Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, the first story there called “Authorized Bread” is VERY relevant to this topic. Thats the future we might be heading into. Ugh.
I love my current Canon Printer as a budget option but I would really like to get a nice Ink Tank printer. I would never even accept an HP printer under any circumstance, I’m disturbed by the idea of even having one on my network. If my options were the print shop or HP printer, I would visit that print shop almost every day.
True, but usually you buy them from retailers… This way they cut out the middleman. And the chance that you use 3rd party inks (although, that “security risk” got patched with firmware upgrades)
Also, they don’t just send you ink… It’s a monthly plan where you have x pages included. Unused pages are rolled over 3 times [1] and afterwards they probably are just lost.
Further, if you cancel the subscription, containers you received within the subscription wont work anymore.
Damn, I knew it was bad, but now that I read the details it’s even worse…
Sort of. You’re renting the ink, not the printer. If you went to Staples or Amazon and got regular ink for the printer, it would immediately start working again.
If you buy ink from the Instant Ink program, the cartridges are sent to you for far less money than a regular cartridge. They sell page based plans where they make the money back and then new ink just shows up in the mail as you go. HP DRM’s these cartridges to prevent people from skipping out on the subscription and printing normally for wayyyyyyy less up front cost.
HP printers suck. And ink sucks too. So there’s a lot of understandable suckiness. But most of the criticisms about HP’s ink DRM are just people mixing up Instant Ink and regular ink cartridges and getting mad they can’t read instructions.
And yet the printer was remotely disabled. If the ink is such an intrinsic part of the printer that the printer can’t be used independently, than it may as well be the same thing.
You’re not renting the car, just the keys!
All our hotel rooms are free for everyone! Access isn’t though, sorry.
I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inklessmonochrome printer.
With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I’m just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.
Back when I used to work as a cashier I would blow my employees mind by heating up random things with my lighter and pressing them onto the paper when nobody was looking. Had everyone thinking the printer was hacked
No he clearly says no ink and no toner. Toner is melted onto the paper after a laser (now mostly LEDs) heat up a drum. He’s talking about burning the paper with a laser… Which would be interesting but really hard to do where a top layer is burned black without toasting the rest of the layers.
I have an HP printer now, Epson before that. Both are dogshit. When the HP eventually kills itself, as they tend to do, should I buy a Brother? I heard a lot of good stuff about it but have 0 experience with it.
I have had no trouble with my Brother printer in ~7-8 years of use. Of course, laser vs inkjet is not a particularly fair comparison, but I am still never going back to HP, Canon, and the like.
I have a Brother HL-2365DW. It’s a home printer, or maybe at most a home-office printer. I’ve had it nearly a decade with only two toner replacements. Being laser and networked solve the two biggest problems I’ve had with inkjet printers in the past, and those two categories are the main things I would strongly recommend to people when choosing a printer.
edit: I initially wrote “it’s not a home printer” (emphasis added here for demonstrative purposes). This was the exact opposite of what I intended to say.
There do exist colour laser printers, although I suspect if you’re interested in artistic printing their quality may not be good enough.
I couldn’t tell you what brands or models are good, but I’m sure some inkjet printers do exist in a less user-hostile business model. You just might need to pay a bit more for them up-front. You’d need to ask the opinions of other people in your hobby’s community for better advice I think.
I’ve had a brother printer going on 10 years and it’s never let me down. I’ve changed toner three times over that time and each cart has never cost me more than 20 ish quid. No DRM carts, no jamming, no subscriptions just a printer that does its job. Even when it’s running low, it doesn’t prevent me printing, it’ll let me know it’s low then keep on printing until you can’t see the letters any more.
10 years ? Mine is around 20 years old. I slapped a Raspberry Pi on it to have it network-enabled and it still works like a champ. Never ever will I buy another brand.
I swear, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve also had good experiences with Brother, I’d be thinking they have an insanely good astroturfing department. Every time there’s a thread about printers, there are dozens of comments saying how good they are.
It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember the specifics. But it was the ol’ asking for ink when it was obviously still full, bad software, unresponsivness and gradually getting worse and worse prints as it aged.
HP reached its pinnacle in 1993 with the 4L laser printer. They were practically indestructible. I bought one and it took 15 years of heavy use to kill it.
Are they not large format commercial printers that cost several thousand dollars (or vinyl cutters)?
What’s wrong with grabbing $100, buying a brother laser printer, and using the change to buy a hammer to obliterate it in case it starts getting any ideas?
Or just buy a cheap laser printer, probably a brother, that doesn’t have any of that bullshit.
Also AFAIK this is some HP program where you sign up for it as a service and they send you ink cartridges. It’s as dystopian as you’d expect:
Sign up & pick a plan. Choose a plan based on how often you print, not how much ink you use. Plans start as low as $0.99/month. Every page costs the same, so you can print high resolution photos for the same price as black and color documents.
Your printer detects when you’re low on ink or toner and automatically ships more when you need it.
Change or cancel your plan anytime with unused pages rolling over each month and extra pages cost just $1.
That’s the issue, people won’t stop buying these things and then complain - selling a scam calling it a feature should be illegal and all these practices should be called out as much as possible.
I made the mistake of buying an HP printer. Fortunately I only spent $70 on it.
Then the ink cartridge ran out as I used all the ink up. So instead of buying more ink I purchased a new printer. This time it was a color inkjet from Brother that will last me years on the first ink cartridge.
Add comment