Bought an HP printer lately? You probably want to avoid like the plague
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charlieg wrote:
it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing).
WHAT??? I am in need of a new printer, but I am not permanently connected to internet (on the machine that will have the printer). Is that a common thing today, that printers won't work without an internet connection? So I will have to stay away from HP+ printers. Are there others that behave the same way? (One essential use for the printer will be for high quality photo output, so I am looking into Epson printers. Are they 'safe', in this respect? I assume that web ads do not reveal such nasty details as this!)
No it's not common to require the internet. This is HP's new business model. Once they purchased Samsung's printer line (I hate you Samsung for whoring out to HP), they really went hard into a protect the revenue, screw the customer. My wife has an HP inkjet on the program. As soon as her free ink for 6 months expires, I'll buy her something else. True story: she's gotten *very* good at sewing and has become a passion of hers. She subscribed to a pattern service where she can print out just about any pattern she wants. So, one Saturday, I'm working on the network (I had no idea the printer needed the internet). After about an hour, she's going ballistic because she wants to sew, but the $^&^## printer won't print her pattern. You would think that the touchscreen on the printer or the software on the laptop would say something like "Sorry, can't print without the internet" - but HP has gone Microsoft stupid. She spends another hour on line with HP Support trying to debug the problem. Finally, the support guy asks, "is your internet on?" My wife, who carries, loses it. "What the hell does that have to do with the printer not printing?" Her sewing area is in the back of the house, my office is in the front. I hear this screaming and think, "oh s***!" and quietly plug the internet and routers back in... :-O The printer started working, and I had to run to the store suddenly... :)
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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I remember the good old days when HP was a proud company that made top tier test equipment. Now their just dicks like everybody else.
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I have a probably 20 year old HP Officejet 470 that keeps on trucking. And yeah, what is with this BS of having to be connected to the Internet, auto-subscribe to replacement ink, can't even get the printer installed without an Internet connection, and I want a cable as I don't do wireless at home and many of my friends don't either - it's all CAT 5 here. There's invasive, then there's mutant CRISPR gene splicing alien invasion invasive. That's what HP is now, and probably all the rest. :mad:
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Create a Digital Ocean Droplet for .NET Core Web API with a real SSL Certificate on a Domain"There's invasive, then there's mutant CRISPR gene splicing alien invasion invasive." I'm stealing that.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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So my venerable Samsung Wireless laser printer gave up the ghost. Time to shop. Brother - would never connect to my wireless network. Back it goes. Canon - had hopes for this but it turns out the office supply store has incomplete dimensional specs. The paper tray is not included in the depth measurement. Back it goes. HP MFP 140we - still has dimensions wrong, but not as badly as the canon. Unfortunately, it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing). It also appears (not well described on the outside of the box) that you have to pay a monthly fee to use your printer. Well, that is not elephanting happening.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I've got 2 Brother printers and both are connected via WIFI. The one in my office (HL-3140CW) works with Windows 10 or with MX Linux. The other printer (MFC-L2710DW) is the wifey's so I never tried printing to it while in Linux. It was, however, auto-discovered when I installed Linux so I just assume I can print to it in Linux.
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So my venerable Samsung Wireless laser printer gave up the ghost. Time to shop. Brother - would never connect to my wireless network. Back it goes. Canon - had hopes for this but it turns out the office supply store has incomplete dimensional specs. The paper tray is not included in the depth measurement. Back it goes. HP MFP 140we - still has dimensions wrong, but not as badly as the canon. Unfortunately, it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing). It also appears (not well described on the outside of the box) that you have to pay a monthly fee to use your printer. Well, that is not elephanting happening.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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So my venerable Samsung Wireless laser printer gave up the ghost. Time to shop. Brother - would never connect to my wireless network. Back it goes. Canon - had hopes for this but it turns out the office supply store has incomplete dimensional specs. The paper tray is not included in the depth measurement. Back it goes. HP MFP 140we - still has dimensions wrong, but not as badly as the canon. Unfortunately, it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing). It also appears (not well described on the outside of the box) that you have to pay a monthly fee to use your printer. Well, that is not elephanting happening.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I have an HP laser printer at home. It is connected to a wireless router and has a fixed IP address. It does not require Internet access, though it works with my phone better with it. I highly recommend laser over ink for overall price as well as not clogging up and requiring buying a new printer because of not being able to unclog it at a reasonable price. I have enough trouble with Epson that I gave up on them. None are perfect.
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So my venerable Samsung Wireless laser printer gave up the ghost. Time to shop. Brother - would never connect to my wireless network. Back it goes. Canon - had hopes for this but it turns out the office supply store has incomplete dimensional specs. The paper tray is not included in the depth measurement. Back it goes. HP MFP 140we - still has dimensions wrong, but not as badly as the canon. Unfortunately, it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing). It also appears (not well described on the outside of the box) that you have to pay a monthly fee to use your printer. Well, that is not elephanting happening.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I just took two HP all-in-one printers to the electronics recycler yesterday. One worked reasonably well, but became unusable when HP stopped supporting its ink cartridges, which had a chip that badgered me for using past-the-pull-date cartridges. Actually the final set of brand-new-from-HP cartridges had this issue. The second one was a wide-format all-in-one capable of printing 11x17. The printer mechanism failed in some way, and it wouldn't let me use the scanner or fax machine components because the printer hardware wouldn't initialize. A new set of ink cartridges for either of these printers was over $100. What a rip-off. HP printers have always been a bear to install and keep connected. I have a masters degree in computer science. I sometimes wondered what my mom would do if she bought an HP printer. I have a Brother 1717 monochrome laser all-in-one now. It installed first try, has never given an instant of trouble, and all its parts work reliably. Plus it was cheaper than an HP inkjet all-in-one. HP has worked diligently to lose my business. Good riddance to unusable rubbish.
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I just took two HP all-in-one printers to the electronics recycler yesterday. One worked reasonably well, but became unusable when HP stopped supporting its ink cartridges, which had a chip that badgered me for using past-the-pull-date cartridges. Actually the final set of brand-new-from-HP cartridges had this issue. The second one was a wide-format all-in-one capable of printing 11x17. The printer mechanism failed in some way, and it wouldn't let me use the scanner or fax machine components because the printer hardware wouldn't initialize. A new set of ink cartridges for either of these printers was over $100. What a rip-off. HP printers have always been a bear to install and keep connected. I have a masters degree in computer science. I sometimes wondered what my mom would do if she bought an HP printer. I have a Brother 1717 monochrome laser all-in-one now. It installed first try, has never given an instant of trouble, and all its parts work reliably. Plus it was cheaper than an HP inkjet all-in-one. HP has worked diligently to lose my business. Good riddance to unusable rubbish.
"HP printers have always been a bear to install and keep connected. I have a masters degree in computer science. I sometimes wondered what my mom would do if she bought an HP printer." This :). I have an EE degree and have been hard at work for 40 years. If it takes me more than 10 minutes (including unpacking) to get a printer working, that's a fail on the printer maker's part. Don't even get me started on the useless outsourced support to India (no offense intended to our Indian CP'rs). The first yahoo I got asked me how they could help. Now you know as soon as you tell them what the problem is they say something like "we are very sorry blah blah blah." Microsoft does the same useless platitudes as well. Anyway, I think they had a chat fail, because the first response was: "Empathy prompt: we are so sorry you are experiencing this problem..." Seriously, they have a button they push for this.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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So my venerable Samsung Wireless laser printer gave up the ghost. Time to shop. Brother - would never connect to my wireless network. Back it goes. Canon - had hopes for this but it turns out the office supply store has incomplete dimensional specs. The paper tray is not included in the depth measurement. Back it goes. HP MFP 140we - still has dimensions wrong, but not as badly as the canon. Unfortunately, it is an HP+ printer that _requires_ you to maintain an internet connection (or it will stop printing). It also appears (not well described on the outside of the box) that you have to pay a monthly fee to use your printer. Well, that is not elephanting happening.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
fwiw, I'm going to grab a used Samsung off eBay. I think I'll be happy. I went out to NewEgg to see if I could scrounge one there. I found one close to the old wireless basic laser I used to have. They want $800 for it. I'm in the wrong business.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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You have to wonder what dumbass came up with that design.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote:
You have to wonder what dumbass came up with that design.
The sales person who gets commission on staples, of course. You have to adjust your cynic glasses to see it clearly. :rolleyes:
fair point. :laugh: I'm just trying to apply this approach to my customer base. If one little issue, shut the entire line down. No, not going to work.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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I ran into a similar issue with an HP printer at the office. It ran out of staples, and therefore would not copy, print, scan, or receive faxes until the staples were replaced, even though most of the jobs did not require staples. Of course, we didn't have any on hand. This is not a small home office machine but a professional laser printer as big as a washing machine.
It really is crap how EVERY printer manufacturer are holding us captive like this.... If they really insist on this being a subscription model, then we should NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR THE PRINTER. Instead, if they want to do things this way, then it should be a case that we contact them, arrange a subscription, they send out the hardware at their expense, we use it, pay our subs for the printing we do, and when our subscription ends... THEN we RETURN IT, again at their expense.. If WE are expected to pay for the printer, then WE SHOULD BE ALLOWED to determine how/when and what we use the device for... Dymo are the latest, with their label printers, you pay for the printer, you pay for the roll of labels, and each role has a chip in the centre of it that counts the labels you print, and you get charged for EVERY LABEL YOU PRINT.... AFTER you have already paid for the roll of labels and the device... Daylight Robbery... plain and simple.
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fair point. :laugh: I'm just trying to apply this approach to my customer base. If one little issue, shut the entire line down. No, not going to work.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
They don't care about things like that... That's a YOU PROBLEM... There job is to figure out how to squeeze more and more $$$$ out of you.
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We recently bought a little HP ($99) for my wife's WFH situation. It took only two cartridges (one black, one color -- which means if magenta is out then you replace entire color cartridge. yes, stupid but we were getting her a printer fast.) It wouldn't print unless you removed the print cable (yes we're using a print cable) and then re-attached the print cable. finally noticed it said we needed drivers. But drivers require a whole application to be installed that tries to register you to send you ink every month. NO!! So I returned it the same day & bought a Epson WorkForce WF-2850 online from Target (of all places) shipping was free. It was $89 & has a flatbed scanner, multisheet loader, and is a far better printer. Plugged it in, installed ink & works perfectly. I will never buy a HP printer so long as they take over your system the way they are now. Epsons are quite nice. We have two of them now & they work well (for inkjet) and have 4 separate ink cartidges so you only have to replace one at a time.
Good information. I'm about to go printer shopping myself. :)
Sometimes the true reward for completing a task is not the money, but instead the satisfaction of a job well done. But it's usually the money.