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HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

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Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#41
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how they could tell though - Maybe the refill bottles themselves have electrical contacts and that's how they serialize the refills? Once it's been dumped into the printer, they burn an efuse on the refill so it's now useless to anybody? Seems like more waste than anything.

My uninformed guess is an RFID tag in each refill bag. The printer will scan for Genuine Authorized Original Virtuous Toner, and only then allow the fill port to open. Once open you have one hour before that tag ID is burned and can't be used further. Or maybe you need to use the app and do this? ( https://ssl-product-images.www8-hp.com/pub/msc/C26A0B64-54DB... ) Whatever the mechanism, reviews are not good: https://…

I love how they market that as protecting the end user from counterfeit.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#42
post #18

CISS's (Continuous Ink Supply System's) have been around for decades. You can buy pretty basic printers and retrofit them with a $100 system that will hold enough ink to print 10's of thousands of pages. The problem with this system is that the ink heads dry (quickly). If you're doing a lot of printing (daily / weekly) – a CISS is pretty much your bread and butter. Refilling the ink in a CISS is pretty simple as well…

That's for inkjet printers though, no? This is for a laser printer. No worrying about drying ink heads. But now you've got me curious -- who is printing 10's of thousands of pages using an inkjet? I would have thought that anything at volume is laser, with the exception of photo printing.

My understanding is you can still use CISS at a smaller scale, for example here's a 'mini' setup I came across: http://new.proinkshop.com/index.php?route=product/product&pa...

I've hesitated on actually trying this though as there's usually some details about keeping an old firmware version or something to make it work.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#43

Bad news from the Q&A section of one of the printers: > With the enhancements giving the new drum a 50k page life it's no longer intended to be a user-serviced part and won't be sold via retail channels. That said, it is still able to be replaced through an HP Service Center or HP Parts in the event it is needed to be replaced.

In a $300 printer? What do you want?

In SMB environments, that's probably a 10 year device. Honestly, do you want a 2022 wifi solution running past 2032?

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#44

Bad news from the Q&A section of one of the printers: > With the enhancements giving the new drum a 50k page life it's no longer intended to be a user-serviced part and won't be sold via retail channels. That said, it is still able to be replaced through an HP Service Center or HP Parts in the event it is needed to be replaced.

It's annoying news but my Brother laser, regarded for its serviceability, needs new drums every 12-15k pages at $90/ea. That's on top of $75 toner cartridges every 5-7k pages. This $400 printer with $30 ink refills that ends up being disposable at the end of its service live has a lower TCO than anything else I've seen.

Yeah the brother magic went away, they 3x the price of first-party consumables a few years ago.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#45
post #8

> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

> Requires the HP Smart app download.

To be able to scan your documents to your phone directly.

> Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries

For some advanced, Prizmo-like scan features and OCR which are probably cloud based.

> Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner

Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good. 2 years is probably printing n 5% filled office documents every day or so.

> HP account required for full functionality.

For HP smart app and web-based functionality (like mail2print) to work, not the printer.

HP is still the best manufacturer which provides a complete driver stack which provides same quality printing in Linux. CUPS supports them in "driverless" fashion now, too.

I use an old HP 4515 web printer, which is the first generation of these devices. Many embedded web features are deprecated (like printables), but it still works great as a wireless, mobile enabled MFP.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#46

> 250-sheet paper input tray nothing more annoying than having a half-empty ream of paper sitting on a shelf.

Unless I want to make emergency office supply trips (in fact, I don't), I have to have something on the shelf. How is a half-ream worse than a ream?

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#47
post #8

> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

> Requires the HP Smart app download. To be able to scan your documents to your phone directly. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries For some advanced, Prizmo-like scan features and OCR which are probably cloud based. > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good. 2 years is probably printi…

The last 3 HP LaserJets we've bought at work have had to go back because they require an HP account to print. You can't use port 9100 unless you've got an account, it just sits at an error state. No matter what we did you couldn't sign in, their cloud service seems to be down all the time and support wouldn't help.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#48
post #8

> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.

> ...or up to 2 years...

How does that have to be interpreted? Will the printer request the toner to be changed after 2 years of ~inactivity or are they referring to the subscription?

I bought a Kyocera about 10-15 years ago and one of its toner cartriges (CMYK) is still the original one... :P

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requires the HP Smart app download. To be able to scan your documents to your phone directly. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries For some advanced, Prizmo-like scan features and OCR which are probably cloud based. > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner Considering printers at same size provides ~3000 pages, that's good. 2 years is probably printi…

The last 3 HP LaserJets we've bought at work have had to go back because they require an HP account to print. You can't use port 9100 unless you've got an account, it just sits at an error state. No matter what we did you couldn't sign in, their cloud service seems to be down all the time and support wouldn't help.

Strange. mine has an option called "Remove embedded web services", and it transforms to a dumb printer.

Then you can re-enable it if you prefer later.

Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer

#50

Bad news from the Q&A section of one of the printers: > With the enhancements giving the new drum a 50k page life it's no longer intended to be a user-serviced part and won't be sold via retail channels. That said, it is still able to be replaced through an HP Service Center or HP Parts in the event it is needed to be replaced.

In a $300 printer? What do you want? In SMB environments, that's probably a 10 year device. Honestly, do you want a 2022 wifi solution running past 2032?

> What do you want?

No artificial restriction? They say the part is changeable, but then say they won't allow consumers purchase and do so because they consider 50K EOL.

So what we want is for a $300 printer to not end up in the landfill because a $50 absolutely replaceable drum cannot be replaced without a service center's unnecessary involvement.

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