Printer cartridges are emblematic of the (sadly widespread) tendency for companies to build things that are obviously wasteful, and clear alternatives should be available.
Every time you have to “throw away” something that looks 70% reusable (or in the case of printer ink, not even fully empty), it’s aggravating. We really need to push all companies to build reuse deeply into their products so that none of them feels pressured to go that route just to stay competitive. And if competition is not an issue, and it really is just a scam for more money, executives need to be going to jail.
It is not hard to imagine a slightly modified printer cartridge that saves virtually all of the electronics and casing, and just plugs in a new ink pod; or, one that has a “gas tank” kind of port where you can add more ink. They just need to do it.
It's a facet of current business. They're ALL trying to give us subscriptions for everything. The "subscription" created by the Gillette safety razor wasn't outrageously priced or terribly wasteful compared to modern blades, and was a fairly good idea over cut-throat razors.
Modern product (as opposed to service) subscriptions exist to extract more cash from the consumer rather than a real tangible benefit (I don't count the marketing benefit). Printer ink (especially HP as the ink cartridge usually contains the print head too), coffee pods (complete with DRM!), air fresheners (at least one brand has DRM here too), sealed laptop and phone batteries and dozens of others are designed to get lock in and more sales/profit. Other industries and products are adopting the same model.
Ties in well with the materials used in consumer products to ensure they need periodic replacement. eg 60s Hoovers were rubbish, but could easily last 50 years, current Hoovers are far better vacuums thanks to Dyson, but are near (or past) end of life by 5 years as the plastic is disintigrating. They're often real terms cheaper, but now objectively too cheap, and there's no better made alternative offered. Even premium brands are now "cheap".
It's a profligate waste of money, packaging and environment. If a product isn't under this model it's easy to get the feeling it's only because they haven't figured out how to get away with it yet.
I'd prefer a saner balance on most of these things.
I've spent the last 16 years at HP in inkjet printhead manufacturing and R&D. Roughly speaking, we've come up with two models:
- disposable cartridges with printheads (what most people have at home), here we have to recoup the cost of the disposed silicon printhead and the low initial price of the printer
- permanent printheads (what you're asking for) and disposable ink "tanks" of various capacities, here the challenge is to make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined before the printer gets replaced. Third party ink can be a contributing factor to printhead health
We now also have an ink-subscription model where you pay at some anticipated level of ink use and you get a replacement cartridge when we think you need it.
Apparently a third and more sensible way is possible in the Indian market though, with the HP DeskJet GT printers, which have refillable reservoir tanks (not even disposable!)
Yet somewhow they aren't offered for sale in Europe?
Instead we get the subscription model, which involves yet more data (printer usage, ink levels) disappearing off to someone else's servers.
Obviously I'm older, but I'd prefer to pay a little more, and give you some profit, for a printer that's built to last, with some metal, rather than <£100 for a near cost pile of fragile plastic as the foundation of my ink subscription - with ink cartridges that seem to get smaller but more expensive with each passing year.
Then pay a reasonable price for cartridge with printhead ongoing, otherwise, if I'm successful keeping the printer as long as possible, I'm still recouping the low cost of the printer long past the point I bought enough ink to do so.
I don't need high throughput, heavy duty, as I don't print that much any more, so buying from the business range isn't usually sensible.
I bought a color laser printer for a few hundred bucks and despite almost never having to print anything it's one of the better purchases I've made.
It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.
Same here. Purchased a workgroup color laser almost 7 years ago. My printing volume is fairly low (around 500 pages / year) and I'm still on the original set of cartridges. The amortized cost of this printer has been amazing-- under $75 / year. It uses the PCL protocol and has an Ethernet connection, so it's a long way off from practical obsolescence, too. I'll likely be using this printer in another 7 years.
I think this whole thread is about how that's a mistake! You get what you pay for and cheap printers are crap; they're so cheap they're virtually useless.
I worked at a .edu for years and we had several of those old, early LaserJets that worked for years, spitting out hundreds of thousands -- even millions, in a few cases -- of printed pages, with nothing more than the occasional change of toner cartridge.
I'm mostly in the same boat as you. However, I have found that with electronics, you run the risk of your beloved older piece of equipment not even being able to connect to your newer equipment because it doesn't have the latest connector (SCSI, Firewire, USB-2, USB-3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, Lightning, VGA, XGA, DVI, Mini-Display Port, HDMI, composite, component, etc.). On top of that, you have the issue of drivers and apps that can talk to the thing, too. Not as bad in the case of a printer, but still an issue for many devices.
How about a third model? Customer replaceable print heads with physically separate customer replaceable and optionally refillable ink tanks of various capacities. Why must such things be mutually exclusive?
That said, I switched to a laser printer from Samsung for any printing that I still do. I had a HP photosmart printer for photo prints, but at the volume of a photo a year, it is cheaper to have the photo printed at walgreens, CVS or any other printing place than it is to buy new ink cartridges, even remanufactured ones.
We have that in the plotter space and had it for a while in the home space as well. Not sure why we switched away from that model although I'm sure economics were involved. It also goes toward what the other commenter says - many of us would prefer a longer-life printer but the reality is that the mass-market prefers low initial prices and it's hard to put replaceable printheads with reliable plumbing into a low-end mechanism.
> "it's hard to put replaceable printheads with reliable plumbing into a low-end mechanism"
Isn't that exactly what HP is doing now when they sell a cheap printer with replaceable cartridges that contain ink and a print head? Are you saying the "plumbing" is the difficult part?
I suspect "economics" in this case means they weren't making huge margins on ink cartridges.
My laser printer has a replaceable toner cartridge and a replaceable drum unit that needs replacement far less often. The market can certainly handle the complexity of separately replaceable printheads and ink.
Hopefully from HP or Samsung... Kidding aside, laser is better for a lot of applications but low-cost color and photo is our sweet spot. That's why we don't like smartphones - nobody feels like they need to print any more.
Cleaning with water is the first defense, solvents could easily dissolve some of the materials. However, with a permanently installed head it's not something we expect our customers to do.
I didn't bought it because it was too big to fit on my desk and I don't know if I will buy an other Epson because they drivers are bad on my Debian. I should try to upgrade them. HP is pretty terrible but the Linux drivers are impressive.
I have a Brother HL2270DW printer, does duplexing and wireless, looks nice, doesn't take up much space. Got it on sale at NewEgg for less than $100. Replaced the toner cartridge once with a third-party brand. It's been great.
I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well.
However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do.
And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer.
And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper.
So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.
Another thumbs up for Brother, their consumer laser printers are now comparable in price to inkjet printers, and the toner is much less hassle and significantly less expensive per print. I've had no trouble with drivers on Linux either.
I've been hearing good things about Brother, but all their (and AFAIK everyone else's) laser printers are still pretty hefty compared to inkjets, aren't they?
Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.
Yes, they are hefty. I don't know if you can find one that's only a printer. We have a printer/fax/scanner model that's now around 10-15 years old. I can tell it's getting ready to give up the ghost soon. We have actually had to use the fax part of it recently, too. The scanner in it is terrible for anything other than scanning documents to PDF. Completely unusable for photos. (Taking a few photos of a photo with my DSLR and doing an HDR merge produces great results, whereas using the scanner produces crushed blacks and blown-out whites with no way to fix them.)
Yes, you can buy just a printer. I'm not really fond of the all-in-one devices because they tend to be a mediocre everything and not a really good anything.
I will say this about my Brother all in one black and white laser- it does everything I need it to do well enough and I don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work. Multi-page scan direct to PDF, fax, printing over WiFi (thanks to my router for that and Brother with some decent Linux drivers)- it does everything I want it to do and pretty good.
Can say good things about brother inkjet too. Was using J5?20 (don't remember exactly):
It auto cleans head while plugged in, can take a3 paper, in emergency can print decent photo in slow(best) mode, has huge black tank, and the size is not much different from other brands a4 inkjets. It weights a ton, though
> I have an association of HP producing total garbage.
It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?
I've got a 7 year old black and white laser multi-function and am on toner cartridge number two. Never had a problem and it plays with my router for printing over WiFi. I've had good luck with it in Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows.
Pretty sure I spent $149 with it on sale at Fry's when I bought it nearly a decade ago.
I have the Epson L210 Ecotank and have been very happy with it for my use, which is printing lots of pages (1000s). I would much rather pay for what I'm getting directly ($300 for the printer, $13 for 70ml bottle of ink) than plans for an "almost-free" printer and $60 cartridges to subsidize the printer. The problem with "free" in everything is that it's not and costs more than paying for what you really want to buy. As someone once said, "Expensive is expensive once. Cheap is expensive over and over again."
rihac.com.au - if you already have a printer we have ink tanks CISS systems that fit to most models. We are also annoyed about HP's little trick but its not the first time a printer manufacturer has tried something like this. there are always little obstacles that we have to tackle. With a decade of experience our tech team know all the tricks to get around these barriers.
AFAIK all toner cartridges are sold this way. I believe it's simply because there's no practical way to refill toner, which is an extremely messy indelible powder. There are also environmental regulations regarding the disposal of toner.
I once got a full refund on a laptop outside of its warranty period because a software update (Windows 8.1) effectively bricked the machine. I demanded it under the UK Sale of Goods Act, which states that a product must be fit for purpose, which it clearly no longer was once the automatic update had happened.
I do wonder if this can be more broadly applied to consumer products that effectively change their behaviour after a software update. Is it the same product you originally bought? I would contest not. And surely lawyers could have a field day with this one?
The issue is why do people in UK/USA put up with this Orwellian customer control business model?
In Asia if a company were to do these things the business would be burnt to the ground, and/or family selling the inferior by design products.
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This is silly, the printer biz has always been 'give away the camera, and take the first born when they need film'
You go abroad ASIA and every printer ink or cartridge, as a bladder attached outside where you have an infinite pool of ink/powder for printing, you buy the printer, and walk out the store with the bladder attached.
Now only in the USA do they sell the SIM card for the phone by ID, or make it a felony to put free ink or powder in a printer. HP? Canon and all have been doing this for years, but why is it that in USA you still walk out of the store with a boxed printer that has cartridge with a 1/2 life of 10 prints and then the ink/powder costs the same as the original printer?
The USA like the Epipen fiasco is FULL retard on screwing people, HP is just on the band-wagon.
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From poor medical care, to Epipen, to all the silly things that USA/UK people put with, its amazing the CORP Fascist government has such willing lemmings to go along with this BS.
Someone I know recently bought an HP DeskJet GT 5820, which has a "bladder" built into it. The package included 4 full bottles of ink, ~60cc for each color. That's enough ink to print thousands of pages, and I don't think the printer even has any way to detect whether it's been refilled with genuine HP ink. You just open the top and squeeze ink into one of the four color-coded tanks. The whole package, including more than half a pint of ink, came in at around $200.
But it's Asia here, so I don't know if the same model is available in the States. Maybe HP will sue you if you try to import it, like what happened to that Asian kid who tried to import cheap textbooks.
Meanwhile, my HP LaserJet 1022n has been going strong for 10 years now, and 4 of those years have been with $10 recycled toner cartridges from a local seller. I'm not sure whether HP even has the ability to brick my printer if they knew what I was doing, because I haven't seen a driver update for ages, let alone a firmware update.
So yeah, maybe HP does crappy things only in countries where they can legally get away with it. Stop letting them get away with it.
AFAICT that HP is not available in the UK, and the only real references to it I can see are in India and Korea, so I guess Asia only.
Which shows that in Asia they feel the need to compete, where here in the UK they're trying to sell us ink subscription plans, where we pay them a set amount per month to use our own printers, with the printer reporting how much we use, and they send new ink when necessary.
When I think of "Orwellian" I think of government control that is forced upon the individual, not simply bad practices of a few players in a single industry. Of course someone could just buy another make of printer. It's not like they have no other choice, lots of people suggested Brother printers as good alternatives when this story first made the rounds. They could make prints at an office supply company or even their local library.
Government control like DMCA is very much put in place by big corporations trough the corruption of congress. I'm not saying the control is total but we're certainly getting there. Even if there are alternatives today they are getting slowly stripped away through more regulation and reallocation of funding. It's not a far stretch to entertain the view that we're under Orwellian control.
That does not make the term apply to this situation. Orwellian is strictly about the relationship between the people and the government. It's a good term, great to use, but not applicable in this case.
Here, HP is allowed to exploit the rules of the free market in a way that is both wasteful and unethical, but legal. Not because of Orwellian practices (we are not told by the government to use HP unquestionably) but rather quite the opposite: the government is in fact explicitly NOT allowed to formalise the ethics here through law. Any kind of governmental regulation here is seen as "the government interfering with the free market", and as idiotic as that claim is, it seems deeply entrenched in the thought patterns of those who can influence the legal landsdcape.
Because people in the US don't understand value, only cost.
A lot of what you discuss fits into this pattern. Buy a cheap $30 printer on sale, and then spend $30 more per ink cartridge for the life of the printer. A lot of people when they run out of ink literally buy a new printer, because it comes with ink, it's almost as cheap and they 'may as well'. They don't realize that it doesn't come with a full tank of ink, or that spending more on a printer means a better quality printer that lasts ten times longer.
Likewise health care. People don't want to pay more (or perceive that they're paying more) in order to have a better-functioning system that works better for everyone. They don't understand that everyone paying slightly more into the pot means a health care system that doesn't turn you away because the nearby hospital isn't 'in-network' so you have to go across town for your insurance to cover your emergency. My wife had to go to the ER the other night, and she chose based on reported wait times of nearby hospitals, rather than which one our insurance would actually pay for. Likewise, not having to pay a $25 co-pay every time you go to the doctor means that you can go to the doctor more often and keep your health up to date, rather than waiting until things are dire before you cough up the $25.
I've also seen lots of people buy Android phones because 'it's like half the price' of an iPhone or a premium Android, and then find out that they were never going to get software updates from the manufacturer again, that the performance was awful, and then turn around and end up buying a new one a year later. Meanwhile, people on the iPhone 5 (five years old) are reporting that iOS 10 actually works pretty well on their device and doesn't slow it down as much as they'd expected, and I know people with a Nexus 5 (three years old) who are still going strong on the latest Android updates because they paid slightly more at checkout.
Fundamentally, commerce in the US has become a race to the bottom: who can offer the cheapest product without consumers realizing that it's cheap because of cut corners and misfeatures.
Because, from healthcare, to consumer products, to software, to books, the US is paying full price to subsidize the cost to much of the world. The US is the profit center that makes possible the steeply-discounted-almost-free sales elsewhere.
Yes, it also includes buying lunches for doctors and private jets for the executive staff. What it does not include is R&D in any shape or form. The fact is R&D isn't making drug prices high.
"the US is paying full price to subsidize the cost to much of the world. The US is the profit center that makes possible the steeply-discounted-almost-free sales elsewhere."
Yeah, right. So why we pay ~30% more[1] for the same iPhone in Europe? I've seen this "we pay for the rest of the world" myth over and over again, but never reliable proofs or sources that support it. Sure, I bet Apple gets most profits from USA, but it's because it sells most of phones there, not that they are "given for free" elsewhere.
A brother MFC is $250, is sturdier and does not hate me as a consumer. Changing a toner is $50 per cartridge. I recommend it to every person looking for a printer: Buy a laser printer.
Random info because I used to work at an office supply store:
Most brother toner cartridges are cheaper because they separate the drum (That extra piece you take apart and place the cartridge in when you replace the toner) from the toner container. This makes for cheaper cartridges, but at some point you will have to replace the drum and that can sometimes be as much as a new printer. That said drum units last for >10,000 pages usually. Overall in my opinion it's a better design than HP or Cannon who's cartridges include the drum and are thus more expensive up front, because you are only replacing what needs to be replaced at the time.
Another Brother laser printer user here. I did have some strange networking problems when I initially configured mine for wireless use. The Macs on the network consistently lost the ability to connect.
My son eventually resolved the problem, though I never bothered to ask how. Never had that issue with Canon, but so far, I much happier with the Brother. The toner cartridge lasts WAY longer than the Canon inkjet and per-age cost is less. I did give up color, but I don't need that often enough to worry about - I can just print at work or go to FedEx/Kinkos.
I bought a wireless colour Brother laser printer in 2010. I basically don't touch it except when something needs printing. No cleaning, no maintenance. Still has the original toner cartridges, still works great and prints instantly. Works with basically any OS trivially; it even supports lpd, so it should theoretically work with anything as recent as Version 6 AT&T UNIX, but I don't know anyone with a UNIX system from 1975 so I haven't been able to test that theory.
I think he gave the Brother a fixed IP (using the admin tool on the wireless router, maybe). We didn't change anything on the Macs themselves. If he's around this evening, I'll ask.
I had this problem. There was a firmware update for the printer that solved the issue. Now it reliably wakes from deep sleep on WiFi from my Mac. It is a Brother DCPL2520DW.
I had the same problem with a Mac losing the wireless connection to our Brother. The best I could do was make the router give the printer a fixed IP, then manually set the port to that IP on the Mac (I'm not in front of it now, so can't recall the exact details.)
I finally, after 12 years, bought my first cartridge for my Lexmark personal laser printer. The only other things I've had to do to this printer are refill the paper tray and use some Rubber Renue[0] on the rubber bits that pick the paper up.
This printer spends most of its time idle and goes months without printing anything, yet whenever I hit print it wakes up and prints a page. There's no worry about drying ink or clogging print heads or wasting half your ink to the self-cleaning cycles.
I got my Brother MFC for around $50 with some clever rebate-stacking. It's an awesome little printer that plays very well with Linux. Highly recommended!
My Brother laser printer gave a "low toner" warning and refused to print. A piece of electric tape over the sensor and I've been printing for literally years since. Whether the sensor is intentionally set to go off way too early or it's a technical problem, it felt pretty slimy and feels ever-slimier as years go by and I'm still printing without issue.
You really need to look at your 50 cartridge as a cost per page. Some Brother's take a larger capacity cartridge that costs more but results in a lower cost per page.
I bought a monochrome HL series almost a decade ago (on sale for $50), and haven't yet needed to replace the drum. I buy toner refills for $15 once or twice a year, and it's always had Linux support. Total cost of ownership, paper excluded, has been around $20/yr.
I'm about to buy a new Brother color laser, as soon as they go on sale again. I'm strangely thrilled.
I was gifted a high end HPOJ Pro and a small mountain of cartridges (it takes 5 or 6 colors!) several years ago (my SO used it for school), and the cartridges once installed dried out or 'expired' long before they were ever depleted.
Now that she doesn't need it, it's going to electronic recycling sooner than later. If they hadn't thrown in the ink, I couldn't imagine shelling out $45-60 on it at regular intervals just to be able to print anything. It's practically a subscription fee shakedown just to use the damned thing.
Brother is playing the game, too. My 3-month-old Brother MFC (printer, copier/scanner) just refused to recognize the generic ink cartridge I bought off of eBay. I had to pry the RFID(?) chip off the empty Brother cartridge and hot-glue it to the generic cartridge. Now it works.
Their inkjets aren't bad either, when I do print I frequently want color but not often enough to want to spend 2-3 times as much upfront on a color laser printer. So far I've replaced the cartridges in my MFC-J4420DW once with the XL sized cartridges for ~$40 and they're still at ~70% capacity after printing 200 pages in the past year. Sure, I'd pay less with a laser printer, but for the volume it made more sense to amortize the cost than pay it all upfront.
I haven't seen anything that even comes close to the cost savings with a Kyocera (not to mention their machines are work horses will print all day without issue). I can get a Kocera TK 3112 toner which yields 15,500 pages (and it actually does) for $66.
I've heard this before, but I'm not aware of any lawsuits that have compelled any printer companies to stop this practice of tying their brand ink to the printer. I'm pretty sure Magnusson-Moss says you can't void warranties, in effect it's not legal to shift liability or burden proof, to disadvantage the consumer. In the case of printers, the warranty is not voided by using 3rd party ink, what they've basically done is add DRM to their printer where it won't use 3rd party ink.
So now the consumer is in this position where if they could get the printer to use 3rd party ink, and the printer dies, the printer company can't void the warranty due to 3rd party ink; but because of DRM and DMCA chances are the user can't legally compel the printer to use 3rd party ink anyway.
"I've heard this before, but I'm not aware of any lawsuits that have compelled any printer companies to stop this practice of tying their brand ink to the printer."
Why do you think I said they need to be sued for such a thing? Specifically because nobody has, yet. I know what HP does Re: their product; I've worked for them in the laptop repair department handling the water damage claims. Let me tell you, they did EVERYTHING they could to get out of honoring warranty and paid-for user damage warranty extensions. I'll guarantee you the second someone tries to return the printer for being defective and HP discovers that they used a 3rd-party cartridge, they'll try to get out of the warranty claim. The Magnusson-Moss act specifically states "Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, the warranty cannot be conditioned to a specific brand of parts, services or vehicle modifications unless those parts or services are provided free of charge." HP charges for the ink carts. I would bet a good attorney would make this a simple case.
I generally like the EFF, and I'm a member (albeit at a low paying level)... but if you're really unhappy about this, isn't it better just to stop buying HP printer products?
Rather than being so activist & "omg outrage!", why doesn't the EFF publish a list of printers that the EFF currently does recommend? Almost like the Wirecutter does with their product testing reviews. (It sounds like Epson might be one alternative with the EcoTank range.) They could evaluate products against EFF values (driver compatibility with Linux / BSD maybe?) and it would be a more positive & productive response than social media outrage.
Because consumer choice is a very weak weapon against your freedoms being taken away. Political action is what corporations fear, in particular the threat of organized support behind ideas to regulate them more heavily.
Edit: RMS quote: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people’s rights with one
hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option
to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together
impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That’s what
democracy was invented for!"
That's kind of overstating things, isn't it? Yes, what HP did was balls-up stupid, and I'll think hard before buying anything from them, but companies have liberties too. They have rights to free speech (you don't want the government telling newspapers what to print), and they have rights to sell what they want, just as we have rights to not buy the merde they try to force on us. Twitter has the right to shut down speech on its network that it doesn't like, and that's not a First Amendment issue. Nobody's liberties are being taken away: rather, someone's liberties are being exercised.
Now, I do think that a lawsuit may be in order here, because it seems quite plausible that HP acted deceptively. But that's not "our rights being taken away", which is primarily an issue related to the guys with guns (i.e., the government). This isn't that: rather, it's a company lying to us, and trying to get us to buy their product on false pretenses.
How about we start characterizing "company lying to us" as theft, and put them in actual jail for it, then?
If you want to treat corporations like people with liberties, let's make basic laws like fraud and theft have consequences. We shoot and choke to death people selling cigarettes or cds 'illegally' on the side of the street why can't Wells Fargo executives go to jail for theft?
No, they don't. They cannot sell a device that harms you or your neighbours, for instance. More to the point, they cannot sell a device that prevents competition.
But then the US government would be able to tell the NYT, CNN and NBC what to print and what not to print (No, you may not print that news which embarrasses the President, It's against Regulation 5v).
> Only the people that comprise them do.
That may work to defend Facebook and Twitter (which allows anyone to post anything, Copyright stays with author, so perhaps it can get away with "safe harbor"). Once the newspaper decides anything (and definitely if it owns the IP), it's now their freedom of speech which is impaired, not the authors.
Stallman never said to avoid using consumer choice. People publishing lists of bogus printers is stronger than just choice because it could coordinate a larger group.
I wonder what would happen to stock prices in printer companies if it became common practice for the the EFF, FSF, and several other noteworthy, but not yet large groups published lists quarterly saying not to buy HP printer and recommending good competitor devices.
It would be a good service to the public and could possibly attract more donations and if just a few news outlets ran with it there could a few % points dropped from HP stock price. If the shareholders ain't happy, then nobody at HP is happy.
Their competitors may be subject to the same regulations, but new regulations force companies to develop products that comply with the new regulations. R&D is a huge expense, and you can't guarantee the product you develop is going to be better than your competitors.
Furthermore, their competitors might already have a product which meets the new regulations, or one which can be easily modified to meet them. This can lead to a financial advantage, but it can also mean the competitor has a period where they are the only product on the market.
I fear it would never meet the paper as "don't screw your customers." It would be something more along the lines of, "Cartridges should be at least the size of (exact dimensions of existing HP cartridges) and work a reasonable amount of time." To which HP could easily counter, "reasonable" is dependent on freshness and quality of the lines or some bs like that.
Edit: to clarify, I agree with you that regulation to the consumers benefit would be good, but am assuming that the law written would just be to HP's benefit anyway
> to clarify, I agree with you that regulation to the consumers benefit would be good, but am assuming that the law written would just be to HP's benefit anyway
A more hopeful, less cynical view would be that consumer protection laws do exist, and it's reasonable to assume that in the absence of any such laws, sellers would certainly try to get away with much more than they currently are. So regulation does work, at least to some extent.
To be sure, I don't know that new regulation is needed in this particular case. HP may have broken an existing law already, but I'm not a lawyer. The bigger point is that lawmakers deal with ambiguity all the time, and if they can be convinced to make a law for a purpose, they surely have the means to do it. The convincing is the hard part, which is why taking issues like this one into the political arena is sometimes necessary.
They'll still need to spend resources (and so will earn reduced profit) updating processes/code/etc to comply with the regs, plus ongoing costs to ensure compliance.
They actually _spent_ resources to ensure that non-hp cartridges are treated differently. If they had been prevented by law to do it (and maybe they are), they would have saved money!
The specific problem here was that this was a booby-trap feature that users couldn't prevent from happening because it got "added" to the product months after the purchasing decision. HP was able to go forward in time to modify the product, post-purchase, but you can't go back in time to get a refund.
I don't know about in the US, but under Australian consumer law companies are required to provide a 2 year warranty against defects.
I think the number of customers who are genuinely affected by this is so low that HP might be happy to just pay off the handful of customers who complain to them. If you're using 3rd party inks, you're probably not a customer that HP want anyway. If no one actually tries to get a refund, we won't know.
Considering that HP tells in its instructions that you must use HP cartridges, there's no way they'd accept the premise that not using HP-branded cartridges is a defect. That's the point of the exercise.
If there's no defect, there's no reason for the EFF to call them out!
As it is, I'll probably cancel my EFF membership over this (my renewal is due in a fortnight). I'd rather they support manufacturers who share their values and provide buyers guides to help customers decide.
Boycotts are a pretty weak weapon compared to the ability to tarnish a company's reputation. I've yet to see a boycott really have any effect in the tech marketplace, but negative publicity often elicits some sort of response when it starts to get mainstream media coverage.
I didn't mean a boycott as such - I have an HP printer, and I knew when I bought it that it requires proprietary/DRM ink. I'm surprised any customers who care about ink DRM would have bought an HP printer. Their website is full of pages about the "anti-counterfeit" ink security in their printer products.
I do hope the customers this affects can get refunds, but it seems to me that if you want a printer where you can refill the ink yourself or use third-party cartridges, it would be better to just buy a printer from a company that already supports that.
That is an option for folks for their future purposes. And some of them will indeed go with another company. This seemed a bit more underhanded.
Ok, maybe the package had things telling folks to always use HP ink and not a different sort. I personally would just pass most of that off as a marketing ploy. I mean, shampoo recommends I use their complementary conditioner after all.
Folks were indeed using non-hp ink with success - it isn't like the printer just refused to print with the replacements. If HP clearly stated that the machine wouldn't work with non-HP parts, it was obviously untrue.
Then a security update introduced the 'feature' that bricked the printers using non-HP ink. So one day, you find you simply can't print. Which is an annoyance if you are printing whimsical stuff, but not so great if you are printing off papers you need to take to work tomorrow or that you need for an immigration appointment or something like that. Suddenly, the printer doesn't work.
I think if it were an upfront, out-of-the-box thing (honesty and stuff) it wouldn't be such a big deal. It would be much like the DRM coffee pods. New machine, now with DRM! They didn't give the old machines an update, however, and take away the ability to use replacements.
Sure it's nice to boycott them but doing it this way has the (slim?) potential of getting that change reverted, restoring full functionality/compatibility to current customers.
That said, I really do want to see someone compile that list you suggested.
I'd love this kind of report with various things. I'm thinking phones would be extremely helpful too, how easy is it to unlock the bootloader on this phone? How hard is it to repair it? What proprietary blobs does it rely upon?
HP has just bought the Samsung printer business. That's one less choice if you want to simply stop buying HP printers. If HP is allowed to keep doing its dirty tricks (sneaky firmware updates and all) then things are only going to get worse.
A chart like they did for messaging apps would be nice. Show the pros and cons, let the consumer decide and even bring light to little known, well behaved players if there are any :^)
I want to know if this is classed as fraud or not. According to the original story I read, the printer allegedly reported that the cartridge was either broken or missing, and the system was programmed to lie in this way on purpose.
Lying to a person in order to gain pecuniary advantage is fraud. Is this analysis correct?
how much does it cost to setup a factory to produce a half decent printer-scanner with ink cartridges and ink supplies? this entire industry is broken. surely basic printers are so well understood by now that every component is a commodity?
for the majority of people, a printer that simply just works is good enough. you do not need to upgrade every year. you do not need the latest in ink technology - you want photo prints, do it properly online.
manufacturers like HP et al only introduce different printer models / cartridges / drivers etc etc to keep people upgrading.
so, what's the cost of doing this? i'd consider it a gift to humanity.
Imagine playing minesweeper on advanced difficulty, blindfolded, but where all the mines are patents. It would be a bit like that unless you wanted 25 year old printer technology.
This is one of HP's top revenue generators, while the rest of the company is in a slow downward spiral (and has been for years). You better believe that they're going to do whatever {they can,it takes} to preserve that revenue.
Why is the EFF getting involved now? HP has been doing stuff like this for well over 15 years. And why are they calling for apologies and promises? They should be calling for open source software and firmware so things like this can't happen.
EFF is calling for HP to publicly promise not to invoke section 1201 of DMCA against researchers and aftermarket vendors. This is necessary in order for anyone in the U.S. to develop open-source software or firmware for HP printers.
I've been wondering why there are no open source projects. After some casual searching, I found one DIY project that uses a commercially available inkjet cartridge.
Previously, I looked on ebay to see what OEM toner drums etc would cost. It might just be cheaper, faster to buy a Brother laser and replace the smarts.
I've made a solemn vow never to purchase a HP product again, after I discovered that the printer I'd bought (from a major UK retailer) was region-locked to US ink. Which you can't buy in the UK.
I threw that thing into the e-waste bin with some force when it finally broke.
I firmly believe that the best use of those printers is disassembling them and taking their stepper motors for use in DIY 3D printers and other CNC machines.
Why? Color laser printers are getting fairly cheap (mine's a basic printer, granted, but it was quite a bit cheaper than the cheapest EcoTank models). You don't have to worry about your ink drying out or print heads getting clogged.
That's great if you print a couple of hundred pages a year, but if you print a couple of hundred pages a day a cheap color laser printer will be very expensive to run and it'll break down often enough to be a significant problem.
No doubt your printer serves you well, but that doesn't mean it's a good solution for everyone.
If you're printing a couple of hundred pages a day, I'd assume its for work and that's part of the cost of doing business. In my personal life I print out like a dozen pages a year? Mostly boarding passes.
The nice thing about inkjets is that they are smaller. I have a Brother HL 5250dn (off the top of my head). I bought it for $75 eight years ago, and I've printed about 30,000 pages through it. Most of those pages were while I was in college and was doing research. Now I print about 100 pages a year, and I mildly resent the printer for all the space it takes up.
On the flip side, my company has a set of 3 hp printers that we use twice a year for printing stuff at the last minute for our two conferences, which are less than a month apart. We have to buy new print cartridges every year, cause the ink dries in the container. I think our cost per page is probably close to a dollar. This year we had to throw out a number of unused cartridges because they dried out in the package, despite being less than 18 months old.
Moral of the story is that inkjets suck no matter what, and the biggest downside of laser printers is their size.
There was a time when cost per (large format) page (high to low) was inkjet, laser, electrostatic.
In fact, with our print volumes, switching from inkjet to the $100k electrostatic would pay for itself in 3 months. Inkjet prints cost $1.40 per vs 0.10 for electrostatic. Laser was somewhere in the middle.
I just took delivery of my first color laser printer and while I agree with the benefits, I was a little surprised at how large it is (mine is an HP M553dn). This of course makes sense: it needs space for four toner cartridges. I can however imagine many people having insufficient counter space to host a color laser printer.
Dell isn't a brand people commonly associate with printers, but I highly recommend their Color Laser printers. You spend $300-$400 upfront, but then you get a machine that talks PostScript and PCL (industry standards -- so no worrying about Linux support or installing special printer driver packages) and can be hooked up to the network (using Ethernet or Wi-Fi, depending on the model), and where each color of toner can be replaced independently.
For many years I've steered clear of HP products and voice a strong opinion against them. While HP figures it out, we should also preach against them to our colleagues, friends, family and to all. The only way these companies realize they are in the wrong is if their bottom line is affected, until then, they don't have a lick of empathy.
Eh, when it comes to computers (not printers) HP isn't that bad. I'll take HP over Lenovo any day. Although HP wouldn't be my first choice when choosing a computer.
There is no practical way for HP to "make amends." I would consider buying an HP printer if they gave me for free, a flawlessly-working printer (or johnny-on-the-spot support and/or enough free replacement printers to achieve the functional equivalent), and 5 years of free ink. In other words, a level of generosity and support that, if they did it for everybody, would put them out of business. Which is probably where they deserve to be. That also, would help make amends.
It would also be okay with me if the whole printer market were regulated into some semblance of normalcy by the government. (Assuming the government is competent and capable of governing the corporate class to which it is currently in thrall... obviously not a valid assumption. Everybody who was all GET BIG GOVERNMENT OFF OUR BACKS - enjoy.)
Can't sign my name to something with a grammar error:
"...the printers now automatically verify whether its ink cartridges are official HP ink..."
The word "its" has no antecedent to which it refers. Assuming you mean "belonging to the printers" then it should be "their." Though it highlights a factual inaccuracy - the cartridges are not the property of the printer(s), so maybe just say "the" ink cartridges, or better yet, "any installed" ink cartridges.
...Among the Hewlett-Packard objectives Bill Hewlett and I set down was one recognizing the company's responsibility to be a good Corporate citizen....
...This means being sensitive to the needs and interests of the community; it means applying the highest standards of honesty and integrity to all our relationships with individuals and groups; ...
Full disclosure, I am a former HP Engineer who worked with HP Labs, mostly in the Computer Vision area, and 100% productizing their labs research into viable profit streams. Your milage on my comments may vary. I am not going to attempt to justify what HP does but it will probably sound as though I am (try to remember myself and my entire team were laid off as unprofitable because we were 5% off on our $1 Billion revenue goal, that stung a bit). I will attempt to throw a few business comments that no one is mentioning, and a few engineering thoughts that no one is sharing, into the mix so that you can see an entire picture.
How much would it change your perception if you found out that a good portion of the refill ink market is also supplied by HP? Internally, we used to call HP an Ink seller thinly veiled as a technical company. They make more money in the refill market than they do in the cartridge market, though their gross in the cartridge market is still very high. This is because selling bottles of ink with syringes and instructions to refill is way cheaper than selling new cartridges with the manufacturing of the rather complex pieces in the cartridge, the packaging, the shipping to the stores, and the marketing. So why would they suddenly shoot themselves in the foot and kill that market? I'll get there.
I hear you say "HP makes so much in ink sales they are trying to monopolize the market and squeeze just a bit more revenue out of it!". I hate to break it to you, most people just buy the refills at Walmart or Costco from the giant displays and have no idea that their printers will be borked if they don't. A majority of the refillers refill with an HP authorized refiller (those people you meet in mall kiosks, most are authorized, they won't bork your printer). Actually HP loses far more money from people using crappy ink refills and crappy knock off cartridges and then calling up to customer service and saying their printers were ruined, thus sending out new printers and ink. The cost of the customer service to deal with that alone is so massive for HP it makes one of the main budget line items at all of the board meetings.
So, the technical. Someone in the comments mentions "Why not just build a new printer company! Printing technology can't be that hard!" A further comment says "Oh you could, but wait until the patent lawyers come to get you!" Well, true. A lot of printing technology is patented and pretty locked down. But it's disingenuous to say that printing technology can't be that hard. Imagine the following scenario:
You just bought a brand new iPhone 7 with a 12 MP ultra clear lens. You have a party at your house and snap a photo of your child with their technically inept grandparent. Grandparent says "I don't use the facebooks, and I don't understand mail with an e, print me a copy of that photo!" No problem, your HP printer is wirelessly on your network. You print from your phone onto photo paper.
Where's the hard part of this technical equation? Well a ton of engineering went into that small 12 MP camera, processing, the wireless network for delivery, etc. But hell, you want to be able to print that photo on any old glossy paper you bought from someone, using a knock off cartridge, with any ink they shove into it. And it better come out looking like an Ansel Adams original, or damn it, HP screwed you as a consumer again!
In order for you to get the sharp colors in the right hues with the perfect lines it takes a lot of engineering. In order for you to get the paper to come out dry (either we're talking photo printing or just your black and white document) and not bleed onto the back of the next page in the tray, it takes technology. I'm sorry Cory, but your analogy with the toaster does not hold true. If I get a new toaster and throw bread into it, I only have to try a few dials and settings to get my toast to come out the way I like it. With printing and ink, there are literally thousands of variables from head design to spray to the viscosity of the ink, and on and on and on. Remember for a moment, consumers don't want think about the angle, velocity, and aeration of their red ink, not to mention how to combat humidity to not ruin the viscosity of the ink between the head and the paper (even if it's only for a fraction of a millisecond). They just want a perfect print. And HP just wants their consumers, on the whole, to like their products and not complain to much, and keep on buying stuff.
Now, if you really want to scare the pants off of HP and get them out of this market, digitize everything and stop printing. Get tablets for everyone you know. Use them at work and at home. Print less. This is what really worries them in the market.
"How much would it change your perception if you found out that a good portion of the refill ink market is also supplied by HP?"
Keeping in mind that the median personal income in the US is around 45k per year, how much would you care whether HP made that printer ink or not if you invested hard-earned salary in a printer several months ago, and stocked up on a few hundred bucks worth of cheaper ink, only to have HP secretly make it obsolete?
Now now, let's not get into poor arguments and logical fallacies. First off, read the rest of my comment, there is more to it.
Second, you pose an interesting question. I am assuming this isn't what you did, but let's pretend for a moment that it really is what you did. Let's also assume that HP printers let you use your cheaper ink. Again, you start printing things with your cheaper ink and suddenly your papers are bleeding onto the back of the next page as they sit in the printer tray. Your photo prints don't come out looking like the photos on your screen or your phone. Your prints fade easily. Your prints don't hold up to even a small amount of water dripping on them. Your ink cartridge heads start to gunk up and won't print. Now what do you do? Do realize that you bought cheap ink and that the ink you bought it not up to the quality you wanted? Do you call the cheaper ink manufacturer and complain? Or do you call up HP and complain their your printer breaks?
You are a smart engineer. You would realize that you did not buy a quality ink product and you got what you paid for. But would everyone?
>> How much would it change your perception if you found out that a good portion of the refill ink market is also supplied by HP?
It makes my perspective that HP thinks its customers very stupid even stronger... since your comment implies that they charge dramatically more for their on-brand inks than for off-brand inks without adding any extra value.
And when they do sell it at a lower rate, under a different name, it's to protect the consumers who are too stupid to buy HP's good on-brand ink from ruining their printers. How noble.
You and HP seem to think that, although cars with tens of thousands of components can somehow continue to run even when consumers are stupid enough to buy aftermarket parts, that printer consumers are too stupid to make a decision about 1 part -- even with the aid of state-of-the art ratings systems that allow them to instantly share any problems with the buying community.
Incidentally, when you accuse someone of a logical fallacy or say they have a "poor argument" without bothering to point why, is just a form of name calling directed at the (actual) argument rather than the person. It's a non-argument.
My apologies, the fallacy used was ad hominem. By casting doubt on my comment by saying that I have Stockholm Syndrome he is overtly attacking my character by pointing out a psychological issue he perceives that I have, comparing my time with HP to, evidently, kidnapping and being a hostage. That's a poor argument. I should have made it more obvious.
They actually charge exactly the same for all of their ink per ounce (with the variable being the type of ink not the method of distribution), and frankly it is quite a lot more than even what was pointed out in the npr reference you show. A number of their inks make more per ounce than just about anything you can imagine. The reason the off-brand ink refilling cost is less than a new cartridge from a display has to do with packaging and distribution. HP has not figured out any magical way to get away from market forces. When they sell the authorized refill supplies, it is just ink, syringes, and instructions. No cartridge, no packaging, no marketing, no shipping.
Also, I don't believe I made myself clear enough. HP isn't trying to protect consumers. They are attempting to protect themselves from consumers. Remember I said "The cost of the customer service to deal with that alone is so massive for HP it makes one of the main budget line items at all of the board meetings." This isn't some argument to try to protect consumers. HP is out for their bottom line, plain and simple. That is not surprising to me.
Your car argument is interesting. The car maintenance industry is absolutely giant. I don't know about your car, but if I pick the wrong oil, the wrong filter, the wrong fluids in general, or the wrong part, my car stops working. And if I pick the wrong thing in a number of categories my warranty also stops working and if I take it back to the manufacturer, they don't fix it. I can use state of the art ratings systems, that is true, to decide if my purchase will, on the whole, be a good one. That is true.
The fact that HP can't get a handle on their service/returns budget isn't their customers' fault. Having problems with things like after-market parts, 3rd party repairs, and home-spun modifications is not a problem unique to HP, or printers. If HP was more interested in reducing their service/RMA costs than forcing someone who owns a $55 printer to buy $40 ink refills, they would have developed an electronic tamper indicator rather than a kill switch.
> But hell, you want to be able to print that photo on any old glossy paper you bought from someone, using a knock off cartridge, with any ink they shove into it. And it better come out looking like an Ansel Adams original, or damn it, HP screwed you as a consumer again!
This is largely because other printers exist that can make acceptable prints on any glossy paper, using a knock-off or modded cartridge, with any ink bought from eBay. I have seen it with my own eyes.
Also, in my scenario, Grandparent is too technically inclined, takes all the photos, color-corrects all of them in Lightroom, and makes the prints on acid-free paper, using an inkjet that was custom-modded to have huge, refillable external reservoirs of archival-quality pigments before Epson EcoTank was even a thing. He guarantees color stability for 100 years. His cost per print is less than using an HP printer with HP ink cartridges. And some of his art photos are better than Ansel Adams prints, in my opinion.
For the rest of us, who take crap photos, we just go online to upload, print, and ship from a photo printing business--like Shutterfly, to name just one.
Don't coddle your parents. Drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and make them administer the family photo-sharing web page, so their brains won't rot in retirement, and so Facebook won't get their meathooks into everybody. If you aren't willing to make photo printing into a full-blown hobby and do it properly, with a decent printer, you are far better off just paying a professional to do it for you, with a proper industrial photo printer. Get yourself a monochrome laser printer with a refillable toner cartridge, or the toner cartridge separate from the drum, so you can print your coupons and boarding passes and tabletop RPG character sheets, or whatever, and let HP color inkjets vanish into the hell of their own making.
I actually agree all the way around. Printing off of an ink jet printer is a horrible way to print photos and a lot of other things honestly. Laser is both technical better and superior in quality and price.
By the way, one interesting anecdote, guess where Shutterfly gets its ink? And Walmart, Costco, Sam's Club, Walgreens, CVS, Snapfish, Peekaboo... I could go on and on. Also interesting, they often don't use HP hardware for printing, just HP ink.
Both HP and Epson inks are perfectly acceptable--when they come in big bottles at wholesale prices, rather than in proprietary cartridges at the wallet-raping retail price.
They are both perfectly acceptable under certain circumstances yes. Though if you put them under a microscope they are pretty different. Epson's engineers designed their inks for Epson ink delivery systems. HP engineers did the same for HP ink delivery systems. They have very interesting and subtle differences which can cause different performance. However, their compatibility is relatively high, yes.
Knock off ink with less engineering on the other hand doesn't mimic HP OR Epson ink nearly as well as they mimic each other.
I don't think the argument is a technical one. Most folks on HN probably have some appreciation of the immense vertical engineering investments that have made printer technology so good. I for one am always quite astounded by the engineering.
The argument is a commercial one. You're probably aware of the old "most expensive liquid on earth" list, that printer ink is, gram for gram, up there with human blood, Chanel No. 5, LSD and certain venoms.
The point is that most people think that is insane, and that it is a business model that is skewed so that printer companies extract money from you based on how much you use the printer ("printing as a service") rather than the cost of the hardware. Imagine if Apple or Intel started charging customers per CPU cycle they used?
Every time you have to “throw away” something that looks 70% reusable (or in the case of printer ink, not even fully empty), it’s aggravating. We really need to push all companies to build reuse deeply into their products so that none of them feels pressured to go that route just to stay competitive. And if competition is not an issue, and it really is just a scam for more money, executives need to be going to jail.
It is not hard to imagine a slightly modified printer cartridge that saves virtually all of the electronics and casing, and just plugs in a new ink pod; or, one that has a “gas tank” kind of port where you can add more ink. They just need to do it.