HP tech here. Stay FAR away from any of their consumer-grade devices. They're cheap, poorly built, and difficult for even HP techs to work on. Save your money and get something with better build quality.
Their business-class devices are okay, because most of those actually have decent build quality and are easily repaired. But stay away from their cheap devices, especially their printers (obviously).
We are also an HP/HPE shop.
Like you said. Not the cheap shit. And definitely not the cheap printer shit!
ProDesk or EliteDesk (maybe even used?)
Thanks for this, good to know. I’ve had nothing but problems with my HP and had many a day of wanting to schwing it out the window.
Any particular brand out there that’s still known for decent build quality? I feel wary of them all now.
Funny. I was about to mention my brother laser toner printer. Have two. They are black and white but tanks
My Brother "network" laser printer is so old, it has no WiFi or Bluetooth, just an ethernet jack and a USB 1.0 port. Seriously. 1.0. It's that old. I've only had to change the toner cartridge one time because I don't print a ton, but it's a workhorse.
Get an older version of the HP printers if you like that brand. I've had Officejets 6900 and 7500 and 8500 series. Cartridges still widely available and the printers accept mortification for external tanks. I only have the 7500 now in the wide format and it's still going strong. Easy to maintain too. I do have a laser printer as well which I only use for b/w printing. Have had experience with fixing other brands in the past and by far the Brother is the most user friendly I guess. Epsons are okay and easy to find parts for.
I saw some Epson or Canon printers with ink tanks.
If I buy any printer for a >30-40% humidity environment it will be one of those.
If it's mostly dry it will be a toner/laser based.
I have a canon with an ink tank. I love it, but it's only about 4 months old. I'll actually curious how I feel about it in a decade from now.
Assuming the ink won't dry out and the driver will not dematerialize or break something I think very good.
I read somewhere that you should not mix inks so I wish you good luck with the vendor of your ink.
Except their printers are good awful to get hold of without the connect X here and there stuff.
Give my my god damn driver without all the other shit to connect via USB to my god damn scanner!
I have two oki mc363's (office and home).
Cost about $600, 6 years ago. Weighs about 30kg, must have a cast iron chassis or something.
Rock solid, great printer scanner in every way. Wouldn't change a thing.
My parents have an okidata microline 82 that still prints. One of the dots hits a little light these days.
They also have a 1994 HP LaserJet 4 plus that is still chugging along. Back from when HP made decent printers.
On the consumer-side devices, are there any brands (specially on repairability) that you would recommend?
That’s funny. When I did sales (oh god like nearly 20 years ago) Lexmark was shit tier.
Acer too, and now look at them. hugs Predator monitor
The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.
Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.
I will never buy any HP product, just out of principle. Every single of their printers I've ever owned had broken down in elaborate ways no one understands, and what only makes it worse, is that the ink costs more than the actual hardware. Obviously it's because they're using only the most premium and exotic materials to make it.
What really nailed the coffin for the final time was my printer refusing to accept the black cartridge, claiming it was not a legitimate one, so it locked down the whole printer into some sort of self-repair loop that it never exited
I have never bought a new, consumer HP printer. Ancient business HP printers though, I have on several occasions. Those are pretty good actually, they work when you need them to, (third party) toners are plentiful, and they're cheap. Much better value than a new one.
You don't fuck with enterprise consumers. They will drop bank on anything that will just consistently work. Regular people don't do that, so you gotta find a new way to rob them
Swore off HP many years ago when my laptop began overheating in minutes. Opened it up, looked at the video card heatsink and duct and saw LIGHT in between. Ended up bending the duct ever so slightly and ground a pre1983 penny down to act as a heatsink and fill the gap. Yeah, a penny filled the gap. This after I owned a 1990s desktop where they cooled the processor by using a case fan and plastic ducts to remove the heat. No heatsink whatsoever. They will cut every corner they can.
I just scanned my signature and stamp it as a Jpg, then flatten the PDF and save as a new file. "I printed, signed, and scanned it again, sure..."
The first issue was buying a cheap printer.
The second issue was buying cheap HP printer.
Buy brother or do your research. If it says on some page "No USB only wireless" just don't buy it ffs!
Brother is no longer allowing 3rd party ink and toner too so do your research there as well.
Or buy a printer that uses refillable ink, such as Epson Ecotank. No cartridges - no DRM.
I've had a couple of the Epson Ecotank printers crap WiFi cards, all of a sudden WiFi just stops working and no amount of resets resolves it.
Yes and no.
Allowed? Probably no 1st party vendor allows/wants it.
Can do? Yeah sure.
Will I get warranty for violating some kind of EULA (or some other equivalent) for using 3rd Party? Probably not.
As an IT helpdesk we usually just tell them to get 1st party as the toner is not that expensive for that volume and just eat it. At least they have warranty for the 11k of printed papers.
I've seen reviews saying that a firmware update stopped 3rd party ink/toner from working. Both myself and my mom have Brother printers that we love and have used for years. It's disappointing and they're great printers but I don't want to pay a premium on toner/ink just because. But yeah, as @cerberus_cat said, refillable ink is good too if you need an ink jet printer but I don't know why anyone would want ink over laser.
Inkjet might be cheaper to buy the device but you'll pay out the ass for ink. Toner just lasts so much longer. I haven't bought toner since 2019.
Bought a laser printer in early 2020 and am still on my first toner cartridge lol
Ok am I taking crazy pills? I bought into the laser printer hype from reddit and got a Brother. And it's a good printer and all, but my toner runs out just as often as the inkjet did! And I don't print a lot, like maybe a page per week on average. Am I doing something wrong?
So the cartridge that came with my laser lasted a month of heavy printing and the off brand replacement is still going with daily use after a year or more.
I guess I'm not understanding all the comments saying "why is anyone buying printers anymore? What do you need to print at home? Just buy a Brother or don't buy one at all."
Do you really need to understand why someone wants or needs a printer? Do people need to be explaining their purchases so we can all decide if they deserve to get scammed by HP or not? It doesn't matter why they bought it, whether it's a want or a need, whether it's the "right" brand, etc. They still don't deserve to get scammed out of their money by some bullshit company that can brick their device whenever they feel like. If you pay for something, it should belong to you. Period.
Best trick in the book is to download the Windows 7 version of the drivers or software package as it is all prior to this cloud BS. Install that in your windows 10 or 11 and it will all work as intended.
I guess that's probably true unfortunately. But official linux hp drivers are less annoying than their windows counterparts at least
Fucking brilliant idea! I'll go ahead and nuke my system with all of my documents, games, videos, and music and install Linux just so I can print out the tickets for a local museum that doesn't have an app! GENIUS! FUCKING GENIUS!
🤨
I'm not saying that you should do that as a solution to this one specific problem. I'm just pointing out there is a better way.
Best trick then it to trash it and buy a new printer. Done keep on sending them money for ink.
I just learned how to manually install PCL5 from the "Professionals ONLY!" Section of their driver download page.
Terrible printer. Among the worst purchases I've ever made. Stunningly anti-customer design choices. I will never, ever buy another HP anything.
HP is doomed, sadly. All our parents who slaved and sweated blood to build their wonderful tech, wasted, their lives pointlessly ruined. All thanks to the horrible directors and management of HP. If you know anybody who works for HP today, make sure to victimise, ostracise, belittle, denigrade and castigate and bully their entire families into submission. No mercy for these fuckers and destroyers of all that is decent.
As if any other conglomerate is any better. Just don't buy the cheap bs and do your research before buying shit... >_>
Can someone explain why there's a cloud printing service involved here at all? We've been able to print over WiFi for a decade now.
Data collection is the current in trend for most tech companies. They cant scrape any data if you don't download their spyware app on your phone or use their cloud servers. Any little scrap of data they can gather from you they will sell to anyone and everyone.
Companies been after the new gold for ages. Any excuse to mine your data.
That way they can lock you in making it difficult to transition. All those icloud users locked into the Apple ecosystem. They make it easy and then you are stuck.
Be careful with your data.
I understand that's the reason why they're doing it - but what excuse can they give? I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the things consumers will endure - just look at literally everything apple does.
but what excuse can they give?
It's "the cloud", so it's high tech, advanced, and good for you!
It's sold as convenience same as every other "private data siphoning" and "insert yourself in as an intermediary" make-money-from-adding-no-value scam out there.
This isn't just in Tech: for example banks have been trying for almost 2 decades to insert themselves into the last group of economic transactions out there which weren't going through them - cash transactions - in order to get a cut of it and latelly they finally seem to be winning with touch-to-pay technology that's replacing little cash playments like, say, buy the newspaper.
Consider that there really isn't much more space in consumer society anymore to sell more things unless you trully innovate (proper breaktrough stuff, not the "some thing done for ages but now from a smartphone and over a network" of the last decade) and innovation is risky so well established players aren't going to do it (and even the supposed "innovators" in the Tech Startup world have mostly been copying each other of late and the only trully innovative stuff - last gen AI - isn't actually something that causes more sales), so instead what you have is more monetising of what hasn't been monetised yet (such as private information) and large companies leveraging their dominant position in one area to insert themselves as intermediaries in some other area (the touch to pay example from the banks but also quite possibly the point of Google's DRM-for-the-web).
Because they want you to subscribe to their ink cartridge auto-ship service that will send you a new one and charge your credit card any time one is empty, clogged, or just because they feel like it.
The only use I've found for cloud printing is how it would identify all the printers on the uni network and allow me to print on them with no hassle compared to manually adding the printer with the correct driver and IP.
My use case is for printing things at home while I am not at home.
I haven't really had a need to do it since I've been out of school but I used my all in one printer a lot while I was in school. I don't print at home anymore because the ink/nozzles are all fucky, but I do plan on replacing it because it's annoying having to go to the library for that
My own printing is so rare that the most cost effective option is to just go to Staples the rare times I do need to print something. I don't think I've spent more than $5 in the last few years.
If only life were that simple. Whose laptops am I going to buy?
Dell: Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x (including the predatory behaviour of embedding QR codes to these in the bios to be shown in error states)
Apple: ...
Lenovo: History of installing literal spyware
Microsoft: Bad products
Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x
You know you can just pop in a Crucial MX500, right?
And I did. The issue is they put in a QR code for their own $800 500 GB SSD in the bios error message for when your SSD breaks.
My non-technical friend had no idea it's an obscene price and may have bought it just to get his laptop working.
Symbols on sticker from top to bottom:
Sounds more like "This printer has WiFi, no need for USB, peel here otherwise".
But still stay away from HP consumer shit, I wouldn't even let it connect over USB.
I had a customer come in on Friday because they couldn't get their brand new printer to work. When I pulled the sticker off a new hp hater was born.
I mean the sticker has a peel up icon on the corner. They're obviously not trying to hide this, they're just pushing the user towards wifi.
Also a custom firmware bound by serial number ranges would be even cheaper than the sticker. Logic doesn't hold up
You are absolutely correct.
It's not very expensive not to populate the USB receptacle on the the PCB.
Sealing the hole in the case would be easy. You could have an removable insert in the case's injection mold so there's the option not to have the hole.
If they thought two case parts were too logistically complicated, or they already made the mold and don't want to mill it out to make space for the insert, they could insert plastic plugs with permanent snaps.
If they really didn't care, they could even just put they sticker over the hole in front of an unpopulated port.
Can't wait for either open source community, or the pirate community, for starting to jailbreak HP printers. To be honest, if I was more savvy with tech, I'd probably start taking that as a fun little challenging hobby.
The open source community would tell you to get an ancient LaserJet 4 (or, more likely at this point, a Brother printer) instead.
Aside from that, there's a worrying increasing trend in the amount of stuff that ought to be getting jailbroken, but isn't for some reason. Smart TVs, for example. I think that the community of people with the skills and willingness to do that sort of thing is too small, and is getting spread too thin to keep up with the fire hose of Tivoized products coming out these days.
If you want a solution for this nonsense, call your congressman and ask for consumer protection legislation, 'cause I don't think the hackers are going to be able to save us from the prevailing trend of the entire consumer electronics industry.
There printers more than 2 decades now. There's no printers jailbreak trend whatsoever. What makes you think it can happen in the future?
Printers are almost useless these days. I mean who uses a printers today anyway? Everywhere and everyone, including government accepting mail today. If I need to print something which happens once a year at best I either go to a photo store or print at work
Depends even then lol. You can have 1st world infrastructure and (considered) 4th world class government.
Just look at Germany. If something is remote doable, you probably at best can only do it via FAX. There is an incentive to improve it but yeaaaah....
Just recently the extra3 show in german TV (current topics presented in a cabaret, comedic and/or satirical way) showed a guy that emigrated to Australia for some time (at least not a full transition). His wallet was stolen with his german drivers license inside. He asked the german embassy in Australia if they could create a new license for him there.
No dice, can't do here (not like they could print one in Germany and mail it there with air mail or so).
He tried it with Germany: Nope. Only in person (+ a fee for creating this mandatory piece of plastic).
He asked again the local embassy just in case: Nope. But you could travel back and come again for a (in total) 30h flight time + 5000€ in flying to get one :)
The conclusion was: Commercial license (no public driving in a personal car. Only for business) and for a private license he has to travel back and forth.
Yeah I retract my comment, I've worked with people in Germany and Japan before. Faxes were required for both!
My country's government is one of the dirtiest, but hey, we have a law that require all government offices to accept documents by email
What about service businesses that need to print documents for their clients? Not everything makes sense as an e-mail.
They're all as bad. Brother just sent an update to my laser jet and now third part cartridges won't work.
Apparently if you try to use the USB port it’ll stop after having printed 20 or so pages, telling you you need to setup WiFi and install their bloatware app.
HP has such a storied legacy in electronics and computers .. I still use my old 48GX .. It's so sad to see this.
I remember buying a pre-build pc some 10-15 years ago that has rod soldered in it just to be sure no hardware upgrade could be made by the user
Don't even get me started on their laptops. Every single one I owned ended with a broken hinge / hinge supports.
I've never seen a good HP product in my entire life. Really makes me wonder why people still buy it.
They stopped making them in the 90s and early 2000s when they quit making calculators. They made the absolute best RPN calculators that have ever been made, but shut down their calculator division. I prefer RPN, but I guess TI has a stranglehold on the market selling calculators without innovation for years and years. Ah well.
HP makes calculators still, actually. Can't say I have any love for their printers but the HP Prime blows any TI equivalent out of the water, easily the best calculator I've ever used.
FYI HP also stopped making those. You can still buy HP calculators, but they happen to be licensed to third parties who carry on with new products of their own design under the same brand. At least in the case of the prime, Moravia managed to pull out a new firmware update since the transition, so there's that.
Ah, interesting to know. I have a 15C and always wanted a 48g but haven't needed a calculator in a long time. I'm glad that HP is still making good calculators. Maybe I should pick one up.
Thanks for the correction and the information!
From what I remember it was when Carly Fiorina took the helm as CEO that the company turned from Quality-Driven to Marketing-Driven.
After she left it just kept being managed in 90s' MBA style, just like a lot of companies of the time many of which eventually went bust or massivelly shrank (GE is a great example).
Well back in 90 the dot matrix printer my family had was an awesome workhorse of a printer. WE got rid of it not because it broke but they stopped making new drivers it around windows 95.
