I'm sure HP deliberately designed the printer to fuck up the working printhead during a "cleaning" routine
My routine for unclogging a printhead is to get 99% IPA, blot the head on a paper towel and then drag the head down a sheet of paper until it is leaking ink. As an IT guy, I have recovered several ink cartridges this way.
After you have done this, do several prints until the ink flows properly.
If you have the ability to do so, you should look into buying a used laser printer. The toner is more expensive upfront, but you don't have these issues and total cost of ownership is significantly cheaper.
Word of warning, do not buy consumer HP printers. These only exist to make you purchase HP toner.
10 years ago I owned a Canon bubble jet printer. When knew I wasn't going to use the printer for a while, I removed the printer head with the tanks and put them in a food storage contaner. In the container, I bent a plastic strip into a wide upside down U and had watered down IPA alcohol.
The print head never clogged. Even for months.
I could see this working, but it's a ton of effort to maintain. If you have the right mindset, after organized enough, and have the space, I guess it will work.
My other beef is just cost in general. At 500 pages for CMYK each, and $20 a cartridge, that's $80 for 500 pages. You get about 10x the yield for the same cost with third party toner. Even if you were buying OEM toner at 4x the price, you are still getting 2.5x the yield for the same cost.
Agreed, I have one of the last “good” HP Color LaserJets from a tech recycler and last time I checked it was two model revisions old. This one still has a config option to allow unofficial toner, so I pay like $120 for a set of all four high capacity cartridges now, I think 5k pages black and 3k pages C Y and M. (It’s a MFP m477fdw I think) I think the next model was the first one that took the option away.
You can still use third party toner with some of the later models, but those are more expensive and come with some kind of jig for transplanting an HP chip into their cartridge.
I will never buy another HP product again (apart from replacement parts for my current printer), and will jealously guard this one and nurse this one along until it dies.
But in a general sense, being able to completely ignore the printer for literally months, and then turn it on and get a perfect print, and then ignore it again… really nice. That’s all laser printers. Never buy HP.
The M477fdw is pretty solid. You can find parts and manuals aplenty for that.
Definitely check before you buy a used HP to see if there is a firmware lockout for toner. I have seen other newer models complain about counterfeit toner and still print.
That being said, I don't endorse HP printers. They are anti-competitive and have terrible software.
No problems with their enterprise desktops, but again, buy used!
That being said, I endorse HP printers.
Do you mean you don't endorse HP printers?
Thanks. Fixed
This is the way. I have a decade+ old HP OfficeJet that I more or less inherited, and it has pigment black ink but dye color inks. When the colors are fine but the black is not, it's because the black (pigment) cartridge is blocked again. It does this with both HP and third party blacks, though, so it's definitely pigment vs. dye thing. Easy enough to clean with isopropyl, as you said.
But just to be clear, when we bought new earlier this year, it sure as hell wasn't HP. I'll ride that old OfficeJet and my 20+ year old LaserJet until they die, there's no chipping of cartridges and I'm quite good at printer repair as long as parts are available and it's not too complex, but otherwise I'm done with HP.
Funny enough, that was the last model I had to do that to, a 9000 series. We had several, but they are dying off steadily to print head failure errors. Reminds me of the Whack-a-Mole scandal.
I would 100% buy a used enterprise printer if I could get a proper deal on it, but that is because I have been a certified HP printer tech and have fixed hundreds of printers. If you count receipt printers and other brands of office printer, I have probably touched over a thousand for anything from rebuilds to jams. There was a year when I rebuilt 10-20 printers a week as part of a schedule.
Anyhow, what I'm getting at isn't that they are better built or anything like that. There just happens to be enough third party vendors that you never have to pay them a cent to keep a printer running. Someone else already paid them the 2-6k for the printer, and it's e-waste if it goes into the dump. I can ship of Thesius it indefinitely, even if I have to buy parts from God knows where.
Your first mistake was choosing inkjet printer. The second mistake was choosing something made by Hewlett-Packard.
Clearly you wouldn't have made these mistakes if you knew but now you do. The question is what will you do with this knowledge going forward?
Related post...
HP stand for Has Problems
Hot paninis.
Because that's all their laptops are useful for.
HP
Well there's your problem....
I'd put anything related to HP printers directly to !actually_infuriating@lemmy.world
Or inkjet in general.
Fuck inkjets
All my homies buys Brother laser printers.
ngl I followed that advice and ended up with one that prints color like shit, toner still costs an arm and a leg, and it's also slow as fuck
I stole an HP from work, had been on a factory floor for years and was obviously a tank so I got a fresh toner and a few reams of paper and it's been great ever since.
This one is a LaserJet m401dn but any from this era are good.
I had a black and white laser printer for a decade for printing mailing labels in a home business. The thing died from incompatibility long before I even had to change the toner cartridge.
This feels like a good time to remind everyone that your local public library probably has public printers available for a small fee, and if you don't print regularly, it'll likely work out far cheaper.
"No, no no no no. We are not malicious! We are incompetent."
No, they're malicious, deceptive, and incompetent.
I know. I know.
the secret is just to buy a new printer that likely has all new ink for less that the price of ink
That's what I used to do until I bought a brother laser printer. That was over 15 years ago and I'm still using it.
The even smarter solution is do whatever it takes and make any and every sacrifice in order to redesign your entire life to NEVER need to use an inkjet printer in any capacity.
Why would you use an HPprinter anyway?? They are endless agravation and needless expense. I wouldn't take one if it was free.
Show support, if you can! (And if the project is still active)
That'll teach you.
It may not be within your control, but laser printers are infinitely more reliable for small batch printing.
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