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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular. They're awful in every regard. They have zero respect for their users, even after they've over paid for inferior products. They've shown time and time again that they will do everythin within their power to rip you off and screw you over.

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> I don't understand why people keep buying HP products - printers in particular.

You need a printer, so you go to the store.

The inkjet printer industry offers you an all-in-one printer/ scanner/ copier with 1200dpi printing for $65. It includes "3 months free instant ink".

The laser printer industry offers you a printer with 600 dpi colour printing, no scanner/copier function, and it costs $265.

You ask the nice young man in the store which is better. He tells you the inkjet gives the best quality for printing photos, and the laser printer is best for business use and people printing 500 pages per week or more.

So you buy the inkjet. Repeat 3 years later after it stops working.

The funny thing is that the laser printer is much better for people who print once a week or less, because toner doesn't dry up and clog the printer. But for the price/quality it's hard to justify buying a new one.

Unless you print colour

Realistically, how many people need and really expect high quality color prints? I’m sure the tech has improved marginally, but I was always disappointed as a kid with inkjet photo prints compared to professional prints. Most people would be better off having professional prints made rather than owning inkjet, very rarely do other documents require high quality color.

how many people need a printer, period? i haven't needed one for decades. if i need to print something i go to a print shop.

my mother (80yrs old) recently bought a printer because she was printing out poems and stories she had written over the years. that made sense for her, but i think that is going to be the exception, unless you live in a suburb or outside a city/village where a print shop is far away.

I take photocopies of kid's activity book pages for my kids to draw on so they're more than one-time-use.

When I know I'm going to cook something big and messy I like printing off the recipe first and treat it as disposable. Same goes for when I'm about to go wrench on the car or motorcycle, having all the torque specs and diagrams and what not printed and handy even with greasy grimy hands is nice.

Then in the end I'll still want some kind of scanner around for those things I get that aren't digital yet. Phone "scanning" apps just aren't as good of quality IMO.

But yeah, outside of these things if I want a high-quality print I just print online. Lots of places around me can take print jobs online and have common stuff all ready in an hour or so.

Since I have kids, it happens a few times a week.

Before that, the scanner got a lot of use for storing copies of official documents.

People doing online returns can print the label at home.

My kid had like $500 worth for printing available at his college and literally didn't use any of it. That said, during covid, I printed a ton of stuff for the kids for school. And it's nice to have one for crafty projects and printing forms for work and the government that can't yet be done online.

This is exactly what I do. There is a great shop a few minutes away and I can order fairly low volumes at great quality. Anything worth printing is worth getting done on their printer which is better quality and the the volume I print likely cheaper overall.

I went to a Brother color laser printer for home and send out high quality color prints to companies with high quality commercial photo grade or print grade equipment

But you do need to keep it and use it over a long period of time to justify the initial outlay. The cheap inkjet may very well be a better deal for most people even if they have to junk it every few years (especially now that the need to print paper copies keeps diminishing).

I know it’s the naive buying inkjets, but if you don’t have a laser printer you’re doing it wrong. It’s possible to find them between 100-300 on sale with all the features (and color on the higher end of that).

The only time I’ve bought a new one is because I didn’t buy a feature I wanted (scanning, duplex, color). Now I have all the things and toner that lasts years.

I threw out my HP when it stopped recognizing it had a black cartridge installed. The complaints about using non-HP ink were annoying but at least it worked until it didn't. Replaced it with a Brother laser, never an issue. The loss of color is something I can overlook since I have an Epson photo printer (also never an issue) should I absolutely need to print in color. HP's corporate policy seems to require everything they make to be as annoying as possible.

I'm really lucky because I have a good and cheap print shop close by. So I never felt the need to buy a printer. The only inconvenience is having to physically go there, but the upsides are numerous. No worrying about toner or paper. Having the shop do all the decisions for me such as what printer to use if I want color, or double-sided, or unusually large paper size. They even have a paper-cutting guillotine for me to use for free. It really outweighs the mild inconvenience of a short walk, especially if I'm already going out anyway.

Just stopping in to give a shout-out to Brother. The black and white laser printer I bought a few years ago (HL-2390DW) is the first reliable printer I have owned in my life.

Mine's more than 12 years old. There's nothing that comes even close.

My DCP-7020 is going on 20 pretty soon here. Don't want to jinx it but it's been the reliable workhorse of the home office.

They also have excellent support, that I’ve only used once in 15 years.

This. Also their Linux drivers work.

I recently installed kubuntu on an old gaming PC. Thought I'd see if I could print one day. To my surprise, my Brother printer was already recognized. Printed what I needed right away. No time spent configuring anything, no fuss.

Yup. I've had a Brother for a long while now, and it replaced a previous Brother only because I reconfigured my office and needed one that would work with wifi.

I had a Brother Multi-Function color scanner/printer that lasted almost 15 years. In the end, the scanner started to malfunction, doing blurry scans, but the printer portion still worked great. Toward the end, it started complaining about low black toner, and I looked up when I last bought black toner: it had been 7 years earlier.

I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.

And they have Linux drivers

I print maybe once or twice a year. In the past, my workflow was: "need to print, realize cartridge has dried out because it's been so long, go buy a ridiculously-priced new cartridge, finally print the 1 page I needed to".

For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.

It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.

I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.

What is this subscription deal ? It looks great. I bought HP Printer because it was the cheapest I could "throw away", because I need to print one page every X years because one stupid legacy organization accepts only paper, but in my case the ink is still drying between two pages.

I paid $100 for a canon laserjet printer from walmart, had it for about two years, still prints on the first included toner cartridge.

I run dnd games and my players like having printed maps and props, so I use it more than once a year, but I’ll never buy inkjet again.

tl;dr version: You sign up for a monthly recurring payment and in return HP monitor your ink levels and number of pages printed, and mail you out new ink as you need it. If you print more than the included pages per month they will charge you an overage. If you stop paying the monthly fee they revoke access to the ink you already have in your procession (ink provided by the subscription service - they don't revoke any ink you have purchased from your local store for example, just to clear.).

My advice, If you only need to print once in a blue moon, get a refrub'ed "office grade" laser printer off eBay (or similar). I picked one up about 10 years ago with 64,000~ prints on it for about £50, and apart from having having to change out some foam pads that had disintegrated over the years, its still printing just fine. Only had to refill the toner once (I don't print a lot) and because the drum and fuser were fine I just ordered a bottle of toner refill.

EDIT: Reread your post. As you are only printing a single page every couple of years, I would adjust my advice. You might be able to ditch the printer completely, When you do need to print use a local library or similar to do the one off print. My local library charges 15p per side for black and 50p per side for colour prints.

Sure I wouldn't use them to print large amounts or even small amounts regularly, but for very very low usage paying a quid once in a blue moon to use someone elses printer and then you can leave the maintenance of the printer to someone else. But granted, you would then have to travel to a place just to print, and if you need to get the document printed ASAP, it might not be the best thing for you. But its another option to consider.

No monthly recurring payment in the UK - I was paying £0, unless I went over 10 pages.

In the US you do have to pay $1.5/mo.

UK prices these days start at £1.50 p/m for their light package. https://instantink.hpconnected.com/uk/en/l/v2 - guess you were grandfathered into to their free package, or was a promo with your printer.

Either grandfathered (I signed up in 2019) or it might've been a new change - I left the UK last year so if it was introduced last year, that would make sense. Good to know though, so I don't keep saying "oh yeah it was free".

Yep, this is exactly my situation - look up HP Instant Ink for your country, hopefully it'll be of use.

If you're printing once or twice a year, is it worth owning a printer? I just go to the library or print shop when I (very rarely) need to print something.

Matter of preference of course, but I'd rather the occasional errand over the subscription/troubleshooting/physical storage.

Have you used an HP printer lately? I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard. The printers I've used work just fine. The output is clean and the paper handling is good.

My current printer at home is a Canon and it's good as well.

> I have and I don't think they are awful in every regard.

I have too. And the printer insisting that I create an account in some "Smart" website and log into it even before I can print anything with it is beyond annoying.

I got around the problem by finding some old drivers that I had a backup of. But I suspect most people don't give old drivers around and are forced to go through this "Smart" sign up nonsense!

I bought a small HP laser printer a couple of years ago, not realizing that the “e” in the model number meant it’d require an HP account and an always on internet connection.

I did the initial setup and declined to create an account, after which it successfully printed 20 pages before refusing to print anything other than a sheet of paper telling me I needed to create an HP account and finish setting it up with the app.

There was absolutely no way it would print without an HP account, and, even if I’d made one, it’d actually refuse to print if it ever didn’t have an internet connection (even over USB). Naturally it’d taken me three weeks or so to print the twenty pages and it was outside the return window, but it made me so upset that I just put it away and bought a new printer from a manufacturer that’s not overtly hostile.

HP lost me as a customer for life with that thing, and actually made me a vocal critic.

The print quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for a laser printer, either.

I think in most European jurisdictions you would have been able to return the printer for a refund on the grounds that it didn't work, that it was not of merchantable quality, was misleadingly advertised, etc.

Agreed, I have a nearly decade old HP now and it's been working fine. It's a multi-function, with duplex printing, color, scanning and Postscript. I'm a Postscript fan because it has tended to work much better with Linux than the brand-specific PCLs. We vary in printing, I average probably a couple pages per month, over the years, with kids, we've varied between no printing and lots of printing. I think we're on our third set of cartridges. I would have bought the HP carts, but they were ridiculously priced, I think $450 for a full set of replacements. So I went with an aftermarket for $100 and they've worked fine.

I think this is an interesting issue -- I also have a multi-year old multi-function HP laser printer. Before that, I had another one that lasted multiple years until a cross-country move broke the scanner. I don't really have any issues with HP or their printers. They've been expensive to replace toner, but aside from that, they've worked fine. I don't print much, but when I do, it's more than adequate.

However, my experience doesn't necessarily mean that I'd by an HP printer now. So much has changed with HP over the time I've had this printer that I'm not sure how much of my experience with older products maps to current products. I'm more inclined to listen to people with more recent experience vs. my own personal experience with a company that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore.

The printers are fine but this post reminded me to cancel my ink subscription as I haven't printed anything in 6 months.

After my subscription date ends in March, they are charging me one final fee of $6.99 for the privilege of cancelling -- first time I have ever seen something like that.

I helped an elderly relative install a brand new all-in-one HP printer over christmas. It was a ridiculous shit show of an experience. The printing quality is OK, but that's the only positive thing I'll say about it. It ships with a bunch of crapware, which nags her about ink subscriptions. It's all quite unpleasant.

If had two Canon lasers and like their output and reliability, but don’t care for their drivers. AirPrint is unreliable unless the printer is awake. I gave up getting CUPS set up in FreeBSD (less necessary with AirPrint, but locked down school Chromebooks need the most generic printer interface possible).

When I moved to IT management I had a guy I didn't want to lose but whose attitude I needed to turn around. Lots of malicious compliance type stuff. When I came on board I expended a ton of goodwill capital on removing all desktop printers, just MFCs.

He threw a fit when I lost a political battle and a crappy policy got implemented. My response was to let him know I was approving Katie the HR lady's latest request for a desktop printer and I needed him spec out the lowest price HP inkjet for me. Dude realized if I wasn't on his team things would have been much worse. Slowly I brought him around thanks to HP printers :)

I asked a friend recently. They were completely sold on the subscription service thinking it was the best thing ever. I was questioning that, but I have to admit the printer that (I assume) was included with the subscription was better than I would have bought with endless consumables. It did seem to make sense for them who runs a business in their home-office. It's an in-between volume between personal ink-jet and business laser printing.

Personally, I bought the cheapest Brother laser on sale from Staples and it does all I need.

Because among the normies they still have a good name, I know enough people that are resistent to anything else.

The first printer I owned was a HP DeskJet 500, but those times are long gone.

I think the first one I bought with my own money was a DeskJet 540. Printing seemed much more important then than it does now.

The escape codes were in the manual, I used that so that we could in our Clipper application write a poor man's printer driver.

Basically we had a table with the escape codes for printers, for the common stuff (bold, italic, underline, ....), we would read the entries for the respective model, and then use them accordingly.

My HP 1320m Laser Printer is still printing after 20 years. No streaks or blotches. It has issues when drawing paper from the lower tray, but still printing and duplexing fine. No proper drivers for newer OSX versions, but the generic driver is working fine. I usually use 600dpi, but it's fine with 1200dpi (and so am I).

I’m still printing on my HP LaserJet 1320 from 20 years ago. It’s a tank. Are there equivalent contemporary models?

The same could be said about a lot of companies. I think most people, the vast majority, just don't realize or understand until they purchase a product and have experience with it. Maybe there needs to be more consumer education about operations, products, and corproate behavior towards consumers.

Most people don't pay attention, while marketing and availability works.

For what its worth, I bought an HP printer about 8 years ago and was pretty happy with it. It was reliable, fairly simple, the screen UI was genuinely well-designed, and the ink prices were fine with how rarely I printed.

And then I moved from the US to the EU and discovered that printer cartridges are regionally locked. After much research and many calls I learned HP can unlock the printer, but you need you buy completely new cartridges first. I gave away the printer and bought a Brother.

So, yeah, it was decent product clearly ruined by stupid business decisions.

The LaserJet was so good that its reputation is keeping the brand alive 30 years later, despite the company's best efforts to flush it down the toilet.

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