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

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

#21

Post by leetrout »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #10
leetrout wrote: post #3

Speaking of YC funding disruption where are the home printer startups? Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software? Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing. HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+. Brother offering basically zero support. Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?

Been using Brother MFC printers for 20 years and all the software and technical documents were easily available on the website. And they are cheap enough that I would toss it if it ever broke early, but none ever have.

My brother mfc stopped working after 13 months and they offered zero support. Comments online said it was a power module.

Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board.

The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home).

So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.

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

#22

Post by dw_arthur »

rwaksmunski wrote: post #8

17 mentions of Ecotank on the 1st page of comments is a little bit sus. That said it's hard to beat older pre chip Brother laser printers for home use. Can often find a used one for around $50.

Is brother doing the same thing? I have an old brother wireless printer that takes generic cartridges. I'm not looking forward to the day it dies if so.

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

#23

Post by lchengify »

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 Brother printer is a bit of a beast, but it does it's job amazingly well. It's 2x the size, weight, and price of my old HP but it's worth every penny for the peace of mind. It prints when I need it to print. It shuts down when it's not printing. It connects to wifi and doesn't try to serve me an ad while doing it. It uses ink logically. And I don't feel like I'm trying to resolve a problem that was effectively solved in 1995.

The hard fact is that printers and copiers as a market has been shrinking (outside of China) for years now [1]. It's gone from a necessity to a niche need, and even then people have kinkos / WeWork / their parents house as a backup.

HP isn't going back, just switch. Save yourself like I did.

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/co...

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

#24

Post by sundvor »

rwaksmunski wrote: post #8

17 mentions of Ecotank on the 1st page of comments is a little bit sus. That said it's hard to beat older pre chip Brother laser printers for home use. Can often find a used one for around $50.

I found this review which appears quite honest and educated: https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2022/10/12/epson-ecota...

It would make sense for Ecotank users to reply to the post, given the cost savings it offers - whilst still retaining overall good print quality (according to the above review).

I'm presently on a Brother HL-L2375DW (BW laser) myself for my occasional use; love it.

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

#25

Post by arprocter »

The HP Smart app actually has a disclaimer mentioning 'non-OEM cartridges might be disabled if you install the firmware update'

https://i.imgur.com/Xp4tElX.png

Apparently some printers can be downgraded via USB

https://lucatnt.com/2022/06/downgrade-hp-pagewide-pro-477dw-...

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

#26

Post by sundvor »

readingnews wrote: post #15
rwaksmunski wrote: post #8

17 mentions of Ecotank on the 1st page of comments is a little bit sus. That said it's hard to beat older pre chip Brother laser printers for home use. Can often find a used one for around $50.

I am amazed no one talks about older HPs. I had a 4 with like 5million pages put through it, worked great. I am on a 4300DN now, in my house, got it used. Great printer. I would never buy any of their new stuff. My gosh, HP what happened? You used to make great test equipment. Then great calculators. Then great printers. Now, what? What do you do? Oh, I forgot, you give the customer a printer and hold them hostage. I…

I had a HP LaserJet 4L back in the very early 90s, which I used with my Amiga. It was amazing. Still regret not taking it with me as I crossed the continents.

I bought it with my own money from my newspaper delivery job when in high school, along with a legitimate copy of Pagestream. The quality and value / advantage I got out of this for my school and later university work was remarkable, just about no-one else (at my age) had anything resembling the same setup.

Fond memories; sad to see this nosedive into DRM hell.

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

#27

Post by thehoff »

leetrout wrote: post #3

Speaking of YC funding disruption where are the home printer startups? Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software? Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing. HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+. Brother offering basically zero support. Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?

Laser printers!

I have an old HP one (8-10 years old) that works and the laser cartridge lasts a really long time. It’s even Wi-Fi enabled which works most of the time (unplug and plug back in for the times it doesn’t gets it humming along again).

Granted I only print probably 5-6 pages a month.

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

#28

Post by coda_ »

lchengify wrote: post #23

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 also like my brother, but it will attempt to detect and reject non-authentic ink. I don't update mine anymore because the last time I did, it rejected my cartridges.

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

#29

Post by Algemarin »

What I find notable whenever something like this is in the news, is that these user-hostile features don't just manifest through abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation.

User-hostile features are created by people.

Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a weekly basis. (Being careful to make a throwaway account and obfuscate any particulars, of course).

I would like to know, direct from the horse's mouth (and not from bike-shed bystanders), what goes on in the heads of the people who make these kinds of features.

Do you just treat it as a source of income, with it not meriting any real internal ethical debate? ("Who cares, these are printers, not chemical weapons")

Do you attempt to justify designing the features somehow? ("If people want to use HP printers, they should use HP cartridges")

Really, I just want to understand why other people engage in behaviors which are explicitly designed to inconvenience, if not outright harm, other people. I have my own theories of course, but I really want to hear it from the people involved.

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

#30

Post by fwlr »

fwlr wrote: post #19
leetrout wrote: post #3

Speaking of YC funding disruption where are the home printer startups? Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software? Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing. HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+. Brother offering basically zero support. Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?

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 printer companies make their cartridges more hostile, your scrappy little company diligently reverse-engineers them and offers a new refiller device, and the customer is happy to buy it because he’s sticking it to the printer man.
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