NEVER buy HP for printing anything, EVER;
I once bought a printer from them that turned out to have a virus in the fucking drivers - it bricked my whole system.
21 Likes
The older enterprise HP printers that last forever all had Canon engines.
4 Likes
This drives me mad. What’s even worse is that I rarely print, so the process goes like this: I want to print a black and white document. The black ink nozzle is clogged. It takes a few cleaning cycles to unclog it. Some other color - because it was spewing out all the colors in the testing/cleaning cycles - is now low, registering as “out.” Now I cannot print my black and white document because of the damn ink I don’t want to use, and which only got used up because it won’t distinguish one color from another during any process, is out.
I really need to get a laser printer.
11 Likes
Brother printers don’t do any of that DRM shit.
I stopped buying HP everything decades ago, when it became clear that their printer drivers were designed to make it impossible to use HP competitors.
Their abuse of the DMCA with ink cartridges has not only convinced me of the correctness of my decision, but being the family tech guy who goes shopping with everyone, I now tell friends and family to never buy anything by HP, either.
11 Likes
We just bought a WiFi laser printer after a decade of making do with the local copy shop. After the unboxing, and as a first test, my 11 year-old wanted a connect-the-dots puzzle. I found one online and then sent him to wait by the printer. I hit print and listened for that familiar old sound. “It’s printing,” he said from the other room. There was silence and then a huge laugh … I had sent him a “puzzle” of a clip-art hand giving the middle finger, the offending digit trivially defined by 9 numbered dots. Took him less than a minute to complete. Smart kid, not like his old man.
7 Likes
The cost of a decent wireless colour laser is a lot easier to stomach if you haunt the newegg or best buy websites for a discounted open box printer, or for a clearance sale.
6 Likes
If this tracks my printer it tracks me and I’m in the EU. GDPR complaint make them sweat.
5 Likes
I second the Brother suggestions. Unless you really need color, you can often find their black & white laser printer with built-in scanner for under $100. It’s the first printer I haven’t regretted buying since probably the early '90s (my first black & white inkjet). And of course they have color options too.
6 Likes
My last printer was from HP. It went through expensive color ink like mad, even when we weren’t printing in color, to the point that we just stopped putting color ink cartridges in it (fortunately it still worked, sounds like a newer one might not). Oddly enough, my wife’s HP laptop also struggled to connect to the printer, while my Sony never had any trouble at all. When we finally replaced it with a laser printer (more expensive up front, but cheaper within the first year) and dropped it off at the recycling center, they asked us if it worked. I said, “technically yes, but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
We have since ridded ourselves of all HP products and I vowed never to buy HP again. When my wife’s monitor died recently, it wasn’t until I was nearly home that I realized I had bought an HP. It was deeply discounted, there are no moving parts, nothing to replace or subscribe to, and objectively it is a really nice monitor for the price point (I ended up with it because I was looking at the screens, not the branding), so we ended up keeping it. I hope we won’t regret that – and I still won’t purposely buy anything HP.
6 Likes
Modern marketing supposes that end users are proles who can only look at the price tag because of lack of funds and can be fleeced with subscriptions later.
BUT, it also knows that businesses, being the overlords that they are, will look at the total cost of ownership.
THEREFORE, buy a printer designed for businesses. Even better, buy a secondhand one, they are quite cheap that way.
That is what I did and for about the price of an inkjet, I have a business laser printer, which has printed thousands of flyers without complaining and for which refilled cartridges are quite cheap. It is actually from HP, but who cares. As it supports postscript, I never needed a driver from HP.
7 Likes
I’ve have a lot of luck simply taking the cartridge out and cleaning the head with rubbing alcohol on a q-tip. You also don’t waste ink that way.
Another thing I wanted to gripe about HP printers is that each and every model uses a power connector that is unique to that model. I worked in the Salvation Army computer refurbishing area and we had fucking boxes of the damned things.
10 Likes
HP computers were a bitch to work on. Lots of proprietary stuff inside that was also made purposely difficult to get to.
5 Likes
Yeah, I’ve always had, well, not good experiences, we are talking about printers here, but at least Brother’s models aren’t actively hostile.
2 Likes
That also goes for laptops (and desktop PCs if you don’t go the build-it-yourself route). A business laptop may cost more and not be as sexy, but it won’t be loaded down with crapware.
1 Like
I saved a lot of money upfront buying a subscription based keyb
23 Likes
It’s been sad to watch HP over the last 20 years or so.
Like watching your favourite uncle spiralling down into substance abuse, coupled with onset of violent dementia, mental incontinence, paranoid schizophrenia and fascist politics. While realising he had mob connections and was a serial rapist in his spare time.
12 Likes
There is no crapware on my ubuntu CD. 
4 Likes
HP has always been two companies, and only recently have they re-branded to make that clearer because the consumer side of the house was giving the enterprise side a bad name.
HPE makes mostly decent, and sometimes awesome, gear. Their switches have lifetime warranties and never die, their servers are designed for a 10+ year lifespan, and while the enterprise laser printers aren’t quite as bullet-proof as back in the Canon days they are still quite good. Even the higher-end workstations aren’t too bad nowadays, (formerly the weakest of the enterprise-grade product lines). Only thing still hit-or-miss is the laptops, but that was always true.
3 Likes
Another vote for Brother. I got mine free, secondhand, & there’s a hacker in the neighborhood who sells refilled cartridges.
3 Likes
