17 ms·

HP Instant Ink is “ink as a service”

567 points by samizdis 6y ago

kayson 6y ago
Do customers have any legal recourse here? They pretty clearly advertised "Print free for life". Even if its a case of fine print saying they can change the deal, surely the advertising would be considered misleading from a legal and/or attorney general's perspective.
- belval 6y ago
  That's my train of thought as well, but my guess is that they did the math and they know that there isn't enough money at 0.99$/month to make it worth a class action lawsuit. As always raise awareness with your friends and family not to buy HP's garbage, Epson pulls the same shady practices as far as I know. When possible, buy a laser printer and just don't give any of them more money.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    My last company, a multi-billion dollar company decided to scrap printers altogether. Anything special is ordered out. The exception is the Finance team which has two very tiny laser printers.
    - theklub 6y ago
      I thought the go "paperless" push died a decade ago, but maybe not.
  - andylynch 6y ago
    Not a class action but given the smallish $ per user I could see this being effectively pursued with the seller and if that doesn’t work through small claims court, at least in places like the UK/EU. This is a change to the functionality of the printer post sale, and that tends to be viewed as an unreasonable action and one where one sided user agreements can be read by the courts as unfair to the consumer. The important point is the the printer no longer works as advertised and as a starting point this is guaranteed in European law for six years after purchase. (https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/united-kingdom/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...).
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      if it's $1 per month and the user is 20 I suppose that implies a value of $624 for that user's expected lifetime. arguably. In UK can you also get your money back for filing fees etc. if you win?
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Businesses own this country so it all boils down to if you have enough financial resources to battle these things out in court. Most people don't care enough or have enough resources to legally fight, effectively nullifying their rights. There is a direct correlation to wealth and rights in this country. Language really has no meaning anymore.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    This would be ideal for small claims court. Still takes some resources and time, but minimal compared to a regular lawsuit.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    >There is a direct correlation to wealth and rights in this country. Language really has no meaning anymore. There is a useful counter correlation in that it's a lot more costly for a wealthy entity to fight thousands on tiny lawsuits for a few hundred dollars each, all over the country, than it is for these suits to be filed, especially when almost every court proceeding is virtual.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      It is still going to be a small drop in a bucket, a mild inconvenience and a lot of hassle for an individual. Would you trade few weeks of your life to fight such battle? Will the satisfaction be comparable to satisfaction coming from achieving something productive? I think for all this time you'd have your life filled with bitterness. It's better to take your money elsewhere and spend time on something productive! You can also think about it as cost of learning about evil companies and their practices.
- willcipriano 6y ago
  They have this nice line in their TOS: > LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY AND REMEDIES. IF YOU ARE IN ANY WAY DISSATISFIED WITH THE INSTANT INK SERVICE OR ANY PART THEREOF INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, AN INSTANT INK PROGRAM OR THE SITE, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USING THE INSTANT INK SERVICE AND/OR THE APPLICABLE INSTANT INK PROGRAM. I had no idea you could have a contract that says, "if you don't like how we fulfilled the contract all you are allowed to do is go away, even if we burn your house down." https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/terms https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/terms
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    A contract can say whatever you want. That doesn't necessarily make it legally enforceable.
    - imglorp 6y ago
      Right, for example, ATT got stung for calling a cell plan "unlimited" in which a reasonable person would apply the dictionary meaning to that word but be wrong; thus deceptive practice. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/att-loses-key-ruling-in-class-action-over-unlimited-data-throttling/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/att-loses-key-ru...
  - jerf 6y ago
    "I had no idea you could have a contract that says, "if you don't like how we fulfilled the contract all you are allowed to do is go away, even if we burn your house down."" You can't. Obviously, companies don't like to be sued. What a lot of the tech industry and Silicon Valley has been doing lately is trying to write up their Terms of Service to make it so difficult to initiate any sort of proceedings, or at least appear to be so difficult to initiate any sort of proceedings, that nobody actually will. The risk of this, though, is that if they act so egregiously that somebody actually does get angry enough to break through the activation energy necessary to start something, that it will be both larger and worse than if they had a more conventional approach. Larger in that larger groups of people may break through at once, especially once someone blazes a trail. It's like raising a dam without fixing underlying issues with water management; it may put off the day you have problems, but when the catastrophe hits it'll be even larger. A perfect approach for a short-term-focused modern company, no? That clause is meant to convince you there's nothing you can do. But if someone does file a class-action suit, there's a very good chance the judge will not look favorably upon such a clause at all, and that'll get factored into any damage awards. Personally I think the expected value of this particular shenanigan is quite negative and I think a lot of companies are going to bitten by it in the next decade... but I have a long term perspective, personally.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  I’m sure the terms of service include binding arbitration, which always rules for the company.
- thebean11 6y ago
  Small claims court would likely get you your money back
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Sure, but that's an ad-hoc solution to a systemic problem. I think we need a change to consumer contract/ToS laws. I remember a few years ago Amazon Prime went from having $3.99 next-day shipping to suddenly charging up to $11.99 for it on one package I ordered. I knew when I signed up, the $3.99 price tag was advertised so I went digging: sure enough, it was not longer advertised, and no longer in their ToS. So I went digging further on how they could do this without any sort of notice to customers. Here's what I found using the internet archive to trace ToS changes wherein Amazon incrementally removed rights & privileges: --When I signed up for Prime, the $3.99 price was in the ToS. So was a provision that said Amazon would notify me of any changes to the ToS 30 days in advance. --A year or so later, the ToS no longer had the 30 day notice provision, but the $3.99 was still there. However, now they no longer had to notify me of a change. --Fast forward a little more, and Amazon was able to change its ToS unilaterally without any advance notice or notification, allowing me to be surprised when I was suddenly asked to pay 2-3x as much for the same service.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  My initial thought here would be to sue in small claims court for (based on the new pricing) $0.99/mo × expected lifespan. A small claims judge is likely to be sympathetic given the extremely straightforward advertising, and it would cost HP more to send someone out than to just pay the lump sum.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    I like it. And if I'd fallen for this scam, I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed enough to do that.
    - akersten 6y ago
      Hell, I would even set up a website with instructions and premade exhibits - give it a catchy name like sueHPinSmallClaims dotcom - and encourage everyone to use it, I'd be so indignant.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  The legal recourse is a class action lawsuit that 3-5 years from now would result in lawyers getting $X million dollars and customers getting something like a $20 voucher for replacement cartridges.
  - nix0n 6y ago
    Probably still worthwhile because it means HP losing the $X million
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Not if they have anticipated the cost and determine that $Y additional revenue minute $X legal costs is still > 0
      - DominikPeters 6y ago
        Still better if they end up with $Y - $X not the full $Y.
        ineedasername 6y ago
        I'm not saying don't sue. I'm saying it won't stop this type of behavior.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    I would be happy for the lawyers to get $X million dollars if it smacks HP on the nose. I suppose one's take on "but the lawyers get all the class action money!" depends on whether one is looking to be made whole (good luck with that), or to punish the company. I tend toward the latter: the whole company can look over their shoulder the next time such jackassery comes up for discussion.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Except they have their own legal team already, and probably budget the incremental cost of additional legal needs for something like this into their product costs. Even if that wasn't the case, a settlement like this sort of coupon, which is common, simply helps them keep more of the customers they cheated. I can't think of many class action lawsuits around this sort of activity where the company was actually harmed by the outcome in any way that would have changed its behavior.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Small claims court. Add up the total costs for the rest of your life (at 15 pages per) and sue them for that. Then have as many un-busy people that you know do the same thing. I know people who managed to get around $5000 when Equifax leaked their data. They just added up the monthly cost of the most expensive credit monitoring that they could find for the next decade and sued for that amount (then kept the money and didn't bother with the monitoring). It's honestly not very difficult to file and right now the meeting is virtual so you barely have to put in any effort (with the downside that in the past you had a large chance the other party wouldn't bother showing up and you'd win by default).
- varispeed 6y ago
  I think this may be the case of "too big too fail", that is law does not apply to large companies because they can easily wiggle their way out of anything by pouring money at lawyers or they can stop supporting political party or individual politicians if they won't get their way.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Wow, this is actually much worse than I thought it would be from the title! > HP rolled out a pay-on-price "Free Ink for Life" plan that gave you 15 pages every month for as long as you owned your printer. But this is HP we're talking about, so words have no meaning. Last month, HP notified its "free ink for life" customers that their life had ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to pay $0.99/month And from what I can tell in a quick Google search, HP introduced the "free ink for life" plan less than a year ago. So "life" lasted less than a year!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pishpash 6y ago
  This has definitely been available for more than a year, but no more than about ten, from my memory. Edit: Looks like it started in 2013, under Meg Whitman. [1] Also, this user says it was ad-sponsored! [2] [1] https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-launches-new-instant-ink-programme/ https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-launches-new-instant-in... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/874mi2/question_ads_in_hp_instant_ink_free_plan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/874mi2/question_a...
  - bserge 6y ago
    Interesting, I've only heard about it ~3 years ago when I got a cheap (and reliable, fwiw) Envy AIO, but it was not free.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Thank you! I couldn't get an exact date, and made a hasty assumption because I couldn't find any stories about the program that predated January 2020. (But I didn't search for too long.) It doesn't look like the "free" plan was available all the way back in 2013 though—it's not mentioned in your first link, and they presumably would have brought up something like that. And more importantly, they were clearly still using this plan to sell new printers as recently as this past winter...
- 6y ago
cbanek 6y ago
I really hate HP, and I had family working there for a while. They lost their way 20 years ago I feel. And now that they've spun off the HP enterprise, I will never buy another HP customer product again. I also feel like it's really informed me that I don't trust products with long warranties. It seems from my personal experience, the longer the warranty the more questionable the quality, and the harder to get the warranty honored. And of course if the product is terrible, the company will go out of business leaving you high and dry anyway.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > I also feel like it's really informed me that I don't trust products with long warranties. It seems from my personal experience, the longer the warranty the more questionable the quality, and the harder to get the warranty honored. And of course if the product is terrible, the company will go out of business leaving you high and dry anyway. I mean, fwiw, I've had the opposite experience in many cases. And I'd hate for the outcome to be that companies are actually incentivized to offer shorter warranties so that customers believe they're real.
  - cbanek 6y ago
    There are some great products out there with great warranties (some are legendary, and often abused) and usually they say how long their product will last. Like the costco return policy, or the craftsman tool replacement. I found that home depot had an interesting replacement policy - bring in a broken tool and you get the free Husky brand (now HD's store brand) tool as a replacement. Now I've personally had quality issues with Husky tools, but I have to admit, that's a good way of doing it! I'm mostly afraid of cheap + long / forever warranty.
    - drewzero1 6y ago
      Don't get me started on Craftsman. They should have gone under with Sears instead of lingering to capitalize on their past glory. Part of my job involves repairing power tools, and I've started lumping Craftsman (and also the once-great Delta) in with "throwaway" brands like Harbor Freight and Tool Shop where I have to turn customers away or at least warn them that I probably can't get parts for them. So many parts for fairly recent models have already been discontinued, if they were ever available at all. I see a lot of older customers to whom Craftsman has always meant quality and service, and they often leave frustrated in my inability to deliver on that legacy. I don't have a problem with their hand tools which, while maybe made more cheaply than before, can still be replaced at any Craftsman retailer that carries a replacement. But their power tool parts support is just abysmal IME.
omnifischer 6y ago
I so often read such dark/wierd news from IT companies which makes me wonder - if in any case did the person that developed this dark/crazy idea ever reads hn? If yes what do you feel? Did you every anticipate or think of some of the opinions expressed here? Note this is not to insult - I genuinely want to know that other point of view. Thanks
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  I doubt it's the work of one ruthless person. Presumably some team in Accounting was doing projections and concluded that it would cost less to burn their customers (especially if some willingly jumped into the flames and paid the buck a month). It seems to be a fairly common scenario that a Marketing dept. will launch something that is on shaky footing with both Legal and Accounting, and at some point will be scuttled / changed beyond recognition.
- RegnisGnaw 6y ago
  I'm working on a product in my company that's doing something similar: we sell THING and supplies for THING The cost for the supplies depend on the region your in. So we're setting it up that if you buy a THING in say US/Canada, you can only buy supplies from a reseller in US/Canada and not a cheaper one in Africa. Why am I doing this? My wife lost her job due to COVID, and I'm the sole income earner right now. Once things recover I'll switch jobs.
  - OkGoDoIt 6y ago
    And if someone finds a way around that arbitrary restriction, your company takes them to court for DMCA violation or hacking or something like that? Gotta love the modern world.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Do you buy parts for the THING in cheaper regions? For example the components that make the THING were made in China or other country with cheap labour? If you say yes, then why do you think it is moral to remove such option from the consumer?
css 6y ago
Last time I looked at printers I found no FOSS options. Most of the time, buying a whole new printer costs less than simply buying replacement ink. This is horrible for the environment. Are there _any_ alternatives in this space?
- _jal 6y ago
  Get a laser printer.
  - css 6y ago
    I have one. The replacement cartridges are listed on Amazon for $96 and the printer (with ink) is $108.
    - JeremyBanks 6y ago
      The cartridges printers come with often have ~half the capacity of retail cartridges.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        I haven't used up the starter cartridge in the printer I bought 10 years ago. I'll be tempted to buy a new printer when it fades, to add duplex and get newer wifi.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      The 'ink' (it's really toner) cartridges that come in new printers have a fraction of the levels in them as retail cartridges. They're referred to as 'starter kits' if you look in the small print. You're looking at a false comparison there.
      - SloopJon 6y ago
        That actually wasn't true when I bought a Canon MG6000-something. When the price of the printer went below the price of ink, I bought a second one and stuck it in the attic, which came in handy when the first one died. Both printers came with standard ink cartridges. The HP laser printer I bought recently, on the other hand, did come with starter cartridges with a smaller amount of toner. My impression is that starter cartridges are more common with toner than ink.
codetrotter 6y ago
When manufacturers talk about lifetime guarantee etc I’ve only ever seen lifetime refer to the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the user. So the title and the contents of this page seems sensationalist to me. Not saying I agree with what HP are doing either but I don’t think this post is going about fighting it in quite the right way.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  This is a service contract. So the "product" is the service. And HP has plenty of ink to serve (otherwise they would not be offering it for a price).
- rwbhn 6y ago
  How/where is the product lifetime defined? Could it really be a year for a printer?
  - tpxl 6y ago
    Not in the EU, with the 2 year minimum warranty.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  Define "lifetime of the product". If a car manufacturer says they offer a complete bumper-to-bumper warranty for the "lifetime of the product", then if a piston rod has a sudden rapid unplanned disassembly event and destroys the engine in only three months, the manufacturer can say "Well, the engine died, the product reached the end of its lifetime, so the warranty is void." If the lifetime is "until we end support for that product", they can announce end of support a day after release. While sure, maybe lifetime of the user might be a bit of an absurd expectation, especially for a subscription to consumables, certainly you'd expect at least a few years, right? This supposed "lifetime" offer lasted less than one year.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Wow, so end of life is one firmware update away? Scary.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
We no longer own anything, we're all share-croppers on Corporate Estates. I really never saw printer ink being something else we subscribe to.
- _dibly 6y ago
  I don't think the comparison to digital streaming services holds up, there are plenty of subscription services that send you products and it's pretty silly to say that you don't own products that are being sent to you. It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received. The issue here has nothing to do with subscription services themselves and everything to do with HP arbitrarily changing the terms of a deal to mandate a subscription service.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    Hp can revoke that liscense, though. They put drm chips in the cartridge and your printer will refuse to work with them.
  - lisper 6y ago
    > It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received. Actually, it's exactly like that. HP cartridges can and do expire, and printers will refuse to work with them even though they are still full and functional.
    - thebean11 6y ago
      Yes but that's not really the case here
      - charwalker 6y ago
        It's important as HP has done it before and will do it again. This is just a new variation of that same mentality. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again except ink.
prh8 6y ago
I signed up for this earlier this year, when my original black ink was getting low. Original, as in the one that came with my printer. HP's system has shown an ink cartridge shipping for 6 months now. I bought a single cartridge off Amazon, and surprisingly they sent me a 4-pack. That will last me quite a while
morpheuskafka 6y ago
They've made the thing more complicated than a phone plan. So before you print something, you have to remember how many pages you have printed this month, plus the rolled over pages from last month and how long before they expire, and if you are going to go over, you have to change your plan instead of just going over because the overage rate is absurd (like, more expensive than going to a print shop). How is anyone supposed to get work done when printing is this complicated? Given that I am not that heavy of a print user, I recently opted for the $300 Canon G7020 refillable inkjet over a color laser. The EPSON EcoTanks also looked good, but I think the G7020 included two extra, full bottles of black ink, plus the initial set of CMYB. The initial bottles are full-size, however, about 1/6 of the ink disappears on setup as it fills the tubing and print heads inside the printer. The only catch I have heard with this printer is that apparently the waste ink absorber (non-replaceable) can fill after a few years of use, shortening lifespan. However, the print heads are replaceable which is nice compared to the EcoTank line. (In a refillable, the print heads look like cartridges, but instead of ink, they have a port that connects to the tanks). The setup (AirPrint) works great and the only issue I have had is that the old-school LCD screen is impossible to read without a lot of lighting.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I bought a different model of Canon's G line for this exact reason. They cost more than a typical entry level inkjet, but not much more than a single replacement of each color cartridge.
- 0x_rs 6y ago
  >apparently the waste ink absorber (non-replaceable) can fill after a few years of use, shortening lifespan. That is true, and correct for many Epson printers in my experience too. There's a program to reset the printed pages counter, AntiPampers, which makes a paperweight printer return to work for many years instead of having to deal with planned obsolescence, which that definitely is - entirely on purpose from a customer view. Printers market, inkjets in particular for their very low initial cost, have a lot of shady if not straight criminal practices that unfortunately are overlooked.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
raiyu 6y ago
The good news is that printing volume has decreased so much that this is really HP's swan song trying to milk that last nearly dead cow. It is annoying that we still have to print anything, and the same for all of the things you receive in the mail. Thank god for docu-sign and electronic filing. Would be great if everyone concerned about the environment would also focus on mail, priting, to add to the list of plastic straws
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Paper copies are a useful technology in a world where digital information can be changed or disappear without notice.
wolco2 6y ago
Why can one party change the terms of service when advertising other facts. If what is mentionex in big print conflicts with small print, the small print should be thrown out.
neilv 6y ago
Separate from the larger concerns, just a few notes on the practical matter of being able to print paper in peace... As people often advise, try to use a laser printer. A Laserjet 5N that I found set out for the trash on the curb one rainy night worked like a tank for over a decade, only very rarely needing consumables, which was perfect for someone in poor grad student in expensive city mode. When the muffin fan finally needed replacement, and I found a newer Laserjet on CraigsList. (And I decided to part out the 5N, rather than repair, which IIRC paid for the new one.) That CL LJ's original toner lasted many years, and a quick tipping around of the cartridge made it last longer. Eventually, I decided to buy a new (third-party) cartridge at the start of Covid (since I didn't know what would happen to supply chains). To that, I'd add, if you care about such things: the Ethernet-facing firmware on my current printer looked so unsettling, like it might be full of vulnerabilities and possibly a lot of malware or features I didn't want, that I put my own print server in front of it (running on an old OpenWrt device, at the moment), and only connect the printer as USB. I also use open source drivers without all the features and bundleware I don't want. When I get a chance, I want to make the print server do filtering of what can be sent to the printer, since I strongly suspect there's some vulns there, but the current setup does block a lot of potential other headaches. I also have some VLAN work to do on a new router.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  I also recommend using your own print server (except I had better luck with a Ubuntu box running CUPS), when everyone at home moved to laptops and smartphones it added 5-10 years to the life of a "dumb" USB printer. (And it was an old enough HP that it didn't have the same DRM or planned obsolescence build quality issues)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ohazi 6y ago
Yes, HP is a giant scumbag. But the conclusion from the big printer thread last week: just buy a Brother laser printer and never look back. Seriously, inkjet and all of the surrounding bullshit is not worth the time or the money or the energy or the frustration.
- Wistar 6y ago
  THIS. I gave up on HP printers in about 2007 when I realized that their required software was absolutely terrible, at least on my machine. It was huge install, and caused a number of weird problems. The Brothers I have work well with a minimum of problems although my Brother color printer required a new drum set awfully fast (and cost more than I paid for the printer). For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    For inkjet printer, I think Epson's ink tank printer is great. The printer cost 3x compared to other cheap loss-leader inkjet printers, but the inks are cheap and you buy it by the bottle instead of by the drips in cartridges.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    You and I are in a similar camp. I have a monochrome Brother laser (with Duplex) and a Color Canon Inkjet, both on wired networking. Both work well including printing from my phone. Not problems with either, I print mostly on the laser, occasionally on the inkjet. The Canon inkjet can sit idle for weeks at a time, and I still haven't had a plugged nozzle in eight years.
- bhouston 6y ago
  I've converted our office to Brother (4 printers), my parents to brother (2 printers) as well as bought 3 Brother printers myself over the last 12 years. Such an amazing printer and company. And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.
  - 6y ago
nvr219 6y ago
I was really nervous this was about the HP ProCurves lifetime warranty. Phew!
tmccrary55 6y ago
I can't remember the last time I've even seen an HP product, outside of stores.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  The consumer side of HP and print? Meh yea not so pretty. But the tech is in a lot of places you probably don't know about. A lot of things you may interact with often rely on underlying HP print technology. Ballots printed in the US for example, ATM machine receipts, your medical statements, packaging, even life sciences research for COVID-19.
jonplackett 6y ago
What printers (if any) have decent priced official ink?
narrator 6y ago
This is all part of a much larger push, and basically the future of everything: "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better" - World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real... World Economic Forum is also pushing the "Great Reset" which is a fundamental transformation of the world economy catalyzed by the COVID crisis. https://www.weforum.org/great-reset https://www.weforum.org/great-reset Imagine communism, where nobody owns anything, and everybody just gets enough to get by if they keep working. All consumption is digitally managed and metered.
- mxskelly 6y ago
  The only reason you'd think that's what communism is is if all your ideas about what "communism" is come from capitalist propaganda.
  - narrator 6y ago
    Sounds like "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability" to me.
- dennnis 6y ago
  great, sounds terrible
- Dahoon 6y ago
  I'm not pro communism but reading stuff like this still irks me. You are allowed to own things under communism, like your house, just as under capitalism. What you cannot is own half a city and rent the houses out. Saying you cannot own anything under communism has become the norm just like saying schizophrenic when one means multiple personalities, which is not and never have been part of schizophrenia no matter how many times people repeat it.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Thats feudal capitalism, not communism.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
Got an Epson ink tank printer - more expensive to buy but glad to be rid of the cartridge scam.
neya 6y ago
I properly got a genuine HP printer and cartridge combo for what seemed like a good deal ($70) in Singapore. It worked fine for about 6 months until when the cartridges had run out of ink. So, I went to a store and bought a pair of genuine HP ink which was crazy expensive (combined with black and white, it almost amounted to 80% of the printer cost for the XL size at the time). Still, I wanted to be a genuine user and I paid for it. When I replaced the new cartridges in the tray, the printer insisted that I connect to the internet and I refused to connect it because it wasn't necessary I thought. It wouldn't let me even print a single paper despite the tray being fully loaded. So, fine with it, I connected the damn thing to the internet. Suddenly, I got a notice saying the ink cartridges aren't genuine. I was puzzled, went back and fought with the store manager and got a replacement and they made sure it was 100% genuine this time. So, I went back, set it up and nope. Still the same issue. The cartridges were full and brand new, and I really wanted to print some flyers for a business convention, which is why I was willing to invest the money because of the shortage of time I had. The printer absolutely refused to print anything at all. HP support left me running around in circles like a headless chicken. I had to take a lot of heat because of this stupid printer for no fault of mine, simply because it was "smart" and needed an internet connection to do an offline job. I was so mad that day that the first thing I did after I came from the business convention was took the damn thing apart and remove all the parts for arduino projects (motors, rollers, display, PSU, etc) and threw everything else away. I wrote a very rude note to their unhelpful customer support and went back and even apologized to the store manager who replaced my genuine cartridges. It was an expensive lesson for me to learn not to trust any printing company, especially HP that relies on the internet to do an offline job. I follow this rule of thumb for coffee makers and every other hardware that shouldn't be "smart" and should be dumb. I'm even ready to pay the premium these days for the dumb version of a product offering simply because..it is so much simpler.
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  Epson Ecotank. Just put in ink. Really - the ink come in bottles you just pour in. The ink is really chip, and it prints just as pretty as another inkjet, including quality photos
  - 6y ago
jrochkind1 6y ago
> Doctorow's novella "Unauthorized Bread" explains why we have to fight DRM today to avoid a grim future > Salima has a problem: her Boulangism toaster is locked down with software that ensures that it will only toast bread sold to her by the Boulangism company… and as Boulangism has gone out of business, there's no way to buy authorized bread. Thus, Salima can no longer have toast. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/doctorows_novella_unauthorized_bread_explains_why_we_have_fight_drm_today_avoid_grim_future https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/doctorows_novella_una...
- _iyig 6y ago
  Sounds a lot like the true story of Juicero, that $700 juicer which only squeezed Juicero-brand juice packs, and only after connecting to WiFi and validating a QR code printed on each (rather extravagantly expensive) bag of pre-chopped vegetables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    Was that the one where you could just squeeze the bag between your hands, too?
    - failrate 6y ago
      Yes, and some indication that the hand squeezing got you more juice than the machine.
  - lostgame 6y ago
    Juicero is a fantastic example of modern startup overfunding and the issues with DRM and form over function. It's intensely worth reading about.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    It wasn't a completely stupid idea but: - The price for the juice packs was outrageous - The juicer was overbuilt. There was a hilarious teardown and BOM estimation[0]. Should have been way cheaper - The IoT aspect served no real purpose. It added to the BOM. But I could totally see a subscription model with an inexpensive juicer that's subsidized by a subscription to juice packs. Sure you could also buy some generic ones and someone will come up with a re-usable pouch, but really you are paying for the convenience. Nespresso did it (but coffee has way better margins than juice pouches). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
homero 6y ago
I actually like instant ink. It's really cheap, I'd be much more upset if they didn't add the 99¢ plan. Most of my life I've tried fake ink, refilling ink and it's so stressful. I finally feel free by paying for what I print and don't think about it much. I think it's a very good thing that it's pretty much pay for what you use, I would hate for set prices.
thanatos519 6y ago
I my Epson EcoTank ET-14000. What HP is doing should be made illegal. Worldwide. In global trade agreements.
bsenftner 6y ago
People need to boycott the printer industry entirely. When their crap ceases to sell, they will change, and only then.
- anuila 6y ago
  I think the home-printing industry is on its last legs. More and more documents don't need to be printed. I haven't owned a printer in years and when I must print something I hop in the nearest (laser-)print shop for peanuts. HP is just trying to make the last few bucks before closing down their print shop.
aj7 6y ago
One time, I bought a brand new HP ink jet for $29, I think at Walmart. When the ink ran out, and I saw the price of a new cartridge, I quite calmly pulled and saved the line cord and USB cable, and any paper inside. Then I picked it up, walked down the hall in my highrise to the trash closet, and threw the whole thing down the chute.
- bserge 6y ago
  Price of a low end All-in-one HP printer: £40. Price of a new set of cartridges for it: £50... The printer came with full cartridges, not the "test cartridge" shit Canon does... It was cheaper to buy a new printer :/
- paxys 6y ago
  Next time do proper electronics recycling though. All modern electronics have rare earth and other materials that should not go in the trash.
- slezyr 6y ago
  Next time just search for the 3rd party refillable cartridges on aliexpress.
  - aj7 6y ago
    They are crap. You get lulled if they work a few times. Then…
paultopia 6y ago
There have to be a bunch of serial founders reading this thread, right? Would someone please found a company to make it unnecessary for individuals to own printers? Even in a pandemic? Kinkos exists, but they do it really shittily. You have to go into a ginormous store filled with surly employees (and these days, covid probably), their prices per page are outrageous, oh, and to print you end up using their scary doubtless malware-laden windows machines in store. Screw that. Why not, like, Amazon locker for printing? Send a print job or several print jobs somewhere from home, have it land in a locked mail slot, go to the place and enter a code to pick it up.
- paultopia 6y ago
  Hell, I'd even pay for delivery. At the rate most humans use non-office printers, it would probably be worth it to pay 10 bucks once a month to have someone just drop a print off by my door.
- macNchz 6y ago
  I've seen these popping up in NYC but never used one: https://www.printwithme.com/ https://www.printwithme.com/
- toast0 6y ago
  What kind of timeline are you looking at? Would print out, stick in a large envelope, and drop in the mail work? If so, I think there are already a fair number of services that do that. And, I think it used to be a service of Compuserve or Prodigy or one of the early services; you just need a small office near major USPS hubs and you can probably get most printouts in a day or two.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Make it a SaaS. There's always a bunch of print shops next to colleges. Most of them are low-tech/no tech (get there in person with your document on a thumb drive/email it to the clerk's gmail account). Make it so the local print shop can run the print server and set it's rates. You display a nice map with all the print shops close to the user and a price for the document, the user select which print shop gets the job. You handle the transaction, they take care of the job.
__MatrixMan__ 6y ago
I've been reading some sci-fi by Doctorow. Got part way through, recognized the style, scrolled up and saw that this was his site. This was the line that did it: > For this to work, you need to win a two-front war: one on your customers and the other on your competitors. HP is fighting both. I like the way he argues.
swalsh 6y ago
Brother laser printers are the way to go. Wish setting up the drivers on linux was easier though.
__MatrixMan__ 6y ago
American capitalism is getting more cancerous by the day. In other news: I really like my Brother monochrome laser printer. My wife is a teacher. Last year we printed nearly 25k pages--hardly any problems. You can shake the cartridges and get an extra 500 or so pages past their limit. I bought a replacement drum because the printer warned me, but I've been ignoring that warning for quite a while--waiting to see when I actually need to install the drum--and it just keeps chugging along. Not the kind of thing you'd see from an HP.
Gunax 6y ago
> Drink verification ink
greyhair 6y ago
Will never buy anything from HP again. I owned and old used LaserJetII (with a duplexor) for years followed by an old used LaserJet 4-Plus (it was awesome!)that both were so reliable, and so Awesome, that I I bought an HP Photosmart color printer. What a mistake. One of those stupid two cartridge models that stopped printing as soon as one color ran out. Plugged heads all the time. Drove me crazy. Dumped that for a Canon about eight years ago, which so far has been excellent. The LaserJet 4 Plus finally wore out two years ago. I replaced it with one of those little Brother 2360s. It works fine. Faster to start up a print job than the HP was, but not as fast printing duplex as the HP. Probably faster in single sided. The end point being, the old LaserJets were built back when HP had not yet lost its soul. The Photosmart Inkjet was the first generation of the "New HP".
- projektfu 6y ago
  I bought one of the page-wide officejet pro printers a while back. (X475DN?) It was amazing! No warm up, 1-2 sec. first page out, fast printing, low energy use. But if you didn't use all the colors on the whole page width at some point, it they would start to clog. Eventually it only printed black reliably, and all the other colors were clogged and useless. Then, like seemingly all modern HP printers, it developed a weird software or controller problem and had to be replaced. Switched to a lexmark color laser which prints very well, doesn't produce a first page very quickly, but then it started having BSODs. Replaced with monochrome laser printers (Samsung) and that has gone pretty well. I'm still nervous about HP being involved, but it seems to be Samsung's show with HP just doing the fulfillment. Edit: just noticed that the HP Laserjet 4+ was introduced at $1,839 in 1994; about $3,230 today.
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
For Black Friday, every year, Walmart would offer the same HP Deskjet color printer for $20. A cartridge of one color would cost $20 as well. So, I’d just buy a new printer. And then finally I got a laser printer by Brother. And I stopped buying a printer ever year, since ink was cheaper than the printer.
microtherion 6y ago
Maybe nostalgia is coloring my memory, but I remember the B&W HP Deskjet I had in the 1990s as rock solid, with ink that rarely ever caused trouble. Nowadays, I generally wouldn't sell an inkjet printer to my worst enemy (I own a very small one that fits into a suitcase for travel). But I'm surprised that laser printers have not become victims to that phenomenon nearly to the same degree. Maybe it's because I like somewhat pricy ones (Duplex all-in-one color lasers), but apart from undersized "Starter Tones" sets, they seem to offer a reasonable value, and I even own a HP.
vibrant_mclean 6y ago
I am in the free plan for about two years. I remember reading the terms before I subscribed which clearly stated that they can discontinue the free plan anytime. It is really good plan as I don't have to worry about buying printer ink, always print in high quality color and printed a lot of photos. TBH, it is still really a good plan for $1 per month.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I think the issue that they shouldn't be allowed to use the term "life" and in the fine print clarify that it's explicitly not for "life".
  - tiernano 6y ago
    I think it says somewhere life of the printer and most small home printers probably have a life of 2-3 years...
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Well, it's well known that once a gym started selling "lifetime membership" it will likely close in a couple of months.
someonehere 6y ago
I realized after reading this I’m stuck in this trap with Epson and their ink. I installed new ink in all colors recently. Black printed fine a few days (shipping labels). Two weeks later I have missing lines on black prints now. I run the ink calibration cleaning option. Works fine for two days. Then the problem comes back so I clean and align again. I realize after reading this I’m wasting ink with the cleaning and alignments I’m running. I went to eBay and bought a used color laser writer from Xerox for the coat of a new color inkjet.
TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
I got tired of the inkjet experience and bought a Brother color laser printer with full duplex printing and scanning and support for AirPrint and uploading scanned docs to the cloud for less than $500 at Staples five or six years ago. I've replaced the toner once, maybe twice. Updated the firmware once. You can toss a bunch of documents in the document feeder, tap a button, and they are scanned and uploaded where you configure. Highly recommended.
dawnerd 6y ago
Input something like 10 bucks at goodwill for my canon laser printer and it works great, even if it’s a bit old and driver support is poor on modern systems. I refuse to pay full price for a printer again. There’s just too many perfectly fine printers at thrift stores.
medievalMoose 6y ago
I was given a used HP printer with instant ink cartridges installed. When the time to actually make use of it, I had to: -Connect printer to the internet -add a credit card to the account the ink came with -Create a new account since I did not 'own' the account associated with the cartridges in hand -wait 5 business days for new cartridges that were linked to my account, even though the ones installed were full. rent seeking in the form of antiquated document acceptance policies
- varispeed 6y ago
  I find it fascinating that people are ready to go through such lengths to achieve what is supposed to be a simple task and they think it is normal. If they were testing this with the customers, really not one said this is just plain stupid or maybe they did, but greedy marketers decided to ignore? It's not like HP has a monopoly on printers?
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
Epson Ecotank.
- radimm 6y ago
  All the way! Guess it’s kind of difficult to trust it - based what HP is doing. But once you try, it’s the best.
krrrh 6y ago
Unpopular opinion, but after not owning a printer for around a decade I bought an HP Tango which is a totally wireless “cloud printer”. It’s small and has a nice linen case, so it looks like a book when on the shelf and not in use. I subscribe to a $4 tier for instant ink (50 pages a month with a 1 month rollover), and I love it. The main thing that pushed me over the edge was that you can also print unlimited 5x7 photos printed from your mobile device as part of the deal, and having recently acquired a baby we thought it would be nice to actually print sie photos for ourselves and relatives. They obviously screwed up by doing a freemium model on a physical product, but the paid tiers combined with the Tango aren’t such a raw deal for people who don’t want a printer taking up dedicated space in their apartments, and it saves the hassle of keeping track of ink levels and ordering cartridges, or going to the library in the cases where printing something made sense. This is insanely (maybe even criminally?) hyperbolic: > The right-to-repair criminals like Apple, John Deere and Medtronic. Tesla and GM, Juicero and Keurig – companies that are not merely content with waging war on customers, but also on competitors who offer those customers shelter. Lots of consumers just have different priorities when it comes to trade offs. Doctorow positions himself as a champion of consumers, but he’d really like to reduce our range of options if he could.
- neil_s 6y ago
  I just went through the exact same experience. Usually would print at work but need a printer for infrequent docs like tax returns during quarantine WFH. The Instant Ink subscription is reasonably priced for that, and I don't need to worry about the cartridges getting spoiled if left alone for too long because I pay for pages printed, not cartridges. The Tango gives me the bonus of printing unlimited photos. Admittedly the photo paper doesn't cost much less than printing photos at retailers, but fun to have it at your house.
sokoloff 6y ago
Makes this recent "oops, we disabled your printer drivers totally by accident" move on HP's part seem even more suspicious. https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/23/hp_printer_macos/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/23/hp_printer_macos/ I was able to reinstall Apple drivers and get my HP color laser back online, but it did make me wonder if this was another underhanded move on HP's part to retire some of their inconveniently inexpensive (from their point of view) to operate laser printers.
varispeed 6y ago
I got a used laser printer few years ago and I still didn't need to replace anything. It feels like it can print ad infinitum. And I paid like £30 for it. Ink printers is a scam.
xbar 6y ago
I shamefully own one of these printers. It's absurd. But sadly, I pay less for ink than the Canon I owned previously. I know I should I have bought the bullet decades ago for a laser printer. Lesson learned.
GuB-42 6y ago
Ok, I get it, HP is evil... But they are actually responding to customer demand. Customers want cheap printers, and HP has to make money somehow, so they make their money on ink. And to be fair, for people who just want to print a page from time to time, it is actually not a bad deal. Want cheap ink, HP also sells ink tank printers which you refill from bottles, no DRM or any nasty tricks here, but the printer is $300+. They also sell laser printers, printer for businesses, etc... Each with economics adapted to its market. HP have competitors of course, but they also fit into an economic model targeted at a market. They may be less aggressive than HP regarding ink, but it doesn't necessarily makes them better. Maybe the printer itself is more expensive, the print quality may be worse or is lacking some feature you need. There is no printer monopoly, and if HP can get away with that, that's because it fits some customer needs, otherwise they would have bought Canon, or Epson, or Brother, or anything else... Personally, I kind of like Brother. They seem to be the company with the least nonsense among printer manufacturers.
humaniania 6y ago
I will not buy or recommend HP products.
p1mrx 6y ago
I was skeptical of that "15 pages/month free" deal when I saw it. For an infrequently-used inkjet, most of the maintenance cost comes from keeping the ink fresh (which is why I have a B&W laser.) How could HP ever hope to profit by maintaining idle printers for free?
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Mods changed title to "HP Instant Ink is “ink as a service” hiding the lede that HP broke its "lifetime subscription" promised in it printer sales contract.
nojvek 6y ago
HP is a giant scumbag. They’re not a monopoly though. Get a brother laser for $70. Will last you decades and need toner changes after 1000s of pages. Vote with your wallet. HP only survives because people pay for them. Arguably I guess that’s what we call a “scam”.
poopsmithe 6y ago
I've been wanting to own a printer for several years, but I hold back on purchasing because I know there isn't a single consumer level printer company out there that doesn't have planned obsolescence built into their machines. I hope to see a company emerge via Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or similar which offers an open source, maintainable, moddable, built-to-last printer. Similarly to how there is now a market for privacy-focused smartphones, I'd like to think that there are enough people out there who would fund such a company.
MartianSquirrel 6y ago
This > Requiring frequent "calibration" printouts that use vast amounts of ink I use my personal printer once every 2 months, on average, and every single time it prints the calibration page. It would make much more sense from a UX point of view if it just asked if I want to calibrate instead of forcing me to waste ink, paper, time and patience in the process.
hi41 6y ago
With all these drawbacks why does thewirecutter recommend an HP printer as the top choice? https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laser-printer/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laser-printe... Edit: spelling
- micaeked 6y ago
  I dunno about this specific page, but Wirecutter quality in general has been disappointing for me lately. Might be related to the nytimes acquisition.

567 points by samizdis 6y ago

Do customers have any legal recourse here? They pretty clearly advertised "Print free for life". Even if its a case of fine print saying they can change the deal, surely the advertising would be considered misleading from a legal and/or attorney general's perspective.

belval 6y ago
That's my train of thought as well, but my guess is that they did the math and they know that there isn't enough money at 0.99$/month to make it worth a class action lawsuit. As always raise awareness with your friends and family not to buy HP's garbage, Epson pulls the same shady practices as far as I know. When possible, buy a laser printer and just don't give any of them more money.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  My last company, a multi-billion dollar company decided to scrap printers altogether. Anything special is ordered out. The exception is the Finance team which has two very tiny laser printers.
  - theklub 6y ago
    I thought the go "paperless" push died a decade ago, but maybe not.
- andylynch 6y ago
  Not a class action but given the smallish $ per user I could see this being effectively pursued with the seller and if that doesn’t work through small claims court, at least in places like the UK/EU. This is a change to the functionality of the printer post sale, and that tends to be viewed as an unreasonable action and one where one sided user agreements can be read by the courts as unfair to the consumer. The important point is the the printer no longer works as advertised and as a starting point this is guaranteed in European law for six years after purchase. (https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/united-kingdom/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...).
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    if it's $1 per month and the user is 20 I suppose that implies a value of $624 for that user's expected lifetime. arguably. In UK can you also get your money back for filing fees etc. if you win?
Frost1x 6y ago
Businesses own this country so it all boils down to if you have enough financial resources to battle these things out in court. Most people don't care enough or have enough resources to legally fight, effectively nullifying their rights. There is a direct correlation to wealth and rights in this country. Language really has no meaning anymore.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  This would be ideal for small claims court. Still takes some resources and time, but minimal compared to a regular lawsuit.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  >There is a direct correlation to wealth and rights in this country. Language really has no meaning anymore. There is a useful counter correlation in that it's a lot more costly for a wealthy entity to fight thousands on tiny lawsuits for a few hundred dollars each, all over the country, than it is for these suits to be filed, especially when almost every court proceeding is virtual.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    It is still going to be a small drop in a bucket, a mild inconvenience and a lot of hassle for an individual. Would you trade few weeks of your life to fight such battle? Will the satisfaction be comparable to satisfaction coming from achieving something productive? I think for all this time you'd have your life filled with bitterness. It's better to take your money elsewhere and spend time on something productive! You can also think about it as cost of learning about evil companies and their practices.
willcipriano 6y ago
They have this nice line in their TOS: > LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY AND REMEDIES. IF YOU ARE IN ANY WAY DISSATISFIED WITH THE INSTANT INK SERVICE OR ANY PART THEREOF INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, AN INSTANT INK PROGRAM OR THE SITE, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USING THE INSTANT INK SERVICE AND/OR THE APPLICABLE INSTANT INK PROGRAM. I had no idea you could have a contract that says, "if you don't like how we fulfilled the contract all you are allowed to do is go away, even if we burn your house down." https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/terms https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/terms
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  A contract can say whatever you want. That doesn't necessarily make it legally enforceable.
  - imglorp 6y ago
    Right, for example, ATT got stung for calling a cell plan "unlimited" in which a reasonable person would apply the dictionary meaning to that word but be wrong; thus deceptive practice. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/att-loses-key-ruling-in-class-action-over-unlimited-data-throttling/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/att-loses-key-ru...
- jerf 6y ago
  "I had no idea you could have a contract that says, "if you don't like how we fulfilled the contract all you are allowed to do is go away, even if we burn your house down."" You can't. Obviously, companies don't like to be sued. What a lot of the tech industry and Silicon Valley has been doing lately is trying to write up their Terms of Service to make it so difficult to initiate any sort of proceedings, or at least appear to be so difficult to initiate any sort of proceedings, that nobody actually will. The risk of this, though, is that if they act so egregiously that somebody actually does get angry enough to break through the activation energy necessary to start something, that it will be both larger and worse than if they had a more conventional approach. Larger in that larger groups of people may break through at once, especially once someone blazes a trail. It's like raising a dam without fixing underlying issues with water management; it may put off the day you have problems, but when the catastrophe hits it'll be even larger. A perfect approach for a short-term-focused modern company, no? That clause is meant to convince you there's nothing you can do. But if someone does file a class-action suit, there's a very good chance the judge will not look favorably upon such a clause at all, and that'll get factored into any damage awards. Personally I think the expected value of this particular shenanigan is quite negative and I think a lot of companies are going to bitten by it in the next decade... but I have a long term perspective, personally.
Analemma_ 6y ago
I’m sure the terms of service include binding arbitration, which always rules for the company.
thebean11 6y ago
Small claims court would likely get you your money back
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Sure, but that's an ad-hoc solution to a systemic problem. I think we need a change to consumer contract/ToS laws. I remember a few years ago Amazon Prime went from having $3.99 next-day shipping to suddenly charging up to $11.99 for it on one package I ordered. I knew when I signed up, the $3.99 price tag was advertised so I went digging: sure enough, it was not longer advertised, and no longer in their ToS. So I went digging further on how they could do this without any sort of notice to customers. Here's what I found using the internet archive to trace ToS changes wherein Amazon incrementally removed rights & privileges: --When I signed up for Prime, the $3.99 price was in the ToS. So was a provision that said Amazon would notify me of any changes to the ToS 30 days in advance. --A year or so later, the ToS no longer had the 30 day notice provision, but the $3.99 was still there. However, now they no longer had to notify me of a change. --Fast forward a little more, and Amazon was able to change its ToS unilaterally without any advance notice or notification, allowing me to be surprised when I was suddenly asked to pay 2-3x as much for the same service.
crooked-v 6y ago
My initial thought here would be to sue in small claims court for (based on the new pricing) $0.99/mo × expected lifespan. A small claims judge is likely to be sympathetic given the extremely straightforward advertising, and it would cost HP more to send someone out than to just pay the lump sum.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I like it. And if I'd fallen for this scam, I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed enough to do that.
  - akersten 6y ago
    Hell, I would even set up a website with instructions and premade exhibits - give it a catchy name like sueHPinSmallClaims dotcom - and encourage everyone to use it, I'd be so indignant.
ineedasername 6y ago
The legal recourse is a class action lawsuit that 3-5 years from now would result in lawyers getting $X million dollars and customers getting something like a $20 voucher for replacement cartridges.
- nix0n 6y ago
  Probably still worthwhile because it means HP losing the $X million
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Not if they have anticipated the cost and determine that $Y additional revenue minute $X legal costs is still > 0
    - DominikPeters 6y ago
      Still better if they end up with $Y - $X not the full $Y.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        I'm not saying don't sue. I'm saying it won't stop this type of behavior.
- mikestew 6y ago
  I would be happy for the lawyers to get $X million dollars if it smacks HP on the nose. I suppose one's take on "but the lawyers get all the class action money!" depends on whether one is looking to be made whole (good luck with that), or to punish the company. I tend toward the latter: the whole company can look over their shoulder the next time such jackassery comes up for discussion.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Except they have their own legal team already, and probably budget the incremental cost of additional legal needs for something like this into their product costs. Even if that wasn't the case, a settlement like this sort of coupon, which is common, simply helps them keep more of the customers they cheated. I can't think of many class action lawsuits around this sort of activity where the company was actually harmed by the outcome in any way that would have changed its behavior.
alasdair_ 6y ago
Small claims court. Add up the total costs for the rest of your life (at 15 pages per) and sue them for that. Then have as many un-busy people that you know do the same thing. I know people who managed to get around $5000 when Equifax leaked their data. They just added up the monthly cost of the most expensive credit monitoring that they could find for the next decade and sued for that amount (then kept the money and didn't bother with the monitoring). It's honestly not very difficult to file and right now the meeting is virtual so you barely have to put in any effort (with the downside that in the past you had a large chance the other party wouldn't bother showing up and you'd win by default).
varispeed 6y ago
I think this may be the case of "too big too fail", that is law does not apply to large companies because they can easily wiggle their way out of anything by pouring money at lawyers or they can stop supporting political party or individual politicians if they won't get their way.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Wow, this is actually much worse than I thought it would be from the title! > HP rolled out a pay-on-price "Free Ink for Life" plan that gave you 15 pages every month for as long as you owned your printer. But this is HP we're talking about, so words have no meaning. Last month, HP notified its "free ink for life" customers that their life had ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to pay $0.99/month And from what I can tell in a quick Google search, HP introduced the "free ink for life" plan less than a year ago. So "life" lasted less than a year!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pishpash 6y ago
This has definitely been available for more than a year, but no more than about ten, from my memory. Edit: Looks like it started in 2013, under Meg Whitman. [1] Also, this user says it was ad-sponsored! [2] [1] https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-launches-new-instant-ink-programme/ https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-launches-new-instant-in... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/874mi2/question_ads_in_hp_instant_ink_free_plan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/874mi2/question_a...
- bserge 6y ago
  Interesting, I've only heard about it ~3 years ago when I got a cheap (and reliable, fwiw) Envy AIO, but it was not free.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Thank you! I couldn't get an exact date, and made a hasty assumption because I couldn't find any stories about the program that predated January 2020. (But I didn't search for too long.) It doesn't look like the "free" plan was available all the way back in 2013 though—it's not mentioned in your first link, and they presumably would have brought up something like that. And more importantly, they were clearly still using this plan to sell new printers as recently as this past winter...
6y ago

cbanek 6y ago

I really hate HP, and I had family working there for a while. They lost their way 20 years ago I feel. And now that they've spun off the HP enterprise, I will never buy another HP customer product again. I also feel like it's really informed me that I don't trust products with long warranties. It seems from my personal experience, the longer the warranty the more questionable the quality, and the harder to get the warranty honored. And of course if the product is terrible, the company will go out of business leaving you high and dry anyway.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> I also feel like it's really informed me that I don't trust products with long warranties. It seems from my personal experience, the longer the warranty the more questionable the quality, and the harder to get the warranty honored. And of course if the product is terrible, the company will go out of business leaving you high and dry anyway. I mean, fwiw, I've had the opposite experience in many cases. And I'd hate for the outcome to be that companies are actually incentivized to offer shorter warranties so that customers believe they're real.
- cbanek 6y ago
  There are some great products out there with great warranties (some are legendary, and often abused) and usually they say how long their product will last. Like the costco return policy, or the craftsman tool replacement. I found that home depot had an interesting replacement policy - bring in a broken tool and you get the free Husky brand (now HD's store brand) tool as a replacement. Now I've personally had quality issues with Husky tools, but I have to admit, that's a good way of doing it! I'm mostly afraid of cheap + long / forever warranty.
  - drewzero1 6y ago
    Don't get me started on Craftsman. They should have gone under with Sears instead of lingering to capitalize on their past glory. Part of my job involves repairing power tools, and I've started lumping Craftsman (and also the once-great Delta) in with "throwaway" brands like Harbor Freight and Tool Shop where I have to turn customers away or at least warn them that I probably can't get parts for them. So many parts for fairly recent models have already been discontinued, if they were ever available at all. I see a lot of older customers to whom Craftsman has always meant quality and service, and they often leave frustrated in my inability to deliver on that legacy. I don't have a problem with their hand tools which, while maybe made more cheaply than before, can still be replaced at any Craftsman retailer that carries a replacement. But their power tool parts support is just abysmal IME.

omnifischer 6y ago

I so often read such dark/wierd news from IT companies which makes me wonder - if in any case did the person that developed this dark/crazy idea ever reads hn? If yes what do you feel? Did you every anticipate or think of some of the opinions expressed here? Note this is not to insult - I genuinely want to know that other point of view. Thanks

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
I doubt it's the work of one ruthless person. Presumably some team in Accounting was doing projections and concluded that it would cost less to burn their customers (especially if some willingly jumped into the flames and paid the buck a month). It seems to be a fairly common scenario that a Marketing dept. will launch something that is on shaky footing with both Legal and Accounting, and at some point will be scuttled / changed beyond recognition.
RegnisGnaw 6y ago
I'm working on a product in my company that's doing something similar: we sell THING and supplies for THING The cost for the supplies depend on the region your in. So we're setting it up that if you buy a THING in say US/Canada, you can only buy supplies from a reseller in US/Canada and not a cheaper one in Africa. Why am I doing this? My wife lost her job due to COVID, and I'm the sole income earner right now. Once things recover I'll switch jobs.
- OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  And if someone finds a way around that arbitrary restriction, your company takes them to court for DMCA violation or hacking or something like that? Gotta love the modern world.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Do you buy parts for the THING in cheaper regions? For example the components that make the THING were made in China or other country with cheap labour? If you say yes, then why do you think it is moral to remove such option from the consumer?

css 6y ago

Last time I looked at printers I found no FOSS options. Most of the time, buying a whole new printer costs less than simply buying replacement ink. This is horrible for the environment. Are there _any_ alternatives in this space?

_jal 6y ago
Get a laser printer.
- css 6y ago
  I have one. The replacement cartridges are listed on Amazon for $96 and the printer (with ink) is $108.
  - JeremyBanks 6y ago
    The cartridges printers come with often have ~half the capacity of retail cartridges.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      I haven't used up the starter cartridge in the printer I bought 10 years ago. I'll be tempted to buy a new printer when it fades, to add duplex and get newer wifi.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    The 'ink' (it's really toner) cartridges that come in new printers have a fraction of the levels in them as retail cartridges. They're referred to as 'starter kits' if you look in the small print. You're looking at a false comparison there.
    - SloopJon 6y ago
      That actually wasn't true when I bought a Canon MG6000-something. When the price of the printer went below the price of ink, I bought a second one and stuck it in the attic, which came in handy when the first one died. Both printers came with standard ink cartridges. The HP laser printer I bought recently, on the other hand, did come with starter cartridges with a smaller amount of toner. My impression is that starter cartridges are more common with toner than ink.

codetrotter 6y ago

When manufacturers talk about lifetime guarantee etc I’ve only ever seen lifetime refer to the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the user. So the title and the contents of this page seems sensationalist to me. Not saying I agree with what HP are doing either but I don’t think this post is going about fighting it in quite the right way.

pfortuny 6y ago
This is a service contract. So the "product" is the service. And HP has plenty of ink to serve (otherwise they would not be offering it for a price).
rwbhn 6y ago
How/where is the product lifetime defined? Could it really be a year for a printer?
- tpxl 6y ago
  Not in the EU, with the 2 year minimum warranty.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Define "lifetime of the product". If a car manufacturer says they offer a complete bumper-to-bumper warranty for the "lifetime of the product", then if a piston rod has a sudden rapid unplanned disassembly event and destroys the engine in only three months, the manufacturer can say "Well, the engine died, the product reached the end of its lifetime, so the warranty is void." If the lifetime is "until we end support for that product", they can announce end of support a day after release. While sure, maybe lifetime of the user might be a bit of an absurd expectation, especially for a subscription to consumables, certainly you'd expect at least a few years, right? This supposed "lifetime" offer lasted less than one year.
- indymike 6y ago
  Wow, so end of life is one firmware update away? Scary.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

We no longer own anything, we're all share-croppers on Corporate Estates. I really never saw printer ink being something else we subscribe to.

_dibly 6y ago
I don't think the comparison to digital streaming services holds up, there are plenty of subscription services that send you products and it's pretty silly to say that you don't own products that are being sent to you. It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received. The issue here has nothing to do with subscription services themselves and everything to do with HP arbitrarily changing the terms of a deal to mandate a subscription service.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  Hp can revoke that liscense, though. They put drm chips in the cartridge and your printer will refuse to work with them.
- lisper 6y ago
  > It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received. Actually, it's exactly like that. HP cartridges can and do expire, and printers will refuse to work with them even though they are still full and functional.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    Yes but that's not really the case here
    - charwalker 6y ago
      It's important as HP has done it before and will do it again. This is just a new variation of that same mentality. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again except ink.

prh8 6y ago

I signed up for this earlier this year, when my original black ink was getting low. Original, as in the one that came with my printer. HP's system has shown an ink cartridge shipping for 6 months now. I bought a single cartridge off Amazon, and surprisingly they sent me a 4-pack. That will last me quite a while

morpheuskafka 6y ago

They've made the thing more complicated than a phone plan. So before you print something, you have to remember how many pages you have printed this month, plus the rolled over pages from last month and how long before they expire, and if you are going to go over, you have to change your plan instead of just going over because the overage rate is absurd (like, more expensive than going to a print shop). How is anyone supposed to get work done when printing is this complicated? Given that I am not that heavy of a print user, I recently opted for the $300 Canon G7020 refillable inkjet over a color laser. The EPSON EcoTanks also looked good, but I think the G7020 included two extra, full bottles of black ink, plus the initial set of CMYB. The initial bottles are full-size, however, about 1/6 of the ink disappears on setup as it fills the tubing and print heads inside the printer. The only catch I have heard with this printer is that apparently the waste ink absorber (non-replaceable) can fill after a few years of use, shortening lifespan. However, the print heads are replaceable which is nice compared to the EcoTank line. (In a refillable, the print heads look like cartridges, but instead of ink, they have a port that connects to the tanks). The setup (AirPrint) works great and the only issue I have had is that the old-school LCD screen is impossible to read without a lot of lighting.

ineedasername 6y ago
I bought a different model of Canon's G line for this exact reason. They cost more than a typical entry level inkjet, but not much more than a single replacement of each color cartridge.
0x_rs 6y ago
>apparently the waste ink absorber (non-replaceable) can fill after a few years of use, shortening lifespan. That is true, and correct for many Epson printers in my experience too. There's a program to reset the printed pages counter, AntiPampers, which makes a paperweight printer return to work for many years instead of having to deal with planned obsolescence, which that definitely is - entirely on purpose from a customer view. Printers market, inkjets in particular for their very low initial cost, have a lot of shady if not straight criminal practices that unfortunately are overlooked.
neurostimulant 6y ago

raiyu 6y ago

The good news is that printing volume has decreased so much that this is really HP's swan song trying to milk that last nearly dead cow. It is annoying that we still have to print anything, and the same for all of the things you receive in the mail. Thank god for docu-sign and electronic filing. Would be great if everyone concerned about the environment would also focus on mail, priting, to add to the list of plastic straws

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Paper copies are a useful technology in a world where digital information can be changed or disappear without notice.

wolco2 6y ago

Why can one party change the terms of service when advertising other facts. If what is mentionex in big print conflicts with small print, the small print should be thrown out.

neilv 6y ago

Separate from the larger concerns, just a few notes on the practical matter of being able to print paper in peace... As people often advise, try to use a laser printer. A Laserjet 5N that I found set out for the trash on the curb one rainy night worked like a tank for over a decade, only very rarely needing consumables, which was perfect for someone in poor grad student in expensive city mode. When the muffin fan finally needed replacement, and I found a newer Laserjet on CraigsList. (And I decided to part out the 5N, rather than repair, which IIRC paid for the new one.) That CL LJ's original toner lasted many years, and a quick tipping around of the cartridge made it last longer. Eventually, I decided to buy a new (third-party) cartridge at the start of Covid (since I didn't know what would happen to supply chains). To that, I'd add, if you care about such things: the Ethernet-facing firmware on my current printer looked so unsettling, like it might be full of vulnerabilities and possibly a lot of malware or features I didn't want, that I put my own print server in front of it (running on an old OpenWrt device, at the moment), and only connect the printer as USB. I also use open source drivers without all the features and bundleware I don't want. When I get a chance, I want to make the print server do filtering of what can be sent to the printer, since I strongly suspect there's some vulns there, but the current setup does block a lot of potential other headaches. I also have some VLAN work to do on a new router.

smileybarry 6y ago
I also recommend using your own print server (except I had better luck with a Ubuntu box running CUPS), when everyone at home moved to laptops and smartphones it added 5-10 years to the life of a "dumb" USB printer. (And it was an old enough HP that it didn't have the same DRM or planned obsolescence build quality issues)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ohazi 6y ago

Yes, HP is a giant scumbag. But the conclusion from the big printer thread last week: just buy a Brother laser printer and never look back. Seriously, inkjet and all of the surrounding bullshit is not worth the time or the money or the energy or the frustration.

Wistar 6y ago
THIS. I gave up on HP printers in about 2007 when I realized that their required software was absolutely terrible, at least on my machine. It was huge install, and caused a number of weird problems. The Brothers I have work well with a minimum of problems although my Brother color printer required a new drum set awfully fast (and cost more than I paid for the printer). For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  For inkjet printer, I think Epson's ink tank printer is great. The printer cost 3x compared to other cheap loss-leader inkjet printers, but the inks are cheap and you buy it by the bottle instead of by the drips in cartridges.
- greyhair 6y ago
  You and I are in a similar camp. I have a monochrome Brother laser (with Duplex) and a Color Canon Inkjet, both on wired networking. Both work well including printing from my phone. Not problems with either, I print mostly on the laser, occasionally on the inkjet. The Canon inkjet can sit idle for weeks at a time, and I still haven't had a plugged nozzle in eight years.
bhouston 6y ago
I've converted our office to Brother (4 printers), my parents to brother (2 printers) as well as bought 3 Brother printers myself over the last 12 years. Such an amazing printer and company. And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.
- 6y ago

nvr219 6y ago

I was really nervous this was about the HP ProCurves lifetime warranty. Phew!

tmccrary55 6y ago

I can't remember the last time I've even seen an HP product, outside of stores.

pugworthy 6y ago
The consumer side of HP and print? Meh yea not so pretty. But the tech is in a lot of places you probably don't know about. A lot of things you may interact with often rely on underlying HP print technology. Ballots printed in the US for example, ATM machine receipts, your medical statements, packaging, even life sciences research for COVID-19.

jonplackett 6y ago

What printers (if any) have decent priced official ink?

narrator 6y ago

This is all part of a much larger push, and basically the future of everything: "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better" - World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real... World Economic Forum is also pushing the "Great Reset" which is a fundamental transformation of the world economy catalyzed by the COVID crisis. https://www.weforum.org/great-reset https://www.weforum.org/great-reset Imagine communism, where nobody owns anything, and everybody just gets enough to get by if they keep working. All consumption is digitally managed and metered.

mxskelly 6y ago
The only reason you'd think that's what communism is is if all your ideas about what "communism" is come from capitalist propaganda.
- narrator 6y ago
  Sounds like "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability" to me.
dennnis 6y ago
great, sounds terrible
Dahoon 6y ago
I'm not pro communism but reading stuff like this still irks me. You are allowed to own things under communism, like your house, just as under capitalism. What you cannot is own half a city and rent the houses out. Saying you cannot own anything under communism has become the norm just like saying schizophrenic when one means multiple personalities, which is not and never have been part of schizophrenia no matter how many times people repeat it.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Thats feudal capitalism, not communism.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

Got an Epson ink tank printer - more expensive to buy but glad to be rid of the cartridge scam.

neya 6y ago

I properly got a genuine HP printer and cartridge combo for what seemed like a good deal ($70) in Singapore. It worked fine for about 6 months until when the cartridges had run out of ink. So, I went to a store and bought a pair of genuine HP ink which was crazy expensive (combined with black and white, it almost amounted to 80% of the printer cost for the XL size at the time). Still, I wanted to be a genuine user and I paid for it. When I replaced the new cartridges in the tray, the printer insisted that I connect to the internet and I refused to connect it because it wasn't necessary I thought. It wouldn't let me even print a single paper despite the tray being fully loaded. So, fine with it, I connected the damn thing to the internet. Suddenly, I got a notice saying the ink cartridges aren't genuine. I was puzzled, went back and fought with the store manager and got a replacement and they made sure it was 100% genuine this time. So, I went back, set it up and nope. Still the same issue. The cartridges were full and brand new, and I really wanted to print some flyers for a business convention, which is why I was willing to invest the money because of the shortage of time I had. The printer absolutely refused to print anything at all. HP support left me running around in circles like a headless chicken. I had to take a lot of heat because of this stupid printer for no fault of mine, simply because it was "smart" and needed an internet connection to do an offline job. I was so mad that day that the first thing I did after I came from the business convention was took the damn thing apart and remove all the parts for arduino projects (motors, rollers, display, PSU, etc) and threw everything else away. I wrote a very rude note to their unhelpful customer support and went back and even apologized to the store manager who replaced my genuine cartridges. It was an expensive lesson for me to learn not to trust any printing company, especially HP that relies on the internet to do an offline job. I follow this rule of thumb for coffee makers and every other hardware that shouldn't be "smart" and should be dumb. I'm even ready to pay the premium these days for the dumb version of a product offering simply because..it is so much simpler.

tobyhinloopen 6y ago
Epson Ecotank. Just put in ink. Really - the ink come in bottles you just pour in. The ink is really chip, and it prints just as pretty as another inkjet, including quality photos
- 6y ago

jrochkind1 6y ago

> Doctorow's novella "Unauthorized Bread" explains why we have to fight DRM today to avoid a grim future > Salima has a problem: her Boulangism toaster is locked down with software that ensures that it will only toast bread sold to her by the Boulangism company… and as Boulangism has gone out of business, there's no way to buy authorized bread. Thus, Salima can no longer have toast. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/doctorows_novella_unauthorized_bread_explains_why_we_have_fight_drm_today_avoid_grim_future https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/doctorows_novella_una...

_iyig 6y ago
Sounds a lot like the true story of Juicero, that $700 juicer which only squeezed Juicero-brand juice packs, and only after connecting to WiFi and validating a QR code printed on each (rather extravagantly expensive) bag of pre-chopped vegetables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
- curiousllama 6y ago
  Was that the one where you could just squeeze the bag between your hands, too?
  - failrate 6y ago
    Yes, and some indication that the hand squeezing got you more juice than the machine.
- lostgame 6y ago
  Juicero is a fantastic example of modern startup overfunding and the issues with DRM and form over function. It's intensely worth reading about.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  It wasn't a completely stupid idea but: - The price for the juice packs was outrageous - The juicer was overbuilt. There was a hilarious teardown and BOM estimation[0]. Should have been way cheaper - The IoT aspect served no real purpose. It added to the BOM. But I could totally see a subscription model with an inexpensive juicer that's subsidized by a subscription to juice packs. Sure you could also buy some generic ones and someone will come up with a re-usable pouch, but really you are paying for the convenience. Nespresso did it (but coffee has way better margins than juice pouches). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

homero 6y ago

I actually like instant ink. It's really cheap, I'd be much more upset if they didn't add the 99¢ plan. Most of my life I've tried fake ink, refilling ink and it's so stressful. I finally feel free by paying for what I print and don't think about it much. I think it's a very good thing that it's pretty much pay for what you use, I would hate for set prices.

thanatos519 6y ago

I my Epson EcoTank ET-14000. What HP is doing should be made illegal. Worldwide. In global trade agreements.

bsenftner 6y ago

People need to boycott the printer industry entirely. When their crap ceases to sell, they will change, and only then.

anuila 6y ago
I think the home-printing industry is on its last legs. More and more documents don't need to be printed. I haven't owned a printer in years and when I must print something I hop in the nearest (laser-)print shop for peanuts. HP is just trying to make the last few bucks before closing down their print shop.

aj7 6y ago

One time, I bought a brand new HP ink jet for $29, I think at Walmart. When the ink ran out, and I saw the price of a new cartridge, I quite calmly pulled and saved the line cord and USB cable, and any paper inside. Then I picked it up, walked down the hall in my highrise to the trash closet, and threw the whole thing down the chute.

bserge 6y ago
Price of a low end All-in-one HP printer: £40. Price of a new set of cartridges for it: £50... The printer came with full cartridges, not the "test cartridge" shit Canon does... It was cheaper to buy a new printer :/
paxys 6y ago
Next time do proper electronics recycling though. All modern electronics have rare earth and other materials that should not go in the trash.
slezyr 6y ago
Next time just search for the 3rd party refillable cartridges on aliexpress.
- aj7 6y ago
  They are crap. You get lulled if they work a few times. Then…

paultopia 6y ago

There have to be a bunch of serial founders reading this thread, right? Would someone please found a company to make it unnecessary for individuals to own printers? Even in a pandemic? Kinkos exists, but they do it really shittily. You have to go into a ginormous store filled with surly employees (and these days, covid probably), their prices per page are outrageous, oh, and to print you end up using their scary doubtless malware-laden windows machines in store. Screw that. Why not, like, Amazon locker for printing? Send a print job or several print jobs somewhere from home, have it land in a locked mail slot, go to the place and enter a code to pick it up.

paultopia 6y ago
Hell, I'd even pay for delivery. At the rate most humans use non-office printers, it would probably be worth it to pay 10 bucks once a month to have someone just drop a print off by my door.
macNchz 6y ago
I've seen these popping up in NYC but never used one: https://www.printwithme.com/ https://www.printwithme.com/
toast0 6y ago
What kind of timeline are you looking at? Would print out, stick in a large envelope, and drop in the mail work? If so, I think there are already a fair number of services that do that. And, I think it used to be a service of Compuserve or Prodigy or one of the early services; you just need a small office near major USPS hubs and you can probably get most printouts in a day or two.
908B64B197 6y ago
Make it a SaaS. There's always a bunch of print shops next to colleges. Most of them are low-tech/no tech (get there in person with your document on a thumb drive/email it to the clerk's gmail account). Make it so the local print shop can run the print server and set it's rates. You display a nice map with all the print shops close to the user and a price for the document, the user select which print shop gets the job. You handle the transaction, they take care of the job.

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago

I've been reading some sci-fi by Doctorow. Got part way through, recognized the style, scrolled up and saw that this was his site. This was the line that did it: > For this to work, you need to win a two-front war: one on your customers and the other on your competitors. HP is fighting both. I like the way he argues.

swalsh 6y ago

Brother laser printers are the way to go. Wish setting up the drivers on linux was easier though.

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago

American capitalism is getting more cancerous by the day. In other news: I really like my Brother monochrome laser printer. My wife is a teacher. Last year we printed nearly 25k pages--hardly any problems. You can shake the cartridges and get an extra 500 or so pages past their limit. I bought a replacement drum because the printer warned me, but I've been ignoring that warning for quite a while--waiting to see when I actually need to install the drum--and it just keeps chugging along. Not the kind of thing you'd see from an HP.

Gunax 6y ago

> Drink verification ink

greyhair 6y ago

Will never buy anything from HP again. I owned and old used LaserJetII (with a duplexor) for years followed by an old used LaserJet 4-Plus (it was awesome!)that both were so reliable, and so Awesome, that I I bought an HP Photosmart color printer. What a mistake. One of those stupid two cartridge models that stopped printing as soon as one color ran out. Plugged heads all the time. Drove me crazy. Dumped that for a Canon about eight years ago, which so far has been excellent. The LaserJet 4 Plus finally wore out two years ago. I replaced it with one of those little Brother 2360s. It works fine. Faster to start up a print job than the HP was, but not as fast printing duplex as the HP. Probably faster in single sided. The end point being, the old LaserJets were built back when HP had not yet lost its soul. The Photosmart Inkjet was the first generation of the "New HP".

projektfu 6y ago
I bought one of the page-wide officejet pro printers a while back. (X475DN?) It was amazing! No warm up, 1-2 sec. first page out, fast printing, low energy use. But if you didn't use all the colors on the whole page width at some point, it they would start to clog. Eventually it only printed black reliably, and all the other colors were clogged and useless. Then, like seemingly all modern HP printers, it developed a weird software or controller problem and had to be replaced. Switched to a lexmark color laser which prints very well, doesn't produce a first page very quickly, but then it started having BSODs. Replaced with monochrome laser printers (Samsung) and that has gone pretty well. I'm still nervous about HP being involved, but it seems to be Samsung's show with HP just doing the fulfillment. Edit: just noticed that the HP Laserjet 4+ was introduced at $1,839 in 1994; about $3,230 today.

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

For Black Friday, every year, Walmart would offer the same HP Deskjet color printer for $20. A cartridge of one color would cost $20 as well. So, I’d just buy a new printer. And then finally I got a laser printer by Brother. And I stopped buying a printer ever year, since ink was cheaper than the printer.

microtherion 6y ago

Maybe nostalgia is coloring my memory, but I remember the B&W HP Deskjet I had in the 1990s as rock solid, with ink that rarely ever caused trouble. Nowadays, I generally wouldn't sell an inkjet printer to my worst enemy (I own a very small one that fits into a suitcase for travel). But I'm surprised that laser printers have not become victims to that phenomenon nearly to the same degree. Maybe it's because I like somewhat pricy ones (Duplex all-in-one color lasers), but apart from undersized "Starter Tones" sets, they seem to offer a reasonable value, and I even own a HP.

vibrant_mclean 6y ago

I am in the free plan for about two years. I remember reading the terms before I subscribed which clearly stated that they can discontinue the free plan anytime. It is really good plan as I don't have to worry about buying printer ink, always print in high quality color and printed a lot of photos. TBH, it is still really a good plan for $1 per month.

ballenf 6y ago
I think the issue that they shouldn't be allowed to use the term "life" and in the fine print clarify that it's explicitly not for "life".
- tiernano 6y ago
  I think it says somewhere life of the printer and most small home printers probably have a life of 2-3 years...

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

Well, it's well known that once a gym started selling "lifetime membership" it will likely close in a couple of months.

someonehere 6y ago

I realized after reading this I’m stuck in this trap with Epson and their ink. I installed new ink in all colors recently. Black printed fine a few days (shipping labels). Two weeks later I have missing lines on black prints now. I run the ink calibration cleaning option. Works fine for two days. Then the problem comes back so I clean and align again. I realize after reading this I’m wasting ink with the cleaning and alignments I’m running. I went to eBay and bought a used color laser writer from Xerox for the coat of a new color inkjet.

TYPE_FASTER 6y ago

I got tired of the inkjet experience and bought a Brother color laser printer with full duplex printing and scanning and support for AirPrint and uploading scanned docs to the cloud for less than $500 at Staples five or six years ago. I've replaced the toner once, maybe twice. Updated the firmware once. You can toss a bunch of documents in the document feeder, tap a button, and they are scanned and uploaded where you configure. Highly recommended.

dawnerd 6y ago

Input something like 10 bucks at goodwill for my canon laser printer and it works great, even if it’s a bit old and driver support is poor on modern systems. I refuse to pay full price for a printer again. There’s just too many perfectly fine printers at thrift stores.

medievalMoose 6y ago

I was given a used HP printer with instant ink cartridges installed. When the time to actually make use of it, I had to: -Connect printer to the internet -add a credit card to the account the ink came with -Create a new account since I did not 'own' the account associated with the cartridges in hand -wait 5 business days for new cartridges that were linked to my account, even though the ones installed were full. rent seeking in the form of antiquated document acceptance policies

varispeed 6y ago
I find it fascinating that people are ready to go through such lengths to achieve what is supposed to be a simple task and they think it is normal. If they were testing this with the customers, really not one said this is just plain stupid or maybe they did, but greedy marketers decided to ignore? It's not like HP has a monopoly on printers?

tobyhinloopen 6y ago

Epson Ecotank.

radimm 6y ago
All the way! Guess it’s kind of difficult to trust it - based what HP is doing. But once you try, it’s the best.

krrrh 6y ago

Unpopular opinion, but after not owning a printer for around a decade I bought an HP Tango which is a totally wireless “cloud printer”. It’s small and has a nice linen case, so it looks like a book when on the shelf and not in use. I subscribe to a $4 tier for instant ink (50 pages a month with a 1 month rollover), and I love it. The main thing that pushed me over the edge was that you can also print unlimited 5x7 photos printed from your mobile device as part of the deal, and having recently acquired a baby we thought it would be nice to actually print sie photos for ourselves and relatives. They obviously screwed up by doing a freemium model on a physical product, but the paid tiers combined with the Tango aren’t such a raw deal for people who don’t want a printer taking up dedicated space in their apartments, and it saves the hassle of keeping track of ink levels and ordering cartridges, or going to the library in the cases where printing something made sense. This is insanely (maybe even criminally?) hyperbolic: > The right-to-repair criminals like Apple, John Deere and Medtronic. Tesla and GM, Juicero and Keurig – companies that are not merely content with waging war on customers, but also on competitors who offer those customers shelter. Lots of consumers just have different priorities when it comes to trade offs. Doctorow positions himself as a champion of consumers, but he’d really like to reduce our range of options if he could.

neil_s 6y ago
I just went through the exact same experience. Usually would print at work but need a printer for infrequent docs like tax returns during quarantine WFH. The Instant Ink subscription is reasonably priced for that, and I don't need to worry about the cartridges getting spoiled if left alone for too long because I pay for pages printed, not cartridges. The Tango gives me the bonus of printing unlimited photos. Admittedly the photo paper doesn't cost much less than printing photos at retailers, but fun to have it at your house.

sokoloff 6y ago

Makes this recent "oops, we disabled your printer drivers totally by accident" move on HP's part seem even more suspicious. https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/23/hp_printer_macos/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/23/hp_printer_macos/ I was able to reinstall Apple drivers and get my HP color laser back online, but it did make me wonder if this was another underhanded move on HP's part to retire some of their inconveniently inexpensive (from their point of view) to operate laser printers.

varispeed 6y ago

I got a used laser printer few years ago and I still didn't need to replace anything. It feels like it can print ad infinitum. And I paid like £30 for it. Ink printers is a scam.

xbar 6y ago

I shamefully own one of these printers. It's absurd. But sadly, I pay less for ink than the Canon I owned previously. I know I should I have bought the bullet decades ago for a laser printer. Lesson learned.

GuB-42 6y ago

Ok, I get it, HP is evil... But they are actually responding to customer demand. Customers want cheap printers, and HP has to make money somehow, so they make their money on ink. And to be fair, for people who just want to print a page from time to time, it is actually not a bad deal. Want cheap ink, HP also sells ink tank printers which you refill from bottles, no DRM or any nasty tricks here, but the printer is $300+. They also sell laser printers, printer for businesses, etc... Each with economics adapted to its market. HP have competitors of course, but they also fit into an economic model targeted at a market. They may be less aggressive than HP regarding ink, but it doesn't necessarily makes them better. Maybe the printer itself is more expensive, the print quality may be worse or is lacking some feature you need. There is no printer monopoly, and if HP can get away with that, that's because it fits some customer needs, otherwise they would have bought Canon, or Epson, or Brother, or anything else... Personally, I kind of like Brother. They seem to be the company with the least nonsense among printer manufacturers.

humaniania 6y ago

I will not buy or recommend HP products.

p1mrx 6y ago

I was skeptical of that "15 pages/month free" deal when I saw it. For an infrequently-used inkjet, most of the maintenance cost comes from keeping the ink fresh (which is why I have a B&W laser.) How could HP ever hope to profit by maintaining idle printers for free?

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Mods changed title to "HP Instant Ink is “ink as a service” hiding the lede that HP broke its "lifetime subscription" promised in it printer sales contract.

nojvek 6y ago

HP is a giant scumbag. They’re not a monopoly though. Get a brother laser for $70. Will last you decades and need toner changes after 1000s of pages. Vote with your wallet. HP only survives because people pay for them. Arguably I guess that’s what we call a “scam”.

poopsmithe 6y ago

I've been wanting to own a printer for several years, but I hold back on purchasing because I know there isn't a single consumer level printer company out there that doesn't have planned obsolescence built into their machines. I hope to see a company emerge via Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or similar which offers an open source, maintainable, moddable, built-to-last printer. Similarly to how there is now a market for privacy-focused smartphones, I'd like to think that there are enough people out there who would fund such a company.

MartianSquirrel 6y ago

This > Requiring frequent "calibration" printouts that use vast amounts of ink I use my personal printer once every 2 months, on average, and every single time it prints the calibration page. It would make much more sense from a UX point of view if it just asked if I want to calibrate instead of forcing me to waste ink, paper, time and patience in the process.

hi41 6y ago

With all these drawbacks why does thewirecutter recommend an HP printer as the top choice? https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laser-printer/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laser-printe... Edit: spelling

micaeked 6y ago
I dunno about this specific page, but Wirecutter quality in general has been disappointing for me lately. Might be related to the nytimes acquisition.