HP's 'free ink for life' plan is over because some scams are legal

[atxcyclist]

2 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

I never understand why anyone even uses paper. I essentially never ever use paper, not at work, not at home, nowhere. What do people still use paper for? Even students these days use laptops, don't they? Blows my mind.

Because I don't feel like hand-drafting fifty, 24x36 inch architectural sheets when I need a set. Many businesses still need to print things, and many industries require paper copies of record documents.

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

As far as I'm aware, the Microsoft Surface uses just another light-emitting screen, at which point many tablets already do the same, but not what it would take to away from paper.

 

Sure.  It’s got a stylus as well though.  Many tablets have available styluses as well.  It just happens that the surface stylus is specifically designed for what you describe. 

[JZStudios]

1 hour ago, ragnarok0273 said:

We use HP Instant Ink with our HP OfficeJet Pro 6968 (CMYK, not CYMRGBK or whatever it is) and have the 500-pages-a-month plan.

15 pages a month?

Naw.
15 pages a day.

 

elephants

15 pages a month is fucking ludicrously low. If you're only printing 15 pages per month, throw away your printer.

 

boobies.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, JZStudios said:

15 pages a month is fucking ludicrously low. If you're only printing 15 pages per month, throw away your printer.

 

boobies.

My household doesn't even hit that number. We only have to print ever few months out of the year. 

[Arika]

i think ill just go out and buy a $20 printer for the 1 time every 3 years that i need to print something.

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Arika S said:

i think ill just go out and buy a $20 printer for the 1 time every 3 years that i need to print something.

I had a similar dilemma.  I used kinko’s for a time.  I found it too time consuming though.  
 

  I had an old used laser printer but it got so aged that it wouldn’t work with windows anymore.  The thing still worked fine but the drivers aged out.  I wound up buying a laser printer/scanner thing. There were much lower cost ink jet options, but while the ink jet business is much less slimy than it used to be its still too slimy for me to touch. I almost hauled out a pi zero to go all CUPS on it but doing the math it was only about $50 more expensive to buy the device I did, and I really really hate dealing with CUPS.

[AlwaysWong]

3 hours ago, Caroline said:

HP and Epson machines are by far the worse you could ever buy for home or office use, anything with liquid ink tbh

 

I always laugh at the fact that you need to get 6 colour cartridges AND a black one to be able to print a document that only uses black, the machines are firmware-locked so you can't use any alternative cartridges or refill the ones you have, if you mod the machine or bypass the cartridge chips the warranty is gone.

 

Laser is kind of the same but you can at least go for a monochrome machine if you only print documents, texts, essays or uni stuff in general which is what I do, I'm using a Lexmark and can either get the toned refilled or get a new compatible one for 1/4 of what the originals cost, same quality, same yield.

DO YOU HAVE ANY PRINTER RECOMMENDATION? My HP inkjet 6520 printer(pos) died this year and I need a new printer. Currently have my eyes on the epson printer but the price $200+ is a big ouch for me. The ink cartridge on my pos hp inkjet 6520 printer dried and ran out fast when not in use like bruh for $40 - $50+ per 4 ink cartridges . I feel like I don't get the full ink amount in the cartridge at all.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, AlwaysWong said:

DO YOU HAVE ANY PRINTER RECOMMENDATION? My HP inkjet 6520 printer(pos) died this year and I need a new printer. Currently have my eyes on the epson printer but the price $200+ is a big ouch for me. The ink cartridge on my pos hp inkjet 6520 printer dried and ran out fast when not in use like bruh for $40 - $50 per 4 ink cartridges . I feel like I don't get the full ink amount in the cartridge at all.

What is the purpose of the thing?  Art level photos?  just forms and stuff?

Edited December 6, 2020 by Bombastinator

[AlwaysWong]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

What is the purpose of the thing?  Art level photos or just forms and stuff?

my pos dead hp printer? It can print pictures and documents. Its all-in-one printer. I need one that can print pictures and documents and ink to last long.

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, AlwaysWong said:

ink to last long.

Bad part is ink can dry out over time. 

[TetraSky]

Good old bait and switch... I would never buy a printer that pretty much needs the internet to function, all to fuck you over if you dare print more than you're "allowed", even though it's all in there, in your printer, for you to use. Wouldn't even be able to print my taxes with that 99¢ tier shit.

 

I'm quite happy with my laser printer. Haven't replaced the toner a single time yet and looking up prices, I can get a new one for as low as $20. Which can print out thousand of pages.

An ink cartridge would net me less than 1/10 that and cost double. I sometimes miss printing in color, but honestly, it's not that big of a deal and colored ink was even more expensive, for less, than black ink. Then again, with my old inkjet, the colored ink fucking dried out because I wasn't using it often enough for its liking.

[Jet_ski]

1 hour ago, TetraSky said:

Good old bait and switch... I would never buy a printer that pretty much needs the internet to function, all to fuck you over if you dare print more than you're "allowed", even though it's all in there, in your printer, for you to use. Wouldn't even be able to print my taxes with that 99¢ tier shit.

 

I'm quite happy with my laser printer. Haven't replaced the toner a single time yet and looking up prices, I can get a new one for as low as $20. Which can print out thousand of pages.

An ink cartridge would net me less than 1/10 that and cost double. I sometimes miss printing in color, but honestly, it's not that big of a deal and colored ink was even more expensive, for less, than black ink. Then again, with my old inkjet, the colored ink fucking dried out because I wasn't using it often enough for its liking.

I have a Xerox Phaser 6280 and it prints color. It’s way better than any inkjet I’ve ever owned. 6.5 years of printing thousands of pages and I’ve only changed the black cartridge once.

 

I lost two HP all in ones, $500 each, bc the ink dried inside them...

[YellowJersey]

I swore off HP a long time ago; had a printer in the 90s that was nothing but trouble. I've been using a Samsung laser printer for the last.... 10 or so years. It's still on the same ink cartridge, but I don't print that much.

[Luxzio22]

Inkjet printers are an abomination and a scam in their current state. After 4 printers in the last 10 years (first 3 from HP) I've given up on the idea of home printing both for photos and documents. I once dreamed of getting old books I could print and having them bound by a local binder, but when every cartridge tops out at around 50 pages, I just cringe when thinking about printing.

 

The printer landscape lacks standardization in hardware and software that it should've had as soon as wifi became popular. The scanner that comes on modern all-in-one printers are entirely proprietary-software-based and finding the right driver for the right model is nightmare when they churn out 20 models a year all with slightly different names. There is no standardization on ink cartridges or even any kind of indication of how much ml of ink they contain. Let that sink in for a second; you're buying a quantity of stuff / substance without knowing how much of it you're getting. I think of everything else in the industry and find it shocking how Nvidia's 4GB VRAM claim or AMD's 8core claim came back to bite them yet printer companies can get away with not disclosing anything at all. 

 

Yup, if I could choose a do-nothing job, I'd choose to be a printer-ink Sheikh. No questions, no liability. 

[suicidalfranco]

yeah stopped using printers years ago, now if i need anything printed i just go the nearest print shop or newsstand. Costs me less than buying a new refill every fucking time 

[Senzelian]

9 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

I never understand why anyone even uses paper. I essentially never ever use paper, not at work, not at home, nowhere. What do people still use paper for? Even students these days use laptops, don't they? Blows my mind.

In Germany we do not only use lots of paper, but also lots of fax machines! Because obviously it's still 1984.

[Man]

I'd recommend the following video to anyone who's looking forward to buying a printer:

"Ink Cartridges Are A Scam" might sound like a gross clickbait but trust me... it's not!

 

[Man]

3 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

In Germany we do not only use lots of paper, but also lots of fax machines! Because obviously it's still 1984.

Our state departments got rid of typewriters and went digital at around late 90s / early 2000s...

 

Bureaucracy!

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

 

[Monkey Dust]

At work our accounts software won't acknowledge it's properly raised an invoice unless it is printed. The printed copies no longer serve a purpose, working from home forced the hands of the few hold outs who liked to receive their invoices by post, but our ancient accounts software insists they must be printed regardless. On the rare occasions when we venture into the office these days we have to recycle large wedges of invoices, 100s of the bastards, without them even being looked at. That aside, covid has certainly hurried up a move to paperless.

 

At home, I haven't had a printer for at least 10 years. My last one was temperamental, expensive ink that I could only buy from one chain of shops because Lexmark had an exclusivity deal. Early on I had to print the occasional thing at work, tickets mostly, but haven't had to do that for 4-5 years.

 

I wonder if home printer manufacturers have shot themselves in the foot. It's so widely known that home printers are a rip off that people have actively avoided owning one. This forced companies (I'm thinking transport & hospitality mostly) to accommodate customers who don't have printers, reducing demand even further.   

[samcool55]

Just, buy a damn laserprinter ffs.

It will work when you need it, doesn't cost you anything if you don't use it for a few months and just knowing that it will work when needed saves so much stress it's really worth the investment.

 

Mine was like 160 bucks on sale, totally worth it. And it prints colors!

Black ran out after a little bit over 500 pages. Good luck getting that out of an inkjet.

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

12 hours ago, Jet_ski said:

And if you don’t use an inkjet printer frequently, the ink dries inside the device and you have to throw it away.

 

Well my printer must be magic, because I use it like once a year, changed the cartridge out like 12 years ago (btw it's a HP deskjet) with a cartridge that didn't cost more than like 12 euros and it's still working fine, it actually started to work better recently because I already used it twice this year!  I suppose that helped to get things "flowing"? 

 

11 hours ago, minibois said:

Printers in general are a scam,

as long you can buy cheap no name cartridges, which is super common here,, not really, but the thing in the OP is 1A scam, unfortunately as mentioned, scamming is not necessarily illegal, it's often even defended as "capitalism". 

[jagdtigger]

IDK why anyone still buy an inkjet, if i need pictures i go to the local photo shop. At home i have a samsung laser printer, the beginner cartridge lasted longer than the warranty period.......

[AndreiArgeanu]

12 hours ago, Kazlehoff said:

5 years ago

Right, because laser printers haven't change one smidge in the last 5 years, so it must mean that if a printer you got 5 years ago with half a toner cartridge lasted you 3 years, it definitely means that new laser printers are exactly the same.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

IDK why anyone still buy an inkjet, if i need pictures i go to the local photo shop. At home i have a samsung laser printer, the beginner cartridge lasted longer than the warranty period.......

Well my printer also makes copies like a copy machine, don't even need a pc! 

 

But yeah I don't use it for photos, 2 photos and the cartridge is empty, what's the point lol 

 

 

1 hour ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

laser printers

I only had issues with laser printers, they either don't print at all or somehow ran out of "ink" even though they're brand new... absolutely terrible (I still have one in case my real printer runs out of ink, but I don't really expect it to work lol *think it's a HP "Laserjet")