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HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

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Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#171

Post by ddingus »

cyberax wrote: post #124
usr1106 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1990s HP was a great brand. Nowadays it's a nightmare. My neighbor asked me to troubleshoot one. Obviously the whole printer cannot be used without WiFi and a connection to HP cloud nonsense. Only that the cloud and Windows driver could not agree whether the printer had been set up or not. And the neighbor could not remember their HP account. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to do a factory reset. 1990 a p…

> 1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. LOL no. Printing and scanning have ALWAYS been terrible. A fortune cookie somewhere: "GNU is a printer driver gone horribly wrong". I have a theory that printer drivers are somehow produced by aliens, who are hellbent on destroying the Earth's infrastructure.

My favorite machines were the Tektronix / Xerox printers. Solid ink, amazing prints.

No driver needed. If a person wanted to, they could ftp a postscript file to the printer.

The machines took an anon connection. From there, simply using the put command resulted in pages coming out of the printer.

How a postscript, or encapsulated postscript file was up to the user.

Handwritten files to print fractals were fun too.

"Why is the printer taking so long?", lol

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#172

Post by ornornor »

Stevvo wrote: post #164
akrotkov wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.

Are phones really better? A scanner has uniform and perfect lighting every time. On a phone there are often issues with glare or shadows.

A phone won’t match of course but it comes surprisingly close for “scanning” documents and sending them to your insurer or whoever wants them. It’s able to remove noise, crop to the page edges, and deskew the whole image.

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#173

Post by bestouff »

perfectstorm wrote: post #39
Justsignedup wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a brother laser printer. Anything that's not a laser printer is not worth it except for very very very specific use cases. Because of this laser printers are actually profitable to sell. So they don't have to loss leader their income from you.

+1 to Brother laser printer. i had mine for over 5 years and it still works great (i had to replace the original toner cartridge once). i recently had some smudges on printed paper and a quick chatGPT search later i was following Brother's troubleshooting guide which helped me get rid of the smudge (essentially showed me how to clean the print header). i even bought an updated printer for my parents whose old hp lase…

I bought a Brother HL 2130 in 2011. It's a cheap monochrome laser printer-only. I works well under Linux, Windows, MacOS. Toner cartridges last forever, drum lasts even more forever, I never had any problem with it, and it still works like a champ.

So a big big +1 for Brother laser printers !

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#174

Post by HybridCurve »

If you come across a newer HP printer, the best thing you can do with it is disassemble it for parts to make other things. They are full of precision rods, rotary encoders, DC motors, and such. If it has a built-in scanner, you'll also get a contact image sensor and a decent pane of glass. But on no circumstances should you ever expect rely on it to function as an output or input device.

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#175

Post by snitzr »

pierat wrote: post #31
snitzr wrote: post #15

My in-laws needed a printer scanner because they are getting old and needed to scan paperwork to move to a retirement community. They went out and bought an HP printer scanner and asked me to help them set it up. It took me multiple hours and I still couldn't figure everything out. It took them the next two days to really get it up and running. Poorly designed actively hostile software.

"Ill help you take that shit back to the store. Its junk. Dont buy HP."

They didn't learn their lesson from the HP laptop they bought two years ago that (I am not making this up) had wifi hardware but no installed wifi driver. How does that happen?

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#176

Post by cptskippy »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #128
cptskippy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no belt in a Laser Jet, at least not modern ones.

Oh? What’s modern?

Transfer belts are still used in high volume enterprise grade printers and print shops because of the speed advantages. But I haven't seen a transfer belt on a consumer laser printer in 20 years. I don't think they've been used on consumer laser printers since the early color laser jets in the late 90s.

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#177

Post by extraduder_ire »

orangepurple wrote: post #131
usr1106 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1990s HP was a great brand. Nowadays it's a nightmare. My neighbor asked me to troubleshoot one. Obviously the whole printer cannot be used without WiFi and a connection to HP cloud nonsense. Only that the cloud and Windows driver could not agree whether the printer had been set up or not. And the neighbor could not remember their HP account. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to do a factory reset. 1990 a p…

Proprietary printer drivers directly contributed to the open source revolution. Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Not just his, it was shared between people on the time-sharing system in the MIT AI lab.

The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed.

I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#178

Post by wdb »

addaon wrote: post #64
tivert wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which brother do you have / recommend? I have been quiet happy with my OKI but the phone connection is the only letdown so far and I might change for a brother in the future. I have a brother HL-2270dw that I've been using for more than 10 years that I'm happy with. I don't think they make that exact model anymore, but Wirecutter recommends the HL-2350dw (I don't know what you get for the extra $10 to get a HL-2370…

HL-L2350DW checking in here. Zero complaints, zero issues. Just works.

Yeah, recently also got a Brother laserprinter on sale. Love this printer. Works great. It’s big but better than fighting with a HP printer

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#179

Post by egberts1 »

Still, our only recourse on a good reliable laser jet is the Brothers mid- range printers.

Do not select the models that touts the “Refresh” feature (that one phones home and gives all your LAN deets to Brothers.

It is getting slim pickier nowadays for a privacy-oriented and quality printer.

Re: HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on printers when ink runs low

#180

Post by smeej »

mattlondon wrote: post #87
dsr_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write your signature. Scan it in. Apply it to documents that want signatures. To some people, this doesn't "feel right" the same way that it doesn't "feel right" that I have rolling star-base office chairs around my dining room table. They are far more comfortable than any "dining room chair" I've ever been in. In both cases, when people don't take my good advice, I shrug and move on.

Ok sure so use a pen or use the printer to write your signature - that doesn't change the need sometimes to go give the doctor/school/solicitor/etc a physical copy . You can keep your "good" advice, but please do move on.

When they need a physical copy, they should be providing the physical blank.
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