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HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly
- thesuperbigfrog 3y agoHP printers used to be among the best. I had a HP Deskjet 500 that ran perfectly for 15 years across multiple PCs. Now I would never buy or recommend HP printers to anyone. They have been fully enshittified to boost HP's profits.
- hypercube33 3y agoMy dad purchased a HP LaserJet 4 in 1986 - the year I came into this world. It was still working well into 2018 when I decided it wasn't worth moving with me as it made the lights in the house dim when it powered on, but it still printed just fine. Thing weighed a zillion pounds, and toner was like $15 - part of me still feels awful for disposing of it. Thing printed reams of paper off for documentation and software development stuff.
- neilv 3y agoMy LaserJet 5 (which I found on the curb when it was already old, and used for around a decade longer) also did the light-dimming pulse on each power-up. Other than that, the only things I didn't like about it were: (1) didn't seem to have an idle mode, so I had to turn on the power switch every time I wanted to use it, and manually turn it off after; (2) I like my electronics black. When a fan (which seemed hard to replace) failed completely, I decided to part out the LJ 5. I netted money on eBay for some of the easy-to-ship parts, so at least it lived on. I wonder whether the lights-dimming was original behavior. I don't know power circuits, but naively wondering whether some component had gone out of spec (resulting in, say, it charging a capacitor more quickly than it was supposed to), and so the unit was drawing more than it should've from the wall for an instant.
- microtherion 3y agoI think HP laser printers are still OK, it's only the inkjet models which have been affected.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoYeah me neither. Brother printers seem to be the least shitty ones these days. I wonder how long that's going to last. Corporations just can't resist.
- crooked-v 3y agoNew Brother printers are enshittified now too.
- jamiek88 3y agoNooooo! Say it ain't so. I have an old B&W MFC that I was thinking of maybe upgrading but to be honest I have to real reason to other than to get colour and maybe document feeding for scanning but I print so rarely that I probably won't now as Brother was going to be my one and only port of call for this. When did this happen?! Can we get older versions still maybe?
- imposterr 3y agoCould you expand? The last Brother product I have is from 5 years ago and it didn't seem to have started its enshittification yet.
- justinclift 3y agoAs mentioned by @Lightbody in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> New Brother printers are encraptified now too. No, new Brothers are fine. A while back where were a very few models that got a questionable firmware release. As I recall, they weren't common retail models. The firmware might have been a beta. Brother got some crap for it, people circulated the IPs of their update servers (for blocking) and that was the end of it. I regularly buy new Brothers for customers. They're fully fine.
- bitwize 3y agoHP gear used to wear like iron because back when HP was Hewlett-Packard, they were primarily a scientific instrument company, and they built their computer peripherals like they built their instruments. During and after Carly's tenure, they made some dumb M&A moves, like spinning off their scientific instruments division, acquiring Compaq, and going all in on consumer electronics. Thus began their slow, but steady, enshittification.
- beej71 3y agoI fear the day my old Brother HL-2040 dies. Will anyone still make a non-shitty printer?
- kayfox 3y agoProbably Brother.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoI hope Brother continues, but I hear Epson has some decent options higher up the price/quality scale that don't hate you.
- chewmieser 3y agoI’ve been pretty happy with Xerox laser printers. If I was going inkjet I would probably look into those Epson Ecotank ones, but knowing how infrequently I use my inkjet today the nozzles would probably dry out in-between prints!
- plussed_reader 3y agoCheck out led vs laser printing for your next b/w printer.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoOh man. I haven't seen LED in years. In 90s-00s, I set up every client I had with Okidata LED printers. Small footprint, quiet, light to med duty, inexpensive to buy and run. They lasted forever. I don't think I ever had one break.
- plussed_reader 3y agoLess moving parts/simpler transport path, LEDs are inexpensive to produce, every toner cartridge comes with the imaging unit integrated. The 4096 resolution of the microled imaging can be a bit blocky on smaller details compared to laser, but for 10-12pt spaced documents it works quite well.
- 3y ago
- havaloc 3y agoYou can get a Canon Megatank for around $150 if you want color, and they have been ok so far. Brother lasers are still ok too at this point.
- plussed_reader 3y agoIf you don't mind the tech difference, the led printers are pretty sweet.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoA recent discussion about Brother printers will be a good highlight here, “Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38429291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38429291
- booi 3y agoGotta know when to stop
- jpablo 3y agoI feel like the brother info is outdated. New brother lasers printers check tonner drm and have a tendency to get it wrong even with original toner.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI buy new Brothers for clients every month or so and have yet to see this. Nor have I seen any Brother DRM anything at any of my service sites, ever. If it's out there, it's hidden well.
- AtheistOfFail 3y ago> New brother lasers printers check tonner drm Source, because I am surprised by this.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoSupport told a redditor that automatic color registration now requires OEM toner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- desaiguddu 3y agoExcellent insights, Brajeshwar.
- fxtentacle 3y ago... and then people wonder about competition from China. Who wouldn't want to buy a cheap printer that can use HP's industrial print heads but the firmware just asks you - the owner - how much ink you put in and it doesn't bother with any kind of DRM? By now, some of these Chinese knock-off products are truly superior to the original design they were once trying to imitate. And mostly that's just because the "original" keeps getting worse. EDIT: just to give an example, here's the link to purchase an authentic 731 print head directly from HP in the US for $116: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-731-designjet-printhead https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-731-designjet-printhead They go for about $30 in authentic but used or $20 for a good factory-new counterfeit. And that printhead can also dispense UV ink like what you use for printing on plastic packaging and cans. It's brilliant technology, made/designed in the US, and highly valued all around the world. But the HP printer that you usually buy together with this HP printhead, that's been fully enshittified. EDIT2: this being hacker news, you might also be interested about this talk where someone builds a tiny esp32-based printer using HP print heads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717022
- justinclift 3y agoInteresting. I didn't realise that Chinese knockoffs of HP printers were even a thing. Any idea if they can print without having internet connectivity? aka "lets not open the security can of worms here" :)
- fxtentacle 3y agoSome of the printers are very basic, more like a reprap 3d printer. Also they will be designed to work in factories, too. So I'd be pretty optimistic that you can buy models with SD card slot. That said, I wonder if US-made printers phoning home is truly that much better than Chinese-made printers phoning home ...
- justinclift 3y agoNeither phoning home is really acceptable, which is why "not being able to connect to the internet" covers all those bases. :)
- Lightbody 3y agoI agree that we should all avoid HP. Just the worst. But the Brotherly love might also seem misplaced, at least according to one HN thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 That said, I have a Brother laser printer + fancy scanner that can upload direct to Google Drive and I’m very happy with it. And from my research other brand toner seems to be allowed on mine (L8895CDW). So… shrug?
- constantlm 3y agoI've been running my super cheap Brother HL-1210W since probably 2015 with the cheapest toner I can find, and it still goes amazingly well.
- FredPret 3y agoI came here ready to fetch my pitchfork, toss the HP in my home office, and buy a Brother. But looks like the price is going up between 0.5 EUR (for the 10 page plan), 3 EUR for the 700 page plan, and 5 EUR for the 1500 page plan. I looked at Brother printers just now - looks like CAD 500-1000 for a good one, with dubious AirPrint support. Instant ink is still well worth it for people like me who print < 1000 pages per year, sometimes from my phone.
- gnicholas 3y ago> Instant ink is still well worth it for people like me who print < 1000 pages per year, sometimes from my phone. I fall into this bucket, but it would never occur to me that I should want to sign up for a service that charges me per page printed. I feel like it would have negligible benefits over paying for ink as I use it, and it would make me think about whether/how much I need to print something every time I go to print. Most importantly, it would make me uncomfortable because I'd be at the mercy of unilateral price increases, like this one. What sold you on the service? Was it when you bought a new printer that you signed up, or when you went to buy more ink/toner?
- LeafItAlone 3y agoOne of my printers is an inkjet. I used it so infrequently that the ink dried up in between uses and I’d end up wasting it all doing print head cleaning. A subscription service seems like it would have been beneficial for me, but I inserted switched to a laser printer. I do not regret that decision, yet.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> I fall into this bucket, but it would never occur to me that I should want to sign up for a service that charges me per page printed. Instead of instant ink, I opted for getting a bazillion pages out of a toner cartridge. This Brother is the first printer I owned I didn't need to setup on anything. The first time I went to print from my phone it was there. Which was kind of weird but certainly welcome.
- kstrauser 3y ago
- halosghost 3y agoI remain infuriated that I cannot purchase a roll of ascorbic-acid based thermal paper that is the width of either US letter or A4, and perforated at the respective appropriate height. Thermal printers have far fewer moving parts, no non-paper consumable, barely any maintenance duty, and much simpler construction. By extension, they are much more compact, capable of going long periods of not operating without issue, and are just obviously easier to manage. For most of my purposes in-printing, the negatives of thermal paper (namely, that it will warp with significant temperature fluctuation) are irrelevant; and the negative of ascorbic acid thermal paper specifically (that it's a bit yellow) is wildly outweighed by the benefit that it's dramatically less environmentally worrisome than the phenol-based options which are more common (both to the people handling it and everything else that exists). I looked into this a while ago, and I'm pretty sure I could buy one thermal printer, with maybe 10 rolls of letter and 10 rolls of A4, and probably be set for my printing needs for the rest of my life (with occasional use of a print shop or library for in-color things or larger prints, etc.). And yet, no one makes ascorbic acid thermal paper in this form factor. It makes perfect sense that they would aim for receipt rolls first (because that's where it'll have the greatest societal impact and safety benefit, and unsurprisingly market), but please! This seems like such a no-brainer to me… /rant All the best, -HG [edit]: s/citric/ascorbic/ [edit]: s/phalate/phenol/ (… what?)
- userbinator 3y agothe negatives of thermal paper (namely, that it will warp with significant temperature fluctuation) are irrelevant Also the fact that thermal prints fade very quickly. Perhaps that may also be why no one makes rolls of them in larger than for receipts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paxys 3y agoWe owe it to the greed and incompetency of printer companies for speeding up the transition to a paperless world. I haven't printed anything in years now, and life is so much better because of it.
- LordShredda 3y agoAccording to the article, instant ink isn't just you paying for ink but also per page. The lowest price has a max of 10 pages a month, then you pay extra.
- blindriver 3y agoHP died after Carly Fiorina’s stint as CEO. All of the good will that HP had before was excised and basically anything was okay as long as it made money. HP went from one of the founders of Silicon Valley to one of the worst companies in the world. I never touched or trusted an HP product since Fiorina and every few months I keep getting reminded why this was a great idea.
- campbel 3y agoI think you're giving too much credit to the people and their decisions and not the circumstances of the business that HP is in. The fact is that the printing business was completely reshaped by re-manufactured ink/toner. The business is razors and blades, build the printer, take a loss on it and make it up on the back end with toner/ink sales. As soon as cheap 3rd party ink/toner became ubiquitous all of the printer manufacturers were put into an existential crisis. The most popular solution, DRM. The big boys got to it quicker than the little guys, but every one of them knew this was 100% necessary or they'd get their lunch eaten at either end (upfront sales from DRM'd devices because they are cheap and backend toner sales from remans). Ever since its been a cat/mouse game of breaking DRM for 3rd party toner suppliers and print manufacturers trying to stay ahead. Instant Ink is a play by HP to get out of this game. Also, I feel like lot's of other product categories are doing the same thing, but get far less hate (e.g. Keurig, video game consoles). Not sure if printers are just easy targets or what. Source - SW Engineer @ HP for 10+ years.
- hakfoo 3y agoThey chose to embrace a razor-blades model-- they sold their soul chasing the consumer market. People trusted HP printers at the high-end of the market, where words like "TCO" and "duty cycle" matter. That could scale that down to the "prosumer" end of the market very easily. They were pretty close to that already, with the LaserJet 6P and similar. I can recall my first job used two big networked HPs for the bulk printing, and a 6P for a special case (a few dozen sheets per day printing cheques with MICR toner). Despite the hundreds of pages per day volume we ran, the printers were pretty bulletproof. They also missed the opportunity to take control of a new market: the "second printer" buyer. Target the people who took the "free" or dirt-cheap inkjet printer that came with a PC bundle. When they're fed up with 25 pages per cartridge, using three colours to print black, and drivers that are clearly a less whimsical GlaDOS, you can be there to say "now that you've learned why a $300 printer is worth it, here's one explicitly engineered to solve your pain points." Brother has now successfully captured this market entirely through word of mouth. One would expect that's the long-term play: selling $49 inkjets was like deciding to double-down on manufacturing 56k winmodems: it might do well in 1998, when the market is flooded with first-time customers taking the cheapest thing they can get, but it doesn't provide you a place to take your brand as customer expectations march upwards.
- linuxftw 3y agoAnybody using the Epson Ecotank printers? Printing from linux? I've been thinking about switching. I print so infrequently I've been stuck with my HP for like a decade, but it's really struggling in it's old age (slow, doesn't want to print from devices randomly).
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]