Samsung sells HP its printer segment plus 6,500 patents for $1.05B

[Adriel]

Story from Arstechnica

Quote

HP announced Monday that it will acquire Samsung’s printer segment for $1.05 billion. The acquisition is part of a move to “disrupt and reinvent the $55 billion copier industry, a segment that hasn’t innovated in decades,” the company said in a press release.

Samsung printers haven't always been the greatest or the best, but their bang for buck B&W Laser printers got me as a customer. HP on the other hand, well.. Not very good experiences.

Will have to see if HP can really disrupt the market with all the new patents they now have. I can't really say much from a business perspective for copiers but I can't see how they'll reinvent the copier industry.

Just buzzwords I think.

 

[Misanthrope]

I'd assume that they could use all the tech and patents for 3D printing. Which is granted a smaller market that printers still but one with more future prospects.

[klatez]

The problem that i have with this is that one of the biggest printer brands bought one of it's competitors which is always bad for the market.

[Prysin]

1 minute ago, klatez said:

The problem that i have with this is that one of the biggest printer brands bought one of it's competitors which is always bad for the market.

oh dont worry, you still have epson and cannon hanging around to ruin every sense of customer service, user-friendlyness along with every form of "price to performance" metric there is.

[Enderman]

6 minutes ago, klatez said:

The problem that i have with this is that one of the biggest printer brands bought one of it's competitors which is always bad for the market.

Samsung wasn't very prominent in that market anyway, epson and canon and brother are still way bigger.

[NumLock21]

IMO Brother's troubleshooting utility are the best. Had to do a basic setup of wireless printer over the network. Done it many times, but that day it won't work and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Luckily it was a Brother printer, so I download their troubleshooting utility and it found the "error". Hit fix and viola printer prints.

I personally still prefer HP printers.

[goodtofufriday]

Brother over any other.

[suicidalfranco]

off-topic: what's the best printer out there if you want to use a third party CISS

[Bouzoo]

I've got an SCX-3405FW, B&W laser model, which with a bit of custom firmware works good, when it decides to work that is, because the drivers are the worst I've ever seen. Seriously, how the hell can you make such bad drivers? For instance, wireless printing works great, until it decides it has had enough and doesn't want to print anymore. Sometimes that happens in a month, but sometimes it's after a week. Almost the same thing with cable. Luckily, few months ago I decided to do everything from the ground and combined different programs, some from the disc and some from the internet, and haven't had issues since. Way too much effort. 

Oh yeah, good luck downloading some specific programs like wireless configuration, because you'd sooner find the cure for TBC than where to download it. Luckily I still have original disc which has few programs that are not that easy to find. Why are they so hard to find? Because when you enter your model on Samsung website, it lists only your driver and Printer Manager and maybe few more, not even Scan Assistant. 

I've bought it as a form of an experiment, and I can survive that much tweaking, but very few people can. HP, Canon, Brother, Lexmark, Epson, I'd recommend every single on of them before Samsung, unless they improved their "stability".

When it comes to printer reliability and actually everything in printers, HP is in class of it's own. Be it for small businesses, big companies, even for normal people, you can't go wrong with HP. 

[Trixanity]

Are there actually any printer manufacturer that isn't bad or scummy in one way or another? I was under the impression that they've reached a consensus that all printers need to barely work, drivers need to suck, be bloated and occasionally crash and that ink needs to be priced like liquid gold while rendering the printer non-functional when it's still half-full. I'm sure if any company tried to do it right that the others will gang up on them for trying to ruin their racketeering.

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Are there actually any printer manufacturer that isn't bad or scummy in one way or another? I was under the impression that they've reached a consensus that all printers need to barely work, drivers need to suck, be bloated and occasionally crash and that ink needs to be priced like liquid gold while rendering the printer non-functional when it's still half-full. I'm sure if any company tried to do it right that the others will gang up on them for trying to ruin their racketeering.

Don't know what kind of printers you're using, but the 2 dozen HP Laser Printers we have at work, work great, and the drivers are no problem at all. Furthermore, the Brother Laser All-in-one I have at home works awesome too.

 

To be honest, I'm totally fine with this news. HP makes great laser printers. Their inkjet printers are alright, but no inkjet printer is "good"