Friends don’t let their friends buy HP.
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Weren’t they from the start, more or less?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company debuted a subscription service today — just like CEO Enrique Lores said it would last month — called the HP All-In Plan.
So if you decide HP All-In isn’t for you after all, you’ll have to return the printer and go back to rubbing elbows with everyone else at FedEx whenever the need to print arises.
That way, if a firmware upgrade blue-screens your printer, at least you have some recourse that doesn’t involve driving to a store to buy a whole new one.
And receiving ink before you run out is great if you are, like me, the kind of person who ignores the “low ink” warning all the way until I’m fully out and am actually printing something critical, rather than coloring pages for your kid, for once.
But those are mostly functions of the fact that I don’t really print that often and rarely encounter the annoyances of printer ownership.
One is HP’s plan, which appeals to the frustration of user-hostile experiences like scanners that don’t work because you bought third-party ink and printers that become unusable without some serious effort because you moved overseas.
The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
the amount of engineering and programming hours spent to make their products worse is just a symptom of how stupid, wasteful decisions are made when there is not enough competition in these industries.
I think it’s time for an open source 2d printer project, we have open source 3d printers and the technology is much more complex than 2d. Time to put HP to sleep
Patents are prohibiting anyone from developing something like that.
I’m sure there would be workaounds to that, also I’m not selling anything, just sharing a project and list of components. i’m not a lawyer but i’m pretty sure there’s nothing they can do to stop me
x doubt
When do the patents expire? Seems like 2D printers are relatively old technology by this point.
For example, a very important patent for any inkjet is the one where heads self clean, basically maintenance. Without that, an inkjet printer would be a pain to have.
fax machines are the predecessor to 2d printers i guess
I would argue that 2D printing is a lot more complicated than 3D, and it’s not even close
I see this said every time this comes up.
Are there any efforts starting or even attempting this? Or even taking an existing printer and replacing it’s main board?
As it stands now printhead technology for quality prints needs microscopic precision and materials like precisely perforated foils that are just not easy to make outside of a specialized fabrication shop, and even then it won’t scale.
That’s surprising and interesting – how come?
I think it is a combination of the required precision, liquid ink vs solid filament and the difficulty of handing paper vs simply moving a print bed on a 3d printer.
I’d argue that this is not an issue from a technical perspective, which would halt open hardware endeavours.
The precision is mainly a problem regarding the used motors / actuation system, which in turn is “just” a money issue, but the hardware is there. Paper handling is pretty easy.
I don’t know how complicated it would be to create ink or laser cartridges, but given that there are a lot of 3rd party vendors who offer refill services, I suppose it is manageable.
My guess for the reason why there is no open hardware 2D printer yet is, because nobody has seriously started such a project yet.
The hardware precision is the hard part, along with speed. Most hardware parts wouldn’t be hard to get because most of the printer is just motors, rollers, etc, but the print head itself is the part that would be the hard part.
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/inkjet-printer.htm
Here’s a good reference, from that website describing thermal bubble which is the more common technology;
Thermal bubble - Used by manufacturers such as Canon and Hewlett Packard, this method is commonly referred to as bubble jet. In a thermal inkjet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble. As the bubble expands, some of the ink is pushed out of a nozzle onto the paper. When the bubble “pops” (collapses), a vacuum is created. This pulls more ink into the print head from the cartridge. A typical bubble jet print head has 300 or 600 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously. Click the button to see how a thermal bubble inkjet printer works.
So that’s the part that would be hard to manufacture, and even if you were able to do it and open source it, it would likely be slower and less precise than the other big companies.
I’m not an engineer, but I work tech support for one of the inkjet printer companies and we learned how the printers work. It’s pretty interesting, and there’s more to consider than you might think. Like color accuracy, if you want to make green on paper then you use cyan and yellow ink. Not only do you have to worry about making sure the print head spits out the correct ratio of cyan to yellow, you have to worry about which color it deposits first. If it drops yellow first, that’s going to be a slightly different hue than if it deposits cyan first. So how do you make sure it deposits the correct color when the print head is moving left to right and back to left? If it deposited ink on the return back to the left, it would be dropping the opposite color first so your colors would be slightly different leading to visible bands or lines. And having the print head return to the left side without printing would take twice as long to print. You have to design the print head with that in mind, and more.
Anyways, I’m sure it’s possible but it would take a lot of time and effort to make sure it worked well enough to be comparable to the big names with proprietary tech.
There was simply no need, we already have great 2D printers. Like Brother, which doesn’t have DRM, doesn’t need internet, and doesn’t complain about anything ever.
For 3D printing to work, you basically just need some standard motors to move a thing that gets hot around. Yes it needs to be pretty precise, but it’s only printing at a single point that moves. Classic 2D printing not only prints across the whole sheet at once, it is also sometimes expected to do it in color (which does take multiple passes usually). As for the technological aspects of conventional printers, I really don’t consider myself an expert, there are great videos online. However by my understanding, a laser is often used to trace the exact contents of the page so that the depositing material is picked up and placed. That sort of light manipulation is already more complicated than everything most 3D printers do.
Basically, you could build a new 3D printer in your garage using off the shelf parts and some knowhow, but good luck even repairing a 2D printer with a serious problem in its printing mechanism, though this difficulty is certainly not made better by companies such as HP
Huh, makes sense. Thanks!
The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,”
Literally “cause a problem, sell them the solution” 🤣
I guess hp won’t care but, while I have bought hp computers for years, this last time I went looking at other brands because of this printer nonsense.
I am sorry some sort of dark curse forced you to only buy hp computers for years, that sounds rough
As you should. The obviously don’t have any loyalty to their customers, don’t give them any back.
When HP requires HP Smart account to print, the brand was already dead to me
Also any recommendation for printers?
EDIT: damn, I think I am going to get a Brother Laser Printer in the future
I love my Canons, especially the canon laser printer
God forbid I recommended you to buy an HP ever, but it feels like they’ve been awful only in the ink jet section. At least my HP laser printer (283 something) doesn’t require me to have a(n) HP Smart account (I don’t even know how/where to set up one), I’ve had it for ~3-4 years now, and it’s been reliable and trusty ever since. I can imagine they started pulling the same shady shit with the new laser printers, but this one seems to be working as of now. Fingers crossed.
EDIT: Still buy a Brother, I have only heard amazing things about them; just saying it’s not happening everywhere - yet.
If you don’t need color printing, I’ve had a fantastic experience with my Brother monochrome laser printer, fwiw. So much cheaper than ink.
I have a colour laser printer from Brother and have also had a great experience with it, been going strong for 5 years now
Brother (Dc4020 model if I remember correctly). I have been using it for 10 years using off brand color toner and very well so far.
Everyone loves Brother for good reason.
I’ve had a decent experience with my Xerox too.
Never had a problem with Brother printers
I mean, they’re printers. So…
But yes, Brother is definitely one of the better options on the market.
Brother are good but I got a Kyocera about 6yrs ago and have never had to change the toner. I’ve been through about 2 blocks of paper in that time. Prints great.
Plug & Play on Windows and Linux
We have around 250 HP Laserjet 1320 printers in our company and while they are generally quite reliable, their age is slowly taking the toll. Each one prints 50-200 pages a week and their guts are becoming a bit loose. So number of paper jams, mispicking, and other breakings increases every month… In near future we’ll be probably forced to replace them, but with what?
These were pretty cheap printers back then, aftermarket toners are dirt cheap and it is still possible to buy parts for self repairing online. Bosses won’t allow the replacement to be some fancy expensive printers or cheap ones that turn to shit in months. These HPs are running for maybe ~10 years? What is the brand/model I should check nowadays? Bearing in mind we’ll have to run hundreds of those? I’ll appreciate any input you might have.
PS: located in EU
At home I have a Brother, but our IT uses Kyocera. We print a lot in manufacturing and they are reliable.
Even if it wasn’t
Has always been meme
I bought a Canon laser printer 10 years ago. The only thing I’ve needed since then was a single new set of toner. (And a bunch of paper, obviously.)
Even back then it was pretty obvious that ink jets are waste of money and everyone that I knew who had ink jets were just constantly complaining about them.
I have a brother laser printer that I love. I just fill up a tub with generic toner and it keeps printing for almost a decade now. I’m old and like to print things. I think it’s much easier to read on paper and I’m happier to print out a 150 page book than read it on a Kindle lol. I’ve also broken multiple ereaders commuting on trains but still have all the papers I saved in binders I printed and really enjoyed reading and will last nearly forever.
HP is so desperate for money that this is what they need to do to survive.
What does HP (hardware) actually do these days? Where do they compete (and I mean compete, not have products in)?
They ruined Compaq.
They killed their golden goose printing business with bullshit like this.
They killed their server hardware business with bullshit like locking software, drivers and firmware behind support contracts.
As somebody who always bought HP and advocated for their hardware (many years ago), I would never buy anything they make today.
Thought they could be Apple without atleast the reasonable build quality
HP is so desperate for money that this is what they need to do to survive.
It’s not what they “need to do”, it’s just what makes them money. Printer scams have been around nearly as long as printers themselves, because suckers buy them. HP is just constantly pushing to see how much bullshit their consumers will tolerate.
They make decent laptops. I had Elitebooks, ZBooks and an Omen, excellent machines. I liked them more than Dell or lenovo.
A friend of mine won the top of the line omen model in a gaming tournament. We went through three of them before we just accepted the thing doesn’t fucking work for shit and demoted it to a Super Gengear 64 Station boy advance and stuffed it under the TV.
About 90% of laptops I’ve seen fail are made by HP. Specifically, it’s their cooling solution that always seems to fail, even after replacing the thermal paste.
They might be great laptops for maybe about 3 years, until they’re not.
The day HP locked all firmware and driver downloads behind active contracts was the day I stopped buying it.
I can go on Dell’s website and download drivers for a server I bought in 2004. For free. By just putting the service tag in.
Don’t even get me started on HP’s partsurfer or warranty websites. It’s a mire of hundreds of subdomains, none of which are actually managed properly.
It’s no wonder they’re swirling the drain. They are blatantly anti-consumer and anti-corporation.
I used to be a bit iffy on Dell years past when their reputation was largely as commodity shovelware and overpriced premium kit. But honestly, they’ve evolved over the years into by far my favourite of the big mass manufacturers. Not only is their hardware generally solid for the price point (with a few exceptions), but their customer service is absolutely second to none. I’ve never had such smooth and helpful customer support from any other hardware manufacturer, big or small.
That alone puts them leagues ahead of HP and Lenovo for me.
Yeah of all the zombie reanimated corpses of computer companies that used to have some kind of reputation but now have been hollowed out by enshittification, Dell seems to smell the least.
Wait. What? Is this real? Firmware and drivers behind a pay wall? Are they insane?
Zero day patch? Fuck you, pay me. Firmware update for your SAN controller? Fuck you, pay me. Doesn’t matter, it’s all profit.
Yeah. Even legacy stuff. Want to fire up that old server? Need new firmware for it? Guess what. Now it needs to be on contract or HP won’t lift a finger to give you old software they already have.
HP printers are about to swarm the recycling centers…
FWIW we have dumb business owners to thank for that.
They’ve been doing this with the Indigo’s for 8+ years that I’m aware of, so probably much longer. And ofc businesses fell for it because just like most cloud shit, nobody can be bothered to calculate actual costs, just fudge stuff and get your bonus/pay rise for pretending to have done something beneficial.
I appreciate the context you added but I think it is important to underline that ultimately we still have hp to thank for this. They didn’t have to be an awful company.
Oh, I’m not denying that they are greedy assholes. But at the same time I feel like we’re in that comic, they saw an terrible opportunity, implemented this shit and were like “no way anyone is going to fall for that”, and “we” allowed them to like “we” seem to do with many other terrible things in this world, and here we are with them laughing away at “our” stupidity.
There seem to be just enough dumb people around to enable assholes like this to exist, which I find sad and disturbing. It’s almost like there is a reason certain groups want people to stay dumb and ban books, ban those who are different from learning etc
Couple of other things about the print stuff; I seriously doubt this even needs to profitable for them in the short term (it likely is), so unless it’s dead on arrival, the longer it keeps going, the more chances this will be the only available solution…perhaps a last ditch effort to milk us dry before printing dies?
And for anyone who comes across this in the future, at best you’re paying 10x per page compared to what medium size business did many years ago, and no you’re not even getting a real service.
There seem to be just enough dumb people around to enable assholes like this to exist
sigh yup! Always was, always will be, it is maddening isn’t it.
We can do this even with all the idiots though, they will fall in line behind good ideas for the same stupid reasons they will fall behind bad ideas.
