What are good recommendations for laser printers these days? What I always liked about older HP lasers was that they were built like tanks, and even to this day they’re user-serviceable — that is, you can order parts directly from HP without having to be an Officially Authorized Reseller or Repair Center or whatever. They don’t sell parts for the really old printers any more, but they did go many years before being EOLed.
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My wife’s on her second HP laser printer - I think she bought the first one ~20 years ago for ~$500, and the second for about half that. Much cheaper than messing with ink cartridges, and these days you can get a non-HP black&white for $50.
My first laser printer at work had a refillable ink well - it was a wet-process Imagen printer, 240DPI, based on a Canon copier engine, and the toner, which came in quart bottles, was basically carbon black in kerosene. Occasionally the ink tubes would clog up, and you’d spill toner on the floor when refilling it. Their next generation of printers used a dry printing process, cost a few thousand dollars less, and was probably 300dpi.
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By violence, what I mean is harming actual people. Not harming printers or buildings. Do it after work hours, or evacuate the building first. Avoiding injury to people is not usually very difficult.
Maybe people here are experiencing Stockholm syndrome, and feel an ethical imperative to protect the same institutions that exploit them. The trend appears to be lots of commiserating - provided that you don’t actually do anything about it. Boingers also complain about accepting business corporations as legal persons, while yet through their inaction making these same institutions physically safer than actual human persons.
If I need to choose between allowing force to be used against actual people or an abstract financial/commercial/manufacturing entity, my ethics are firmly on the side of doing the latter to protect the former. And I do not feel compelled to make any excuses for it.
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Um, how about we keep it simple. If they mess with me, their customer, I stop buying their printers. If we all do, they go out of business. Nice, simple, and best of all, moral.
And if not enough people care, then I have no right to disrupt people who actually want to purchase their cheap printer, and their terribly overpriced ink.
(Now if HP tries to silence my public dismay at their policies, then bets are off. But if it’s between HP trying to persuade people to buy their printers, and me trying to persuade people not to do so, then all’s good.)
As for their pricing, the consumer has (in general) made it abundantly clear that they’ll go for the lowest price, no matter what the long-term consequences (unless it’s a status good). And if that’s what they want, then that’s what they get, at least until I’m appointed God, and I don’t see that happening soon.
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Well, when you add that additional stipulation, it becomes more defensible to say that you didn’t advocate violence. But you didn’t say that in the first place.
And you complain about presumption! Hey, I would thoroughly enjoy doing the things you suggest. But I wouldn’t do them, because I’ve learned to recognize post hoc rationalizations of adolescent impulses for what they are.
You don’t. Where did you get this idea? We live under a social contract, the entire concept of which is to provide means by which people don’t have to resort to force of violence on account of injustices such as their printer stopped working!
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You should keep commenting here. I like your style!
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What? I was just trying to clarify what popbawa4u meant with “damage HP infrastructure”. Seems like you misunderstood my reply somehow.
Clicks on link, desperately hoping to see a genuinely hand-made printer…
Not disappointed!!!
Nice work!
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No I’m not putting words in your mouth. You nebulously stated that we should “damage HP infrastructure”. I was asking what you specifically meant with that.
So you suggest one should risk multiple years in prison by sabotaging HP infrastructure because they made a printer cartridge unusable… yeah right not exactly what I would call a proportionate response 
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Well… Unpopular opinion in this thread perhaps, I’m pretty happy with the HP LaserJet I bought a couple of years ago…
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If you really were concerned with what I stated, you would have read it more closely. Who exactly are “we”? Are you speaking on behalf of a group here?
I made a simple conditional statement, excerpted here with emphasis:
The precise probabilities are vague, but I am only loosely describing a kind of strategy which I think could get results, and certainly not telling anybody to do anything. I wonder why you read it that way.
So if that’s something you or others disagree with, then feel free to simply say so and explain why, rather drowning the signal-to-noise ratio of the topic with personal challenges and accusations. I can only back up what I mean and say, not whatever you wish I had said. It seems like either a lame rhetorical device, or selective reading comprehension.
Depending upon the statutes, any of us might be risking centuries of prison based upon our sex lives alone. If one’s main ethical concern is whether or not somebody else might punish oneself, then they are already politically insolvent. The point is not you, the printer, or HP - it is working against relationships and contracts based upon creating and perpetuating power balances between people and institutions. Forcing them to actually negotiate with their customers instead of hiding behind laws and financial abstractions put there specifically to shield them while they mine you like a resource.
I think we have said enough about this here, so I will spin it off to a separate topic later.
I used to own an HP printer, until it refused to print a black and white document because it was out of yellow ink. Three minutes later it was in a dumpster, and I’ve never even considered buying an HP product since. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
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Oh man I chickened out on buying this one exactly for this reason, and been regretting it ever since.
This is probably the future of 3D printing as well.
While this is partly true at the heavy office equipment level, at the end user/desktop level it is quite wrong. Disclaimer: I used to be a consultant and software developer in the printing industry.
Business inkjet printers are built to last, have good print quality and are far more environmentally friendly than laser printers, with a much lower cost and weight of consumables per page. HP themselves have a range of heavy duty inkjet printers which do around 40ppm and use cartridges with a capacity of 9000 pages; a set of 4 has about the same material footprint as a single laser cartridge. Epson too make high quality business and photo inkjets, Ricoh are in the market and there are other more niche versions. Not only are consumable costs low, so is electricity consumption. The peak power of business inkjets is usually around 50-80W, while that for lasers can be in the order of 700-1500W and although fusers are much faster to heat than they were even ten years ago, they still have quite a lot of thermal mass that has to be loaded even to print a single page.
The cheap colour laser printers sold in discount shops actually work on the inkjet pricing model. The printer itself is largely a shell with the machinery in the cartridges, and the printers come with relatively low capacity “starter cartridges”. When these run out, it sometimes turns out that a full set of cartridges costs more than a new printer. The model works partly because so many people buy printers but do hardly any printing. If like us they went through ten or twenty reams a year they would soon notice the real costs.
The problem of the consumer printer industry is the passion of US businesses for the Gillette model, and the tendency of Americans to have low savings which puts them off up front purchases. They end up paying far more than if they bought products at reasonable first cost. This is slowly changing in the mobile phone industry.
I really like the print quality of those Xerox printers; nothing else comes close other than the 7-colour proofing printers from HP or Epson. But the smaller they are the more they cost to run, and the cost per page of the desktop ones is very high. The big ones with the 9000 page brick size ink blocks are very economical - but a bit large and expensive for home use.
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I always felt the long life drums did not produce the print quality of Canon (=HP) or Xerox. If that isn’t important to you, a second hand Kyocera or Lexmark is the way to go, but you have to disable the stop on out of toner because both of them tend to “run out” with up to 20% left in the tank.
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Lexmark’s main printer assembly factory was moved to the Philippines years ago. If you look at the plant now, you can see entire buildings were removed reducing the production facility to less than half of available floor space (talking hundreds of thousands of square feet)
It was like a Detroit auto maker here until BOOM, the -market- decided that it didn’t want that type of shenanigans anymore. The same plant previously was the main Selectric (Google it) plant until that went to Mexico before IBM stopped production. (that was a precision machine BTW, designed to do repetitive tasks and designed to last a lifetime.)
What I’m getting to is that things change.
HP may have noticed that they were looking at a failed market and they decided to try to hold onto the only thing that makes them special. The DRM in the software is their only easy way of control.
Personally, I do believe the consumer division of HP is on the ropes, struggling just like IBM, but getting the s**t pounded out of them by the competition. I foresee a new leaner HP will soon emerge, possibly targeting high end business class users that do not buy but lease their ridiculously expensive printers. Or maybe not. This is the kind of move that kills corporations.
Trust me, I’ve already seen it happen with IBM. And Lexmark.
Goodbye HP. can’t say I’ll miss you, but then again, I never bought into you like so many others.
May you be favorably mentioned in the Wikipedia page about technology corporations that aren’t with us anymore.
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For home use, may I heartily recommend the cheap black and white laser printer. The cartridges can sit in the printer and not dry and and clog even if only used occasionally, the cartridges last longer, the print quality is faster and better than an inkjet. I have a cheapo brother MFC that set me back 120 AUD (which is cheap for a printer here) and haven’t refilled it in the 3 years since I bought it. As far as I know, there is no firmware preventing third party cartridges in Brother printers either (yet).
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There’s a setting by which “black & white” actually uses all five colors of ink in order to provide a deeper black. ISTR it’s on by default but you can definitely uncheck that option.
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Fair enough. By Apex, which is essentially Static Technologies; by PAG, which owns a big chunk of Apex; and by Legend, which owns a big chunk of PAG.
Hopefully they will still maintain an office and phone line in Kentucky so they can pretend to the Defense Department that they are a domestic company not subject to espionage dangers.
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