Eh, HP has always worked fine for us. I have two sitting here, actually - one is an all-in-one from ~2009 that we printed our wedding programs on when it was new, and it still works fine, but ink is getting harder to find for it, and we had a scare with the irreplaceable print head a few years ago (I got it working, using HP’s “try this if you’re out of options, but it’s unlikely to work” directions, but we realized it was probably time to consider replacing it).
The other is a few years old and is one of the ones with the subscription service. We’ve had a good experience with it, and I spend less on ink than I did with the old one, but that upsets a LOT of people.
For what it’s worth, all of HP’s business hardware is very good, whether it’s printers or PC systems. It’s just the cheap consumer-oriented products that suck.
That’s my experience as well. Everyone absolutely hates HP laptops, for good reason, but I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about the ProBook line unless their employees bought them the barebones i3 version.
Same is true with a lot more companies as well. Lenovo makes some terrible plastic waste with allegedly a computer inside, but some great Thinkpads that will last a decade of punishment.
I think there’s a pretty direct correlation between companies that everyone thinks are bad and companies that make cheap models. It’s probably why the general public likes Apple so much; of course you’ll have a great laptop when you spend 1500 dollars on it, they simply don’t make devices cheap enough that you would hate.
Meanwhile Acer is out there with their barely functional laptops containing chips not powerful enough to play Youtube videos yet power hungry enough to overheat, for prices lower than a week’s groceries. I’m sure their top of the line models are pretty good too, if they even make those, but everyone knows them for their cheap hardware.
and I spend less on ink than I did with the old one, but that upsets a LOT of people.
I think it’s because you’re part of the minority who’s better off with the subscription. Almost everyone I know needs to print something once or twice a year, and only a few pages at that. That’s also the target market for HP to shove subscriptions down everyone’s throats.
The sad thing is that whether or not the subscription makes sense is simple math. The problem is that HP knows the math doesn’t work out for most people, which is why they ask you three to six times if you want the subscription during initial setup, and why the printers have a sticker over the USB port that will then only work a limited amount of times before you need to go through the wizard.
When you’re printing stuff regularly, the subscription makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, if you’re printing enough for the subscription to be a better option, you may be better off buying a laser printer instead. The upfront cost is higher, but they’re more reliable and often cheaper to refill in the long term.
First, it’s nice to get a reasonable response to my comment. Most of the responses about HP printers are people foaming at the mouth. Even a few here, in a thread meant to be funny, generated some of that.
Yeah, I might go with a laser next time. I’ve read that Brother makes a pretty good laser printer, and I see color models are like $250, which isn’t bad. We’ll see. No major rush right now. I would miss the flatbed scanner; I do use that (maybe as much as the printer) for random things.
Oh…haha…I just went to Brother’s site to look at one, and oh look, there’s a toner subscription service!
Yeah, printer companies noticed consumers kept buying HP and are copying their shitty practices. I think Brother still doesn’t bother consumers as much, but I fear it’s only a matter of times. I think that’s why others have such a violent reaction to HP printers, they see what’s going on and they know they’ll lose their last good options if the general public doesn’t stop falling for HP’s scam, selling them way more ink than they’ll ever need.
As for your flatbed scanner: there’s a good chance your old HP printer will work fine as just a scanner when the printer eventually breaks! I don’t think scanners have increased that much in quality over the last ten years, and they definitely didn’t get any faster.
In my experience, it’s always the printer part that stops working. Makes a lot of sense, of course: the moving parts containing liquids spewed out at sub-millimeter precision are more likely to break than that light bar moving back and forth once.
Unfortunately, you can’t just take off the scanner, as it’s built into the plastic frame, so you end up with a huge printer assembly doing nothing, but it’d be a shame to throw out a perfectly working scanner just because you upgraded your printer.
Sometimes these things aren’t even broken, several cheap printer models have a leftover ink tray that’ll fill up, and when the printer decides that the tray is full, it’ll just brick itself, because clearly customers can’t be trusted to empty an ink reservoir safely.
This just makes me sad for you.
Eh, HP has always worked fine for us. I have two sitting here, actually - one is an all-in-one from ~2009 that we printed our wedding programs on when it was new, and it still works fine, but ink is getting harder to find for it, and we had a scare with the irreplaceable print head a few years ago (I got it working, using HP’s “try this if you’re out of options, but it’s unlikely to work” directions, but we realized it was probably time to consider replacing it).
The other is a few years old and is one of the ones with the subscription service. We’ve had a good experience with it, and I spend less on ink than I did with the old one, but that upsets a LOT of people.
I may have exaggerated a bit. We use both HP and Konica Minolta printers at work. Our HP printers are excellent compared to KM.
I haven’t used a printer at home since I was a kid. I bet the situation is different for printers that aren’t going 365 days a year.
I will say that I do not like HP’s ink “DRM” shenanigans.
For what it’s worth, all of HP’s business hardware is very good, whether it’s printers or PC systems. It’s just the cheap consumer-oriented products that suck.
Same thing with Dell
That’s my experience as well. Everyone absolutely hates HP laptops, for good reason, but I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about the ProBook line unless their employees bought them the barebones i3 version.
Same is true with a lot more companies as well. Lenovo makes some terrible plastic waste with allegedly a computer inside, but some great Thinkpads that will last a decade of punishment.
I think there’s a pretty direct correlation between companies that everyone thinks are bad and companies that make cheap models. It’s probably why the general public likes Apple so much; of course you’ll have a great laptop when you spend 1500 dollars on it, they simply don’t make devices cheap enough that you would hate.
Meanwhile Acer is out there with their barely functional laptops containing chips not powerful enough to play Youtube videos yet power hungry enough to overheat, for prices lower than a week’s groceries. I’m sure their top of the line models are pretty good too, if they even make those, but everyone knows them for their cheap hardware.
I think it’s because you’re part of the minority who’s better off with the subscription. Almost everyone I know needs to print something once or twice a year, and only a few pages at that. That’s also the target market for HP to shove subscriptions down everyone’s throats.
The sad thing is that whether or not the subscription makes sense is simple math. The problem is that HP knows the math doesn’t work out for most people, which is why they ask you three to six times if you want the subscription during initial setup, and why the printers have a sticker over the USB port that will then only work a limited amount of times before you need to go through the wizard.
When you’re printing stuff regularly, the subscription makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, if you’re printing enough for the subscription to be a better option, you may be better off buying a laser printer instead. The upfront cost is higher, but they’re more reliable and often cheaper to refill in the long term.
First, it’s nice to get a reasonable response to my comment. Most of the responses about HP printers are people foaming at the mouth. Even a few here, in a thread meant to be funny, generated some of that.
Yeah, I might go with a laser next time. I’ve read that Brother makes a pretty good laser printer, and I see color models are like $250, which isn’t bad. We’ll see. No major rush right now. I would miss the flatbed scanner; I do use that (maybe as much as the printer) for random things.
Oh…haha…I just went to Brother’s site to look at one, and oh look, there’s a toner subscription service!
Yeah, printer companies noticed consumers kept buying HP and are copying their shitty practices. I think Brother still doesn’t bother consumers as much, but I fear it’s only a matter of times. I think that’s why others have such a violent reaction to HP printers, they see what’s going on and they know they’ll lose their last good options if the general public doesn’t stop falling for HP’s scam, selling them way more ink than they’ll ever need.
As for your flatbed scanner: there’s a good chance your old HP printer will work fine as just a scanner when the printer eventually breaks! I don’t think scanners have increased that much in quality over the last ten years, and they definitely didn’t get any faster.
In my experience, it’s always the printer part that stops working. Makes a lot of sense, of course: the moving parts containing liquids spewed out at sub-millimeter precision are more likely to break than that light bar moving back and forth once.
Unfortunately, you can’t just take off the scanner, as it’s built into the plastic frame, so you end up with a huge printer assembly doing nothing, but it’d be a shame to throw out a perfectly working scanner just because you upgraded your printer.
Sometimes these things aren’t even broken, several cheap printer models have a leftover ink tray that’ll fill up, and when the printer decides that the tray is full, it’ll just brick itself, because clearly customers can’t be trusted to empty an ink reservoir safely.