiver.
The only time I couldn't do that was when I needed a notarized document.
> Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
Yup. I save screenshots of barcodes for tickets and other stuff instead. I have a second phone as a backup :)
they stated that they print regularly, then without knowning anything of their use case and needs, came the "ackchyually" like they know it better or the original commenter is an idiot, why is it so unfathomable that they have done their research
A more polite, charitable response might have been "My job is _____ and in this field it's required for documents to be delivered by courier." You haven't made it clear why you necessitate printing in your workflow, just that it's required and that anyone who thinks otherwise clearly doesn't understand _your job_ as well as you do.
Nobody thinks you're clever or cool for shutting down someone trying to be helpful.
The general trick I’ve found for things like this is the missing step is to first convert the PDF to image files, THEN watermark it with the dynamic date, then convert back to PDF.
Which is a pain in the ass to automate but effective.
Wet signatures are also a thing to avoid updating ancient procedures. I looked into the legal requirements for needing a wet signature (in my jurisdiction) and it turns out that they are rarely required. You need one when buying a house, but you need them for very little else.
I told the credit card company that demanded that I mail them letter with a wet signature to just accept a scanned PDF or lose my business and after a few emails back and forth they simply relented (admittedly, this was a few years ago).
I agree. I usually have hard copies of all pertinent documents when travelling.
In addition and on long distance trips I upload everything important to Dropbox. So, even if I lose the documentation I'm able to print it from a hotel or Internet Cafe (yes, they still exist)
Starter cartridge can be smaller in volume than the standalone ones you buy though. Unless you are certain they are identical, you can't compare price if a new printer to new cartridge.
Sometimes what you said is true though, because they want to sell you a product that keep you buying their cartridge so selling the printer "at a loss" can be profitable.
If that is the case, it is more because of a failing on our part to teach people the benefits of printing than anything else.
I'll hold onto my printer and print language stdlib and API reference docs til the day I die. There's just something about having it in print that helps me navigate the corpus of information more effectively.
Well, double down? When I check the shops here the open ink tank printers are everywhere from every manufacturer. Just pour ink in.
That's a lot more open than they used to be.
Ps: my printing needs are also minimal these days. A boarding pass here, a form there. A couple of pages a month. I have a Brother laser for that reason, no heads to dry out and consumables are cheap.
This is something irrelevant but I thought I'd share an anecdote from a mate who worked for HP a long time ago. He worked on their driver software for their printers. In one of the assignment he was asked to rebrand the same software with another manufacturer's name (can't recall if it was Canon or Epson)! HP may have shared some printer technology with another company.
There is nothing new in this space. HP hasn't exactly been the beacon of customer satisfaction thanks to their restrictive policies. Most of these printers are probably made in similar factories (probably a handful of places), somewhere in China. I'd buy from a brand that offers more flexibility when it comes to ink/toner than anything else.
HP has had partnership with Samsung an has bought its printer division in 2017, it has partnership with Canon too. I think there is not much invention anymore, it is just long tail market now. Other than for specialised use, people just buy printer once forever for ocassional use.
This way the printer market is really shrinking and consolidating, like HDD market.
Kinda wish this lawsuit also included the issue where many HP printers will not print a black and white page in situations where one has plenty of black ink but the color cartridges are empty.
OP has a color printer...? Do you instead mean to say that tracking dots shouldn't be printed in B/W mode?
I doubt that tbh - the wikipedia article above shows Reality Winner got caught printing (presumably) black/white NSA documents because the printer was able to print the color tracking dots.
OP wanted to be able to print in B/W mode when out of color ink. Ostensibly, the tracking dots' purpose was to stop currency counterfeiting, so they were only ever added on color printers (not B/W ones).
Therefore, not being able to display the dots shouldn't be an obstacle to the printer operating in B/W mode, as it would effectively be a B/W printer in that case. The more likely explanation is simply that HP wants to sell more overpriced color ink.
Are we at the same stage today? An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums?
Just curious if someone in 10 or 20 years might come back to these threads and reminisce at this unattainable open hardware ideal as they grumble about HPCanon's latest dystopian ""innovation"".
I've encountered that thread before, but I re-read it anyways, and I had a thought:
A fully open source printer (hardware and everything) is likely still infeasible....but how hard would it be to design and sell an open source control board replacement?
According to that thread, the hardest thing about an open source printer is the patents on all the hardware, but I'm pretty sure that it is legal (in the US at least), to buy a printer and swap out the control board if one so desires.
And I'm also pretty sure that, as long as you are not using copyrighted firmware or something, that it would be legal to sell such a motherboard with new, open source software on it.
This moves the goalpost from "design a completely new printer" to "create new control firmware and software". The downside is that you lose the full repairability options one would have if the entire thing was open source/open hardware, but honestly, hardware doesn't seem to be the primary problem with modern printers.
This feels like a 95% as good solution with <5% of the difficulty, unless I'm missing something.
Right, it can definitely be a good approach (that did work for openwrt)
But I do feel like (in the case of printers) building on top of hardware from hostile companies is too risky. And yeah, you wouldn’t be able to get replacement parts. It’d be a devil’s bargain.
I’m definitely envisioning/dreaming of something as open and tweak-able as a 3d printer. That world is full of customization and innovation. And it seems to be truly built from the ground up. To me that’s the goal.
Are patents on printer technology still relevant? Printers were booming in the nineties but as I haven't seen a single piece of innovation in the last 20 years my guess is that all important patents have expired by now.
I'd guess the physical print engine is a standard off-the-shelf piece of hardware made in bulk in China, and very likely all the mfrs use the same standard part/s.
So unless there's some kind of lock-in agreement, there would be no issue with a bulk order from some other party.
Although given how printing is becoming a legacy tech, I doubt there would be enough interest to make it worthwhile today.
An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums?
I think "open source" doesn't need to mean "every component from scratch", much like a lot of open-source hardware relies on MCUs whose designs are decidedly not open. There's been some attempts at using existing inkjet cartridges with integrated printheads:
Is it because printers are low margin devices where the actual profit is in consumables (in the consumer market) and service contracts which include consumables (in the enterprise market), so there is nothing for an off-brand supplier to undercut?
A budget 3d printer is like $200, plus $70 for the inkshield. And it isn't really a good printer. A consumer laser printer for half that will do 25 pages per minute actually feed in the paper reliably and the toner lasts longer
I bought an old HP LaserJet 2015 ages ago. Together with two 7000 pages toners for about 100USD. It just works. I can lea e it for two years, than plug in the USB cable and it jist spits out pages.
This is how printers should be.
I've owned 2 shitty HP inkjets and used countless more.. going all the way back to the deskjet 500...
enough to know I'd never buy anything with an HP logo ever again. I don't care how good their laser printers are. They can fuck right off.
I'm not even sure I feel that great about their laserjets lol. Every time I came across one in school or college they'd have issues with goofy rollers causing paper jams.
Inkjets are just an entirely different thing, and they all suck, no matter what brand. Older HP Laserjets are great, as long as they're not recent enough to have had their firmware updated to the next extortion scheme.
The Deskjet 500 was a tank. Built to industrial standards, like all HP gear of the time.
Later, their printers became flimsy, driven by marketing whims not engineering. I gave up on them when I looked at the small mountain of dried ink that was inside from the constant cleaning cycles, and realized that it represented more money than I had spent on the entire printer.
I had two problems with mine: First off, it used the same crappy "vacuum sealed" cartridge with the built-in print head that cost like $60 when Canon and Epson were selling separate ink tank vs print head units.
I replaced it with a canon, where I could hold the ink tank upside down and squeeze more ink into it with a really cheap refill kit lol. The HP required you to drill a hole in the cartridge and then use a plug to seal it (which often leaked).
HP's inkjet printhead also makes a distinct annoying sucking air sound. Nobody else's inkjet does that. I don't even like their plotters for the same reason lol.
The second reason was the rollers were made out of cheap rubber and my dj500 seemed to rather often need attention.
Dude I have a 13 year old canon where I've never cleaned the rollers, never replaced the print head (maybe once? I forgot), and I have always used cheap generic ink from amazon in it. I've probably spent less than $100 on ink the entire time I've owned the machine.
Sadly, newer Canons don't seem to be that good. I 'replaced' mine with a new one that I got free with a laptop, and it died after a year lol. Like, totally dead.
Anyway, I stand with the Brother laser printer crowd lol. It seems like you either are small enough on printing that you can get by with a Brother... or you're big enough that you rent a Konica or a Minlota or a Xerox or whatever from some company that does all the maintenance for you.
Outside of the inkjet printers, I understand the reverence for oldschool HP gear. Their power supplies and scopes were awesome. Still nice to use keysight gear.
During the pandemic I had a Canon all-in-one printer with ADF and bells and whistles that refused to let me use the scanner if one of the ink cartridges was empty, which happened all the time because the self-cleaning used a ton of ink and ran every time I wanted to use the ADF scanner, and while it did support pushing PDFs to a NAS via Samba, only a hopelessly insecure stone age version of Samba was actually implemented. The thing was an utter pos, it's crazy that it could be sold like that.
I've since replaced it with a standalone Brother b&w laser printer and an HP ADF scanner and lo and behold both devices just work, I can scan and process my mail using scanline and python and print the occasional document and both devices take up less space than the Canon pos.
So how does HP make money from that scanner? Is it limited to a number of pages per month or pay per scan? Oh I know, 1200dpi scanning is enabled with your subscription? I mean surely they don't just sell it to you as a physical product and then let you use it?!?!
How can they still sell you a product that doesn't use a little digital green man on a circuit board to cross his arms and demand you pay rent to use the hardware you legally bought and now (in theory only) own?
Those fools. Don't they see that there's rent to be extracted here? If you teach a man to fish, he might fish without paying you.
If you build a fishing pole that refuses to cast unless he inserts a quarter... fishing and paying you become inseparable! Genius!
You're on a board frequented not just by technical types, but MBA's as well (VC).
Sometimes, as tempting as it is to post a sarcastic remark, it's better to just remain silent rather than sowing the seeds of misery by making $exceedingly_bad_idea tangible to the PHB who'll eventually try to get people to implement it for them.
If you don't want to see it, don't bring it up in any way. Lord knows, the fool is out there that'll think "that's a revolutionary idea!"
If you think this behavior isn't already standard practice... you're living under a rock.
This has become the bread and butter of digital age capitalism: Sell a fancy device. Include digital green bouncer on board. Make the device stop working (or cut off features) using the digital green bouncer if payment stops.
Why do work when you can just keep charging for the work you already did?
Personally - it's WAY too fucking late for mere obscurity to stop this. It's time for "Fucking nuke it from orbit with regulation" type approaches. Or, more likely and also much sadder - feudalism.
My bet is that feudalism is going to come back in a major, major way. But your lord is going to hand out keys to digital devices instead of titles to land.
My hope is that we manage to enforce legislation requiring manufacturers to provide all keys to a device. In the same way that it's not legal to sell a home and refuse to provide the keys.
I'm really curious what all the commenters here are printing so much of? I have some crappy inkjet which works fine, for the maybe 2 pages I print per year.
It's so infrequent it's hard to even generalise what I use it for. Very occasional government forms, things that absolutely have to be sent by snail mail, stuff like that. What is everyone else printing?
Mostly return shipping labels and random government or financial documents that require hard copy. The former probably once a month? The latter once or twice a year?
We have a ~10 year old compact Brother laser multi-purpose. Back when Brothers were mostly not full of dark patterns. It was cheap-ish and it’s been reliable. Leagues better than any HP or Canon we owned previously.
This - during lockdown we got a printer plus refillable ink cartridges - and let the kids go crazy. They loved printing photos and making collages, but mainly loads of colouring sheets and quite a bit of 'homework' - we definitely got our monies worth.
Pain is that it blocks up if not used for 3 months - and the cheap ink fades for any photos we printed - but cleaning it is really easy, literally stuck the print head in the sink and wash it.
I think it's a testament to how bad printers are that we can instantly create an ultra-high quality hardcopy of literally anything in seconds and we do everything we can to avoid using it.
We have the sole printer (laser) in our extended family, so we wind up printing a lot of shipping labels, tax documents and recipes. Occasionally handouts or flyers for something, map excerpts or directions for a trip where phone signal may be iffy.
And I'll often print out draft writing of mine in order to revise it with a pen. For whatever reason, I'll notice totally different things on the screen vs. on paper.
Can't you just provide the bar/QR code to the pick up guy showing at your door these days? Last time I shipped something, I only provided the barcode that the second hand marketplace (similar to craiglist but for another country) I used generated for me. It was at the local post office though, not a DHL/UPS pick up guy but I would have assumed it would have been the same.
First of all, that would be amazing if there was a pick up guy. No, I have to bring all packages to UPS/USPS/etc. myself. They either don't do pickups or charge $$ for them (and then don't show up but still charge you for the supposed "attempt", despite evidence that nobody ever rang your doorbell).
Second, the only scannable QR code I've ever seen has only been for Amazon returns. Never seen any other retailer or shipping service support that. (I'm sure there are, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule.)
Third, scanning a code at UPS etc. requires waiting in a line behind everyone else, which is often 10+ minutes. If you print your own label, you can just drop off.
I mean usually you can, but if you have a printer and packaging tape, boxing it up yourself means you can drop the package off at a box and skip the store(and possible line)
While I print a bit more than that, it's still not so much (or so time-sensitive) that I can't just queue it up on a USB stuck for the next time I pass by my local library.
So far I haven't exceeded their free weekly page-allotment of 10 greyscale or 3 color. (After that, $0.15 per greyscale, $0.50 per color.)
I print a lot of bank documents etc for archival purposes.
Also, I'm surprised that your inkjet printer works well with you printing infrequently. Usually the nozzles will clog up or dry out over time if not used.
Documents when applying for a Visa, e.g. Bank Statements, Utility Bills etc. Also the actual e-Visa / travel authorizations which for some countries are just electronic
Anything that cannot be provided by a bar/QR code these days, which mean very few. It changed a bit when my daughters were younger and would do a lot of coloring.
I jumped from HP printers long ago and bought some cheap Canon (yes I read the full article and saw Canon mentioned) as it was easier to buy cheap cartdriges. My usage is very low.
What printer would be the good one to go these days?
I couldn't be happier with my Brother HL-L3290CDW all-in-one.
I posted this response to a similar question here 3 months ago:
>"I got tired of the user-hostile shenanigans, bad software, low-quality output, and high TCO (5 or 6 HP or Canon devices over the years), finally came to my senses and bought a Brother. It "Just Works", is fast and quiet and reliable, does exactly what it's supposed to, and is in such stark contrast to the typically terrible printer UX it's almost funny."
Coincidentally, just yesterday it warned of low black toner (for the 1st time) and I realized I actually believe it, given all the printing my family's done this year. I've read that it supports non-OEM cartridges, will find out for myself in a day or two.
I had my brother printer do this to me. I had been using a 3rd party toner cartridge and it just stopped working one day.
Luckily I was able to remove the DRM chip off of the expended starter cartridge that I hadn't yet thrown out and swap it into the 3rd party toner cartridge which got it working again.
I'm honestly confused at how they were able to do this. I'm pretty sure that several years ago HP lost a class action lawsuit about exactly this kind of behavior. I'd have thought that, having another company lose that lawsuit, there'd be a lawyer just waiting to jump on this. Is brother just too small market share to attract a class action lawsuit over?
I have a DCP9020CDW that works just fine on the cheapest eBay toner going (under £30 for a 5-cartridge CMYKK set with shipping included). At that price it's not really even worth trying a powder-bottle refill!
I'm kinda at the point where I think someone needs to kickstart an (Semi)open Solid Ink printer design.
1. The tech has been around long enough that any/all patents should be done with.
2. In general they are much more eco-friendly, the 'cartridge' is just a specially shaped wax block.
3. Prints wind up being extremely robust due to the wax ink, I remember when salespeople would spray photo prints with water and show it just run off.
Of course, the challenges would be providing a sufficient filter for ink, any foreign particles can clog up the print heads after all, as well as making sure users understand that there are processes in moving them.
After I got burned by Brother institute toner cartridge DRM, I started looking into this. Apparently there are a lot of patents around paper feed mechanisms etc. It would, apparently, be very expensive to design a new, non-infringing, non shitty paper feeding mechanism and the customer base would likely be extremely small, resulting in a sky high price.
I'm no expert and can't vouch for any of the details, but this is what I encountered in multiple online discussions when I looked into it last.
That being said, I'd probably be willing to pay up to $500 for a simple black and white open source, open hardware laser jet printer, assuming that it worked as well (from a pure mechanical perspective) as current consumer grade printers.
Let's bring back the pen plotter. It can use a lot of the existing parts and software now being made for 3D printers but changing the filament head to a pen carriage.
I bought a black-and-white Brother laser circa 2000. It ran an ran until around 2020 when it finally broke (physically) in ways that weren't worth repairing. I bought a Brother 3770CDW colour laser to replace it. It has run and run with no problems.
Everyone seems to repeat that brother lasers are the way to go, but I’ve found that for home use (photos and documents) that the canon eco tank is superior to the brother is basically every way.
I have a totally featureless Brother laser printer (its most advanced feature is dual-sided printing) and it does its job perfectly fine. I've replaced the toner with a refilled cartridge and have not had any problems with it.
I'm fine with only B&W and no scanner. When I need to scan something, I grab the insanely good camera I have in my pocket all the time and use the Microsoft Lens app. Works great for scanning a few pages.
My wife is a teacher and prints a lot of stuff at home. I have an MFC-2710 that I just had to replace the drum on. First time I've had to do anything except toner. It just plugs along, sometimes going weeks-months without use. For the price (and lack of subscription hijinks), it's unbeatable.
So you can not use the eco tank for 6 months and it will just work when you need to print again? That is why I like laser printers, I don't have to worry about head cleaning or clogged nozzles.
The clogged print head is overestimated. I recently revived a Brother inkjet printer that was in storage for 4 years and after 3 or 4 head cleanings it was back in business.
I just use an online printing service to mail the prints. At like 50¢/ea mailed if I send a collection it'll take almost a thousand prints just to match the price of a decent photo printer. And even then most 4x6s printed at home still cost like 20¢-40¢/ea each anyways, so even after a thousand prints I'll still probably be ahead in the end. And then I also don't have to store a photo printer and it's supplies in my house.
So yeah, black and white laser multi-function and online printing services for me.
That’s not remotely worth the hassle of a colour inkjet. Just decide on the photos together and upload them to a proper photo print service for delivery to her home.
It sure is a hassle, but the grandma loves it so much it feels worth it. I gave up on HP in the past but I’m giving it another go now with an Epson eco tank. So far so good.
I love my brother black and white laser printer. But I print infrequently. The problem I had with inkjets for years and years was dealing with clogging if I used them infrequently. Does anyone know if the color canon eco tanks work if you only print infrequently? Or do they clog? Some cursory searching sounds like clogging is still a problem for infrequent users.
You'd think you could flush with water or some such after orint, as long as it was pure h2o (no minerals, etc) One flush after each print, but sadly, no manufacturer cares I guess.
No I think it’s actually the majority of printer users who go months without printing. The reason inkjets still exist is because these folks keep buying new ones when their old one clogs up (or the ink dries up completely) in between prints. They don’t buy lasers because inkjets hit the very lowest price point.
If everyone who did that just bought a brother B&W laser just once instead of re-upping their inkjet I bet anything the consumer market for cheap inkjet printers would disappear forever. Inkjets would only survive as a high end commercial colour technology.
I suspect that there are a lot of people with kids in school and various other use cases where color printing isn't really optional. (Though color laser isn't all that unreasonable these days.)
I think that assumption is wrong. For me I have had my printer since 2011 and have printed less than 4,000 pages. I often go months between print jobs. Sometimes I print, sometimes I scan, and sometimes I photocopy.
Basically a ream of paper a year sounds like not a lot by office printer standards but not a trivial amount either. With travel, I probably can go months without printing, but I'd still say I print "regularly."
Yeah, I only print every few months so I just use staples. Not sure why you would want a printer with such infrequent usage, you're not really saving money doing it yourself
Driving to a Staples to print a recipe or some travel information every week or two sounds incredibly painful and inefficient (admittedly we're not talking months). (But I admit I don't like to be dependent on information on my phone for everything.) A laser printer connected to my computer at home is essentially free.
I bought a brother color laser 4 years and haven’t had to change the toner yet. The toner was included with the printer. We have probably printed around 150 pages in that time span including a 6 page document today.
No complaints. It just works. 3rd party toner also works should i need it.
Also, the toner cart it comes with is only half-full*, so when you do eventually have to replace it.. you can expect the new one to last twice as long.
* they're transparent about this, was just pointing out how efficient they are.
I had a $200-ish Brother laser printer which worked great for a few years, but at some point semi-bricked itself. It no longer accepts print jobs from any source (USB, ethernet, wifi) and nothing seems to fix it, not even factory resets.
There were some posts online that pointed to reflashing firmware fixing the problem but it wasn't clear how to do that and the required utility is apparently only distributed to licensed technicians.
Be careful of some Brothers models as the ones to avoid have "Refresh" option.
"Refresh" is just a way for a centralized Brothers server to monitor your printer and your local subnet (for what ever purpose they wanted). HP/Epson/Canon have few or no models without "Refresh" option, unless you spring for a more expensive business-class printer.
I’ll add my support to the chorus of Brother laser printers. My spouse bought one about 6 years ago and the company has updated drivers and it is just super reliable. I just bought a new one for my parents this year. Couldn’t be happier.
Do people still print a lot? Those things went the way of the DVD drive for me.
For the very rare occasion I do need to print something (exclusively, of course, things that could have been digitized 20 years ago), the one in the office works fine..
What is an office? I joke obviously but I don't really have an office to go into any longer, I still need to print things out from time to time, and taking a 20 minute drive to Staples is pretty suboptimal for something I can otherwise take care of for not much money or effort at home.
I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service. Looks like the problem is living in a terrible suburbia that prevent businesses from opening close to the residents and being dependent on a car for simple services, not the printers themselves.
What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
I live in a semi-rural area among apple orchards. So, no, we don't have copy shops on every corner.
A toner cartridge lasts me years and it's obvious when it's getting somewhat low--and can generally be revitalized for another number of months by shaking it a bit.
It's really tiresome that some people seem to think there's is the only reasonable lifestyle.
> I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service.
Nearest Staples is in the nearest bigger city, a 30 minute drive.
> What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
Laser toner in home use lasts for years, and the printer will tell you percentage levels and warn about if for the last year of operation. Shaking the toner cartridge lets you print a few hundred pages more. There's plenty of time to order a replacement.
I love all technology - except printers. Don’t make me have to own a scanner, printer or (god forbid) fax machine. That’s you, governments, accountants, lawyers and insurance companies.
If you only use your printer occasionally but can't fully get rid of it, like me, I can recommend getting a pocket thermal printer. I got a Peripage A4 sized one [1] and I use it whenever I can't fake having printed something (by adding a signature in software and deepfrying the document to look scanned if the other side requires it) or when I want a printed backup (like for travel documents in case my phone died or I lost it).
It has no consumables other than the thermal paper which I believe is easy to come by from any vendor. The printed documents look like trash and obviously aren't in color, but they are readable and frankly, they'll do.
I have yet to run into a situation where this thermal printed document is not accepted by the other party in case the other party requires a printed document and I can't work around that requirement digitally.
Aaand I don't have to deal with any sort of ink or anything of the sort.
Someone downthread mentioned the idea of an open source printer and how complicated it would be for the maker community to build one. I wish people gave building an open source thermal document-sized printer a shot, because the only thing I don't like is that I need to use a Chinese app on my phone to print through this printer. I am sure it would be easy to reverse engineer, though, so I could reuse the hardware and just get a clean app, but I didn't put the effort into that.
I have (or had) a few thermal prints filed away. After about 10 years they have faded to be unreadable. Not a problem for many applications, but documents meant for the long term probably should not be thermal prints.
You're right - I should have mentioned this in my comment. I would not use a thermal printer for one's own bookkeeping. I solely use it to be able to produce dead tree slices for people who require them and won't relent without having to dedicate desk space for the printer or buy consumables for it. I personally never need to print stuff for myself so this use-case didn't even cross my mind.
Check out the Epson Eco tank. There is no cartridge with a microchip. You just fill the ink tank on the printer with bottles, so if third parties can make it for cheaper than Epson it'll work just fine.
>> I wonder if it's cheaper to just buy a new ink-jet printer instead of refilling?
Unless you are printing color, a Brother laser is the way to go. I purchased my printer 5yrs ago and purchased only a single toner replacement over the years. Best no-nonsense purchase ever.
And if you are printing colour, then a Brother ink-jet isn't a ridiculously stupid way to go either. I have a Brother DCP-J4120DW, about 7 years old. It sat unused for about 3 years, and just took a few head cleans to get it going again. Now it prints two sides every couple of weeks, whenever I do click&collect at the local supermarket. Ink was last bought more than a year ago.
I actually noticed last night that I need to replace my Brother toner cartridge. But I think it's been a few years since I just gave the current cartridge a bit of s shake :-)
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but it used to be that the cartridges that came with a printer were way underfilled. If so, you’re likely much better off buying the new cartridges.
I believe the ink cartridges that come with (some) new printers aren't close to full size, so you wouldn't be getting a full set of new ink cartridges with every purchase. I would speculate that if they went to that length, they probably calculated the break even point for the price of cartridges vs. the price of a new printer. My guess would be no, but it would be very funny if that was wrong.
Depends on amount and frequency of printing needs. Some low amount and low frequency, it probably is. When you don't fully use the cartridges it makes sense to get the cheapest option.
Actually, I am quite happy with using my budget HP all-in-one printer; private usage. I also chose to subscribe to the Instant Ink service. I took the smallest one with 10 pages p.m. This plan was, and still is for me, free of charge. So I have not payed for ink in the last 6 yrs. If I print more than 10pages, which happened once, I pay 1€ for another 10 pages. Also why I am happy with HP, is that there is quite decent support in linux (hplip). All in all at least I am happy.
One drawback is, that the printer needs to send some telemetry back to HP. But that is the service, if the ink get low, they'll send me cartridges without my interaction.
Thus, I never ran out of ink and did not face the situation of a non working printer/scanner. And I got blinded by the good working service, that I did not realize the lock-in situation I am in. I dislike vendor-lock-ins like these, but for home printing I got used to it, due to the many benefits.
Also wish someone would do something about single player computer games that you find out won't work when the Internet is down (I assume because of telemetry but I don't know for sure), until it's too late to request a refund.
If only there were ways to get superior versions of games that don't have these lousy, baked-in restrictions that break a perfectly good set of bits...
They should just better more expensive printers that function really good.
They are too busy min maxing the profits. All big and great companies today that survive and endured the years survived because they put the product first. A sign a company is about to die is when they start cutting corners to maximize profits. A good executive only gets paid when his/her ocmpany turns a profit. Of course a living expense is always given, you can't eat ramen noodles forever. Not the Japanese kind.
We want to be able to print things once in a while, but that's not enough to sustain a manufacturing business and certainly not much innovation.
Either someone comes up with a reason for people to print more and makes space in the market for innovation... or printing will just kind of suck forever.
I'd argue there's too much "innovation" in the printer space. We would have been better off if they stopped at the 2000s level, and just charged actual manufacturing costs + margin.
If the printers are so bad, can a fax machine be used (that would not have any internet and not have any auto-updating software, if they still make them that way)? Can a FOSS program on the computer to emulate the fax signals? Would that work?
I used to use Epson for this reason, but unless they've really polished their drivers I will be sticking with my HP. Yes, HP is more expensive and anti-consumer but when I want to print something it just works. My last Epson worked fine at first but soon got to the point that I needed to clean and reinstall the drivers nearly every time I wanted to print something.
if you need to reinstall the drivers, that is an os problem, not a driver problem. Driver files don't self destroy themselves.
I have an epson printer that I have used for 2 year during the pandemic, I never had to reinstall drivers both on my computer running linux and my partner's windows.
I am the only one in my immediate family with a printer so I am constantly emailed with requests to print things out. It’s actually kind of nice, and leads to impromptu family interaction when they come over to pick it up.
I have one of those ink tank printers and it has been revolutionary in the printer space. I can’t believe we went this long with cartridges
Yep, as a relatively recent (2.5 years ago) convert from HP to Brother because HP was pulling all this crap with with 3rd party toner cartridges.
The Brother has proved to be just as bad, and in some ways even worse.
Once it decides the (genuine) toner must be empty it basically refuses to print without some complex reset procedures. At least the HP would just happily print faded pages all day long.
My Brother printer once said the cartridge was empty and I refused to believe it. After browsing the internet a bit, I found a trick on an obscure forum that worked for me: you put a small piece of tape on the cartridge chip, and miraculously it's not detected as "empty" anymore. Two years after the procedure, I'm still printing on the same cartridge that was supposedly empty.
It was only a matter of time. I bought mine for this reason, and I realize that when the time comes to replace it, I will have to find another vendor, if one even exists, since Brother no longer waves that banner of openness.
> Canon, another printer manufacturer that sells all-in-one devices, was sued in 2021 for the exact same reasons as Freund and McMath's suit against HP - that Canon all-in-ones disabled non-printing functions when ink was low. That case was settled late last year for an undisclosed sum.
They should not allow settlements in cases like this. There should be a ruling and one that forces companies to not continue these bad practices.
You can’t not allow settlements. The plantiff brings the case. You can’t tell a plantiff they are unable to withdraw their case, you’d be infringing on the rights of the plantiff.
Yes it works against the creation of precedent, but the court system is meant to provide a resolution of dispute between parties. The creation of precedent is a side effect of that process, not it’s primary goal.
Edit: And just to end on a note of positivity, the courts aren’t really the place to make changes like this anyhow, which is out of most people’s hands. Instead we can lobby our Congress people etc to make laws that can end these practices (which is where most of our consumer protections have come from).
If it’s class action, then you have to not have participated.
If you didn’t, then you can bring your own suit. But in order to bring a suit you’d have to show you’ve been harmed, so you’d have to have been a customer of one of these printers.
Settlements have clauses usually that prevent the same litigation from happening again. Otherwise it’s an infinite money glitch where people keep suing the same company again and again once it’s proven they’re willing to settle.
You can always bring your own case as long as you were not a party to the settlement. Though for it to be successful you’re probably going to have to show you suffered more than the average class member.
For instance you buy a dishwasher that is faulty. There’s a class action settlement, but for you, the dishwasher ruined your apartment and the neighbors downstairs. You can opt out and sue directly even if there’s been a class settlement.
On the other hand, there are laws against false advertising and (in this case) sabotage, where the action is illegal regardless of what a plaintiff thinks. If I went around offices and sabotaged their printers, the district attorney could prosecute me regardless of what the office owners thought (assuming they wouldn't lie and claim they authorized my sabotage).
This case is exactly the same. Don't be fooled - despite HP's name on the printers, they're not HP's printers anymore - they sold them, and have no more claim to them than I.
Tangentially, and orthogonal to the issue of if settlements should be allowed, undisclosed settlements should be banned. The public has a right to know what terms are reached through the threat of and with the sanction of the legal system. Because in a democracy, the public is ultimately responsible for reforming or maintaining that system, and how can they do that when they don't know how it's being used?
First the example you mention confuses civil and criminal proceeding. Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act. District attornies bring criminal cases, not civil.
The government could bring a civil suit as plantiff, (like the attorney general’s office) but the government would have to show its been harmed. Perhaps for instance through cost of printers used in government offices, or if some specific statute was violated.
Also regarding any settlement. If it’s class action it’s public. If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.
> Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act.
That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.
> If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.
And the public has a right to transparency in the legal system. The rights are in conflict, and given the obvious risks of a black-box legal system, the right to transparency should prevail.
You have a right to my private contract with someone? Because that’s what a settlement is. What you’re saying is that all contracts need to be made public? That seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
>> Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act.
> That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.
Breaking into someone’s office and physically damaging their property as in your example is different than a machine that disables itself. The machine can’t commit criminal acts. If you’re arguing that the CEO of HP commited a criminal act, that’s a stretch, as I have no idea what criminal law you’d say he broke. On top of which criminal cases have a much higher burden of proof, so civil litigation is likely to provide a better outcome.
And anyway, again, the proper venue for this, is to create better consumer protection laws in the first place. The judicial system isn’t going to magically police companies. We as the people have to hold them accountable and that means voting, lobbying etc, just as is being done with right to repair bills. The judicial system can compensate for harm, which hopefully will happen here, but it’s only part of the solution.
> You have a right to my private contract with someone? Because that’s what a settlement is. What you’re saying is that all contracts need to be made public?
I hear what you are saying, but a contract is only private while both parties agree that the other is not in breach. The minute you want to enforce a contract its contents are made fully public.
TBH, I don't think anyone who got a life-changing amount of money from a settlement would want to jeopardise that by breaching the NDA and forcing the other party to sue, making the contract open to public inspection.
My kiddo bought a new printer in 2015 because he had to print something for high school and the toner cartridge was empty. It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge (and it was delivered for free within the a couple of hours!). I still have it, still use it once in a while, and it's still on that same starter cartridge and maybe the same ream of paper. Two more kids have finished high school using it...hardly at all.
In the past year I can remember two printer jobs, each a single page.