I was a HP customer for decades. I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend.

My mfc-l3750cdw Brother printer is a bit of a beast, but it does it's job amazingly well. It's 2x the size, weight, and price of my old HP but it's worth every penny for the peace of mind. It prints when I need it to print. It shuts down when it's not printing. It connects to wifi and doesn't try to serve me an ad while doing it. It uses ink logically. And I don't feel like I'm trying to resolve a problem that was effectively solved in 1995.

The hard fact is that printers and copiers as a market has been shrinking (outside of China) for years now [1]. It's gone from a necessity to a niche need, and even then people have kinkos / WeWork / their parents house as a backup.

HP isn't going back, just switch. Save yourself like I did.

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/co...

They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.

In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.

I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.

I've got the HL-L2300D and I recommend it to anyone that just 'needs a damn printer'.

Is that you can easily circumevent the way this particular brand tries to cheat you.

But they're not refillable, you might say. Usually they're thinwalled plastic, nothing a little knife and some duct tape can't solve.

I am big on antiwaste, but if you have ever accidentally released toner, you realize that it's a very fine powder that aerosolizes easily and stains everything it touches.

If so, that's unfortunate.

I queried him further & according to him its random because he's heard both positive & negative stories with the exact same model numbers (which makes me think it must be firmware updates).

Thankfully my (very new) laser didn't have this issue: print quality is perfect. Afraid to do any fw updates now though.

I was under the impression that newer Brother firmware versions had restrictions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I have an HL-L2360D, but my firmware is from 2015 (with no plans to upgrade), so have no idea if anything has changed recently.

I think that was the initial push RMS needed to start his open source movement, printer drivers. Firmware sould be next :)

There was a way to turn off the low toner warnings, I did it, and seem to be ok, but it makes me wonder.

EDIT: wow, it sells for $449 on amazon. I paid $115 in 2017.

Surely DRM here, and allowing closed firmware, and such, are anti-Capitalist? Don't they prevent the market from optimising?

It can have other reasons than the old products being bad (e.g. I recently bought two copies of a discontinued mosue at higher-than-MSRP prices because switching to a different model costs me in time to get used to it) but I wouldn't discount it as a major factor. A lot of products really have gotten shittier replacements.

A perpetual pattern in humanity is this refrain coming from old people. :-) You can find examples of it from centuries ago.

It does have a power button (near the wifi button) but I expect that is a soft switch of some sort.

That said, I plug peripherals like this into a power strip with individual switches for each outlet.

The printer manufacturer is 'Brother', your brother is just 'brother', except if he's also part of a fraternal order.

But what about the buffalo?

If yes, what other product categories is this applicable?

And I’m sure printers are probably a minefield of patents.

So it makes it not impossible for a new manufacturer to incorporate interface electronics with a core from an experienced manufacturer. The most difficult part might not be the engineering, but getting one of the old line print companies to do business at some reasonable cost with a smaller startup company.

A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).

The mistery is why the printers market get away with it.

Printers are basically sold at a loss.

A more apt analogy would be selling you a laundry washer/dryer for $100 but only accepting name brand detergent pods.

Or, what Keurig tried to do to coffee, though even they sell the machines above the printers margins.

Printers get away with it because unlike your car, laundry, or coffee maker, most people don't actually use the printer very often and can't be bothered to raise a public outcry over it.

There are a handful of companies that hold all the patents necessary to build a printer. If you try to build one from scratch "taking inspiration" from consumer ones you will be sued into oblivion

Indeed, that's the goal, in part, of the patent system to make technologies available in return for a time-limited monopoly.

The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.

The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Allianc...

To the gent suggesting Moca - an option generally, but no coax in the office.

I think a pi or small wireless bridge will probably be the way to go. Or I will talk my wife into letting me drill another hole in the floor.

It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.

I settled on trying one of these things or similar:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014SK2H6W

The scum even introduced drm-checking printers under same model name and number so the previous good reviews stay

I'm sure it's got enough stepper motors.

Not sure about the 'legally' part though.

Hp is the worst company for any hardware needs, all their laptops/dektops sucked so much, back in the day in my electronics shop they where the ones with the worst return/faults rate, by a big margin.

I bought a brother color laser (HL-L3290CDW). She was skeptical as it was much more expensive than the HP inkjet we had. A few weeks later, she called me randomly to thank me for getting it telling me how fantastic it was and how much easier it had made her life. First time she’s done that for any tech stuff I’ve gotten her.

I’ll never but another HP product.

I now recommend friends and family to avoid HP like the plague, including laptops (which I've also had bad experiences with). Such a shame, their stuff used to be great.

I also love my Brother laser printer, and don't hate my p-touch.

No bullets to bite. My brother laser is over 12 years old and works just like it did when I bought it. I like it so much I bought another for another part of the house. Did I mention it also groks postscript for those that might want to print from a BSD machine right OOTB?

It just works.

I'm buying a Brother laser today. I've hated this HP since I bought it, but it was a necessary evil for raising elementary school-aged children.

about a year ago, the drum gave out. it cost me $40 to replace

over those 7 years, i printed about 2000 pages: somewhat less than 1 page a day

take from what that what you will

User-hostile features are created by people.

Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).

I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.

Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")

Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")

Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.

So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design

Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights. The only reason lawyers were able to threaten that client to remain silent was because the law in his jurisdiction was on my companies' side.

As an employee, when a big decision maker makes such a decision, uses the beacon of tech as an example, and has the law on his side, what do you do? Majority of people can't just up and quit. And even if they do, odds are extraordinarily high that the next job will present the same enshittification.

So no, I disagree that is the "willing employees" causing everything to go to shit but the corporate and governing leadership that have worked together to enshrine the protection of predatory business models over consumer rights, which itself is rooted in the Greed is Good dogma that's ruled since 1980

Your reasoning illustrates the problem of "no individual snowflake is responsible for the avalanche". When you're making fat stacks it is a very convenient narrative to tell yourself and perpetuates the status-quo of suck.

We don't have to keep going along with this shit.

Having said that, I do try to fight back in whatever capacity I can by not supporting those decisions at work, and as a consumer by avoiding crap, DIYing and repairing as much as I can, and "fuck your new streaming plan, I know how to download shit" while making sure my kids also know how and why dad does it this way

It's useful to distinguish between ideas, decisions, and actions. Every idea, no matter how good/bad, far-fetched, that would make your company money has been considered. It doesn't matter which company. When a company decides what to do, they reject most ideas for a variety of context dependent reasons. Reputation is one of those reasons. Unfortunately the meaning and importance of reputation itself has been undermined by enormous reflowing of attention by screens and the remarkable credulity of people.

>Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights.

Greed is unbounded, restrained first by character, then by law. This basic assumption is part of the fabric of the US, itself based in part on the analysis Adam Smith. There has always been tension between greed and character+law, and modern fashion has weakened the meaning and importance of character to almost 0, so greed feels ascendant. But I propose that greed is the same, only the countervailing forces are weaker.

This might seem like splitting hairs. The value in the distinction is that you can let go of worrying about intrinsic human qualities like greed getting worse. If that were true, it would be unsolvable. You can instead worry about a fixable problem, like how "character" itself can rise back to prominence, and how the public's BS meters can be improved.

(Getting a big population to a reasonable standard is a lot of work, so any help appreciated.)

Cheaper: we got rid of the supplier mounting, so even counting the BOM of the new box and manifold, we saved about 5-10%

Worse performance: The extra connectors on the manifold increased the total volume the sample passed through, which gave a lower resolution (this was a chromatography system). Nothing that wouldn't pass spec, but visibly degraded compared to the original system. There's also more potential for minor leaks because with the manifold you now have an additional 12 connection points to worry about

Increase tolerances to reduce cost at scale, sometimes doesn't fit perfectly or requires a little jiggling to line up right.

But now you can't do the jiggle or try to manually quickly realign it, instead you need to call a tech to do it for X bucks and a wait time of longer than a few seconds.

They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost.

They believe businesses want OEM.

They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes.

They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product.

By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their data analysis also says on some level.

Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.

> Advocating for consumer welfare or improving the industry reputation falls completely flat. They don’t believe it’s what the market wants. Or they just bluster, or look annoyed and make sure that person’s manager fixes the meeting invites.

Everybody wants to think of themselves as a good guy which means sometimes they have to come up with insane and unconvincing excuses to justify their evils. They are bound to feel uncomfortable when someone tells them the truth by advocating for the customer. They can still take the money by screwing over other people, but it means they can't do it while pretending that it doesn't make them assholes.

When I heard the truth blurted out I don't think it was the actual truth that made them uncomfortable. What was uncomfortable was that a person had gotten into that meeting and did not know how to operate in that world. The time for long, candid talks about what the hell the industry is doing to itself was during dinner later at night--but while some of those conversations probably changed careers long term, they didn't at all change the results the following day.

LumenPnP (https://opulo.io/products/lumenpnp) is fully OSHW, and that I think really aligns the interests of the developer and users. I really dream of a completely open society!

On the other hand you have granite countertops, more security for your children’s future, a vacation, increases to your own social status, and higher quality food.

It’s pretty easy to see which option we are wired to choose, and which one takes a higher level of personal integrity and effort.

That's assuming a lot right here. I know way too many people who flourish in being bad (and will you tell so explicitly)

this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!

As an example that isn't too far from third-party ink cartridges, as a user I'd like app store owners to apply quality control measures to the contents of the app store so it doesn't contain malware. Sure, you could argue that users aren't dumb and can decide which apps to install on their own, but in practice the amount of knowledge and time needed to decide whether an app is malware is incredibly high, up to disassembling and analyzing the code.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: I wouldn't actually like third-party ink cartridges to be blocked. But the limited resources of the customer are a problem that should be recognized.

We don't need an AMA, we already know the answer. Money.

The company exists to make money. The fact that it also creates printers is a side effect, not its primary purpose.

Once you look at it in this way, there's nothing confusing about user hostile features. They exist to further the primary purpose of the company, to make money. That's all there is to it, there's no mystery. It's sad and hard to accept, but it's not hard to understand.

PC hardware is still very much an industry of "I'll ask the enthusiast kid down the street what to buy"-- the sort of business where souring a small number of power users can blow back with a lot of lost mainstream consumer sales.

Do they assume that the "enthusiast kid down the street" is already a lost cause and figure he's never even going to buy a HP printer, let alone express his dismay about it to all his friends?

Regular people don’t want to research a printer; they want printed pages. If that means buying a $100+ OEM cartridge every so often, that’s what it costs and they don’t think much more about it.

I don't think that applies to HP, and suspect that most of their customer base are big businesses who prefer business type reasons for their purchasing decisions

At one point, this whole idea made me furious but now it just feels like the water around us. Unfortunate, to say the least.

And what is astounding is that we, as a society, have accepted this backwards rationale.

The only reason we should allow companies to exist is to serve the societal interests, and making the money should be the side effect.

The phrasing of your statement is quite illustrative of the problem, I think. We have had it drilled into our heads that society should serve the corporation, which exists only for profit, and that this is natural and good.

Which is bullshit. Society is what permits an entity like a corporation to exist in the first place, and we do it because it is (theoretically) in our interest to do so. When it ceases to serve this function it has become a cancer and should be excised from society, but since it is such an effective cancer it has convinced us that we exist for it and not the other way around.

I think we should "excise" cancers that are callous about sweeping societal and economic effects based on their personal whims.

We put people in prison because we don't like them selling drugs. If that makes sense, so does this.

Besides, those people can (theoretically) get other jobs. And if we're really worried about it, then 'excise' in this case can just mean nationalizing the company.

To say that we should continue to employ people to make the world worse for the sake of economy is just the broken window fallacy.

The thing is, this didn't used to be the case. This is a relatively recent occurrence, and absolutely not the natural order of things.

Once upon a time (yes, this is very long ago), charters were granted to corporations for specific purposes, and if you didn't propose a useful company, you wouldn't be allowed to incorporate.

Sure, there have always been people with skewed incentives and decision making processes, but on the whole, until the past few decades, the basic idea of a company was always "create a product or provide a service; if you do it well, you will profit."

In more recent time, as you say, for far too many, that has turned around into "make as much money as possible; creating a product or providing a service is a necessary evil to that end, and we must trim it to the bone to extract every last cent of profit."

This obviously is antithetical to a healthy, functioning society and economy. It incentivizes all sorts of ultimately destructive behaviors, far beyond the stuff described in the article.

Because the simple fact of the matter is that if people did care, what you're describing is exactly what would happen. HP (or someone else) would do something like this, a competitor would start buying ads talking about their open source ink cartridges and HP would start losing market share.

BTW whenever these "how are you supposed to" things are pointed out, people are quick to say "just use ..." with several conflicting recommendations, which actually doesn't counter but support the point that finding out isn't easy.

I find this is why I am increasingly outsourcing my purchasing decisions to Costco. It may not be the best option, but I typically only have to pick from ~3 models, and it was good enough for them to stock it on the shelves. More skin in the game than just a digital listing.

In the UK here I remember it being a question on the panel quiz show QI, about being the most expensive liquid on earth.

Companies exist only for themselves and for making money, and not for serving the people or making the communities they operate in better. They will happily hurt people and destroy the environment to get even just a little bit more wealth.

We grant them the privilege of existing as legal entities though, so maybe we should start demanding they start doing more for us in order to keep or attain that privilege.

I don't know what the actual numbers are, but if I had to guess I'd say Brother has been stealing market share from HP for a while now, because their products are better. It's one of the top comments practically every time there's a thread like this.

I worked for a large Telco and wrote and maintained the software and system(s) that calculated internet usage, and charged overages monthly. (The home internet plans sold by this telco that service a massive landmass all had hard usage caps. There is no competition).

I saw many, many monthly internet overage bills that were $5k+. Hundreds a month that were $1k+. That system alone made many millions in profit per year.

Why did I do it? It was my job, I needed to pay rent and buy food.

Longer term, I decided to "stay on the inside" because I genuinely thought I could improve things. Over the years I had meetings with basically all the VPs and even the CEO, and sent many a passionate email on behalf of customers that many told me were "Career Limiting Moves".

I'm not there anymore, and it's many years later, but that Telco does now offer unlimited internet plans (introduced very recently). I was the first at the company to run the numbers on what it would look like and start to push for it at all levels, so I like to think I did actually make things better.

FWIW, there was one guy in my department who refused to work on/with that usage system, and made it clear that from a moral standpoint he would quit if they forced him to.

(excluding Hughesnet... which was catastrophically bad)

The inital strategy by all companies was to point out that original ink is better in some way, then most of them tried some sorts of firmware based restrictions. HP actually tried a pretty interesting approach with their ink subscription model. They have a decent price/page with that and you don't ever have to worry about running out of ink because you automatically get a replacement cartridge if you subscribe for x$/month. The downside is that the number of pages that you are "allowed" to print each month is limited which seems pretty ridiculous at first glance for a tech person. However, if you think about "normal users" I think they actually found a good way to force them back to their ink by selling "peace of mind".

So basically, while I completely disagree with the approach because I want to use a device I buy any way I please I think HP is actually making the right business call here. The average customer cares about having an ok price/page and having a printer that always prints when they need it. I think HP is targeting that with their subscription model and also making cash flows a bit more reliable.

By and large I expect most workers know and dislike that, but ultimately it's a small compromise for them personally - in most cases they may not even use the product they work on. The best they can do usually is object to it, but if people want it done then it'll be done; after all, that's what you're getting paid for.

I’m not really in a a financial position to just say fuck it and leave at a moments notice, and it feels a bit different when you’re making Adobe for example pay extra money.

I think we can all imagine the actual reason people in charge do it though: money

The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be (the PM since moved off to another team to continue innovating). This made me angry and sad, but most of my peers didn't care at all, and some even expressed interest to "work on the high impact feature" to get a promo for themselves as well :(

Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.

I'd say that's 99% of the tech workers' mentality. Especially if they need to stay employed to stay in the country, better to just lick the boot than give any impressions of opposition.

These questions should be posed to executives at shareholder meetings.

not cogs in the machine. When was an evil feature ever stopped by rank and file workers?

You'd be surprised how easy is to change your mind when it's your own work or company, yet still be outraged at others when they do it. It's very common.

> what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.

The people who make the decision to implement these kinds of features are bad people. Full stop. They want to punish people, and believe a technological solution provides a fool-proof way to punish the people around them. It's about control, and spreading hurt around. It's about being able to exert control on others, without them having the ability to push back. It is evil, and I hate it.

I have implemented user-hostile features in the past because it was my job at the time, and I would be fired if I didn't.

When I've had to create this sort of anti-feature, I do a shitty job on purpose. It barely works. There are workarounds that defeat the punitive nature of the horrible thing I've had to create. It'll work on paper, but be shit in production. In every case I've had to do this, the people who ask for the anti-features are not capable of testing that they work right. They gleefully take their new pain toy and go off to hurt people with it. I never hear from them again. Then I start updating my resume and begin to look for a new job.

Could you imagine if the defense industry adopted this? Manufacturer loses follow-on contract, soon the entire inventory "Sorry, this missile will only interface with genuine <contract loser> parts"

Companies exist to make a profit. I'm sure some extra returns are caused by 3rd party laser and ink cartridges. I've personally seen a 3rd party toner cart have some kind of internal failure and strip the drive gear in the printer.

Just like the EU is requiring USB-c to charge a phone, governments should consider requiring a standard ink and toner cartridge. It would reduce inventories, increase volumes, amortize R&D over a greater number of printers, and increase competition for the standard cartridge. The standards committee (like the USB committee) could set the standards, have branding/labeling for particular features, and talk with industry about desirable features for the next generation.

I just hope they avoid doing something insanely stupid like making dozens of USB-c cables, visually identical, but incompatible.

I got paid all of $50k to be a financial analyst there. I was young and straight of out school with a shit job economy and needed to pay rent and buy food. I also took comfort in working there for a year and a half doing virtually zero work.

- In 2005, they had one printer that refused to print if the cartridge was past a certain date, even if full. Several also underestimated the volume of ink in cartridges and told you it was empty when not.

- In 2007, HP refused to honor hardware warranty if you install any other OS on their laptop.

- in 2010, HP refused to provide drivers for the new windows Vista for its old ScanJet scanners (linux worked fine though).

- in 2020 they hardcoded the path to the EFI of their laptop to be windows only.

That's just the examples I could easily google, I remember that HP was having one scandal every 6 months in 2000, and we didn't have twitter back then.

So if a brand has been very publicly misbehaving for 2 decades, how does it still have customers?

Well, Facebook has still a billion users. Microsoft is now considered the father of unicorns and rainbows. Oracle is still making banks, one of my biggest client just migrated to it.

So the so-called cancel culture seems very superficial to me: lots of noise, but very actual consumer behavioral change. The brands can get away with anything and thrive. Maybe they'll get a little bit of heat for a few months on social media, so what?

But the bottom line is: if you are a big company, just do whatever makes you money. You don't need reputation.

What are they smoking

There’s not many companies that can provide all the mundane business management tools for a huge variety of business like an ATM manufacturer, an oil and gas company, a massive hotel chain, or a financial services company. The tech is not sexy by any means but it can run businesses from top to bottom.

At this point, you have a completely custom stack that could have been developed entirely for half the price, that would run faster, without licensing cost. Money you could invest in hiring a company that will actually provide you support instead sending you interns they bill as experts.

This isn’t true for a majority of companies outside of FAANG otherwise the majority of companies would dump Oracle and SAP. A lot of executives hate them with passion and would love to dump Oracles horrible licensing models. They pay for CYA and the ability to point a finger at the vendor instead of themselves.

I went though a merger between two Fortune 500 financial services companies. One had dumped vendors 5 years prior and they were foaming at the mouth to get off all of their homegrown apps. The reality is a lot of companies are going to off shore this type of development and support to SE Asia for bottom dollar body shops.

The consultant thing is absolutely true for enterprise software, not just ERPs. I’ve seen it with Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, ERP/Oracle. Pretty much anything KPMG or Accenture are building.

However if you get top tier consultant lift companies or professionally services from the SAAS vendor it is much less likely to be greenhorn college grads.

That's a very good point. Nobody every been fired to buy IBM is still a stong motto as ever, except for the IBM part.

So you can't install Linux at all on HPs post-2020?

cp /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi 1>/dev/null 2>&1

:D

Myself I run Samsung (HP) CLP-365W for over 10 years with cracked firmware for endless refills. The hardware itself is very good, just had to rotate feeder pull rubber to fix paper problem, but that is all.

That said, a really interesting startup would be an open source inkjet printer. (All the necessary patents have expired ones that are current revolve mostly around cartridges or cleaning systems). I suspect it is a kind of niche market as my kids tell me that "nobody prints things, we have it on our phone!" which I kind of understand, but point out you don't need multiple monitors to do code development if you have listing printed out :-).

Whenever I run into an especially intractable bug, one of the first techniques I attempt to use to solve it is to print out all the relevant source code and grab a conference room where I can lay it all out on the table.

1. be using open source drivers (e.g., one of the CUPS PCL drivers, preferably on Linux or BSD) on all possible clients;

2. isolate the printer from direct network access (e.g., don't connect printer's Ethernet or WiFi, and instead run CUPS on a RasPi, which talks to the printer only via USB); and

3. consider limiting which devices can access your print server (i.e., via routing VLANs and/or authentication/authorization).

This isn't perfect:

* there are still ways that the printer can get firmware changes against your wishes;

* still ways that it can leak information to HP;

* still ways it's vulnerable to attacks by others; and

* might be awkward to explain when a visitor to your home/office needs to print something.

But I decided the headache of isolating the HP printer a bit (especially from HP), was less than the likely headache of trusting HP more.

(Which is kinda sad, since the company previously known as HP was great.)

CUPS PCL drivers for these devices are nonexistent. You're at this point forced to use HP's windows software which *emulates a Parallel port* in at least one case.

My gosh, HP what happened? You used to make great test equipment. Then great calculators. Then great printers. Now, what? What do you do? Oh, I forgot, you give the customer a printer and hold them hostage. I guess it is the new business model.

I bought it with my own money from my newspaper delivery job when in high school, along with a legitimate copy of Pagestream. The quality and value / advantage I got out of this for my school and later university work was remarkable, just about no-one else (at my age) had anything resembling the same setup.

Fond memories; sad to see this nosedive into DRM hell.

It probably wouldn't have worked on other continents due to different voltage and frequency. You'd need a huge and expensive adapter (laser printers use a LOT of power when printing). Back in the 90s, they didn't have adapters that could convert frequency.

Generally, it's best to leave high-power appliances (or sell on Ebay) when you move between continents and buy new stuff at your new home.

My Rotel system from 1997 is humming along just fine to this date. :)

Aus voltages are a bit up and down; it's actually around 243v at my place, according to my UPSes. I use an APC Voltage regulator in front of my main one.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...

They make decent laptops, but with incredibly sharp, non-rounded edges, which have actually cut* some user's palms.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/iioylp/just_...

edit:

* Yes I exaggerate here, but it is annoyingly sharp

My comment is currently I believe the top comment there, talking about how these things have a designed-to-fail Ink Waste Tank or Ink Waste Pad, and an internal Ink Counter that locks up the printer after a certain amount of printing. I'm not 100% absolutely certain, but I've ran into numerous semi-trustworthy reports & videos while searching for printers. (Amid many glowing reviews of people who've had theirs for 1 week to a couple of months.)

I seriously lusted after the EcoTank L1800 for a while, after @leashless posted about them being a super interesting "10x" product back in 2015 then 2018. But by then they were already only available in a couple secondary markets (ex: Brazil). For a while though they had been sold widely. It feels quite likely to me that Epson knew they built a deliberately designed-to-fail product, sold it for a bit, realized they were going to get in trouble, sold it only to a couple assorted countries, didn't change the product, & now is trying again. https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609 https://twitter.com/leashless/status/630192409293508609

(The cheap Moonman M2 fountain pens leashless linked were/are indeed pretty sweet though.)

Then buy one with a replaceable pad like the Epson 5150. The replacement costs....drum roll ... $10.

My last color laser had a non serviceable fuser rated for 20,000 pages and that's what I got out of it.

I replaced it with a color ecotank and it's just a better product. Look up the price of my ink vs the price of comparible color toner and there is simply no comparison. Even color toner generics, which are not perfect, are more expensive.

It's fine to have scepticism over ink printers, or any printers. But it's not all rainbows and sunshine with other options either (other than a basic black laser I guess)

It would make sense for Ecotank users to reply to the post, given the cost savings it offers - whilst still retaining overall good print quality (according to the above review).

I'm presently on a Brother HL-L2375DW (BW laser) myself for my occasional use; love it.

Who remembers the Epson chip resetters? Those were glorified EEPROM writers and the chips on cartridges back then were simple EEPROMs. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054177 )

Now, I believe there's nontrivial crypto involved; but just like other attempts at locking them out, expect the aftermarket to already be hard at work cracking this. It's probably legal to do so, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....

I've had and installed only 5 home printers over my entire life (excluding professional printers at works)

One was an already refurbished dinosaur from Xerox. 1 was a canon (would have to look for the model). The other 3 are HP LaserJet 100 Color MFP M175nw.

All 5 have lasted over 10 years, the MFPs being the youngest at 12 years. That Xerox one was still going with after 20, it was just slow. And 1 of the HPs may be replaced for that reason, as apparently waiting 20s for a page is now too long for my family members, which I can't fathom for a single page of paper once in a while.

Not a single technical issue with any of these.

Not a huge test sample, but that makes me wonder:

1/ What do you people do with their printers?

During the most active period, I printed about 2000 pages / year, which was already too much, and was mostly because of the kids when they were younger and when someone I knew had to deal with a lot of paperwork with an administration, and maybe one year when finishing my studies where I printed a crap load of reports.

2/ What's the failure rate on these things??

3/ When did we decide that "over a decade" is an achievement to be noteworthy for any piece of equipment worth a decent amount of money?

EDIT: My only gripe was the disappearance of ChromePrint. That bugged me quite a bit. Unrelated to the printers, though. Those MFPs work fine with HP Print, default print drivers, CUPS, etc... on Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS.

It's a good tip, though. But with mobile phones now, people tend to start printing already on their way to the room and then stare at the printer and wonder if it's OFF, starting up, pending, or if for some reason it decided whatever PDF they were printing was a bit too annoying to print (I do have occasional buffering issues with some of these printers, as I suspect their available memory/disk storage isn't great).

I mostly use it to print labels for sales from my eBay store.

Does the EU have defenses against this kind of behavior? I feel like monopolistic is the wrong word. Creating captive markets?

The best way to regulate it is for people to stop buying HP printers. I haven't bought one for about 20 years.

>I haven't bought one for about 20 years.

Just the fact that you are commenting on HN shows that you aren't the average consumer when it comes to electronics. People tend to overestimate the others' knowledge on topics they themselves are familiar with. A considerable chunk of printer "consumers" don't even know the difference between an inkjet and a laser printer. We can blame them all we want because they aren't "doing their research before spending money", but we don't even know what we are wasting our money on, especially with thing we aren't that knowledgeable about. Everyone values their time differently, so they may or may not research something before purchase depending on what they are buying.

In short, no regulation means leaving sheep alone with wolves.

There is no such thing as an unregulated market. The only meaningful difference is between a free market--a market that is regulated solely by the voluntary choices of market participants--and a non-free market--which is at least to some degree also regulated by rules dictated and enforced by entities who are not market participants (the most common such entities, of course, being governments). Both types of markets are regulated; they're just regulated by different mechanisms.

> will always promote marketing over quality

No, a market in which consumers are either unable to perceive quality, or are unwilling to take the time to do so (possibly for rational reasons such as the lack of time or the product being so cheap that it's not worth the effort) will always promote marketing over quality.

But that doesn't mean this is a "problem" that either needs to be or can be fixed by outside regulation. It can't be fixed by outside regulation because outside regulation makes the problem worse, not better; it makes consumers think their interests are being protected, when in fact regulatory capture means all that is really happening is that the biggest players are getting further entrenched because the cost of regulatory compliance shuts out potential competitors.

It doesn't need to be fixed because consumers have the choice of what to buy or not to buy, and if they either can't or won't (again, possibly for rational reasons) take the time to choose based on quality, either they don't buy at all or they choose based on something else, and take the consequences. That's what not taking the time to perceive quality means: you choose to be at the mercy of whatever marketing or other information you do use to determine what to buy (or whether to buy), however unreliable it is.

> no regulation

More precisely, absence of outside regulation from entities like governments that are not market participants. See above.

> means leaving sheep alone with wolves

No, it means consumers make the choice of whether or not to be sheep, and take the consequences. Which is the only way to actually regulate a market and have the regulation actually improve anything. The wolves can't prey on consumers who refuse to be sheep, and that choice is up to the consumer.

Something something semantics... something something I'm not a native English speaker something something... I will use the correct definitions from now on though, so thanks for correcting.

>No, a market in which consumers are either unable to perceive quality, or are unwilling to take the time to do so (possibly for rational reasons such as the lack of time or the product being so cheap that it's not worth the effort) will always promote marketing over quality.

And as I said, ideally this wouldn't be the case. However, we are living in the real world where every statement in this sentence is unfortunately the case.

>all that is really happening is that the biggest players are getting further entrenched because the cost of regulatory compliance shuts out potential competitors.

While this may be true with some regulations, in this specific example it is the exact opposite. A fresh company with little capital won't be able to afford a razor and blades model the same way a giant company like HP can. An outside regulation that protects the consumers' interests will serve to make the playing field more even, giving the new company higher chances of actually succeeding. It reduces the risk of startups, because with correct rules higher quality/cost ratio guarantees higher success.

>it means consumers make the choice of whether or not to be sheep, and take the consequences

That only works if consumers actually know what the consequences are. As I said, there are probably countless purchasing decisions that you and I make that we don't even know are dumb. Everyone thinks they know the best for themselves until they find out their knowledge is negligible compared to what they don't know.

Voting with your wallet doesn't work when the default for "not voting" is "I agree" and people don't care about voting.

All of the achievements of humanity comes from collaborative effort, whether it be cumulative knowledge, joining of powers or protecting each-other's interests. Total individuality would only end up with the absolute domination of first-movers: people who managed to leave individuality behind and work as a group. The best way we currently have to avoid this is to have a democratic, all inclusive government that decides what rules we should set and follow.

I absolutely agree. So the next question is, which way of organizing collaborative efforts of humans has worked better (not perfectly, just better), if we look at human history? Free markets, or governments? When I look at human history, I see free markets doing better--not because free markets are great, but because governments suck even worse.

> The best way we currently have to avoid this is to have a democratic, all inclusive government that decides what rules we should set and follow.

Sorry, but this is a myth. There is no such thing as "a democratic, all inclusive government". Government is not magic. It's some human beings being given permission to exercise arbitrary power over other human beings. Human beings cannot be trusted with that kind of power. Various ways have been tried to limit the power of governments, such as the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. The invariable result is that the people in power simply find ways around the limitations. The only way to stop human beings from abusing power is to stop giving them the permission to exercise it in the first place.

I understand that, realistically, no such thing will happen any time soon. But accepting at least some government regulation because we can't avoid it because the world is imperfect and we're not going to convince everyone to implement and learn to live with full-on libertarianism tomorrow, is way, way different from thinking of government regulation as the go-to tool of first resort for solving any problem. It's not. It's the worst tool for solving problems.

> Total individuality

This is also a myth. Nobody can totally support themselves with just their individual efforts. Well, perhaps there are a few edge cases living totally off the grid in a forest somewhere, but they're not going to be posting here and they're not going to be impinging on other people's lives anyway so we can ignore them.

The people who abuse power do not do it by "total individuality". They do it by co-opting, through corrupt institutions, huge numbers of other people to further their abuses. Those institutions did not get the power they have, which the people then abuse, through a free market. They got it through governments (in many cases the institutions are governments, or governmental institutions). In an actual free market, the kinds of abuses of power we routinely see in government-run societies could not exist, because the institutions and the implied permission of power that comes with them would not exist. People who want to do something collectively in a free market have to convince other people to help them by trading things of actual value. That's how a free market works: if you don't have something worth trading, people simply ignore you. You don't have the option of saying, hey, I'm in a position of power, you have to do what I say. And so people are forced to stop exercising their "total individuality" and actually cooperate with others.

And to also outlaw those practices.

Some things just shouldn't be left to market forces.

No things should be left to government regulators. They make things worse, not better. Regulatory capture is a thing. I'm sure HP would love it if government regulation entered this arena; sure, they might have to pay some costs of compliance, but their competitors, who don't have as deep pockets as they do, will be hurt worse than they are--meaning their market position will improve.

I really can't understand this point of view. If one supports the existence of any law, including things making murder illegal, this view becomes inconsistent. Why is outside regulation of our daily lives okay but market isn't? If one thinks there should be no laws, no governments and we should live in complete anarchy, you are still wrong, but at least they are consistent.

Healthy markets exist, in part, because of regulatory action, not in spite of it.

Most of the government consists of unelected bureaucrats who cannot even be fired by the elected officials.

> With a complete monopoly in a totally free market with no regulation, what can you do?

Start your own competing firm. That sounds hard, sure, but try starting your own government and see how that works for you!

> Vote with your wallet even if it means you die from starvation?

The only food monopolies in history were run by governments, and they led to a lot of starvation.

The last time I checked, this was roughly the same price as buying ink refills.

Sadly, it is terrible for the environment, and probably wouldn’t correct their bad behavior.

Except that there is always a new batch of people who don't know any better:

* https://xkcd.com/1053/

So companies can survive on that ignorance.

Maybe they already are in a death-spiral, and that's why they're becoming more cunty about the ink...

Next, HP should pay influencers to write/record rave reviews about their printers, so if someone googles what printer to buy they think HP is good.

The Sherman Antitrust Act would prohibit printer manufacturers from engaging in anti-competitive practices such as locking out third-party printer cartridges. Under the law, monopolistic or anti-competitive practices are illegal and may be subject to government enforcement.

To quote the sherman act "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal" (Shermanj Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 1).

Sherman anti trust act: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

I'm on an old Epson Artisan cartridge based printer currently for colour photos, but want to replace it as they are just too painful and expensive. So meanwhile I have a cheap Brother laser printer for my black and white printing, which TBH is great for the occasional use. It's on an ultra low power sleep mode most of the time, and comes to life when it needs to.

Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software?

Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing.

HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+.

Brother offering basically zero support.

Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?

Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture.

Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture.

The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers.

Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.

There's very little difference in how I use a printer today versus 10, 20 years ago, so why can't they just sell me the same basic printer?

I'm sure there's someone on the "edge" of the printer space-- maybe a firm that formerly offered laser printers but moved out of the home market (does Okidata still sell those LED-based printers?) where you could probably buy the rights to a proven design and firmware, maybe even the tooling itself, for basically scrap cost. Polish it up a little- fix the known issues on a 20-year-old design-- and restart the line with an advertised guarantee of long-term availability.

If the main cost is design, then limit the design. Don't come out with a new model every year. Don't have a dozen products. Sell a color laser printer with USB-C and wifi, that's it. Have a black and white SKU if needed. What other major innovations in printer technology do we need?

I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.

Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board.

The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home).

So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.

Worth checking out.

https://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php