21 ms·

The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place inside your printer

457 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894
- echelon 6y ago
  It's nice to see Slashdot on the homepage. This was the website that started it all. Before HN, before Reddit. Slashdot used to crash web servers with all the traffic it sent. Good times...
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Slashdot was the only site that I (in the UK) could load on 9/11. As I was in an office with no IRC client, TV or radio it was invaluable. Then Jon Katz was digging up old amigas in Kabul to download the latest movies.
    - ecmascript 6y ago
      Why didn't any other site load?
      - iso1631 6y ago
        Combination of loss of a lot of connectivity in New York, with massive amounts of increased load on the databases of sites from everyone wanting to know what was happening It was nearly 20 years ago, but from memory the BBC did load occasionally, really really slowly
      - TomVDB 6y ago
        CNN had to revert to a bare bones HTML page because their servers and Internent connection couldn’t handle the load of everybody reloading as things unfolded.
      - skylanh 6y ago
        Network demand seems to be the best answer. There were key network switches and fibre that was located at those sites which was destroyed during the events. I remember nothing was working or loading. News sites went to plain text with minimal content during this period. The book "The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11" appears to deal with this fairly well: https://www.nap.edu/read/10569/chapter/4 https://www.nap.edu/read/10569/chapter/4 This was the era where a major computer consultant (IBM) failed to provision for the Olympics: https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/09/09/216607/index.htm https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
  - dang 6y ago
    Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).
- dang 6y ago
  Yes. But this feels like one of those stories where the community needs to have more than one go at it, and it will probably get reposted anyhow, so I think we'll leave this one up.
ajay-b 6y ago
What if I just buy my own ink from a third-party supplier at a drastically discounted cost?
- judge2020 6y ago
  Assuming the cartridges work, go for it, but you might run into DRM/issues using third-party ink.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    I can understand (not approve of, but understand) DRM for like your OS, and anything that can install. It is easy to slip up and install malicious software, for non-tech, non-critical-thinking individuals. But DRM on ink? What's the worst that could happen? I ruin the printer I paid for? I ruin the page I'm printing? What's the justification, outside of blind greed?
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      I would assume the "justification" is something along the lines of "you get poor print quality and then blame it on the printer hurting our brand". You did mention the real reason though.
    - waihtis 6y ago
      In case anyone else was interested what the justification is: 1) Counterfeit cartridges may cause damage to your HP LaserJet printer hardware – which can lead to downtimes of the whole company’s printing infrastructure and disruption of entire workflows. 2) Manufacturing and distributing counterfeit items is illegal. So, buying fakes may bring you and your organization into contact with shady business which may be operated by large-scale criminal syndicates. 3) Counterfeit toner cartridges may alter the printing behavior of your HP printer. When using Original HP toner cartridges, only then can HP printing systems perform within Blue Angel guidelines limits. 4) Due to their often poor print quality and necessary re-prints, counterfeits are likely to waste valuable resources such as paper or energy. Also at the end of life, counterfeits likely don’t get recycled. Directly copy-pasted from https://www8.hp.com/us/en/cartridge/anti-counterfeit.html https://www8.hp.com/us/en/cartridge/anti-counterfeit.html
umvi 6y ago
Even though it's possible to connect my HP printer to WiFi, I've never done it, and I am so glad. I can use super cheap 3rd party ink that lasts years at a time.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You're probably lucky that there's no built-in firmware that prevents that, because they will and probably do have protections, like a print / usage counter in the cartridge itself.
beamatronic 6y ago
I’m glad to see Slashdot is still around
- trollied 6y ago
  I'm very surprised! I have a 5-digit userid on there & it used to be my go-to site for news back im the day. Wonder how many owners it has had over the years?
  - iso1631 6y ago
    After Malda + co, it was Dice, then it was bought by the same guy who bought Sourceforge and tried to turn them both round.
- dang 6y ago
  Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).
pwinnski 6y ago
Stop buying HP! Get a Brother laser printer.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  I can second this. I bought a $120 laser printer years ago for college. It's been extremely solid, I've only needed to replace toner once and it was cheap. It can sit for months unused without getting clogged or become unusable. If you print sporratically and don't need to print pictures, then it's perfect.
- terse_malvolio 6y ago
  Get a laser printer, brother https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014482
- roflc0ptic 6y ago
  Yes. As someone with absolutely no vested interest in anyone buying brother printers, I can confirm that my brother printer has worked for years, the ink lasts apparently forever, and I'm finally beginning to unlearn the feeling of dread and uncertainty I instinctively have whenever I think to myself, "Man, I really need to print this out."
  - derefr 6y ago
    Printers are mostly-mechanical devices, with a little bit of electronics. Most consumer printer brands, though, are designed by computer hardware or consumer electronics companies who don’t know all that much about mechanical engineering. Meanwhile, Brother is a typewriter and sewing machine company—mechanical engineers make up the majority of their engineering competence. So, IMHO, it’s no surprise that Brother gets design elements correct like “efficient use of toner” and “self-cleaning” and “optimizing for low wear on the print head” that other printer manufacturers struggle with. (If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t. Then again, hardware-headed companies do seem to treat drivers as literal drivers, while software-headed companies seem to treat them as a fat shim that value-adds and makes noise all the time.)
nobrains 6y ago
The pupil has become the master (slashdot / hacker news)
- dang 6y ago
  Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).
goldcd 6y ago
To give a counter argument - I've embraced HPs new model. Couple of years ago, my old printer ended up in the bin. Was a great big hulking thing with a flatbed scanner that took up too much space. For the odd things I needed printing, I just did this at work. For scanning I have a lovely Fuji SnapScan (Feed in stack of pages, scans both sides, OCRs them and gives them to Google for storage). With lock-down, I'm working at home and maybe once a week I've found I need to print something. Shipping labels, application forms to sign etc. I missed having a printer, but didn't want to commit to having to keep a printer fed with consumables for those few times I need one. My employer offered to pay for bits I might need at home, so picked up an HP Tango printer for the Instant Ink. I'm not going to print more than 50 pages a month, so I'm out of pocket £2 a month for any printing I need. £24 a year. I'm happy with that (plus you get a few months free, only starts charging when carts it ships with are switched out, rolls over up to 150 pages and photos printed from app are free). In summary - it suits my needs and I suspect those of many others. If I needed to print loads of course I'd just buy a laser, but for occasional 'I need a printer' and don't want to get annoyed every time I hear it pumping though ink to clear the heads..
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I love my ScanSnap. My workflow is incoming paper -> scanner -> DevonThink -> shredder. But note that £24 is ferociously expensive in terms of ink if you're not printing more than 600 pages a year. That's probably £8 worth of laser toner. You can also get a nice Brother B/W laser printer for under 200 USD these days.
  - goldcd 6y ago
    I'm a bit evangelical about the Snapscan (I somehow managed to talk about it whilst discussing printers..) I don't see the £24 as being ferociously expensive - as I'm really buying convenience. If you're looking at cost-per-page, I agree - If it were, then I'd be buying a laser-jet or a tanked ink-jet (and that would be many multiples of £24 extra). Not just the cost I can now put out of mind, it's the annoying stuff (like "I bet HP just made 50 cents every time I clear the heads" or "FFS I just printed 20 cards with a sky on them, so I'm out of Cyan")
rkagerer 6y ago
I am constantly amazed at how the market keeps doing business with large companies that outright lie to them.
fxtentacle 6y ago
"DRM Kitty Litter: The Only Thing Stupider Than DRM Coffee" https://www.ifixit.com/News/6900/drm-kitty-litter https://www.ifixit.com/News/6900/drm-kitty-litter I thank that article for mentioning this :)
- Shivetya 6y ago
  I will be honest, I wasn't sure this wasn't satire until I went to the company's own site. I am really curious how many customers they actively maintain.
exabrial 6y ago
We really need to design a Free (as in freedom) open source printer. It _is_ sort of ironic there are quite a few open source 3d printers but no open source 2d printers. I really like the simplicity of the Creality Ender3. The controller board is an Arduino and it uses commodity stepper drivers and stepper motors. The complicated specialized parts are the hot-end, which has now been somewhat standardized. Would an open source laser be out of reach? Maybe we could pick a cheap, readily-available toner cartridge and design a printer around it.
- milquetoastaf 6y ago
  There was a big HN thread a few weeks ago on open source 2d printers. It seems the biggest bottleneck would be the nozzle designs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
  - exabrial 6y ago
    Oh interesting! That's why I think the "design a printer around an accessible cartridge", or starting with a laser printer would be a better approach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 6y ago
  Literally speaking, a 3d printer becomes a 2d printer if you unplug an axis. You can get open source kits that are basically this, called plotters. The issue is that hobbyists can't achieve the resolution necessary for printing texts or images, no matter how many axes the machine has. A $30 inkjet printer at Walmart has easily 10x or 20x the resolution of a desktop 3d printer. That kind of precision is hard to do without specialized machinery. The people with that ability are, well, printer manufacturers.
adamc 6y ago
What I take from that article is "avoid HP!".
balabaster 6y ago
This kind of reinforces my opinion that I made the right decision by going completely paperless at home. All documents are electronic. Anything that needs signing gets signed digitally. I'll admit, it was a hard mental adjustment to make the shift and wasn't without some effort to figure out how to make it work, but now that I have, I'm happy I did. I did away with a printer more than a year ago now and every time I think of going back, I look at the price of ink cartridges and realize how much better for my wallet and the environment the switch has been.
- stanmancan 6y ago
  This is great if you can pull it off. Do you have any school aged kids? I'd say 80% of our printer use is for school projects or forms that have to get printed out, signed, and physically handed back in. Not sure how we could get by without one. With that being said, when we did buy a printer about 5 years ago we bought a monochrome Brother laser printer and it's a way better investment than inkjet printers (if you don't need to print pictures or something)
  - balabaster 6y ago
    I have two school age kids, and yes, that's been a constant battle. Teaching them to think about how to be able to submit projects electronically has been a learning curve for all of us.
  - wing-_-nuts 6y ago
    When I dealt with this in school, I would simply fill the answers in on a separate document. Make sure answers are labeled correctly. Scan in notebook drawings if needed. I haven't had a printer in decades. If I absolutely have to get something printed out, I go to the library or print shop.
- awb 6y ago
  Our HP printer ran out of ink and we stopped printing at home. It's far easier / cost-effective to pay 19 cents at CVS in the rare event I need anything printed these days, than to mess around with paper jams, ink, a bulky printer on my desk or these ridiculous "pay as you go" printing plans.
disown 6y ago
Just yesterday I was noting how we are moving into a subscription model world in the linux thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029829 It isn't just software, but also hardware that is going to be subscription based. How long before our stove, shower, can opener, etc are all subscription based. Image coming home from the supermarket and you can't open the can of tuna because you aren't current on your can opener subscription? Wake up and you can't brew coffee on your Keurig single serve coffee machine because you failed to pay the monthly subscription fee. Every door can be subscription based. If you are short on funds, do you pay the bathroom door or bedroom door subscription?
mcot2 6y ago
I agree with everyone here. Get a brother laser printer. I have bought 3 of them between myself and my family and have never looked back.
code4tee 6y ago
Inkjets are just not great printers, especially if you print infrequently. Laser printers used to be an expensive luxury but they’ve long since become a commodity. Get a half decent laser printer and it will work fine even if you only print once a month.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Okay, I think lasers > inkjets for most people. But its dangerous to generalize. Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. As you approach photo-quality, you can probably get very good photos from a $500 inkjet, and commercial quality photos from a $1000 inkjet. I don't know of any laserjet that approaches that quality. Instead, laserjets main advantage is the simpler and cheaper to use toner. At the $300 price point, laser jets are just cheaper to maintain and use over ink. -------- Now there's a bunch of $100 to $200 ink printers (and laser printers) which have even worse attributes. Since most $100 printers seem to be inkjet, I think people rightfully give them a bad reputation. But at higher price points, a 11-ink printer is the only way you're going to get anything near photo-quality. (Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000).
  - code4tee 6y ago
    Agree, but I’d consider the photo quality printing to be more of an edge case for most users. If one just occasionally prints a few photos there are other inexpensive services available. But if that is the use case then yes I’d agree inkjet is better.
  - xienze 6y ago
    > Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. But you get photos printed at <wherever> for pennies, so who wants to buy an inkjet and the fancy photo paper?
  - asciimov 6y ago
    Unless your really need to print huge amounts of photos, most people would be better served by having their photos printed at a store or through an online service.
inetsee 6y ago
Whenever I read articles like this I wonder about the economics of behavior like this. Are the profits gained by these kinds if behaviors enough to offset the loss of customers, either directly by people swearing to never buy HP products again, or indirectly by bad word of mouth or by articles like this warning potential customers of HP's bad behavior. Hewlett-Packard used to be a trusted brand. The HP brand seems to be losing more trust with every action like this that they take.
- brlewis 6y ago
  Hypothesis: The average printer buyer is not reading eff.org or having conversations with friends about friends' printer experiences. They go to a store and buy what the salesperson recommends. After purchase, they think of the restrictions as an annoyance, not a freedom issue to talk with their friends about.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    As someone who just had his 4th, fancy HP inkjet printer kick the bucket, vowed to never spend another dime with HP, and brought a Brother laser jet, I think at least part of the problem is: what's the alternative? Kodak promised a printer that was going to solve the ink price problem, but that never materialized. One would think there was a golden opportunity to disrupt this ridiculous market, but color ink is apparently the most expensive resource on planet earth. It hardly matters which piece of crap printer I buy. It's going to cost $100 to refill, and it will break in less than 2 years. I mean, next, someone's going to tell me there's been collusion in this market for 30 years, and I'd be all like, pfft, come on. Really?
  - secabeen 6y ago
    Also, from HPs perspective, people buy a printer, use it, but then they use up the initial ink, and buy cheap knock-off ink. It's not as good, it gets clogged in the heads, or people don't want to waste ink running the cleaning, etc, so then people hate on the printer and HP. Instant ink charges you by page, so you can run cleaning cycles as much as you want, do everything you need to do that maintains a good experience, and people just pay for what they actually use in output. I see the appeal.
jdofaz 6y ago
I've had a Samsung ml-2525 for probably ten years, it works great. Sadly Samsung sold their printer division to HP. HP even removed features from the driver, they took out the ability to do manual duplex printing. HP doesn't sell toner for my model anymore but I was able to find it from cdw. I figure the printer will outlast my ability to find toner for it. This just confirms my already existing stance to never buy anything from HP.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Similar here: I've had a bottom-of-the-range Samsung laser for over 10 years, and it just keeps going (using cheap 3rd-party toner cartridges), despite periods of relatively heavy use for a "home" printer (hundreds of pages per day, at times). But I'm not sure what I'll do when one day it finally dies.
  - Moru 6y ago
    Just buy a Brother printer. Mine is probably more than 15 years and runs very cheap and no failures. Haven't even changed drum yet. 3rd-party toners very cheap and can be easily found online.
    - sn41 6y ago
      Also it's easy to get even cheaper refills on these toners. Brother works great.
    - taneq 6y ago
      Seconded on Brother. Mine (B&W laser) is over 7 years old now, does automatic duplex printing, and is on its second toner/drum cartridge. Still trucking along just like it did when it was new. It cost like $120 to buy and only a couple of cents per page. Of course, their value and longevity means all of these reviews are years out of date so I have no idea if the current models are as good. I hope they are, though.
  - artificial 6y ago
    I'm in a similar situation. 3rd party toner. I've got a Brother laser printer (MFC7840W) that doesn't die. I've owned it for nearly 12 years and I really want a new fancy printer, too, but it's silly to replace something that works.
AnssiH 6y ago
I often find these HP ink plan headlines clickbaity. They make it sound like your printer stops working unless you pay a monthly fee. In reality, you can still buy standalone ink cartridges as normal, no one is forcing you to go for a monthly ink plan.
WilTimSon 6y ago
HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. Facebook is hated by the internet but plenty of people offline love it. Many hate Amazon but some can't stop loving the convenience. HP, though? Everybody hates them and it's always because of their predatory practices. The company is essentially running its name into the ground for no reason.
- apexalpha 6y ago
  Their business notebooks are well built, so there's that. I can imagine HP printing to have 0 fans, though.
- hollandheese 6y ago
  They used to make really great calculators, but that stopped basically a decade ago.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  I have heard (and experienced) OK things about their enterprise laptops, FWIW. And I've certainly heard good things about their Laserjets back in the day :) The current budget consumer inkjets seem to be pretty awful; though I wonder how much that's the fault/state of entire category - I notice that whenever we talk about HP Inkjets being awful, the counter-recommendation is not e.g. Epson or Canon budget Inkjet, but a laser printer. Specifically, almost exclusively, a Brother laser :). Which is a different category. There are professional photographers who are happy with Epson & Canon fancy Inkjets; but the loss-leader el-cheapo printers do indeed seem to be generating ill-will.
  - nn3 6y ago
    As far as I understand consumer inkjets are designed as loss leaders. They make the majority of product revenue with the ink. Pretty much everything that people hate about them comes from this business model. I personally print very rarely, but I found laser printers are much better for rare printing. When I had an Inkjet the Ink was always dried up when I tried to use it occasionally, so when I actually needed it it didn't work. So now I buy the cheapest laser printer that can do duplex, and that works when I need it. Probably the only reason to have an Inkjet is if you need color printing
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Lol that's why I always get Brother lasers. They work great and there's plenty of aftermarket cartridges available. I print for years on a $20 toner.
TedShiller 6y ago
Just use a laser printer. Even HP. Works perfect after 12 years. One cartridge lasts 6 years.
dyingkneepad 6y ago
So: is there any other printer brand that I can buy without having to check whether the specific model will work on Linux?
Hnrobert42 6y ago
Who the hell is this piece written for? We all know HP’s printer business is shady, but this tome reads like an Ayn Rand novel (style, not philosophy). Get to the point.
blfr 6y ago
Paper/2D printers are largely on their way out, it's a stale industry. I doubt free/libre design can take off there. It's much like Linux. It took the cloud by storm, smartphones by default, but it came too late to make headway on laptops/desktops. Sure, many people here use it. I do. And about 2% of the Internet with a declining tendency.
asdfk-12 6y ago
What are the blocks to developing community-driven libre drivers for common/cheap printers? Would it involve a lot of reverse-engineering and unique edge cases for each unit?
cosmodisk 6y ago
If Ink as service becomes mainstream, I'll drop whatever I'll be doing at the time and start printer company that doesn't do it.
- snvzz 6y ago
  Printers are synonymous with trouble. The market is saturated with shitty printers with anti-consumer products and features. There's a huge void in the field of OSHW printers. I imagine a decent effort to make an OSHW laser printer would gather a lot of interest. Even if the first printer were to be slow, expensive and had poor resolution. If you need a printer now, by all means, avoid the bad brands, and go for a laser, preferably monochrome, with an ethernet port, postscript support and IPP support.
rogerdickey 6y ago
HaaS
taylodl 6y ago
Are we saying ink-jet printers are a problem free market economics can't solve, or actually makes worse? What class of problem does this represent? Are there other classes? I'm not an economist and only took very basic economics courses in college. We hear so much about the problems solved by free market economics but we don't hear so much about the problems not solved or even are exacerbated by free market economics. Just curious as to what these classes of problems might be.
- ColanR 6y ago
  It seems like the free-market solution is the cheap brother laser printers that keep being mentioned.
- josephcsible 6y ago
  Free market economics would solve this problem. The reason we still have this problem is that our market isn't free enough: once you buy something, it should be yours to do whatever you want with, but intellectual property laws are currently abused so that the solutions to this problem tend to be illegal.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  The market has solved this. But consumers are short-sighted and irrational. They'll buy the cheap HP inkjet printer rather than a laser printer because all they look at is the upfront cost. The free market makes this worse. Ideally, HP should be sued for false advertising when they sell you something with the promise something is free for life, then take it away in less than a year.
- anonymfus 6y ago
  I think that the thing that makes this problem practically unsolvable by market is that consumers most informed about deficiencies of the product are a the least affected by them. Specifically people with knowledge about tricks of printer manufacturers are likely to know how to hack DRM on cartridges and ever how to install continuous ink systems, and so are not interested in buying more expensive printers without trickery. Another example of the same problem probably more familiar to HN audience (we have more network hackers here than printer hackers) is routers and other internet of shit: standard firmware tends to be very insecure because people who understand how bad it is tend to ignore the security of firmware in their buying decisions as they just want a hardware compatible with software they will install themself. As there is a term "lemon market" for information asymmetry between buyers and sellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ) I think we need to choose some other fruit as a term for that kind of information asymmetry between buyers that I am talking about.
cookiengineer 6y ago
The whole point of IoT is for hardware vendors to get into subscription based business models to maximize revenue. We've seen that with thermostats that stopped working until you pay more, and we've seen that a lot with internet-ready "cloud printers" that stopped working, too. I don't understand why people don't see this and still buy IoT hardware. IoT, by design, implies less control (and less privacy) on the consumer side.
acd10j 6y ago
I find InkTank Printers (where instead of cartridge you can fill Ink directly) good middle ground between exploitative inkjet cartridge vs Laser. Using from Canon Pixma without any issues.
dang 6y ago
We changed the URL from https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/11/09/0221226/hp-replaces-free-ink-for-life-plan-with-99-cents-a-month-or-your-printer-stops-working https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/11/09/0221226/hp-repl..., which points to this. This topic had a discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894. But I have a feeling this story has enough energy to demand another airing, so we won't treat the current post as a dupe.
Digit-Al 6y ago
>Our kids' teachers want them to print out assignments, fill them in, and upload pictures of the completed work to Google Classroom. Why the hell are such ludicrously byzantine solutions being employed in the first place? What happened to the dream of the paperless office? We're sitting here having pointless discussions about the feasibility of open source printers when we should be discussing the creation of better options to avoid the need to print stuff. Kids shouldn't be printing assignment sheets and then photographing them and uploading the photo's, that completely idiotic. The should be able to download it, fill it in, and re-upload it. These are things we should really be discussing. We don't need better printers, we need better solutions to printing. Then we can wave goodbye to HP and the like and watch them suffocate to death under the weight of their own greed and incompetence. IMHO
- kawfey 6y ago
  I know a few teachers so I asked around. The status quo - like in the classroom - is to still just use ___________'s and whitespace on printouts. Some teachers even print the students completed work, just because "grading is easier that way" (read: they're unaware that computer based solutions for this problem exist, or they're not very computer savvy to begin with.). Science and math classes are a different ball game. A HS chem teacher I know wants to use all the fancy modern teaching, assignment, and grading tools, but the district disallows it. Since the student's work involves drawing chemical structures, stoichiometry , and "showing your work" it's far easier to just have students print, handwrite, and scan/photograph their work than to persuade the district to buy software to perform the task. However, several students have been using iPads and drawing tablets to avoid printing and scanning, and a few overachievers use their own science/math drawing/graphing software, even LaTeX, to produce actual graphics and formatted equations. I can imagine the same is true for math classes, where it's a huge PITA to properly format algebra, long division tables, etc on computers without expensive proprietary software (that includes MS office!).
  - gigel82 6y ago
    Most educational institutions get MS Office for free (or very cheap), and the math support in something like Word is surprisingly good. It's not available in the (free) online version though (just checked now).
jpswade 6y ago
In around 2010, I made a conscious decision to go paperless, or at least as much as possible. At the time I remember wasting so much paper trying to get inkjet printers to work. I’d had enough. I bought a HP laser jet printer, which I replaced with a wireless one in 2015. I’ve never replaced the toner since I bought it and it prints flawlessly, quickly every time without fail. I get that people are unhappy with HPs motives but I’m a happy customer, and if it’s any conciliation taking this approach will result in HPs business model not working out for them. Good luck.
Marazan 6y ago
HP sadden me now. The HP1020 I have is a superb budget laser printer. Has lasted for years. They discontinued it and replaced it with a vastly inferior model.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andromeduck 6y ago
Instead of all this hand wringing over bad business models why not just vote with your wallet? Brother and Epson already make inkjets that accept bulk ink and at reasonable prices. https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers https://www.brother.ca/en/inkvestment/c/pr-printers-inkvestment https://www.brother.ca/en/inkvestment/c/pr-printers-inkvestm...
- shaftway 6y ago
  When the business model changes after you buy the printer, how are you supposed to know about it? Instead of calling it "hand wringing" think of it as "educating potential buyers of HP's past abuses so they don't make the mistake of buying one"
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    Look, I'm not against going after HP for loss of use as here, and I'm all for the end users hacking the hardware they purchased to suit their desires, but where a lot of these activist groups loose me is when they try to force their ideas of how these business relationships should be structured upon everyone else. And at the end of the day there is a reason why brands and trademarks exist. The reputation of a business has value. Caveat emptor.
    - shaftway 6y ago
      It's not complaints about how their business relationships should be structured. It's complaints about how the business relationships are structured and then changed out from underneath the consumer. And at the end of the day there is a reason why articles like this exist. To destroy the reputation of businesses that do this.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Also, don't be foolish enough to buy a printer from a company that'll be sold to HP within the next 15-20 years.
- 6y ago
enriquto 6y ago
More than thirty years after Stallman's troubles with printer drivers and we have still the same problem. Sigh.
tomsmeding 6y ago
This piece is so full of opinion-loaded words it just becomes untrustworthy. In fact, the choice of words sounds suspiciously like those corona denier articles floating around, expecting the audience to just eat up their words and copy the intended opinion. Now I believe the EFF to at least be fighting for a good cause (though its methods are sometimes criticised), but articles like these make it harder to believe. I see that the central claim is correct (the formerly free ink plan now indeed costs $0.99 per month on HP's website). However, had they taken a more fact-based, and less opinion-based, approach to writing the article, I would actually have more than skimmed it. EDIT: My main frustration is that I expected "us" to do better than the manipulative text that large companies continuously put out. I was disappointed.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Which parts are not factual? I think you’re talking about the style with which the article is written. I found it quite amusing and they made what could have been a very dry article engaging, but each according to their own...
  - tomsmeding 6y ago
    I'm indeed referring to the writing style, not necessarily the content. If it was meant to be amusing: sure, to each their own, but apparently not for me. :)

457 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894

echelon 6y ago
It's nice to see Slashdot on the homepage. This was the website that started it all. Before HN, before Reddit. Slashdot used to crash web servers with all the traffic it sent. Good times...
- iso1631 6y ago
  Slashdot was the only site that I (in the UK) could load on 9/11. As I was in an office with no IRC client, TV or radio it was invaluable. Then Jon Katz was digging up old amigas in Kabul to download the latest movies.
  - ecmascript 6y ago
    Why didn't any other site load?
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Combination of loss of a lot of connectivity in New York, with massive amounts of increased load on the databases of sites from everyone wanting to know what was happening It was nearly 20 years ago, but from memory the BBC did load occasionally, really really slowly
    - TomVDB 6y ago
      CNN had to revert to a bare bones HTML page because their servers and Internent connection couldn’t handle the load of everybody reloading as things unfolded.
    - skylanh 6y ago
      Network demand seems to be the best answer. There were key network switches and fibre that was located at those sites which was destroyed during the events. I remember nothing was working or loading. News sites went to plain text with minimal content during this period. The book "The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11" appears to deal with this fairly well: https://www.nap.edu/read/10569/chapter/4 https://www.nap.edu/read/10569/chapter/4 This was the era where a major computer consultant (IBM) failed to provision for the Olympics: https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/09/09/216607/index.htm https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
- dang 6y ago
  Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).
dang 6y ago
Yes. But this feels like one of those stories where the community needs to have more than one go at it, and it will probably get reposted anyhow, so I think we'll leave this one up.

ajay-b 6y ago

What if I just buy my own ink from a third-party supplier at a drastically discounted cost?

judge2020 6y ago
Assuming the cartridges work, go for it, but you might run into DRM/issues using third-party ink.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I can understand (not approve of, but understand) DRM for like your OS, and anything that can install. It is easy to slip up and install malicious software, for non-tech, non-critical-thinking individuals. But DRM on ink? What's the worst that could happen? I ruin the printer I paid for? I ruin the page I'm printing? What's the justification, outside of blind greed?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    I would assume the "justification" is something along the lines of "you get poor print quality and then blame it on the printer hurting our brand". You did mention the real reason though.
  - waihtis 6y ago
    In case anyone else was interested what the justification is: 1) Counterfeit cartridges may cause damage to your HP LaserJet printer hardware – which can lead to downtimes of the whole company’s printing infrastructure and disruption of entire workflows. 2) Manufacturing and distributing counterfeit items is illegal. So, buying fakes may bring you and your organization into contact with shady business which may be operated by large-scale criminal syndicates. 3) Counterfeit toner cartridges may alter the printing behavior of your HP printer. When using Original HP toner cartridges, only then can HP printing systems perform within Blue Angel guidelines limits. 4) Due to their often poor print quality and necessary re-prints, counterfeits are likely to waste valuable resources such as paper or energy. Also at the end of life, counterfeits likely don’t get recycled. Directly copy-pasted from https://www8.hp.com/us/en/cartridge/anti-counterfeit.html https://www8.hp.com/us/en/cartridge/anti-counterfeit.html

umvi 6y ago

Even though it's possible to connect my HP printer to WiFi, I've never done it, and I am so glad. I can use super cheap 3rd party ink that lasts years at a time.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You're probably lucky that there's no built-in firmware that prevents that, because they will and probably do have protections, like a print / usage counter in the cartridge itself.

beamatronic 6y ago

I’m glad to see Slashdot is still around

trollied 6y ago
I'm very surprised! I have a 5-digit userid on there & it used to be my go-to site for news back im the day. Wonder how many owners it has had over the years?
- iso1631 6y ago
  After Malda + co, it was Dice, then it was bought by the same guy who bought Sourceforge and tried to turn them both round.
dang 6y ago
Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).

pwinnski 6y ago

Stop buying HP! Get a Brother laser printer.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
I can second this. I bought a $120 laser printer years ago for college. It's been extremely solid, I've only needed to replace toner once and it was cheap. It can sit for months unused without getting clogged or become unusable. If you print sporratically and don't need to print pictures, then it's perfect.
terse_malvolio 6y ago
Get a laser printer, brother https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014482
roflc0ptic 6y ago
Yes. As someone with absolutely no vested interest in anyone buying brother printers, I can confirm that my brother printer has worked for years, the ink lasts apparently forever, and I'm finally beginning to unlearn the feeling of dread and uncertainty I instinctively have whenever I think to myself, "Man, I really need to print this out."
- derefr 6y ago
  Printers are mostly-mechanical devices, with a little bit of electronics. Most consumer printer brands, though, are designed by computer hardware or consumer electronics companies who don’t know all that much about mechanical engineering. Meanwhile, Brother is a typewriter and sewing machine company—mechanical engineers make up the majority of their engineering competence. So, IMHO, it’s no surprise that Brother gets design elements correct like “efficient use of toner” and “self-cleaning” and “optimizing for low wear on the print head” that other printer manufacturers struggle with. (If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t. Then again, hardware-headed companies do seem to treat drivers as literal drivers, while software-headed companies seem to treat them as a fat shim that value-adds and makes noise all the time.)

nobrains 6y ago

The pupil has become the master (slashdot / hacker news)

dang 6y ago
Alas, we changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038421).

goldcd 6y ago

To give a counter argument - I've embraced HPs new model. Couple of years ago, my old printer ended up in the bin. Was a great big hulking thing with a flatbed scanner that took up too much space. For the odd things I needed printing, I just did this at work. For scanning I have a lovely Fuji SnapScan (Feed in stack of pages, scans both sides, OCRs them and gives them to Google for storage). With lock-down, I'm working at home and maybe once a week I've found I need to print something. Shipping labels, application forms to sign etc. I missed having a printer, but didn't want to commit to having to keep a printer fed with consumables for those few times I need one. My employer offered to pay for bits I might need at home, so picked up an HP Tango printer for the Instant Ink. I'm not going to print more than 50 pages a month, so I'm out of pocket £2 a month for any printing I need. £24 a year. I'm happy with that (plus you get a few months free, only starts charging when carts it ships with are switched out, rolls over up to 150 pages and photos printed from app are free). In summary - it suits my needs and I suspect those of many others. If I needed to print loads of course I'd just buy a laser, but for occasional 'I need a printer' and don't want to get annoyed every time I hear it pumping though ink to clear the heads..

kstrauser 6y ago
I love my ScanSnap. My workflow is incoming paper -> scanner -> DevonThink -> shredder. But note that £24 is ferociously expensive in terms of ink if you're not printing more than 600 pages a year. That's probably £8 worth of laser toner. You can also get a nice Brother B/W laser printer for under 200 USD these days.
- goldcd 6y ago
  I'm a bit evangelical about the Snapscan (I somehow managed to talk about it whilst discussing printers..) I don't see the £24 as being ferociously expensive - as I'm really buying convenience. If you're looking at cost-per-page, I agree - If it were, then I'd be buying a laser-jet or a tanked ink-jet (and that would be many multiples of £24 extra). Not just the cost I can now put out of mind, it's the annoying stuff (like "I bet HP just made 50 cents every time I clear the heads" or "FFS I just printed 20 cards with a sky on them, so I'm out of Cyan")

rkagerer 6y ago

I am constantly amazed at how the market keeps doing business with large companies that outright lie to them.

fxtentacle 6y ago

"DRM Kitty Litter: The Only Thing Stupider Than DRM Coffee" https://www.ifixit.com/News/6900/drm-kitty-litter https://www.ifixit.com/News/6900/drm-kitty-litter I thank that article for mentioning this :)

Shivetya 6y ago
I will be honest, I wasn't sure this wasn't satire until I went to the company's own site. I am really curious how many customers they actively maintain.

exabrial 6y ago

We really need to design a Free (as in freedom) open source printer. It _is_ sort of ironic there are quite a few open source 3d printers but no open source 2d printers. I really like the simplicity of the Creality Ender3. The controller board is an Arduino and it uses commodity stepper drivers and stepper motors. The complicated specialized parts are the hot-end, which has now been somewhat standardized. Would an open source laser be out of reach? Maybe we could pick a cheap, readily-available toner cartridge and design a printer around it.

milquetoastaf 6y ago
There was a big HN thread a few weeks ago on open source 2d printers. It seems the biggest bottleneck would be the nozzle designs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
- exabrial 6y ago
  Oh interesting! That's why I think the "design a printer around an accessible cartridge", or starting with a laser printer would be a better approach.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kube-system 6y ago
Literally speaking, a 3d printer becomes a 2d printer if you unplug an axis. You can get open source kits that are basically this, called plotters. The issue is that hobbyists can't achieve the resolution necessary for printing texts or images, no matter how many axes the machine has. A $30 inkjet printer at Walmart has easily 10x or 20x the resolution of a desktop 3d printer. That kind of precision is hard to do without specialized machinery. The people with that ability are, well, printer manufacturers.

adamc 6y ago

What I take from that article is "avoid HP!".

balabaster 6y ago

This kind of reinforces my opinion that I made the right decision by going completely paperless at home. All documents are electronic. Anything that needs signing gets signed digitally. I'll admit, it was a hard mental adjustment to make the shift and wasn't without some effort to figure out how to make it work, but now that I have, I'm happy I did. I did away with a printer more than a year ago now and every time I think of going back, I look at the price of ink cartridges and realize how much better for my wallet and the environment the switch has been.

stanmancan 6y ago
This is great if you can pull it off. Do you have any school aged kids? I'd say 80% of our printer use is for school projects or forms that have to get printed out, signed, and physically handed back in. Not sure how we could get by without one. With that being said, when we did buy a printer about 5 years ago we bought a monochrome Brother laser printer and it's a way better investment than inkjet printers (if you don't need to print pictures or something)
- balabaster 6y ago
  I have two school age kids, and yes, that's been a constant battle. Teaching them to think about how to be able to submit projects electronically has been a learning curve for all of us.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  When I dealt with this in school, I would simply fill the answers in on a separate document. Make sure answers are labeled correctly. Scan in notebook drawings if needed. I haven't had a printer in decades. If I absolutely have to get something printed out, I go to the library or print shop.
awb 6y ago
Our HP printer ran out of ink and we stopped printing at home. It's far easier / cost-effective to pay 19 cents at CVS in the rare event I need anything printed these days, than to mess around with paper jams, ink, a bulky printer on my desk or these ridiculous "pay as you go" printing plans.

disown 6y ago

Just yesterday I was noting how we are moving into a subscription model world in the linux thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029829 It isn't just software, but also hardware that is going to be subscription based. How long before our stove, shower, can opener, etc are all subscription based. Image coming home from the supermarket and you can't open the can of tuna because you aren't current on your can opener subscription? Wake up and you can't brew coffee on your Keurig single serve coffee machine because you failed to pay the monthly subscription fee. Every door can be subscription based. If you are short on funds, do you pay the bathroom door or bedroom door subscription?

mcot2 6y ago

I agree with everyone here. Get a brother laser printer. I have bought 3 of them between myself and my family and have never looked back.

code4tee 6y ago

Inkjets are just not great printers, especially if you print infrequently. Laser printers used to be an expensive luxury but they’ve long since become a commodity. Get a half decent laser printer and it will work fine even if you only print once a month.

dragontamer 6y ago
Okay, I think lasers > inkjets for most people. But its dangerous to generalize. Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. As you approach photo-quality, you can probably get very good photos from a $500 inkjet, and commercial quality photos from a $1000 inkjet. I don't know of any laserjet that approaches that quality. Instead, laserjets main advantage is the simpler and cheaper to use toner. At the $300 price point, laser jets are just cheaper to maintain and use over ink. -------- Now there's a bunch of $100 to $200 ink printers (and laser printers) which have even worse attributes. Since most $100 printers seem to be inkjet, I think people rightfully give them a bad reputation. But at higher price points, a 11-ink printer is the only way you're going to get anything near photo-quality. (Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000).
- code4tee 6y ago
  Agree, but I’d consider the photo quality printing to be more of an edge case for most users. If one just occasionally prints a few photos there are other inexpensive services available. But if that is the use case then yes I’d agree inkjet is better.
- xienze 6y ago
  > Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. But you get photos printed at <wherever> for pennies, so who wants to buy an inkjet and the fancy photo paper?
- asciimov 6y ago
  Unless your really need to print huge amounts of photos, most people would be better served by having their photos printed at a store or through an online service.

inetsee 6y ago

Whenever I read articles like this I wonder about the economics of behavior like this. Are the profits gained by these kinds if behaviors enough to offset the loss of customers, either directly by people swearing to never buy HP products again, or indirectly by bad word of mouth or by articles like this warning potential customers of HP's bad behavior. Hewlett-Packard used to be a trusted brand. The HP brand seems to be losing more trust with every action like this that they take.

brlewis 6y ago
Hypothesis: The average printer buyer is not reading eff.org or having conversations with friends about friends' printer experiences. They go to a store and buy what the salesperson recommends. After purchase, they think of the restrictions as an annoyance, not a freedom issue to talk with their friends about.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  As someone who just had his 4th, fancy HP inkjet printer kick the bucket, vowed to never spend another dime with HP, and brought a Brother laser jet, I think at least part of the problem is: what's the alternative? Kodak promised a printer that was going to solve the ink price problem, but that never materialized. One would think there was a golden opportunity to disrupt this ridiculous market, but color ink is apparently the most expensive resource on planet earth. It hardly matters which piece of crap printer I buy. It's going to cost $100 to refill, and it will break in less than 2 years. I mean, next, someone's going to tell me there's been collusion in this market for 30 years, and I'd be all like, pfft, come on. Really?
- secabeen 6y ago
  Also, from HPs perspective, people buy a printer, use it, but then they use up the initial ink, and buy cheap knock-off ink. It's not as good, it gets clogged in the heads, or people don't want to waste ink running the cleaning, etc, so then people hate on the printer and HP. Instant ink charges you by page, so you can run cleaning cycles as much as you want, do everything you need to do that maintains a good experience, and people just pay for what they actually use in output. I see the appeal.

jdofaz 6y ago

I've had a Samsung ml-2525 for probably ten years, it works great. Sadly Samsung sold their printer division to HP. HP even removed features from the driver, they took out the ability to do manual duplex printing. HP doesn't sell toner for my model anymore but I was able to find it from cdw. I figure the printer will outlast my ability to find toner for it. This just confirms my already existing stance to never buy anything from HP.

jfk13 6y ago
Similar here: I've had a bottom-of-the-range Samsung laser for over 10 years, and it just keeps going (using cheap 3rd-party toner cartridges), despite periods of relatively heavy use for a "home" printer (hundreds of pages per day, at times). But I'm not sure what I'll do when one day it finally dies.
- Moru 6y ago
  Just buy a Brother printer. Mine is probably more than 15 years and runs very cheap and no failures. Haven't even changed drum yet. 3rd-party toners very cheap and can be easily found online.
  - sn41 6y ago
    Also it's easy to get even cheaper refills on these toners. Brother works great.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Seconded on Brother. Mine (B&W laser) is over 7 years old now, does automatic duplex printing, and is on its second toner/drum cartridge. Still trucking along just like it did when it was new. It cost like $120 to buy and only a couple of cents per page. Of course, their value and longevity means all of these reviews are years out of date so I have no idea if the current models are as good. I hope they are, though.
- artificial 6y ago
  I'm in a similar situation. 3rd party toner. I've got a Brother laser printer (MFC7840W) that doesn't die. I've owned it for nearly 12 years and I really want a new fancy printer, too, but it's silly to replace something that works.

AnssiH 6y ago

I often find these HP ink plan headlines clickbaity. They make it sound like your printer stops working unless you pay a monthly fee. In reality, you can still buy standalone ink cartridges as normal, no one is forcing you to go for a monthly ink plan.

WilTimSon 6y ago

HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. Facebook is hated by the internet but plenty of people offline love it. Many hate Amazon but some can't stop loving the convenience. HP, though? Everybody hates them and it's always because of their predatory practices. The company is essentially running its name into the ground for no reason.

apexalpha 6y ago
Their business notebooks are well built, so there's that. I can imagine HP printing to have 0 fans, though.
hollandheese 6y ago
They used to make really great calculators, but that stopped basically a decade ago.
NikolaNovak 6y ago
I have heard (and experienced) OK things about their enterprise laptops, FWIW. And I've certainly heard good things about their Laserjets back in the day :) The current budget consumer inkjets seem to be pretty awful; though I wonder how much that's the fault/state of entire category - I notice that whenever we talk about HP Inkjets being awful, the counter-recommendation is not e.g. Epson or Canon budget Inkjet, but a laser printer. Specifically, almost exclusively, a Brother laser :). Which is a different category. There are professional photographers who are happy with Epson & Canon fancy Inkjets; but the loss-leader el-cheapo printers do indeed seem to be generating ill-will.
- nn3 6y ago
  As far as I understand consumer inkjets are designed as loss leaders. They make the majority of product revenue with the ink. Pretty much everything that people hate about them comes from this business model. I personally print very rarely, but I found laser printers are much better for rare printing. When I had an Inkjet the Ink was always dried up when I tried to use it occasionally, so when I actually needed it it didn't work. So now I buy the cheapest laser printer that can do duplex, and that works when I need it. Probably the only reason to have an Inkjet is if you need color printing

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Lol that's why I always get Brother lasers. They work great and there's plenty of aftermarket cartridges available. I print for years on a $20 toner.

TedShiller 6y ago

Just use a laser printer. Even HP. Works perfect after 12 years. One cartridge lasts 6 years.

dyingkneepad 6y ago

So: is there any other printer brand that I can buy without having to check whether the specific model will work on Linux?

Hnrobert42 6y ago

Who the hell is this piece written for? We all know HP’s printer business is shady, but this tome reads like an Ayn Rand novel (style, not philosophy). Get to the point.

blfr 6y ago

Paper/2D printers are largely on their way out, it's a stale industry. I doubt free/libre design can take off there. It's much like Linux. It took the cloud by storm, smartphones by default, but it came too late to make headway on laptops/desktops. Sure, many people here use it. I do. And about 2% of the Internet with a declining tendency.

asdfk-12 6y ago

What are the blocks to developing community-driven libre drivers for common/cheap printers? Would it involve a lot of reverse-engineering and unique edge cases for each unit?

cosmodisk 6y ago

If Ink as service becomes mainstream, I'll drop whatever I'll be doing at the time and start printer company that doesn't do it.

snvzz 6y ago
Printers are synonymous with trouble. The market is saturated with shitty printers with anti-consumer products and features. There's a huge void in the field of OSHW printers. I imagine a decent effort to make an OSHW laser printer would gather a lot of interest. Even if the first printer were to be slow, expensive and had poor resolution. If you need a printer now, by all means, avoid the bad brands, and go for a laser, preferably monochrome, with an ethernet port, postscript support and IPP support.

rogerdickey 6y ago

HaaS

taylodl 6y ago

Are we saying ink-jet printers are a problem free market economics can't solve, or actually makes worse? What class of problem does this represent? Are there other classes? I'm not an economist and only took very basic economics courses in college. We hear so much about the problems solved by free market economics but we don't hear so much about the problems not solved or even are exacerbated by free market economics. Just curious as to what these classes of problems might be.

ColanR 6y ago
It seems like the free-market solution is the cheap brother laser printers that keep being mentioned.
josephcsible 6y ago
Free market economics would solve this problem. The reason we still have this problem is that our market isn't free enough: once you buy something, it should be yours to do whatever you want with, but intellectual property laws are currently abused so that the solutions to this problem tend to be illegal.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
The market has solved this. But consumers are short-sighted and irrational. They'll buy the cheap HP inkjet printer rather than a laser printer because all they look at is the upfront cost. The free market makes this worse. Ideally, HP should be sued for false advertising when they sell you something with the promise something is free for life, then take it away in less than a year.
anonymfus 6y ago
I think that the thing that makes this problem practically unsolvable by market is that consumers most informed about deficiencies of the product are a the least affected by them. Specifically people with knowledge about tricks of printer manufacturers are likely to know how to hack DRM on cartridges and ever how to install continuous ink systems, and so are not interested in buying more expensive printers without trickery. Another example of the same problem probably more familiar to HN audience (we have more network hackers here than printer hackers) is routers and other internet of shit: standard firmware tends to be very insecure because people who understand how bad it is tend to ignore the security of firmware in their buying decisions as they just want a hardware compatible with software they will install themself. As there is a term "lemon market" for information asymmetry between buyers and sellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ) I think we need to choose some other fruit as a term for that kind of information asymmetry between buyers that I am talking about.

cookiengineer 6y ago

The whole point of IoT is for hardware vendors to get into subscription based business models to maximize revenue. We've seen that with thermostats that stopped working until you pay more, and we've seen that a lot with internet-ready "cloud printers" that stopped working, too. I don't understand why people don't see this and still buy IoT hardware. IoT, by design, implies less control (and less privacy) on the consumer side.

acd10j 6y ago

I find InkTank Printers (where instead of cartridge you can fill Ink directly) good middle ground between exploitative inkjet cartridge vs Laser. Using from Canon Pixma without any issues.

dang 6y ago

We changed the URL from https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/11/09/0221226/hp-replaces-free-ink-for-life-plan-with-99-cents-a-month-or-your-printer-stops-working https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/11/09/0221226/hp-repl..., which points to this. This topic had a discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008894. But I have a feeling this story has enough energy to demand another airing, so we won't treat the current post as a dupe.

Digit-Al 6y ago

>Our kids' teachers want them to print out assignments, fill them in, and upload pictures of the completed work to Google Classroom. Why the hell are such ludicrously byzantine solutions being employed in the first place? What happened to the dream of the paperless office? We're sitting here having pointless discussions about the feasibility of open source printers when we should be discussing the creation of better options to avoid the need to print stuff. Kids shouldn't be printing assignment sheets and then photographing them and uploading the photo's, that completely idiotic. The should be able to download it, fill it in, and re-upload it. These are things we should really be discussing. We don't need better printers, we need better solutions to printing. Then we can wave goodbye to HP and the like and watch them suffocate to death under the weight of their own greed and incompetence. IMHO

kawfey 6y ago
I know a few teachers so I asked around. The status quo - like in the classroom - is to still just use ___________'s and whitespace on printouts. Some teachers even print the students completed work, just because "grading is easier that way" (read: they're unaware that computer based solutions for this problem exist, or they're not very computer savvy to begin with.). Science and math classes are a different ball game. A HS chem teacher I know wants to use all the fancy modern teaching, assignment, and grading tools, but the district disallows it. Since the student's work involves drawing chemical structures, stoichiometry , and "showing your work" it's far easier to just have students print, handwrite, and scan/photograph their work than to persuade the district to buy software to perform the task. However, several students have been using iPads and drawing tablets to avoid printing and scanning, and a few overachievers use their own science/math drawing/graphing software, even LaTeX, to produce actual graphics and formatted equations. I can imagine the same is true for math classes, where it's a huge PITA to properly format algebra, long division tables, etc on computers without expensive proprietary software (that includes MS office!).
- gigel82 6y ago
  Most educational institutions get MS Office for free (or very cheap), and the math support in something like Word is surprisingly good. It's not available in the (free) online version though (just checked now).

jpswade 6y ago

In around 2010, I made a conscious decision to go paperless, or at least as much as possible. At the time I remember wasting so much paper trying to get inkjet printers to work. I’d had enough. I bought a HP laser jet printer, which I replaced with a wireless one in 2015. I’ve never replaced the toner since I bought it and it prints flawlessly, quickly every time without fail. I get that people are unhappy with HPs motives but I’m a happy customer, and if it’s any conciliation taking this approach will result in HPs business model not working out for them. Good luck.

Marazan 6y ago

HP sadden me now. The HP1020 I have is a superb budget laser printer. Has lasted for years. They discontinued it and replaced it with a vastly inferior model.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

andromeduck 6y ago

Instead of all this hand wringing over bad business models why not just vote with your wallet? Brother and Epson already make inkjets that accept bulk ink and at reasonable prices. https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers https://www.brother.ca/en/inkvestment/c/pr-printers-inkvestment https://www.brother.ca/en/inkvestment/c/pr-printers-inkvestm...

shaftway 6y ago
When the business model changes after you buy the printer, how are you supposed to know about it? Instead of calling it "hand wringing" think of it as "educating potential buyers of HP's past abuses so they don't make the mistake of buying one"
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Look, I'm not against going after HP for loss of use as here, and I'm all for the end users hacking the hardware they purchased to suit their desires, but where a lot of these activist groups loose me is when they try to force their ideas of how these business relationships should be structured upon everyone else. And at the end of the day there is a reason why brands and trademarks exist. The reputation of a business has value. Caveat emptor.
  - shaftway 6y ago
    It's not complaints about how their business relationships should be structured. It's complaints about how the business relationships are structured and then changed out from underneath the consumer. And at the end of the day there is a reason why articles like this exist. To destroy the reputation of businesses that do this.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Also, don't be foolish enough to buy a printer from a company that'll be sold to HP within the next 15-20 years.
6y ago

enriquto 6y ago

More than thirty years after Stallman's troubles with printer drivers and we have still the same problem. Sigh.

tomsmeding 6y ago

This piece is so full of opinion-loaded words it just becomes untrustworthy. In fact, the choice of words sounds suspiciously like those corona denier articles floating around, expecting the audience to just eat up their words and copy the intended opinion. Now I believe the EFF to at least be fighting for a good cause (though its methods are sometimes criticised), but articles like these make it harder to believe. I see that the central claim is correct (the formerly free ink plan now indeed costs $0.99 per month on HP's website). However, had they taken a more fact-based, and less opinion-based, approach to writing the article, I would actually have more than skimmed it. EDIT: My main frustration is that I expected "us" to do better than the manipulative text that large companies continuously put out. I was disappointed.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Which parts are not factual? I think you’re talking about the style with which the article is written. I found it quite amusing and they made what could have been a very dry article engaging, but each according to their own...
- tomsmeding 6y ago
  I'm indeed referring to the writing style, not necessarily the content. If it was meant to be amusing: sure, to each their own, but apparently not for me. :)