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.
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.