Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
I'm just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that's a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
deleted
I haven't had any reason to print in color for like 20 years. I'm sure many consumers are the same.
If I do need to print color, I'll pay $0.10 at UPS or the library or whatever to print it off.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
deleted
HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won't notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a "virus" to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid "instant ink" scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by... not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
deleted
People say that, but...
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you'd installed a new cartridge when you hadn't, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don't think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It's not like it's going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I'd buy any printer that doesn't attempt to monitor the ink.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the 'T' part of their SWOT analysis.
I'm not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like "Fuck yeah."
We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been "HP CEO admits company's products are platform for malware attacks."
"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."
If the cartidges didn't have drm chips you wouldn't have anything to load with malware to begin with.
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it's not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I've had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don't print a lot at home so I've only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
For home usage, a later printer toner cartridge will last you years and won't go bad. Ink jet printer cartridges are way more expensive and dry out which is why they constantly need replacing. Brother is a much better brand than HP.
Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don't make as much on ink sales so they don't really care about third party ink cartridges.
It's funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.
You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don't lock you out of your own printer for doing it.
On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can't print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP's path.
In other words: "Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it."
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn't make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That's what all the cool investors care about now, right?
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
This just screams that it's a bad investment to buy HP stock at the moment. No company will insult their potential customers if they aren't desperate.
"Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."
They literally can't help themselves. They've gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn't perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they're fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren't exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an "investment," in the employee. Nevermind the employee can't afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
"You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more," is what they are saying to themselves.
Proud to be a bad investment here 😊
That's not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Guess I'm fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation's "bad investment". I'll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
In case anyone cares, I'm sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I've bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I've never had to buy more black). I'm extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special ~~rootkit~~ software in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that's a selling point in our blighted modern age.
In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
