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Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

336 points by galaxyLogic 3y ago

hashtag-til 3y ago
I jumped from HP printers long ago and bought some cheap Canon (yes I read the full article and saw Canon mentioned) as it was easier to buy cheap cartdriges. My usage is very low. What printer would be the good one to go these days?
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Everyone seems to repeat that brother lasers are the way to go, but I’ve found that for home use (photos and documents) that the canon eco tank is superior to the brother is basically every way.
  - graton 3y ago
    So you can not use the eco tank for 6 months and it will just work when you need to print again? That is why I like laser printers, I don't have to worry about head cleaning or clogged nozzles.
    - RedShift1 3y ago
      The clogged print head is overestimated. I recently revived a Brother inkjet printer that was in storage for 4 years and after 3 or 4 head cleanings it was back in business.
      - foobarian 3y ago
        Get back to us when the absorbent cleaning sponge in the printer fills up :-)
        RedShift1 3y ago
        You can always use some isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs and clean them yourself.
        r00fus 3y ago
        I’ve been using inexpensive laser (monochrome) since 2010 and haven’t had to do any of this nonsense. Sometimes I don’t even replace the toner when it complains; I just take toner out shake it and it keeps working (a bit lighter than usual)
        foobarian 3y ago
        Laser is great but it doesn’t solve the visiting grandma wanting to print photo album pictures.
        pbjtime 3y ago
        My color LaserJet photos are magazine quality. If I need better, I get them at CVS for something like eight cents
        robin_reala 3y ago
        That’s not remotely worth the hassle of a colour inkjet. Just decide on the photos together and upload them to a proper photo print service for delivery to her home.
        foobarian 3y ago
        It sure is a hassle, but the grandma loves it so much it feels worth it. I gave up on HP in the past but I’m giving it another go now with an Epson eco tank. So far so good.
        vel0city 3y ago
        I just use an online printing service to mail the prints. At like 50¢/ea mailed if I send a collection it'll take almost a thousand prints just to match the price of a decent photo printer. And even then most 4x6s printed at home still cost like 20¢-40¢/ea each anyways, so even after a thousand prints I'll still probably be ahead in the end. And then I also don't have to store a photo printer and it's supplies in my house. So yeah, black and white laser multi-function and online printing services for me.
      - pbjtime 3y ago
        Can someone calculate the price of ink consumed for those for cleanings?
      - Spare_account 3y ago
        But I have to clean the print heads every time I print (about once a month). I use up vast amounts of ink just keeping this thing working. I wish I'd bought a laser
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It really depends on if you or family needs a color printer more than rarely. I have a Brother laser. I pretty gave up on my inkjet ink drying out. For (rarely) printing photos I just send them out.
  - mcshicks 3y ago
    I love my brother black and white laser printer. But I print infrequently. The problem I had with inkjets for years and years was dealing with clogging if I used them infrequently. Does anyone know if the color canon eco tanks work if you only print infrequently? Or do they clog? Some cursory searching sounds like clogging is still a problem for infrequent users. https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_new_ink_tank_printers_still_clog/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_n...
    - b112 3y ago
      You'd think you could flush with water or some such after orint, as long as it was pure h2o (no minerals, etc) One flush after each print, but sadly, no manufacturer cares I guess.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I expect the Venn diagram of people who own a printer but may not print for a few months at a time is fairly small. Every now and then I'd like to print out a map or whatever in color but it's just not often enough to maintain an inkjet printer.
        thatguy0900 3y ago
        Yeah, I only print every few months so I just use staples. Not sure why you would want a printer with such infrequent usage, you're not really saving money doing it yourself
        ghaff 3y ago
        Driving to a Staples to print a recipe or some travel information every week or two sounds incredibly painful and inefficient (admittedly we're not talking months). (But I admit I don't like to be dependent on information on my phone for everything.) A laser printer connected to my computer at home is essentially free.
        chongli 3y ago
  - eek2121 3y ago
    I bought a brother color laser 4 years and haven’t had to change the toner yet. The toner was included with the printer. We have probably printed around 150 pages in that time span including a 6 page document today. No complaints. It just works. 3rd party toner also works should i need it.
    - mh- 3y ago
      Also, the toner cart it comes with is only half-full*, so when you do eventually have to replace it.. you can expect the new one to last twice as long. * they're transparent about this, was just pointing out how efficient they are.
  - Lio 3y ago
    Brother laser printers are boring. Mine just sits there until the rare occasions when I need to print something. It's still on the original toner cart that came with it. I've not needed to install a printer driver for any of the 4 platforms we've printed from on it. No photo storage, no ink drying out, ink subscription service and no multi-gig downloads before you can use it. A totally, wonderfully boring product. I wish I could buy more stuff like that.
    - Moru 3y ago
      My brother is so old I changed toners twice. Still no paper jams. Saw too many customers with HP printers with problems so stayed away from those.
      - mh- 3y ago
        My wife is a teacher and prints a lot of stuff at home. I have an MFC-2710 that I just had to replace the drum on. First time I've had to do anything except toner. It just plugs along, sometimes going weeks-months without use. For the price (and lack of subscription hijinks), it's unbeatable.
    - lbourdages 3y ago
      I have a totally featureless Brother laser printer (its most advanced feature is dual-sided printing) and it does its job perfectly fine. I've replaced the toner with a refilled cartridge and have not had any problems with it. I'm fine with only B&W and no scanner. When I need to scan something, I grab the insanely good camera I have in my pocket all the time and use the Microsoft Lens app. Works great for scanning a few pages.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I had a $200-ish Brother laser printer which worked great for a few years, but at some point semi-bricked itself. It no longer accepts print jobs from any source (USB, ethernet, wifi) and nothing seems to fix it, not even factory resets. There were some posts online that pointed to reflashing firmware fixing the problem but it wasn't clear how to do that and the required utility is apparently only distributed to licensed technicians.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Brother printers are great but not like they used to be. The prices have 2-3x in the last decade. The issue with any inkjet is that you need to use them. The eco tank makes sense if you print a lot.
- egberts1 3y ago
  Brothers printers get mentioned a lot BUT ... Be careful of some Brothers models as the ones to avoid have "Refresh" option. "Refresh" is just a way for a centralized Brothers server to monitor your printer and your local subnet (for what ever purpose they wanted). HP/Epson/Canon have few or no models without "Refresh" option, unless you spring for a more expensive business-class printer.
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  I couldn't be happier with my Brother HL-L3290CDW all-in-one. I posted this response to a similar question here 3 months ago: >"I got tired of the user-hostile shenanigans, bad software, low-quality output, and high TCO (5 or 6 HP or Canon devices over the years), finally came to my senses and bought a Brother. It "Just Works", is fast and quiet and reliable, does exactly what it's supposed to, and is in such stark contrast to the typically terrible printer UX it's almost funny." Coincidentally, just yesterday it warned of low black toner (for the 1st time) and I realized I actually believe it, given all the printing my family's done this year. I've read that it supports non-OEM cartridges, will find out for myself in a day or two.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    I have a DCP9020CDW that works just fine on the cheapest eBay toner going (under £30 for a 5-cartridge CMYKK set with shipping included). At that price it's not really even worth trying a powder-bottle refill!
  - smegsicle 3y ago
    several models auto-updated a year or so ago to reject third party toner, so if your auto updater is off make sure to keep it that way
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      I had my brother printer do this to me. I had been using a 3rd party toner cartridge and it just stopped working one day. Luckily I was able to remove the DRM chip off of the expended starter cartridge that I hadn't yet thrown out and swap it into the 3rd party toner cartridge which got it working again. I'm honestly confused at how they were able to do this. I'm pretty sure that several years ago HP lost a class action lawsuit about exactly this kind of behavior. I'd have thought that, having another company lose that lawsuit, there'd be a lawyer just waiting to jump on this. Is brother just too small market share to attract a class action lawsuit over?
- stefan_ 3y ago
  Do people still print a lot? Those things went the way of the DVD drive for me. For the very rare occasion I do need to print something (exclusively, of course, things that could have been digitized 20 years ago), the one in the office works fine..
  - ghaff 3y ago
    What is an office? I joke obviously but I don't really have an office to go into any longer, I still need to print things out from time to time, and taking a 20 minute drive to Staples is pretty suboptimal for something I can otherwise take care of for not much money or effort at home.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service. Looks like the problem is living in a terrible suburbia that prevent businesses from opening close to the residents and being dependent on a car for simple services, not the printers themselves. What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I live in a semi-rural area among apple orchards. So, no, we don't have copy shops on every corner. A toner cartridge lasts me years and it's obvious when it's getting somewhat low--and can generally be revitalized for another number of months by shaking it a bit. It's really tiresome that some people seem to think there's is the only reasonable lifestyle.
      - yencabulator 3y ago
        > I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service. Nearest Staples is in the nearest bigger city, a 30 minute drive. > What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty? Laser toner in home use lasts for years, and the printer will tell you percentage levels and warn about if for the last year of operation. Shaking the toner cartridge lets you print a few hundred pages more. There's plenty of time to order a replacement.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  I bought a black-and-white Brother laser circa 2000. It ran an ran until around 2020 when it finally broke (physically) in ways that weren't worth repairing. I bought a Brother 3770CDW colour laser to replace it. It has run and run with no problems. It just works. Even The Verge agree: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-... "...it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me..."
- to11mtm 3y ago
  I'm kinda at the point where I think someone needs to kickstart an (Semi)open Solid Ink printer design. 1. The tech has been around long enough that any/all patents should be done with. 2. In general they are much more eco-friendly, the 'cartridge' is just a specially shaped wax block. 3. Prints wind up being extremely robust due to the wax ink, I remember when salespeople would spray photo prints with water and show it just run off. Of course, the challenges would be providing a sufficient filter for ink, any foreign particles can clog up the print heads after all, as well as making sure users understand that there are processes in moving them.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    After I got burned by Brother institute toner cartridge DRM, I started looking into this. Apparently there are a lot of patents around paper feed mechanisms etc. It would, apparently, be very expensive to design a new, non-infringing, non shitty paper feeding mechanism and the customer base would likely be extremely small, resulting in a sky high price. I'm no expert and can't vouch for any of the details, but this is what I encountered in multiple online discussions when I looked into it last. That being said, I'd probably be willing to pay up to $500 for a simple black and white open source, open hardware laser jet printer, assuming that it worked as well (from a pure mechanical perspective) as current consumer grade printers.
    - matkoniecz 3y ago
      When this patents are expiring?
  - whoopdedo 3y ago
    Let's bring back the pen plotter. It can use a lot of the existing parts and software now being made for 3D printers but changing the filament head to a pen carriage.
- wilsynet 3y ago
  I’ll add my support to the chorus of Brother laser printers. My spouse bought one about 6 years ago and the company has updated drivers and it is just super reliable. I just bought a new one for my parents this year. Couldn’t be happier.
sillywalk 3y ago
I wonder if it's cheaper to just buy a new ink-jet printer instead of refilling? Also all this printer lock-down bs should be flat out illegal.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> I wonder if it's cheaper to just buy a new ink-jet printer instead of refilling? Unless you are printing color, a Brother laser is the way to go. I purchased my printer 5yrs ago and purchased only a single toner replacement over the years. Best no-nonsense purchase ever.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I actually noticed last night that I need to replace my Brother toner cartridge. But I think it's been a few years since I just gave the current cartridge a bit of s shake :-)
  - mnw21cam 3y ago
    And if you are printing colour, then a Brother ink-jet isn't a ridiculously stupid way to go either. I have a Brother DCP-J4120DW, about 7 years old. It sat unused for about 3 years, and just took a few head cleans to get it going again. Now it prints two sides every couple of weeks, whenever I do click&collect at the local supermarket. Ink was last bought more than a year ago.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    And if you are printing color, a color laser is the way to go. Unfortunately, it's hard to buy a new printer that isn't evil. Brother has gone down road too, it's no longer the non-evil option.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I believe the ink cartridges that come with (some) new printers aren't close to full size, so you wouldn't be getting a full set of new ink cartridges with every purchase. I would speculate that if they went to that length, they probably calculated the break even point for the price of cartridges vs. the price of a new printer. My guess would be no, but it would be very funny if that was wrong.
djmips 3y ago
I threw mine on the ground a la Office Space when faced with that situation and a deadline. Cathartic.
pxeger1 3y ago
Just to contravene consensus: I have an HP laser MFP bought in 2021(?) and the ink is perfectly affordable and I've had no DRM issues
RedShift1 3y ago
If you need an inkjet printer, get an Epson Ecotank. Other printers with cartridges are really just e-waste.
- x3m157 3y ago
  I used to use Epson for this reason, but unless they've really polished their drivers I will be sticking with my HP. Yes, HP is more expensive and anti-consumer but when I want to print something it just works. My last Epson worked fine at first but soon got to the point that I needed to clean and reinstall the drivers nearly every time I wanted to print something.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    if you need to reinstall the drivers, that is an os problem, not a driver problem. Driver files don't self destroy themselves. I have an epson printer that I have used for 2 year during the pandemic, I never had to reinstall drivers both on my computer running linux and my partner's windows.
darth_avocado 3y ago
> Canon, another printer manufacturer that sells all-in-one devices, was sued in 2021 for the exact same reasons as Freund and McMath's suit against HP - that Canon all-in-ones disabled non-printing functions when ink was low. That case was settled late last year for an undisclosed sum. They should not allow settlements in cases like this. There should be a ruling and one that forces companies to not continue these bad practices.
- crazydoggers 3y ago
  You can’t not allow settlements. The plantiff brings the case. You can’t tell a plantiff they are unable to withdraw their case, you’d be infringing on the rights of the plantiff. Yes it works against the creation of precedent, but the court system is meant to provide a resolution of dispute between parties. The creation of precedent is a side effect of that process, not it’s primary goal. Edit: And just to end on a note of positivity, the courts aren’t really the place to make changes like this anyhow, which is out of most people’s hands. Instead we can lobby our Congress people etc to make laws that can end these practices (which is where most of our consumer protections have come from).
  - eclipticplane 3y ago
    What's stopping someone else from copying the lawsuit?
    - darth_avocado 3y ago
      Settlements have clauses usually that prevent the same litigation from happening again. Otherwise it’s an infinite money glitch where people keep suing the same company again and again once it’s proven they’re willing to settle.
      - crazydoggers 3y ago
        You can always bring your own case as long as you were not a party to the settlement. Though for it to be successful you’re probably going to have to show you suffered more than the average class member. For instance you buy a dishwasher that is faulty. There’s a class action settlement, but for you, the dishwasher ruined your apartment and the neighbors downstairs. You can opt out and sue directly even if there’s been a class settlement.
tomas789 3y ago
I bought an old HP LaserJet 2015 ages ago. Together with two 7000 pages toners for about 100USD. It just works. I can lea e it for two years, than plug in the USB cable and it jist spits out pages. This is how printers should be.
- WWLink 3y ago
  I've owned 2 shitty HP inkjets and used countless more.. going all the way back to the deskjet 500... enough to know I'd never buy anything with an HP logo ever again. I don't care how good their laser printers are. They can fuck right off. I'm not even sure I feel that great about their laserjets lol. Every time I came across one in school or college they'd have issues with goofy rollers causing paper jams.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Inkjets are just an entirely different thing, and they all suck, no matter what brand. Older HP Laserjets are great, as long as they're not recent enough to have had their firmware updated to the next extortion scheme.
  - chiph 3y ago
    The Deskjet 500 was a tank. Built to industrial standards, like all HP gear of the time. Later, their printers became flimsy, driven by marketing whims not engineering. I gave up on them when I looked at the small mountain of dried ink that was inside from the constant cleaning cycles, and realized that it represented more money than I had spent on the entire printer.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      I had two problems with mine: First off, it used the same crappy "vacuum sealed" cartridge with the built-in print head that cost like $60 when Canon and Epson were selling separate ink tank vs print head units. I replaced it with a canon, where I could hold the ink tank upside down and squeeze more ink into it with a really cheap refill kit lol. The HP required you to drill a hole in the cartridge and then use a plug to seal it (which often leaked). HP's inkjet printhead also makes a distinct annoying sucking air sound. Nobody else's inkjet does that. I don't even like their plotters for the same reason lol. The second reason was the rollers were made out of cheap rubber and my dj500 seemed to rather often need attention. Dude I have a 13 year old canon where I've never cleaned the rollers, never replaced the print head (maybe once? I forgot), and I have always used cheap generic ink from amazon in it. I've probably spent less than $100 on ink the entire time I've owned the machine. Sadly, newer Canons don't seem to be that good. I 'replaced' mine with a new one that I got free with a laptop, and it died after a year lol. Like, totally dead. Anyway, I stand with the Brother laser printer crowd lol. It seems like you either are small enough on printing that you can get by with a Brother... or you're big enough that you rent a Konica or a Minlota or a Xerox or whatever from some company that does all the maintenance for you. Outside of the inkjet printers, I understand the reverence for oldschool HP gear. Their power supplies and scopes were awesome. Still nice to use keysight gear.
seltzered_ 3y ago
Kinda wish this lawsuit also included the issue where many HP printers will not print a black and white page in situations where one has plenty of black ink but the color cartridges are empty.
- techhazard 3y ago
  That’s likely because it’s unable to print the tracking dots[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
  - warning26 3y ago
    According to that article, the tracking dots only apply for color printers/printouts, so they wouldn’t apply in GP’s scenario (out of color ink).
    - gcr 3y ago
      OP has a color printer...? Do you instead mean to say that tracking dots shouldn't be printed in B/W mode? I doubt that tbh - the wikipedia article above shows Reality Winner got caught printing (presumably) black/white NSA documents because the printer was able to print the color tracking dots.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - warning26 3y ago
        OP wanted to be able to print in B/W mode when out of color ink. Ostensibly, the tracking dots' purpose was to stop currency counterfeiting, so they were only ever added on color printers (not B/W ones). Therefore, not being able to display the dots shouldn't be an obstacle to the printer operating in B/W mode, as it would effectively be a B/W printer in that case. The more likely explanation is simply that HP wants to sell more overpriced color ink. Interestingly, the Reality Winner documents were actually in color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spearphishing.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spea...
devsegal 3y ago
That's amusing - I initially read this as "Judge denies Harry Potter's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit."
ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
The current state of printers is sad. Everything wrong with tech is enclosed within them. 1. You get DRM inc, which increases the cost even you buy the "required toners" [^1] 2. Don't get to control what they print: - Adds stuff to your page [^2] - Won't let you print certain patterns [^3] [^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-has-canon-telling-customers-how-to-skirt-its-printer-toner-drm/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-ha... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code [^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
- throwaway914 3y ago
  Thank you for this. I didn't know about the EURion constellation thing. Very cool/alienating examples of DRM.
- sva_ 3y ago
  I'm pretty happy with my Brother laser printer.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Recent HN discussions on this subject mentioned that Brother, too, has begun to betray their reputation for openness.
    - basilgohar 3y ago
      It was only a matter of time. I bought mine for this reason, and I realize that when the time comes to replace it, I will have to find another vendor, if one even exists, since Brother no longer waves that banner of openness.
    - cbo100 3y ago
      Yep, as a relatively recent (2.5 years ago) convert from HP to Brother because HP was pulling all this crap with with 3rd party toner cartridges. The Brother has proved to be just as bad, and in some ways even worse. Once it decides the (genuine) toner must be empty it basically refuses to print without some complex reset procedures. At least the HP would just happily print faded pages all day long.
gregsadetsky 3y ago
I read back with interest/curiosity and a bit of sadness the last time that an "open source printer" idea was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 Are we at the same stage today? An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums? Just curious if someone in 10 or 20 years might come back to these threads and reminisce at this unattainable open hardware ideal as they grumble about HPCanon's latest dystopian ""innovation"".
- userbinator 3y ago
  An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums? I think "open source" doesn't need to mean "every component from scratch", much like a lot of open-source hardware relies on MCUs whose designs are decidedly not open. There's been some attempts at using existing inkjet cartridges with integrated printheads: http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=inker http://spritesmods.com/?art=inker
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  I've encountered that thread before, but I re-read it anyways, and I had a thought: A fully open source printer (hardware and everything) is likely still infeasible....but how hard would it be to design and sell an open source control board replacement? According to that thread, the hardest thing about an open source printer is the patents on all the hardware, but I'm pretty sure that it is legal (in the US at least), to buy a printer and swap out the control board if one so desires. And I'm also pretty sure that, as long as you are not using copyrighted firmware or something, that it would be legal to sell such a motherboard with new, open source software on it. This moves the goalpost from "design a completely new printer" to "create new control firmware and software". The downside is that you lose the full repairability options one would have if the entire thing was open source/open hardware, but honestly, hardware doesn't seem to be the primary problem with modern printers. This feels like a 95% as good solution with <5% of the difficulty, unless I'm missing something.
stevage 3y ago
I'm really curious what all the commenters here are printing so much of? I have some crappy inkjet which works fine, for the maybe 2 pages I print per year. It's so infrequent it's hard to even generalise what I use it for. Very occasional government forms, things that absolutely have to be sent by snail mail, stuff like that. What is everyone else printing?
- causality0 3y ago
  I think it's a testament to how bad printers are that we can instantly create an ultra-high quality hardcopy of literally anything in seconds and we do everything we can to avoid using it.
- Jill_the_Pill 3y ago
  We have the sole printer (laser) in our extended family, so we wind up printing a lot of shipping labels, tax documents and recipes. Occasionally handouts or flyers for something, map excerpts or directions for a trip where phone signal may be iffy.
- gsich 3y ago
  printer bad is a common meme here.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    I think this is much wider than HN. Consider Office Space.
- mattkrause 3y ago
  I print off journal articles when I need to read them really carefully. Proofreading and editing stuff I’ve written is also a lot easier on paper. People with young kids seem to print a lot too: colouring book pages, pretty pictures, and all kinds of forms.
  - ljf 3y ago
    This - during lockdown we got a printer plus refillable ink cartridges - and let the kids go crazy. They loved printing photos and making collages, but mainly loads of colouring sheets and quite a bit of 'homework' - we definitely got our monies worth. Pain is that it blocks up if not used for 3 months - and the cheap ink fades for any photos we printed - but cleaning it is really easy, literally stuck the print head in the sink and wash it.
backendanon 3y ago
Also wish someone would do something about single player computer games that you find out won't work when the Internet is down (I assume because of telemetry but I don't know for sure), until it's too late to request a refund.
- basilgohar 3y ago
  If only there were ways to get superior versions of games that don't have these lousy, baked-in restrictions that break a perfectly good set of bits...
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  Nowadays I try to test such software by dialling internet and checking is it still working (and checking is it not anywhere).
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
jp0d 3y ago
This is something irrelevant but I thought I'd share an anecdote from a mate who worked for HP a long time ago. He worked on their driver software for their printers. In one of the assignment he was asked to rebrand the same software with another manufacturer's name (can't recall if it was Canon or Epson)! HP may have shared some printer technology with another company. There is nothing new in this space. HP hasn't exactly been the beacon of customer satisfaction thanks to their restrictive policies. Most of these printers are probably made in similar factories (probably a handful of places), somewhere in China. I'd buy from a brand that offers more flexibility when it comes to ink/toner than anything else.
- imhoguy 3y ago
  HP has had partnership with Samsung an has bought its printer division in 2017, it has partnership with Canon too. I think there is not much invention anymore, it is just long tail market now. Other than for specialised use, people just buy printer once forever for ocassional use. This way the printer market is really shrinking and consolidating, like HDD market.
osigurdson 3y ago
I love all technology - except printers. Don’t make me have to own a scanner, printer or (god forbid) fax machine. That’s you, governments, accountants, lawyers and insurance companies.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  Most everything can be fixed by percusive maintenance - except printers.
  - Cerium 3y ago
    True, the printer can't but you can get a good one or two hundred prints out of a fading toner cartridge with some percusive maintenance.
gumby 3y ago
Thankfully the demand for printers is fading. This will of course cause printer mfrs to double down on their lockdowns ("Sorry, your toner is too old so you'll have to go out and buy new a new cartridge"). But its their anti-consumer practices that drive people not to print. My kiddo bought a new printer in 2015 because he had to print something for high school and the toner cartridge was empty. It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge (and it was delivered for free within the a couple of hours!). I still have it, still use it once in a while, and it's still on that same starter cartridge and maybe the same ream of paper. Two more kids have finished high school using it...hardly at all. In the past year I can remember two printer jobs, each a single page.
- LeonB 3y ago
  Love the use of: “Printer mfrs” As we all know it isn’t just an abbreviation for “manufacturers”
  - adalacelove 3y ago
    To save ink in case you print Hacker News for reading.
    - tigerlily 3y ago
      Not if you print it in dark mode.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling. Work stuff requires offline archives for contracts and legal stuff Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling. Lifehack: you can annotate a PDF with a signature and just send it to the receiver. The only time I couldn't do that was when I needed a notarized document. > Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue. Yup. I save screenshots of barcodes for tickets and other stuff instead. I have a second phone as a backup :)
Sparkyte 3y ago
They should just better more expensive printers that function really good. They are too busy min maxing the profits. All big and great companies today that survive and endured the years survived because they put the product first. A sign a company is about to die is when they start cutting corners to maximize profits. A good executive only gets paid when his/her ocmpany turns a profit. Of course a living expense is always given, you can't eat ramen noodles forever. Not the Japanese kind.
- chmod600 3y ago
  Maybe printers are kind of a dead end business? We want to be able to print things once in a while, but that's not enough to sustain a manufacturing business and certainly not much innovation. Either someone comes up with a reason for people to print more and makes space in the market for innovation... or printing will just kind of suck forever.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    I'd argue there's too much "innovation" in the printer space. We would have been better off if they stopped at the 2000s level, and just charged actual manufacturing costs + margin.
    - chmod600 3y ago
      Of course that's not real innovation. It's just profit extraction from a dwindling business. The simple business that makes a good product for a fair price and pays fair wages and keeps going forever is a romantic myth for the most part. Why? I'm not sure exactly, but it has something to do with growth.
zzo38computer 3y ago
If the printers are so bad, can a fax machine be used (that would not have any internet and not have any auto-updating software, if they still make them that way)? Can a FOSS program on the computer to emulate the fax signals? Would that work?
- prmoustache 3y ago
  The only thing you need is an old dialup modem.
tomashubelbauer 3y ago
If you only use your printer occasionally but can't fully get rid of it, like me, I can recommend getting a pocket thermal printer. I got a Peripage A4 sized one [1] and I use it whenever I can't fake having printed something (by adding a signature in software and deepfrying the document to look scanned if the other side requires it) or when I want a printed backup (like for travel documents in case my phone died or I lost it). It has no consumables other than the thermal paper which I believe is easy to come by from any vendor. The printed documents look like trash and obviously aren't in color, but they are readable and frankly, they'll do. I have yet to run into a situation where this thermal printed document is not accepted by the other party in case the other party requires a printed document and I can't work around that requirement digitally. Aaand I don't have to deal with any sort of ink or anything of the sort. Someone downthread mentioned the idea of an open source printer and how complicated it would be for the maker community to build one. I wish people gave building an open source thermal document-sized printer a shot, because the only thing I don't like is that I need to use a Chinese app on my phone to print through this printer. I am sure it would be easy to reverse engineer, though, so I could reuse the hardware and just get a clean app, but I didn't put the effort into that. [1]: https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-printer https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-pr...
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  I have (or had) a few thermal prints filed away. After about 10 years they have faded to be unreadable. Not a problem for many applications, but documents meant for the long term probably should not be thermal prints.
  - tomashubelbauer 3y ago
    You're right - I should have mentioned this in my comment. I would not use a thermal printer for one's own bookkeeping. I solely use it to be able to produce dead tree slices for people who require them and won't relent without having to dedicate desk space for the printer or buy consumables for it. I personally never need to print stuff for myself so this use-case didn't even cross my mind.
- 3y ago
dividedbyzero 3y ago
During the pandemic I had a Canon all-in-one printer with ADF and bells and whistles that refused to let me use the scanner if one of the ink cartridges was empty, which happened all the time because the self-cleaning used a ton of ink and ran every time I wanted to use the ADF scanner, and while it did support pushing PDFs to a NAS via Samba, only a hopelessly insecure stone age version of Samba was actually implemented. The thing was an utter pos, it's crazy that it could be sold like that. I've since replaced it with a standalone Brother b&w laser printer and an HP ADF scanner and lo and behold both devices just work, I can scan and process my mail using scanline and python and print the occasional document and both devices take up less space than the Canon pos.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  So how does HP make money from that scanner? Is it limited to a number of pages per month or pay per scan? Oh I know, 1200dpi scanning is enabled with your subscription? I mean surely they don't just sell it to you as a physical product and then let you use it?!?!
  - horsawlarway 3y ago
    I know, right! How can they still sell you a product that doesn't use a little digital green man on a circuit board to cross his arms and demand you pay rent to use the hardware you legally bought and now (in theory only) own? Those fools. Don't they see that there's rent to be extracted here? If you teach a man to fish, he might fish without paying you. If you build a fishing pole that refuses to cast unless he inserts a quarter... fishing and paying you become inseparable! Genius!
    - salawat 3y ago
      Do you realize where you are? Poe's law, man. You're on a board frequented not just by technical types, but MBA's as well (VC). Sometimes, as tempting as it is to post a sarcastic remark, it's better to just remain silent rather than sowing the seeds of misery by making $exceedingly_bad_idea tangible to the PHB who'll eventually try to get people to implement it for them. If you don't want to see it, don't bring it up in any way. Lord knows, the fool is out there that'll think "that's a revolutionary idea!"
Decabytes 3y ago
I am the only one in my immediate family with a printer so I am constantly emailed with requests to print things out. It’s actually kind of nice, and leads to impromptu family interaction when they come over to pick it up. I have one of those ink tank printers and it has been revolutionary in the printer space. I can’t believe we went this long with cartridges
yonrg 3y ago
Actually, I am quite happy with using my budget HP all-in-one printer; private usage. I also chose to subscribe to the Instant Ink service. I took the smallest one with 10 pages p.m. This plan was, and still is for me, free of charge. So I have not payed for ink in the last 6 yrs. If I print more than 10pages, which happened once, I pay 1€ for another 10 pages. Also why I am happy with HP, is that there is quite decent support in linux (hplip). All in all at least I am happy. One drawback is, that the printer needs to send some telemetry back to HP. But that is the service, if the ink get low, they'll send me cartridges without my interaction. Thus, I never ran out of ink and did not face the situation of a non working printer/scanner. And I got blinded by the good working service, that I did not realize the lock-in situation I am in. I dislike vendor-lock-ins like these, but for home printing I got used to it, due to the many benefits.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  > This plan was, and still is for me, free of charge. If so, then you're special, because the cheapest tier is $0.99/month, and has been since 2020. https://instantink.hpconnected.com/ https://instantink.hpconnected.com/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/12/hp_free_printing/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/12/hp_free_printing/

336 points by galaxyLogic 3y ago

I jumped from HP printers long ago and bought some cheap Canon (yes I read the full article and saw Canon mentioned) as it was easier to buy cheap cartdriges. My usage is very low. What printer would be the good one to go these days?

shiftpgdn 3y ago
Everyone seems to repeat that brother lasers are the way to go, but I’ve found that for home use (photos and documents) that the canon eco tank is superior to the brother is basically every way.
- graton 3y ago
  So you can not use the eco tank for 6 months and it will just work when you need to print again? That is why I like laser printers, I don't have to worry about head cleaning or clogged nozzles.
  - RedShift1 3y ago
    The clogged print head is overestimated. I recently revived a Brother inkjet printer that was in storage for 4 years and after 3 or 4 head cleanings it was back in business.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      Get back to us when the absorbent cleaning sponge in the printer fills up :-)
      - RedShift1 3y ago
        You can always use some isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs and clean them yourself.
        r00fus 3y ago
        I’ve been using inexpensive laser (monochrome) since 2010 and haven’t had to do any of this nonsense. Sometimes I don’t even replace the toner when it complains; I just take toner out shake it and it keeps working (a bit lighter than usual)
        foobarian 3y ago
        Laser is great but it doesn’t solve the visiting grandma wanting to print photo album pictures.
        pbjtime 3y ago
        My color LaserJet photos are magazine quality. If I need better, I get them at CVS for something like eight cents
        robin_reala 3y ago
        That’s not remotely worth the hassle of a colour inkjet. Just decide on the photos together and upload them to a proper photo print service for delivery to her home.
        foobarian 3y ago
        It sure is a hassle, but the grandma loves it so much it feels worth it. I gave up on HP in the past but I’m giving it another go now with an Epson eco tank. So far so good.
        vel0city 3y ago
        I just use an online printing service to mail the prints. At like 50¢/ea mailed if I send a collection it'll take almost a thousand prints just to match the price of a decent photo printer. And even then most 4x6s printed at home still cost like 20¢-40¢/ea each anyways, so even after a thousand prints I'll still probably be ahead in the end. And then I also don't have to store a photo printer and it's supplies in my house. So yeah, black and white laser multi-function and online printing services for me.
    - pbjtime 3y ago
      Can someone calculate the price of ink consumed for those for cleanings?
    - Spare_account 3y ago
      But I have to clean the print heads every time I print (about once a month). I use up vast amounts of ink just keeping this thing working. I wish I'd bought a laser
- ghaff 3y ago
  It really depends on if you or family needs a color printer more than rarely. I have a Brother laser. I pretty gave up on my inkjet ink drying out. For (rarely) printing photos I just send them out.
- mcshicks 3y ago
  I love my brother black and white laser printer. But I print infrequently. The problem I had with inkjets for years and years was dealing with clogging if I used them infrequently. Does anyone know if the color canon eco tanks work if you only print infrequently? Or do they clog? Some cursory searching sounds like clogging is still a problem for infrequent users. https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_new_ink_tank_printers_still_clog/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_n...
  - b112 3y ago
    You'd think you could flush with water or some such after orint, as long as it was pure h2o (no minerals, etc) One flush after each print, but sadly, no manufacturer cares I guess.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I expect the Venn diagram of people who own a printer but may not print for a few months at a time is fairly small. Every now and then I'd like to print out a map or whatever in color but it's just not often enough to maintain an inkjet printer.
      - thatguy0900 3y ago
        Yeah, I only print every few months so I just use staples. Not sure why you would want a printer with such infrequent usage, you're not really saving money doing it yourself
        ghaff 3y ago
        Driving to a Staples to print a recipe or some travel information every week or two sounds incredibly painful and inefficient (admittedly we're not talking months). (But I admit I don't like to be dependent on information on my phone for everything.) A laser printer connected to my computer at home is essentially free.
      - chongli 3y ago
- eek2121 3y ago
  I bought a brother color laser 4 years and haven’t had to change the toner yet. The toner was included with the printer. We have probably printed around 150 pages in that time span including a 6 page document today. No complaints. It just works. 3rd party toner also works should i need it.
  - mh- 3y ago
    Also, the toner cart it comes with is only half-full*, so when you do eventually have to replace it.. you can expect the new one to last twice as long. * they're transparent about this, was just pointing out how efficient they are.
- Lio 3y ago
  Brother laser printers are boring. Mine just sits there until the rare occasions when I need to print something. It's still on the original toner cart that came with it. I've not needed to install a printer driver for any of the 4 platforms we've printed from on it. No photo storage, no ink drying out, ink subscription service and no multi-gig downloads before you can use it. A totally, wonderfully boring product. I wish I could buy more stuff like that.
  - Moru 3y ago
    My brother is so old I changed toners twice. Still no paper jams. Saw too many customers with HP printers with problems so stayed away from those.
    - mh- 3y ago
      My wife is a teacher and prints a lot of stuff at home. I have an MFC-2710 that I just had to replace the drum on. First time I've had to do anything except toner. It just plugs along, sometimes going weeks-months without use. For the price (and lack of subscription hijinks), it's unbeatable.
  - lbourdages 3y ago
    I have a totally featureless Brother laser printer (its most advanced feature is dual-sided printing) and it does its job perfectly fine. I've replaced the toner with a refilled cartridge and have not had any problems with it. I'm fine with only B&W and no scanner. When I need to scan something, I grab the insanely good camera I have in my pocket all the time and use the Microsoft Lens app. Works great for scanning a few pages.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I had a $200-ish Brother laser printer which worked great for a few years, but at some point semi-bricked itself. It no longer accepts print jobs from any source (USB, ethernet, wifi) and nothing seems to fix it, not even factory resets. There were some posts online that pointed to reflashing firmware fixing the problem but it wasn't clear how to do that and the required utility is apparently only distributed to licensed technicians.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Brother printers are great but not like they used to be. The prices have 2-3x in the last decade. The issue with any inkjet is that you need to use them. The eco tank makes sense if you print a lot.
egberts1 3y ago
Brothers printers get mentioned a lot BUT ... Be careful of some Brothers models as the ones to avoid have "Refresh" option. "Refresh" is just a way for a centralized Brothers server to monitor your printer and your local subnet (for what ever purpose they wanted). HP/Epson/Canon have few or no models without "Refresh" option, unless you spring for a more expensive business-class printer.
chrisweekly 3y ago
I couldn't be happier with my Brother HL-L3290CDW all-in-one. I posted this response to a similar question here 3 months ago: >"I got tired of the user-hostile shenanigans, bad software, low-quality output, and high TCO (5 or 6 HP or Canon devices over the years), finally came to my senses and bought a Brother. It "Just Works", is fast and quiet and reliable, does exactly what it's supposed to, and is in such stark contrast to the typically terrible printer UX it's almost funny." Coincidentally, just yesterday it warned of low black toner (for the 1st time) and I realized I actually believe it, given all the printing my family's done this year. I've read that it supports non-OEM cartridges, will find out for myself in a day or two.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  I have a DCP9020CDW that works just fine on the cheapest eBay toner going (under £30 for a 5-cartridge CMYKK set with shipping included). At that price it's not really even worth trying a powder-bottle refill!
- smegsicle 3y ago
  several models auto-updated a year or so ago to reject third party toner, so if your auto updater is off make sure to keep it that way
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    I had my brother printer do this to me. I had been using a 3rd party toner cartridge and it just stopped working one day. Luckily I was able to remove the DRM chip off of the expended starter cartridge that I hadn't yet thrown out and swap it into the 3rd party toner cartridge which got it working again. I'm honestly confused at how they were able to do this. I'm pretty sure that several years ago HP lost a class action lawsuit about exactly this kind of behavior. I'd have thought that, having another company lose that lawsuit, there'd be a lawyer just waiting to jump on this. Is brother just too small market share to attract a class action lawsuit over?
stefan_ 3y ago
Do people still print a lot? Those things went the way of the DVD drive for me. For the very rare occasion I do need to print something (exclusively, of course, things that could have been digitized 20 years ago), the one in the office works fine..
- ghaff 3y ago
  What is an office? I joke obviously but I don't really have an office to go into any longer, I still need to print things out from time to time, and taking a 20 minute drive to Staples is pretty suboptimal for something I can otherwise take care of for not much money or effort at home.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service. Looks like the problem is living in a terrible suburbia that prevent businesses from opening close to the residents and being dependent on a car for simple services, not the printers themselves. What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I live in a semi-rural area among apple orchards. So, no, we don't have copy shops on every corner. A toner cartridge lasts me years and it's obvious when it's getting somewhat low--and can generally be revitalized for another number of months by shaking it a bit. It's really tiresome that some people seem to think there's is the only reasonable lifestyle.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      > I just do the 2 min walk to the closest copy/print service. Nearest Staples is in the nearest bigger city, a 30 minute drive. > What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty? Laser toner in home use lasts for years, and the printer will tell you percentage levels and warn about if for the last year of operation. Shaking the toner cartridge lets you print a few hundred pages more. There's plenty of time to order a replacement.
rodgerd 3y ago
I bought a black-and-white Brother laser circa 2000. It ran an ran until around 2020 when it finally broke (physically) in ways that weren't worth repairing. I bought a Brother 3770CDW colour laser to replace it. It has run and run with no problems. It just works. Even The Verge agree: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-... "...it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me..."
to11mtm 3y ago
I'm kinda at the point where I think someone needs to kickstart an (Semi)open Solid Ink printer design. 1. The tech has been around long enough that any/all patents should be done with. 2. In general they are much more eco-friendly, the 'cartridge' is just a specially shaped wax block. 3. Prints wind up being extremely robust due to the wax ink, I remember when salespeople would spray photo prints with water and show it just run off. Of course, the challenges would be providing a sufficient filter for ink, any foreign particles can clog up the print heads after all, as well as making sure users understand that there are processes in moving them.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  After I got burned by Brother institute toner cartridge DRM, I started looking into this. Apparently there are a lot of patents around paper feed mechanisms etc. It would, apparently, be very expensive to design a new, non-infringing, non shitty paper feeding mechanism and the customer base would likely be extremely small, resulting in a sky high price. I'm no expert and can't vouch for any of the details, but this is what I encountered in multiple online discussions when I looked into it last. That being said, I'd probably be willing to pay up to $500 for a simple black and white open source, open hardware laser jet printer, assuming that it worked as well (from a pure mechanical perspective) as current consumer grade printers.
  - matkoniecz 3y ago
    When this patents are expiring?
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  Let's bring back the pen plotter. It can use a lot of the existing parts and software now being made for 3D printers but changing the filament head to a pen carriage.
wilsynet 3y ago
I’ll add my support to the chorus of Brother laser printers. My spouse bought one about 6 years ago and the company has updated drivers and it is just super reliable. I just bought a new one for my parents this year. Couldn’t be happier.

sillywalk 3y ago

I wonder if it's cheaper to just buy a new ink-jet printer instead of refilling? Also all this printer lock-down bs should be flat out illegal.

TuringNYC 3y ago
>> I wonder if it's cheaper to just buy a new ink-jet printer instead of refilling? Unless you are printing color, a Brother laser is the way to go. I purchased my printer 5yrs ago and purchased only a single toner replacement over the years. Best no-nonsense purchase ever.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I actually noticed last night that I need to replace my Brother toner cartridge. But I think it's been a few years since I just gave the current cartridge a bit of s shake :-)
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  And if you are printing colour, then a Brother ink-jet isn't a ridiculously stupid way to go either. I have a Brother DCP-J4120DW, about 7 years old. It sat unused for about 3 years, and just took a few head cleans to get it going again. Now it prints two sides every couple of weeks, whenever I do click&collect at the local supermarket. Ink was last bought more than a year ago.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  And if you are printing color, a color laser is the way to go. Unfortunately, it's hard to buy a new printer that isn't evil. Brother has gone down road too, it's no longer the non-evil option.
karaterobot 3y ago
I believe the ink cartridges that come with (some) new printers aren't close to full size, so you wouldn't be getting a full set of new ink cartridges with every purchase. I would speculate that if they went to that length, they probably calculated the break even point for the price of cartridges vs. the price of a new printer. My guess would be no, but it would be very funny if that was wrong.

djmips 3y ago

I threw mine on the ground a la Office Space when faced with that situation and a deadline. Cathartic.

pxeger1 3y ago

Just to contravene consensus: I have an HP laser MFP bought in 2021(?) and the ink is perfectly affordable and I've had no DRM issues

RedShift1 3y ago

If you need an inkjet printer, get an Epson Ecotank. Other printers with cartridges are really just e-waste.

x3m157 3y ago
I used to use Epson for this reason, but unless they've really polished their drivers I will be sticking with my HP. Yes, HP is more expensive and anti-consumer but when I want to print something it just works. My last Epson worked fine at first but soon got to the point that I needed to clean and reinstall the drivers nearly every time I wanted to print something.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  if you need to reinstall the drivers, that is an os problem, not a driver problem. Driver files don't self destroy themselves. I have an epson printer that I have used for 2 year during the pandemic, I never had to reinstall drivers both on my computer running linux and my partner's windows.

darth_avocado 3y ago

> Canon, another printer manufacturer that sells all-in-one devices, was sued in 2021 for the exact same reasons as Freund and McMath's suit against HP - that Canon all-in-ones disabled non-printing functions when ink was low. That case was settled late last year for an undisclosed sum. They should not allow settlements in cases like this. There should be a ruling and one that forces companies to not continue these bad practices.

crazydoggers 3y ago
You can’t not allow settlements. The plantiff brings the case. You can’t tell a plantiff they are unable to withdraw their case, you’d be infringing on the rights of the plantiff. Yes it works against the creation of precedent, but the court system is meant to provide a resolution of dispute between parties. The creation of precedent is a side effect of that process, not it’s primary goal. Edit: And just to end on a note of positivity, the courts aren’t really the place to make changes like this anyhow, which is out of most people’s hands. Instead we can lobby our Congress people etc to make laws that can end these practices (which is where most of our consumer protections have come from).
- eclipticplane 3y ago
  What's stopping someone else from copying the lawsuit?
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    Settlements have clauses usually that prevent the same litigation from happening again. Otherwise it’s an infinite money glitch where people keep suing the same company again and again once it’s proven they’re willing to settle.
    - crazydoggers 3y ago
      You can always bring your own case as long as you were not a party to the settlement. Though for it to be successful you’re probably going to have to show you suffered more than the average class member. For instance you buy a dishwasher that is faulty. There’s a class action settlement, but for you, the dishwasher ruined your apartment and the neighbors downstairs. You can opt out and sue directly even if there’s been a class settlement.

tomas789 3y ago

I bought an old HP LaserJet 2015 ages ago. Together with two 7000 pages toners for about 100USD. It just works. I can lea e it for two years, than plug in the USB cable and it jist spits out pages. This is how printers should be.

WWLink 3y ago
I've owned 2 shitty HP inkjets and used countless more.. going all the way back to the deskjet 500... enough to know I'd never buy anything with an HP logo ever again. I don't care how good their laser printers are. They can fuck right off. I'm not even sure I feel that great about their laserjets lol. Every time I came across one in school or college they'd have issues with goofy rollers causing paper jams.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Inkjets are just an entirely different thing, and they all suck, no matter what brand. Older HP Laserjets are great, as long as they're not recent enough to have had their firmware updated to the next extortion scheme.
- chiph 3y ago
  The Deskjet 500 was a tank. Built to industrial standards, like all HP gear of the time. Later, their printers became flimsy, driven by marketing whims not engineering. I gave up on them when I looked at the small mountain of dried ink that was inside from the constant cleaning cycles, and realized that it represented more money than I had spent on the entire printer.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    I had two problems with mine: First off, it used the same crappy "vacuum sealed" cartridge with the built-in print head that cost like $60 when Canon and Epson were selling separate ink tank vs print head units. I replaced it with a canon, where I could hold the ink tank upside down and squeeze more ink into it with a really cheap refill kit lol. The HP required you to drill a hole in the cartridge and then use a plug to seal it (which often leaked). HP's inkjet printhead also makes a distinct annoying sucking air sound. Nobody else's inkjet does that. I don't even like their plotters for the same reason lol. The second reason was the rollers were made out of cheap rubber and my dj500 seemed to rather often need attention. Dude I have a 13 year old canon where I've never cleaned the rollers, never replaced the print head (maybe once? I forgot), and I have always used cheap generic ink from amazon in it. I've probably spent less than $100 on ink the entire time I've owned the machine. Sadly, newer Canons don't seem to be that good. I 'replaced' mine with a new one that I got free with a laptop, and it died after a year lol. Like, totally dead. Anyway, I stand with the Brother laser printer crowd lol. It seems like you either are small enough on printing that you can get by with a Brother... or you're big enough that you rent a Konica or a Minlota or a Xerox or whatever from some company that does all the maintenance for you. Outside of the inkjet printers, I understand the reverence for oldschool HP gear. Their power supplies and scopes were awesome. Still nice to use keysight gear.

seltzered_ 3y ago

Kinda wish this lawsuit also included the issue where many HP printers will not print a black and white page in situations where one has plenty of black ink but the color cartridges are empty.

techhazard 3y ago
That’s likely because it’s unable to print the tracking dots[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
- warning26 3y ago
  According to that article, the tracking dots only apply for color printers/printouts, so they wouldn’t apply in GP’s scenario (out of color ink).
  - gcr 3y ago
    OP has a color printer...? Do you instead mean to say that tracking dots shouldn't be printed in B/W mode? I doubt that tbh - the wikipedia article above shows Reality Winner got caught printing (presumably) black/white NSA documents because the printer was able to print the color tracking dots.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - warning26 3y ago
      OP wanted to be able to print in B/W mode when out of color ink. Ostensibly, the tracking dots' purpose was to stop currency counterfeiting, so they were only ever added on color printers (not B/W ones). Therefore, not being able to display the dots shouldn't be an obstacle to the printer operating in B/W mode, as it would effectively be a B/W printer in that case. The more likely explanation is simply that HP wants to sell more overpriced color ink. Interestingly, the Reality Winner documents were actually in color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spearphishing.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spea...

devsegal 3y ago

That's amusing - I initially read this as "Judge denies Harry Potter's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit."

ColoursofOSINT 3y ago

The current state of printers is sad. Everything wrong with tech is enclosed within them. 1. You get DRM inc, which increases the cost even you buy the "required toners" [^1] 2. Don't get to control what they print: - Adds stuff to your page [^2] - Won't let you print certain patterns [^3] [^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-has-canon-telling-customers-how-to-skirt-its-printer-toner-drm/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-ha... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code [^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

throwaway914 3y ago
Thank you for this. I didn't know about the EURion constellation thing. Very cool/alienating examples of DRM.
sva_ 3y ago
I'm pretty happy with my Brother laser printer.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Recent HN discussions on this subject mentioned that Brother, too, has begun to betray their reputation for openness.
  - basilgohar 3y ago
    It was only a matter of time. I bought mine for this reason, and I realize that when the time comes to replace it, I will have to find another vendor, if one even exists, since Brother no longer waves that banner of openness.
  - cbo100 3y ago
    Yep, as a relatively recent (2.5 years ago) convert from HP to Brother because HP was pulling all this crap with with 3rd party toner cartridges. The Brother has proved to be just as bad, and in some ways even worse. Once it decides the (genuine) toner must be empty it basically refuses to print without some complex reset procedures. At least the HP would just happily print faded pages all day long.

gregsadetsky 3y ago

I read back with interest/curiosity and a bit of sadness the last time that an "open source printer" idea was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 Are we at the same stage today? An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums? Just curious if someone in 10 or 20 years might come back to these threads and reminisce at this unattainable open hardware ideal as they grumble about HPCanon's latest dystopian ""innovation"".

userbinator 3y ago
An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums? I think "open source" doesn't need to mean "every component from scratch", much like a lot of open-source hardware relies on MCUs whose designs are decidedly not open. There's been some attempts at using existing inkjet cartridges with integrated printheads: http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=1 http://spritesmods.com/?art=inker http://spritesmods.com/?art=inker
MostlyStable 3y ago
I've encountered that thread before, but I re-read it anyways, and I had a thought: A fully open source printer (hardware and everything) is likely still infeasible....but how hard would it be to design and sell an open source control board replacement? According to that thread, the hardest thing about an open source printer is the patents on all the hardware, but I'm pretty sure that it is legal (in the US at least), to buy a printer and swap out the control board if one so desires. And I'm also pretty sure that, as long as you are not using copyrighted firmware or something, that it would be legal to sell such a motherboard with new, open source software on it. This moves the goalpost from "design a completely new printer" to "create new control firmware and software". The downside is that you lose the full repairability options one would have if the entire thing was open source/open hardware, but honestly, hardware doesn't seem to be the primary problem with modern printers. This feels like a 95% as good solution with <5% of the difficulty, unless I'm missing something.

stevage 3y ago

I'm really curious what all the commenters here are printing so much of? I have some crappy inkjet which works fine, for the maybe 2 pages I print per year. It's so infrequent it's hard to even generalise what I use it for. Very occasional government forms, things that absolutely have to be sent by snail mail, stuff like that. What is everyone else printing?

causality0 3y ago
I think it's a testament to how bad printers are that we can instantly create an ultra-high quality hardcopy of literally anything in seconds and we do everything we can to avoid using it.
Jill_the_Pill 3y ago
We have the sole printer (laser) in our extended family, so we wind up printing a lot of shipping labels, tax documents and recipes. Occasionally handouts or flyers for something, map excerpts or directions for a trip where phone signal may be iffy.
gsich 3y ago
printer bad is a common meme here.
- grotorea 3y ago
  I think this is much wider than HN. Consider Office Space.
mattkrause 3y ago
I print off journal articles when I need to read them really carefully. Proofreading and editing stuff I’ve written is also a lot easier on paper. People with young kids seem to print a lot too: colouring book pages, pretty pictures, and all kinds of forms.
- ljf 3y ago
  This - during lockdown we got a printer plus refillable ink cartridges - and let the kids go crazy. They loved printing photos and making collages, but mainly loads of colouring sheets and quite a bit of 'homework' - we definitely got our monies worth. Pain is that it blocks up if not used for 3 months - and the cheap ink fades for any photos we printed - but cleaning it is really easy, literally stuck the print head in the sink and wash it.

backendanon 3y ago

Also wish someone would do something about single player computer games that you find out won't work when the Internet is down (I assume because of telemetry but I don't know for sure), until it's too late to request a refund.

basilgohar 3y ago
If only there were ways to get superior versions of games that don't have these lousy, baked-in restrictions that break a perfectly good set of bits...
matkoniecz 3y ago
Nowadays I try to test such software by dialling internet and checking is it still working (and checking is it not anywhere).

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

jp0d 3y ago

This is something irrelevant but I thought I'd share an anecdote from a mate who worked for HP a long time ago. He worked on their driver software for their printers. In one of the assignment he was asked to rebrand the same software with another manufacturer's name (can't recall if it was Canon or Epson)! HP may have shared some printer technology with another company. There is nothing new in this space. HP hasn't exactly been the beacon of customer satisfaction thanks to their restrictive policies. Most of these printers are probably made in similar factories (probably a handful of places), somewhere in China. I'd buy from a brand that offers more flexibility when it comes to ink/toner than anything else.

imhoguy 3y ago
HP has had partnership with Samsung an has bought its printer division in 2017, it has partnership with Canon too. I think there is not much invention anymore, it is just long tail market now. Other than for specialised use, people just buy printer once forever for ocassional use. This way the printer market is really shrinking and consolidating, like HDD market.

osigurdson 3y ago

I love all technology - except printers. Don’t make me have to own a scanner, printer or (god forbid) fax machine. That’s you, governments, accountants, lawyers and insurance companies.

chris_wot 3y ago
Most everything can be fixed by percusive maintenance - except printers.
- Cerium 3y ago
  True, the printer can't but you can get a good one or two hundred prints out of a fading toner cartridge with some percusive maintenance.

gumby 3y ago

Thankfully the demand for printers is fading. This will of course cause printer mfrs to double down on their lockdowns ("Sorry, your toner is too old so you'll have to go out and buy new a new cartridge"). But its their anti-consumer practices that drive people not to print. My kiddo bought a new printer in 2015 because he had to print something for high school and the toner cartridge was empty. It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge (and it was delivered for free within the a couple of hours!). I still have it, still use it once in a while, and it's still on that same starter cartridge and maybe the same ream of paper. Two more kids have finished high school using it...hardly at all. In the past year I can remember two printer jobs, each a single page.

LeonB 3y ago
Love the use of: “Printer mfrs” As we all know it isn’t just an abbreviation for “manufacturers”
- adalacelove 3y ago
  To save ink in case you print Hacker News for reading.
  - tigerlily 3y ago
    Not if you print it in dark mode.
pjmlp 3y ago
I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling. Work stuff requires offline archives for contracts and legal stuff Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > I print regularly, plenty of stuff requires signatures, and being safe when travelling. Lifehack: you can annotate a PDF with a signature and just send it to the receiver. The only time I couldn't do that was when I needed a notarized document. > Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue. Yup. I save screenshots of barcodes for tickets and other stuff instead. I have a second phone as a backup :)

Sparkyte 3y ago

They should just better more expensive printers that function really good. They are too busy min maxing the profits. All big and great companies today that survive and endured the years survived because they put the product first. A sign a company is about to die is when they start cutting corners to maximize profits. A good executive only gets paid when his/her ocmpany turns a profit. Of course a living expense is always given, you can't eat ramen noodles forever. Not the Japanese kind.

chmod600 3y ago
Maybe printers are kind of a dead end business? We want to be able to print things once in a while, but that's not enough to sustain a manufacturing business and certainly not much innovation. Either someone comes up with a reason for people to print more and makes space in the market for innovation... or printing will just kind of suck forever.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I'd argue there's too much "innovation" in the printer space. We would have been better off if they stopped at the 2000s level, and just charged actual manufacturing costs + margin.
  - chmod600 3y ago
    Of course that's not real innovation. It's just profit extraction from a dwindling business. The simple business that makes a good product for a fair price and pays fair wages and keeps going forever is a romantic myth for the most part. Why? I'm not sure exactly, but it has something to do with growth.

zzo38computer 3y ago

If the printers are so bad, can a fax machine be used (that would not have any internet and not have any auto-updating software, if they still make them that way)? Can a FOSS program on the computer to emulate the fax signals? Would that work?

prmoustache 3y ago
The only thing you need is an old dialup modem.

tomashubelbauer 3y ago

If you only use your printer occasionally but can't fully get rid of it, like me, I can recommend getting a pocket thermal printer. I got a Peripage A4 sized one [1] and I use it whenever I can't fake having printed something (by adding a signature in software and deepfrying the document to look scanned if the other side requires it) or when I want a printed backup (like for travel documents in case my phone died or I lost it). It has no consumables other than the thermal paper which I believe is easy to come by from any vendor. The printed documents look like trash and obviously aren't in color, but they are readable and frankly, they'll do. I have yet to run into a situation where this thermal printed document is not accepted by the other party in case the other party requires a printed document and I can't work around that requirement digitally. Aaand I don't have to deal with any sort of ink or anything of the sort. Someone downthread mentioned the idea of an open source printer and how complicated it would be for the maker community to build one. I wish people gave building an open source thermal document-sized printer a shot, because the only thing I don't like is that I need to use a Chinese app on my phone to print through this printer. I am sure it would be easy to reverse engineer, though, so I could reuse the hardware and just get a clean app, but I didn't put the effort into that. [1]: https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-printer https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-pr...

dividedbyzero 3y ago
I have (or had) a few thermal prints filed away. After about 10 years they have faded to be unreadable. Not a problem for many applications, but documents meant for the long term probably should not be thermal prints.
- tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  You're right - I should have mentioned this in my comment. I would not use a thermal printer for one's own bookkeeping. I solely use it to be able to produce dead tree slices for people who require them and won't relent without having to dedicate desk space for the printer or buy consumables for it. I personally never need to print stuff for myself so this use-case didn't even cross my mind.
3y ago

dividedbyzero 3y ago

During the pandemic I had a Canon all-in-one printer with ADF and bells and whistles that refused to let me use the scanner if one of the ink cartridges was empty, which happened all the time because the self-cleaning used a ton of ink and ran every time I wanted to use the ADF scanner, and while it did support pushing PDFs to a NAS via Samba, only a hopelessly insecure stone age version of Samba was actually implemented. The thing was an utter pos, it's crazy that it could be sold like that. I've since replaced it with a standalone Brother b&w laser printer and an HP ADF scanner and lo and behold both devices just work, I can scan and process my mail using scanline and python and print the occasional document and both devices take up less space than the Canon pos.

badcppdev 3y ago
So how does HP make money from that scanner? Is it limited to a number of pages per month or pay per scan? Oh I know, 1200dpi scanning is enabled with your subscription? I mean surely they don't just sell it to you as a physical product and then let you use it?!?!
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  I know, right! How can they still sell you a product that doesn't use a little digital green man on a circuit board to cross his arms and demand you pay rent to use the hardware you legally bought and now (in theory only) own? Those fools. Don't they see that there's rent to be extracted here? If you teach a man to fish, he might fish without paying you. If you build a fishing pole that refuses to cast unless he inserts a quarter... fishing and paying you become inseparable! Genius!
  - salawat 3y ago
    Do you realize where you are? Poe's law, man. You're on a board frequented not just by technical types, but MBA's as well (VC). Sometimes, as tempting as it is to post a sarcastic remark, it's better to just remain silent rather than sowing the seeds of misery by making $exceedingly_bad_idea tangible to the PHB who'll eventually try to get people to implement it for them. If you don't want to see it, don't bring it up in any way. Lord knows, the fool is out there that'll think "that's a revolutionary idea!"

Decabytes 3y ago

I am the only one in my immediate family with a printer so I am constantly emailed with requests to print things out. It’s actually kind of nice, and leads to impromptu family interaction when they come over to pick it up. I have one of those ink tank printers and it has been revolutionary in the printer space. I can’t believe we went this long with cartridges

yonrg 3y ago

Actually, I am quite happy with using my budget HP all-in-one printer; private usage. I also chose to subscribe to the Instant Ink service. I took the smallest one with 10 pages p.m. This plan was, and still is for me, free of charge. So I have not payed for ink in the last 6 yrs. If I print more than 10pages, which happened once, I pay 1€ for another 10 pages. Also why I am happy with HP, is that there is quite decent support in linux (hplip). All in all at least I am happy. One drawback is, that the printer needs to send some telemetry back to HP. But that is the service, if the ink get low, they'll send me cartridges without my interaction. Thus, I never ran out of ink and did not face the situation of a non working printer/scanner. And I got blinded by the good working service, that I did not realize the lock-in situation I am in. I dislike vendor-lock-ins like these, but for home printing I got used to it, due to the many benefits.

yencabulator 3y ago
> This plan was, and still is for me, free of charge. If so, then you're special, because the cheapest tier is $0.99/month, and has been since 2020. https://instantink.hpconnected.com/ https://instantink.hpconnected.com/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/12/hp_free_printing/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/12/hp_free_printing/