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HP is buying Samsung’s printer business for $1.05B
- gjolund 10y agoI've been thinking about investing in the cable tv industry, this seems like as good a time as any.
- grabcocque 10y agoI suppose somebody has to make printers. And it's not like HP are good at anything else, so...
- kalleboo 10y agoApple used to make some fine printers (of course I think they were mostly Canon print engines). First thing I thought of... http://www.theonion.com/article/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-21207 http://www.theonion.com/article/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-th...
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoExcept at the time you got more bang for your buck from the QMS equivalents,
- pyvpx 10y agoHPE networking isn't terrible. it's certainly far and above what Dell is putting out.
- Bino 10y ago+1 for HP Procurve series
- linker3000 10y ago..except for the older ones that would occasionally freak out if they saw multicast packets.
- jhbadger 10y agoCalculators? I used to love my HP48.
- KevinEldon 10y agoI've used by EliteBook 8570w for about 4 years. It's a powerful, rugged laptop with a decent keyboard and good screen. I've upgraded the memory and hard drive over time and don't plan on replacing it any time soon. My mom just bought a Windows 10 laptop from HP for under $200 including tax; that's an amazing price point... sure there will be bloatware and it's a cheaply made laptop... but for under $200 that's pretty impressive.
- protomyth 10y agoMy counter example is we bought 120 of their cellular equipped netbooks from Verizon and had 100 hard drive failures. They got tired of us shipping them back and just sent us hard drives to replace. Our techs did not like the headache.
- hga 10y agoEvery day I use an HP LTO-4 tape drive for backup, they are or at least were good at that. And echoing jhbadger, I still make occasional use of my 2nd HP calculator, a 28S. Nothing beats RPN.
- thrillgore 10y agoYou act like HP is even good at that.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoActually, HP is an Ink company. Printers are just an unfortunate distraction for them.
- znpy 10y agoHopefully we'll now have good Linux support for Samsung printers. Last time I bought a printer I went straight to hp ones and ignored all the others (Canon printers above all), and recommend HP printers to all who ask me. Hplip is awesome and often don't get all the praises it deserves.
- radicalbyte 10y agoI'd stay away from their InkJet printers. Mine has a chip which forces you to replace coloured ink when it's empty. I've not printed one color page, yet I recently had to install a new yellow ink cartridge in order to print in black/white.
- gbl08ma 10y agoMost printers do - at least that's what I found out after I realized both of my Epson printers wouldn't print in black without color cartridges. Color cartridges are still used when printing in black and white, because the black ink alone will look terrible. Granted, it would be better if printers offered an option to print with just the black ink and get the terrible result, for emergencies. However, I'm sure lots of people would just click the warnings/confirmations away and then complain about the bad quality of the results. I should mention that if you do mostly black and white printing it may be more economical to get a laser printer, even just a grayscale one.
- kalleboo 10y agoI thought it was due to the yellow tracking dots, but it turns out those are only on laser printers https://www.eff.org/issues/printers https://www.eff.org/issues/printers
- stephenr 10y agoMy canon inkjet has an option to use just the black (and i think just colour) cartridge.
- digi_owl 10y agoI think you have to specifically pick a mode in the settings for each print job for the thing to use only black ink. Just slapping a black and white document into the queue do not trigger this automatically.
- Bino 10y agoAll I can say, congrats to Samsung.
- jwr 10y ago> "to breathe much needed new energy and ideas into the industry" Much needed indeed. The printer industry is a catastrophe. There is zero innovation, everybody keeps making the same crap over and over again, with new branding, and new numbers/designations. Is your Samsung X1214LX2 better than your HP LP19311A? Also, where are the specialized niche printers? Why can't I print ink on a copper PCB, so that I can etch it later? Why can't I print soldermasks or silkscreens? Where is my printer that prints on fabric? All of these could be sold for much more than the ultra-low-margin generic home office printers, and yet manufacturers can't be bothered to innovate.
- makomk 10y agoI'm pretty sure one big printer company buying another big printer company is the exact opposite of "disruption" and reduces the amount of "new ideas and energy" in the industry. Indeed, the press release says something slighthy different: "Today, HP is investing to disrupt this category by replacing copiers with superior multifunction printer (MFP) technology." Basically, they want to replace the copier industry with printers, bringing the exact same crap you complain about to a whole new market segment. (Most photocopiers are already just digital scanners coupled to printers internally. They just want to replace them with cheaper, worse ones.)
- mseebach 10y agoHasn't pretty much every copier sold in the past 20 years essentially been an MFP anyway? And isn't it fairly obvious that once you're bringing in a scanner and a printer anyway, you might as well expose them on the network as separate devices? (I use the scan-to-email function of the office "copier" fairly frequently myself, I print a bit too, but I practically never copy anything directly)
- SixSigma 10y agoyour email system might thank you if you used scan-to-SMB instead :)
- thorntonbf 10y agoSamsung has a printer business? Who knew?
- pawadu 10y agoapparently HP
- makomk 10y agoThey make pretty decent laser printers, from what I can tell.
- osullivj 10y agoThey do. I got a Samsung C480 colour laser printer, scanner, copier a few weeks back to replace a broken Dell. The cartridges are far more accessible than the Dell. All three functions are reliable so far; so it's been a good buy for 208GBP. I'm becoming something of a Samsung loyalist. My Ultra laptop is still going strong after nearly four years, as is my 3 yr old Galaxy S4 phone and 10 yr old flat screen TV.
- ryao 10y agoMy Samsunf ML-2525W has been the most reliable printer that I have ever owned. It was cheap too.
- ceejayoz 10y agoMy Samsung SL-M2020W/XAA was killed by a simple paper jam. There was literally no way to get it open to reach the shreds of jammed paper inside - one-way plastic tabs etc. Only time I've ever gone Office Space on a piece of equipment.
- urda 10y agoMy family owns a CLP-315W Samsung Color Laser. It's been in service for years, has fantastic network support for Windows, OSX, and Linux, and a lot of the parts are interchangeable (even the Drum / Imaging unit can be replaced by the end user). I dread the day I'll have to replace it, but until it keeps printing like a champ.
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- __michaelg 10y agoLargeCorp foo division buys BigCorp's foo division in order to disrupt the foo business? That seems... unlikely.
- Giorgi 10y agoSamsung has printer business?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Kequc 10y agoThat's too bad, I bought a cheap Samsung laser printer that thing was a tank, I bought one for my mother too and it's still going. HP on the other hand make the worst printers I have ever used anywhere.
- kristopolous 10y agoI only buy samsung. The laser printers are cheap, durable and resilient. They remind me of what HP was, in 1989. Now they are a scam. They do a better version of the hustle Gillette does with its razors. Somewhere in the 90s they realized higher profits were available if they hoodwinked people by coercing them to become a victim to a proprietary ink-cartridge dependency racket. With that, their integrity and quality were summarily abandoned. What a crooked morally bankrupt company.
- moomin 10y agoI would be quite surprised if the EU didn't take a pretty dim view of this deal.
- urda 10y agoWho cares, the EU has no jurisdiction on this matter.
- agumonkey 10y agoIt's a weird business. Kinda like taxi cabs with the advent of Uber / SDV. Printers are from the era of paper day offices, nowadays most prints are not that useful and mostly mandatory for rare official documents. Most of things are now mailed. The business model is also odd, a entry level wireless scanner/printer is only worth 2 packs of cartridges. methinks..
- codeulike 10y agoPlease let me know if anyone makes a wifi home printer that actually works.
- ashmud 10y agoI have a Canon Pixma MG7520 that works fine over wifi with a Win 8.1 client. Quality of the prints are scans are pretty much inline with the price I paid (i.e., mediocre). It sees very light use, so I have no ideas about how long or well it will last. I got it to scan contracts and for the occasional color print (not photos).
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoI've got an earlier version of one of these http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-cheap-printer/ http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-cheap-printer/ cheap and reliable. If I need colour prints I send them off to PhotoBox (UK).
- samfisher83 10y agoPrinting happens to be HPs most profitable group. They make more money selling ink than software. They made 3.8B on 21B in sales in 05. http://h30261.www3.hp.com/~/media/Files/H/HP-IR/documents/reports/2016/2015-form-10k.pdf http://h30261.www3.hp.com/~/media/Files/H/HP-IR/documents/re...
- rhaps0dy 10y ago>They make more money selling ink than <activity> I'm not surprised. At all. With the prices ink has...
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoHm. My printing volume is down tenfold from a few years back. Pretty much all I print now, is card stock for my game club (draft copies of new card games). And my printer has a hard time if it gets very thick. I wonder, has paper sales volume tanked? Is specialty printing all that's left? Why don't printers do a better job there already?
- pipio21 10y agoOhhh, man. With negative interest rates companies have it easier to buy the competition that actually competing with them. Innovation is never obtained from big companies buying other big companies. On the contrary.
- shostack 10y agoHow does that work exactly? Does the bank pay you to borrow money?
- jylam 10y agoI worked for some months on the printer industry (on the image processing side). Innovation is not a word we used a lot. A printer is basically a microcontroller driving a DSP doing some image processing (scaling and dithering mostly). The µC then sends that to another µC driving the different motors. The DSP is a generic component used by half the industry. The other half used another DSP. Both the µCs are generic components used by half the industry. The other half, you know the drill. It was maybe 7 years ago, and I guess now they have a single µC containing the DSP and able to speak USB, do the dithering, and control the motors all in one package. There is almost no R&D in those markets. That's how you get a $20 printer (and $50 ink cartridges). Do no count on printing on PCBs or fabric, that'll be R&D, and that's expensive, no one cares up there.
- agumonkey 10y agoI assume most of the R&D focused on nozzle and ink which are enough for the market ?
- jaredhansen 10y agoHi there. Would you mind dropping me an email? (In profile - I checked yours but didn't see a way to reach you.) I run a company that actually is innovating in printing, and I'd like to ask you a few questions if you could spare a few minutes... Thanks in advance.
- hrktb 10y agoTo state the obvious, it's an industry that will really have a serious growth problem in the coming decades. Right now people are still printing a ton and more every year, but laptops and tablet are becoming very affordable in most situations where paper was needed in companies, and paperless is something that starts to become the norm. I hear the printer in our office like once a week, my printer at home actually prints twice a year. We used to have whole areas in big supermarkets with printer boxes, now it's like three models in a corner. What saddens me is that scanners haven't evolve much as well, at this time where they are more needed that anytime before. I deeply regret not having bought a snapscan, but then the software that drives them seems so limited (last time I checked it was coupled with evernote, and nothing like dropbox or gdrive integration) it doesn't feel that much better than other scanners coupled with a always on home server solution.
- sly010 10y agoLet me ask this: How much would anyone here pay for a quality printer that lasts virtually forever, has great software support across all platform and got cheap ink/toner that fits automatically replaced?
- zanny 10y agoI currently use XP-320's everywhere because of the lack of any higher grade controller printer that isn't a laser. Those are $50 each, so I'd take what you are talking about (I get aftermarket 4 sets of ink cartridges for my printers for about $6, so the ink price would probably just be similar) for about $500.
- pcurve 10y agoI have a wireless Brother printer that I paid $120 for 8 years ago and still on the 'starter' toner. Worked fine through XP, Windows 7, 8, 10, and Mac. I have a replacement toner that I bought 4 years ago because the printer said toner was running low, but I must've printed out at least 1000 sheets since then and still it prints fine. Bottom line... no more than $150.
- paulmd 10y agoYup Brother is the way to go. I have one of their MFP units and it's been rock solid. My parents have been using a printer unit for about a decade now. I wish I had a color laser but it's at least $300 more for an equivalent unit and I just don't care that much anymore. Most of what we'd print are photos and it's cheaper to just go to the supermarket and have them run on a Kodak machine. A couple cents per print = oh well. An inkjet system would probably end up costing us more anyway once you factor in wastage like ink lost to head cleaning. Inkjets are really only economical for people who are using them for color photo prints on a daily basis, and those people are moving to bulk-ink/inktank systems and getting bigtime savings. For everyone else, B+W laser is by far the best solution for "occasional printing" and has really nice bleed/smear resistance, and the Brothers are best-in-class.
- ecopoesis 10y agoI paid about $250 12 years ago for exactly what you describe. It's an HP Color LaserJet. Since it's laser, there are no clogged cartridges, the toner works forever. It has built in Ethernet, and both MacOs and Windows can auto discover it. Since it's jet direct, you can just send it PCL so there will always be drivers. It only has three problems: 1) no WiFi (which is understandable given its age), which we solve with a bridge. 2) if you leave it on, it occasionally runs a self test/clean cycle, which set off our old house's smoke detector. Fixed this by turning it on when we need it. 3) no duplex option. Other then these issues, it's a great machine and is literally the oldest piece of tech we own.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wooptoo 10y agoSuch a shame. Samsung printers were among the best in the industry. I feel that HP were pretty mediocre in the last few years and they're just riding the hype train. What we need are printers which are more "open". Cheaper to run, easier to service. Just like the ones Brother makes. Their toners are refillable and the drum is a separate unit. And they have Linux drivers out of the box.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoBrother printers are great. My black and white laser printer has been great fit 4 years so far.
- noja 10y agoAnd since Samsung region encodes their toner/ink now, Brother are about to get a lot more business.
- kronion 10y ago> "Samsung will make a reciprocal investment of between $100 million and $300 million into HP’s business." Is this a standard M&A term? Why not acquire Samsung's business for $100-300M less?
- PanosJee 10y agoWhat is a printer?
- Kequc 10y agoThey use them to make paper with words on it.
- mathattack 10y agoHP is buying Samsung’s printer business for $1.05 billion in a move aimed at “disrupting” the dusty and stale printing industry. By "Disrupting" do they mean monopolizing?
- tome 10y agoDoes HP do anything other than buy and sell vast business units?
- camiller 10y agoSamsung has/had a printer business???
- protomyth 10y agoThey're not bad printers, its a little weird with the circular toner cartridges on the model we bought, but it hasn't broke and the drivers worked.
- sandstrom 10y agoInk already cost about $4000 per liter ($16,000 per gallon). More consolidation isn't what this industry needs. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3021290/why-printer-ink-should-be-packaged-like-chanel-no-5 https://www.fastcodesign.com/3021290/why-printer-ink-should-...
- nobrains 10y agoSo, its going to be HP vs. Brother now in the home printers industry.
- nfriedly 10y agoYea, but how much is the ink going to cost? (</sarcasm>)
- jbverschoor 10y agoGood luck with "Deve Home Sensor Error" hp.
- mindcrime 10y agoI guess office use is one thing, but I haven't bothered keeping a printer at home for at least the last 8 years or so. On the rare occasion I need to print something, I use Fedex' online print service and pick up the prints at the Fedex store near my apartment. I can't help but feel that traditional paper printers are a dying breed in general. Yeah, it'll be a long, slow death, but paper definitely seems passé in general. Now if we're talking 3d printers and specialty printers like others have mentioned, that seems like an area where there could be some room for growth. Heck, if anything, I can't help but wonder if a company like HP shouldn't generalize the idea of "printer" even more and introduce a line of desktop CNC milling machines and the like.
- mjmasn 10y agoSamsung printers are awful, and their customer service is non-existent. They'll have a lot of synergy with HP ;)
- reiichiroh 10y agoHP has their ink subscription thing. That's innovation, right?
- Johnny555 10y agoThe best printer decision I ever made was to quit buying disposable inkjets and purchase a cheap Brother laser printer instead. I've had it for about 8 years now and it's still going strong. I don't print much (which is why the inkjets kept clogging up stopped working), but about 2000 pages later, it's only on its second toner cartridge and will probably not run out for years. I'm kind of hoping that it breaks so I can replace it with a color laser, but it's been extremely reliable.
- mingabunga 10y agoAgree. Struggled with an Epson business inkjet for years and gained some pleasure from smashing it up in the end. Replaced with a Brother color laser and it was ridiculously easy to setup (I was expecting some pain) and works really nicely.
- djfergus 10y agoFor what its worth, the cheap Brother printers use a binary blob driver for Linux which only has x86 drivers. So don't get caught thinking you can use your ARM Raspberry Pi or Synology NAS as a low power print server...
- rsync 10y agoYes. We bought a "Brother Hl-l2360dw" and have been so happily surprised. Finally a printer that actually works and doesn't make me want to kill myself (and others) every time I interface with it. Don't get an all-in-one, don't get an inkjet and don't get color. Following those rules will allow you to actually print things stress free.
- alanbernstein 10y agoHP will also be buying Samsung's ink business for $10B in approximately three months.
- jkk4y 10y agobreaking news - samsung made printers?
- jkk4y 10y agobreaking news - samsung made printers?
- roflchoppa 10y agolemme just slap a ball point pen into the printer, use that things ink. ill buy that printer. ill pay top dollar for that.
- jimjimjim 10y agothe problem is us (in the general population usage of 'us'). The bulk of people are going to buy a $79 printer instead of a $89 because they are unable to see the differences (not their fault). Therefore each and every manufacturer will find ways to lower the price and end up making the shittiest piece of knocked together crap that still looks shiny.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoWhere is my book full of e-ink pages? Where is my stack of A4 e-ink pages?