Live data from Hacker News

HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

old.reddit.com

121–130 of 314 posts

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#121

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

Does this open up the space for a "framework laptop" like company to open up? For "open" printers? If yes, what other product categories is this applicable?

they money in the printer is the ink. this is why HP try to block you off of third party ink.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#122

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

Just want to make another suggestion. Ink tank printers are also good, can print coloured prints for cheap. We have one and just need to buy the inks and pour the ink into the tanks of printer.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#123

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

I'm a fan of Canon lasers, as they put the drums on the cartridge. Mine accepts anything that fits, unsure if newer ones are the same.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#124
post #30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printers are very expensive to design, especially if you care about reliably not jamming. Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture. Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture. The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers. Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn…

The real answer for disrupting the printer industry is making and selling “cartridge refiller devices”. You sell the ink super cheap (hell, you could give it away for free, it’s that cheap). Your margin is on the refiller devices: the fact that printer companies have made hundreds of different cartridges with a myriad of anti-tamper mechanisms means you offer dozens of different devices, and whenever the big bad prin…

These were actually a thing in the 90s. As well as shops where you could take your empty cartridges, and they'd refill them for you.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#125

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

Been with a laser Brothers for 10 years. Switched to a newer one 5 years ago but it’s only because I needed the wifi feature. Works great, no bullshit update software, stays connected to my wifi, never had to fight drivers or anything to get a new Mac connected to it. It just works.

My HL-2140 still runs, but I can’t use it from my work laptop. Their macOS 13 drivers dropped some models.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#126
What's amazing about all it is that HP being hostile to its own customers is nothing new:

- In 2005, they had one printer that refused to print if the cartridge was past a certain date, even if full. Several also underestimated the volume of ink in cartridges and told you it was empty when not.

- In 2007, HP refused to honor hardware warranty if you install any other OS on their laptop.

- in 2010, HP refused to provide drivers for the new windows Vista for its old ScanJet scanners (linux worked fine though).

- in 2020 they hardcoded the path to the EFI of their laptop to be windows only.

That's just the examples I could easily google, I remember that HP was having one scandal every 6 months in 2000, and we didn't have twitter back then.

So if a brand has been very publicly misbehaving for 2 decades, how does it still have customers?

Well, Facebook has still a billion users. Microsoft is now considered the father of unicorns and rainbows. Oracle is still making banks, one of my biggest client just migrated to it.

So the so-called cancel culture seems very superficial to me: lots of noise, but very actual consumer behavioral change. The brands can get away with anything and thrive. Maybe they'll get a little bit of heat for a few months on social media, so what?

But the bottom line is: if you are a big company, just do whatever makes you money. You don't need reputation.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#127

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist.

The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine.

The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#128
post #127

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist. The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine. The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

You can make it wireless by adding some router and link two wifi if you want :)

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen these kinds of decisions being made. They believe they’re worth it, their product is good enough to have a premium total ownership cost. They believe businesses want OEM. They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes. They believe they need to shut out low cost market entrants that begin with a supplemental product. By believe I mean that’s what their gut tells them, and their dat…

> They believe they’re preventing consumers from making expensive mistakes. this is by far the easiest one to trick yourself into believing. Average consumers are pretty dumb and if only you can protect them then it's a win-win!

I don't think that "makes mistakes -> dumb" is a valid conclusion. People make mistakes based on limited time, limited information, and various other reasons.

As an example that isn't too far from third-party ink cartridges, as a user I'd like app store owners to apply quality control measures to the contents of the app store so it doesn't contain malware. Sure, you could argue that users aren't dumb and can decide which apps to install on their own, but in practice the amount of knowledge and time needed to decide whether an app is malware is incredibly high, up to disassembling and analyzing the code.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: I wouldn't actually like third-party ink cartridges to be blocked. But the limited resources of the customer are a problem that should be recognized.

Post reply on HN