HP tech here. Stay FAR away from any of their consumer-grade devices. They’re cheap, poorly built, and difficult for even HP techs to work on. Save your money and get something with better build quality.
Their business-class devices are okay, because most of those actually have decent build quality and are easily repaired. But stay away from their cheap devices, especially their printers (obviously).
We are also an HP/HPE shop.
Like you said. Not the cheap shit. And definitely not the cheap printer shit!
ProDesk or EliteDesk (maybe even used?)Thanks for this, good to know. I’ve had nothing but problems with my HP and had many a day of wanting to schwing it out the window.
Any particular brand out there that’s still known for decent build quality? I feel wary of them all now.
Brother printers are still very decent and most importantly, not DRM ridden.
Would you say they’re…A bro?
I have two oki mc363’s (office and home).
Cost about $600, 6 years ago. Weighs about 30kg, must have a cast iron chassis or something.
Rock solid, great printer scanner in every way. Wouldn’t change a thing.
My parents have an okidata microline 82 that still prints. One of the dots hits a little light these days.
They also have a 1994 HP LaserJet 4 plus that is still chugging along. Back from when HP made decent printers.
I’ve had a Brother laser printer for years now, never given me any issues.
Funny. I was about to mention my brother laser toner printer. Have two. They are black and white but tanks
Brother.
from what I’ve heard brother makes pretty solid laser printers
Except their printers are good awful to get hold of without the connect X here and there stuff.
Give my my god damn driver without all the other shit to connect via USB to my god damn scanner!
The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.
Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.
Removed by mod
The first issue was buying a cheap printer.
The second issue was buying cheap HP printer.Buy brother or do your research. If it says on some page “No USB only wireless” just don’t buy it ffs!
Brother is no longer allowing 3rd party ink and toner too so do your research there as well.
Yes and no.
Allowed? Probably no 1st party vendor allows it.
Can do? Yeah sure.
Will I get warranty for violating some kind of EULA (or some other equivalent) for using 3rd Party? Probably not.As an IT helpdesk we usually just tell them to get 1st party as the toner is not that expensive for that volume and just eat it. At least they have warranty for the 11k of printed papers.
Fuck HP.
This post was brought to you by the Brother Laser Printer gang.
Hell yeah, brother
Best trick in the book is to download the Windows 7 version of the drivers or software package as it is all prior to this cloud BS. Install that in your windows 10 or 11 and it will all work as intended.
I just learned how to manually install PCL5 from the “Professionals ONLY!” Section of their driver download page.
Best trick is to not buy HP.
He’s using a Mac, they can’t run Windows 7 drivers.
Or just use linux with CUPS and you never have to let hp install spyware on your computer.
I will never buy any HP product, just out of principle. Every single of their printers I’ve ever owned had broken down in elaborate ways no one understands, and what only makes it worse, is that the ink costs more than the actual hardware. Obviously it’s because they’re using only the most premium and exotic materials to make it.
What really nailed the coffin for the final time was my printer refusing to accept the black cartridge, claiming it was not a legitimate one, so it locked down the whole printer into some sort of self-repair loop that it never exited
I have never bought a new, consumer HP printer. Ancient business HP printers though, I have on several occasions. Those are pretty good actually, they work when you need them to, (third party) toners are plentiful, and they’re cheap. Much better value than a new one.
Terrible printer. Among the worst purchases I’ve ever made. Stunningly anti-customer design choices. I will never, ever buy another HP anything.
HP is doomed, sadly. All our parents who slaved and sweated blood to build their wonderful tech, wasted, their lives pointlessly ruined. All thanks to the horrible directors and management of HP. If you know anybody who works for HP today, make sure to victimise, ostracise, belittle, denigrade and castigate and bully their entire families into submission. No mercy for these fuckers and destroyers of all that is decent.
As if any other conglomerate is any better. Just don’t buy the cheap bs and do your research before buying shit… >_>
I guess I’m not understanding all the comments saying “why is anyone buying printers anymore? What do you need to print at home? Just buy a Brother or don’t buy one at all.”
Do you really need to understand why someone wants or needs a printer? Do people need to be explaining their purchases so we can all decide if they deserve to get scammed by HP or not? It doesn’t matter why they bought it, whether it’s a want or a need, whether it’s the “right” brand, etc. They still don’t deserve to get scammed out of their money by some bullshit company that can brick their device whenever they feel like. If you pay for something, it should belong to you. Period.
Symbols on sticker from top to bottom:
- WiFi
- no USB
- peel here
Sounds more like “This printer has WiFi, no need for USB, peel here otherwise”.
But still stay away from HP consumer shit, I wouldn’t even let it connect over USB.
Can’t wait for either open source community, or the pirate community, for starting to jailbreak HP printers. To be honest, if I was more savvy with tech, I’d probably start taking that as a fun little challenging hobby.
The open source community would tell you to get an ancient LaserJet 4 (or, more likely at this point, a Brother printer) instead.
Just stop buying their product. Issue fixed !
Oh Brother
You need to be fired… Out of a canon
The gunpowder is made by Epson and needs a payment update to catch fire
Oki dokey.
🥰 You’re my bro too.
HP are on the top of my shitlist. Every day I hear a new reason to keep them there!
If only life were that simple. Whose laptops am I going to buy?
Dell: Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x (including the predatory behaviour of embedding QR codes to these in the bios to be shown in error states) Apple: … Lenovo: History of installing literal spyware Microsoft: Bad products
Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x
You know you can just pop in a Crucial MX500, right?
And I did. The issue is they put in a QR code for their own $800 500 GB SSD in the bios error message for when your SSD breaks.
My non-technical friend had no idea it’s an obscene price and may have bought it just to get his laptop working.
The correct answer to that question is currently Framework.
When HP shows you who they are, believe them.
I dont know the technical knowhow or how complex will an open source printer hardware and software could be ? Like nobody ever tried building one ?
I’ve thought of doing hardware design attempts on this before. My rough mental notes:
.
Ink:
- Ink tech is mostly the heads (either piezo or thermal). There are some projects on the web where people repurpose these for other stuff, so it’s doable, but you then have to rely on parts from 1st party printer makers (?)
.
Toner (aka “laser”):
- Toner and drums are cheap and made by many 3rd parties. Design around whatever models are easiest to get clones of, don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Similar for coated fuser rollers (hot rolly bit that melts the toner to the paper).
- To put the image on the drum you will need either a high res LED bar (only available 1st party?) or a spinning prism + laser (probably easier to get parts for to make).
- Work around prism spinning stability issues by attaching a honking great rotational inertial mass to it.
- Stick to single colour (single laser, single drum, single toner) to begin with; colour is the same thing x4
.
Paper path:
- Modern printers folder the paper over several times in complicated ways. It’s very space efficient.
- Stuff that: do everything flat and linear. The printer will be an awkward shape (long and thin) but will be many times easier to work, test and modify.
.
Electronics:
- Chuck a small SBC on it and keep the software as portable as possible to other platforms (not tied to the one micro/brand/peripheral set). This means using simple GPIO for paperpath sensors and standard buses like I2C for digital sensors. (My current work project has been burned by a microcontroller going out of stock, it would have been much better if we threw a more generic SBC at the problem).
- Best interface to throw high bandwidth sync’d laser pulse data (image) out of? For compatibility and headache reduction maybe a USB bridge chip to some simple SRAM that gets dumped as a row when the laser starts a row across the drum. Maybe that doesn’t exist.
.
Extras:
- A printer that scans and prints with almost the same mechanism. Feed a page over the drum where the laser hits, record the reflected light intensity, produce a B&W (or maybe even grayscale) image from this.
.
Legal:
- Do it in a country where you are free to break patents for non-commercial use
- Commercial attempts: LOL I suspect the existing printer companies will own patents on everything including the concept of human vision. Be prepared to spend your entire life savings (and lifetime) in courts. They do NOT want more competitors.
Probably easier to make a replacement control board.
if you mean computer software and driver stack, there’s unix cups and various open source printer firmwares for linux.
I mean the sticker has a peel up icon on the corner. They’re obviously not trying to hide this, they’re just pushing the user towards wifi.
Also a custom firmware bound by serial number ranges would be even cheaper than the sticker. Logic doesn’t hold up
You are absolutely correct.
It’s not very expensive not to populate the USB receptacle on the the PCB.
Sealing the hole in the case would be easy. You could have an removable insert in the case’s injection mold so there’s the option not to have the hole.
If they thought two case parts were too logistically complicated, or they already made the mold and don’t want to mill it out to make space for the insert, they could insert plastic plugs with permanent snaps.
If they really didn’t care, they could even just put they sticker over the hole in front of an unpopulated port.
Yeah, but we can’t be angry about that.
They’re all as bad. Brother just sent an update to my laser jet and now third part cartridges won’t work.
HP has such a storied legacy in electronics and computers … I still use my old 48GX … It’s so sad to see this.
