I have a small business that requires me to print lots of pages. To keep printing costs in check I use Brand X cartridges instead of HP (expensive) cartridges. The last time I put in a cartridge I had to go through and read large error messages so that I would select the correct clicky area to proceed to print. This was new and sent out with the latest software upgrade from HP. Makes one have faith in software updates; kinda like “I Robot”.
Can anyone guess how much HP hardware I’ll buy in the future? Can’t trust their updates not to sabotage my gear. Wonderful corporate thinking. I was a customer, I never intended to be abused.
Solution I’ve used for many years is to get a printer that doesn’t use cartidges with chips on them. On some printers if you even remove it a put it back it’ll show as empty. Since then I’ve switched to a laser printer: doesn’t dry out, prints out faster, can be refilled BUT not color unless you’re ready to drop some serious cash.
Jerk move, HP. But a lot of the money on these printers is made on the Ink, both for HP and the reseller. There’s almost no margin on the printer at all. I remember working for an electronics retail store and being told not to sell a printer that was on sale unless we could bundle Ink with it, because we were losing a few cents on every one.
I personally use an Epson printer, and get my ink on ebay. A business that prints a lot of documents should be using Laser without a doubt.
This is an interesting snippet though, could be changed quickly with legal action, so don’t dump your printer yet.
Oh no, I’m keeping it until it can no longer be used. Plus as you suggest, it’s not over yet. If they can screw it up with a downgrade they can upgrade it to fix their induced problem. HP has not helped their corporate image with this move. Nothing like shooting themselves in the foot by destroying customer relations, but I have no HP stock.
I’d go to laser, but I print a lot of pages in color. That would totally drive my printing costs out of whack. Inkjet with Brand X ink works for me.
If I had even suspected that HP would consider crippling my printer I would have disconnected it from the internet. Phooey on their updates! But now it needs to stay connected so that after the lawsuit they can fix it. Or they can pay me what I paid for it and they can pick it up, and I’ll go buy a different manufacturers printer with the money.
10 years ago I bought a bunch of older HP LaserJets at a the Pratt & Whitney surplus store.
The 2300’s were $20 each and included the network card. The larger format printers, the 8100 and 8150 no one wanted, so they were free. I have one of those in the Man Cave and it will duplex a 11x17 page.
I have a motto, if I can’t print it in black and white, I just don’t print it.
The worse thing that ever happened to HP was all the money they made selling inkjet cartridges
I have a 16 year old HP LaserJet 2200D that still works flawlessly with $25 aftermarket toner cartridges. If I have to replace it at some point, I sure as hell won’t be buying another one from HP. BTW, I don’t use HP’s software. I use the built in drivers in OSX.
I work in the IT department for a college. We only buy HP printers but most of ours are laserjet printers. We only really have issues with the small offices that use HP deskjet, inkjet, or photosmart printers. We’re actually in the process of implementing a centralized printing policy and have refused to approve any more orders of ink cartridges because of how much money is wasted on them. We’ve ordered a bunch of Canon ImageRunner copiers and are networking them so that each user in that particular are can scan from the copier to their desktop or print from their desktop to the copier. Since they are on contract we don’t have to buy the toner or maintain them. Any HP printer besides a laser printer is pretty much guaranteed to go to crap after a little while.
Gillette Razor business model. Give away the handle, charge $$$ for the blades. :money_mouth_face:
I also work in corporate IT, and have always hated the HP printers for the numerous “HP Phone Home” features built into their driver packages, all of which must be turned off manually. Also, the HP driver bloatware…
The bloatware issue is apparent, when a full driver set may be 250+MB to download. I recall a day when I installed two printers for two users; one was an HP, the other was a Brother. They were both similar size/type/function units; basic desktop color scan/copy/print units. The full driver set download for the HP was 200+MB. The full driver download for the Brother, with the exact same function, was about 15MB.
HP sell printers at a loss so that they can then make a profit from the ink. To them, if you are buying unbranded ink you are a waste of time and tech. They lost money on you and want to make a profit. They will try and try again to do so.
…and, at the same time, we had an entire building that had HP desktop printers installed for the majority of the users there. Someone had gotten a good deal on some remanufactured cartridges and had purchased a large stock of them. The cartridges had bad ink or another issue from the remanufacturing process; they leaked, and ended up gumming up the print heads on all of the printers they were used in. We ended up throwing away a large number of printers that were ruined by those print heads.
I ’ve been lucky with my HP672C printer. Installed it in 1999 !!! still using it…that’s right…believe it or not… It’s a home based printer used almost every day. Geat thing is I can get literally shoeboxes full of factory inks from EBAY vendors for CheapCheap…
Still working after all these years. I’ve cleaned/lubed the rails couple times that’s all.
Dont Ever Use GENERIC INKS, at least not in HP printers. You WILL have problems.
If I get 20 years out of this HP, I’ll contact them so they can put it in a museum. :laughing:
ETA: Every now and then I’ll come across an ink cartridge that is no good/too old/grossly expired…I just toss it for the price I’ve been paying
You might check if you can download the old firmware and “downgrade” it yourself. I had to do that with a router one time when Cisco decided to get cute.
The older HP Laser Jet’s are bullet proof. I have two antiques (a 6MP and a IIIP). Both are over 20 year old. Where I work we had (and have again) HP printers. One of the retired printer had almost 750,000 pages on it. Never any trouble. I wish I could say the same for Xerox Laser printers (which is why we don’t have them any longer). These days my main printer is LaserJet Pro300 all in one color laser. The good news is that works great. The bad news is a full set of toner cartridges is almost $400. Fortunately I bought it used, and it came with essentially new toner cartridges. I don’t plan on replacing the HP toner cartridges with HP however. I have had very good experiences buying and using Xerox Toner cartridges at fire sale prices on Ebay. YMMV
Yea, that’s similar to the reason I hate my Epson. It won’t print black and white if the cyan cartridge is empty… I have to buy all three colors to get it to print using only the black cartridge… Hate it, such a stupid design. I guess the only reason to design it that way is because they are greedy.
Interesting, they aren’t all like that. Mine isn’t.
I’m not loyal to any particular brand. I just found at the time I needed a printer, Epson cartridges were cheapest on ebay so that’s the brand of printer I bought.
We have a LaserJet CP1515n in a family business, for about 8 years now; it's missing some sort of spring which got expelled after slamming it over the table while inspecting it years ago, which causes it to stop printing with a sort of paper jam message on the LCD once it runs out of paper, LOL!
Tried some cheap off-brand toners in the past, all of them rubbish. Official HP toner prices are ridiculous. We have a local provider with competitive prices, though, yet they're still expensive.
Nowadays, my nephew uses off-brand black toners from such provider which he says are 0K (they still have quality issues, but bearable). Regarding printing in colour, we have to die in HP, the other stuff is a PoS.
Cheers ^:)
P.S.: I upgraded the printer's RAM from 96 to 352MB with a special format DDR2 DIMM I had to buy from a specialized german provider years ago. HP's official price for such 256MB DIMM? $200+… :FACEPALM:
Most ink-jets are like this if you print as an image and a pdf is regarded as an image even if it has only text on it, they use all the colors to produce black, the only time the black cartridge is used is for text, the exceptions to this are those with a black cartridge in color set.
Black ink is pigment based and color is dye based and you can not mix the two
