I really don’t understand why people keep buying HP printers. There are so many better options and you end up paying far more in ink with these shit brands.
Well if you have an M234dw, then too bad: If it’s already in ‘self-bricked’ mode then simply uncovering and trying to use the USB port will just make the motor spin up for half of a second and then just cancel itself. Nothing un-bricks the self-brick.
It will only ever be able to print testpages for the rest of its existence.
the Epson with the refillable tanks are good, but because the ink lasts so long for me I usually have to do a head cleaning every couple weeks or so and that wastes a lot of ink. I still like the printer for printing photos but a color lazer printer might be good. The initial price for the Epson is high, but I have had mine for over 2 years and only went through 2 black tanks and 2 cyan maybe, 1 each of the others.
I think I have the same model (dont judge me, didnt pay for that shit lol), but no sticker here. Not using cable anyway Im thinking should I toss it after reading about hp
We’re talking about the same company that tries to “gift” free months of ink in exchange of buying only genuine (and overpriced) HP ink for the rest of the printer’s lifetime, and obviously if you accept you can’t use the printer offline.
I still have an “old” HP printer and, as long as it works, I’ll keep it, but seeing their practices I don’t know if I would choose HP again for a new printer
The problem for me is scanners. I need a printer with a scanner, but scanning seems to require installing proprietary drivers :(
So I realized I probably need a printer that doesn’t require a computer to use. It’s ridiculous that it came to this, but there are printers that can print from USB and scan to a USB device. They seem to be rare though.
I’ve thought of doing hardware design attempts on this before. My rough mental notes:
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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 (?)
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Data collection is the current in trend for most tech companies. They cant scrape any data if you don’t download their spyware app on your phone or use their cloud servers. Any little scrap of data they can gather from you they will sell to anyone and everyone.
Companies been after the new gold for ages. Any excuse to mine your data.
That way they can lock you in making it difficult to transition. All those icloud users locked into the Apple ecosystem. They make it easy and then you are stuck.
I understand that’s the reason why they’re doing it - but what excuse can they give? I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at the things consumers will endure - just look at literally everything apple does.
It’s sold as convenience same as every other “private data siphoning” and “insert yourself in as an intermediary” make-money-from-adding-no-value scam out there.
This isn’t just in Tech: for example banks have been trying for almost 2 decades to insert themselves into the last group of economic transactions out there which weren’t going through them - cash transactions - in order to get a cut of it and latelly they finally seem to be winning with touch-to-pay technology that’s replacing little cash playments like, say, buy the newspaper.
Consider that there really isn’t much more space in consumer society anymore to sell more things unless you trully innovate (proper breaktrough stuff, not the “some thing done for ages but now from a smartphone and over a network” of the last decade) and innovation is risky so well established players aren’t going to do it (and even the supposed “innovators” in the Tech Startup world have mostly been copying each other of late and the only trully innovative stuff - last gen AI - isn’t actually something that causes more sales), so instead what you have is more monetising of what hasn’t been monetised yet (such as private information) and large companies leveraging their dominant position in one area to insert themselves as intermediaries in some other area (the touch to pay example from the banks but also quite possibly the point of Google’s DRM-for-the-web).
My use case is for printing things at home while I am not at home.
I haven’t really had a need to do it since I’ve been out of school but I used my all in one printer a lot while I was in school. I don’t print at home anymore because the ink/nozzles are all fucky, but I do plan on replacing it because it’s annoying having to go to the library for that
My own printing is so rare that the most cost effective option is to just go to Staples the rare times I do need to print something. I don’t think I’ve spent more than $5 in the last few years.
Because they want you to subscribe to their ink cartridge auto-ship service that will send you a new one and charge your credit card any time one is empty, clogged, or just because they feel like it.
The only use I’ve found for cloud printing is how it would identify all the printers on the uni network and allow me to print on them with no hassle compared to manually adding the printer with the correct driver and IP.
I used to work for a company that HP contracted us as reps to stand around best buys and office depots and such and sell HP. I remember sometime after the 02 inks went away reliability really took a dump. But 02, while more reliable in my experience, took 5 different color cartridges. Pricey (though I’d get free ink sometimes from the job).
Toward the end of my time there the printers were just hot garbage, and I went through two HP laptops in a short time (got a big discount on number 2).
I am sitting here with HP’s very first printer / scanner copier the PSC1200 on my right from well over 20 years ago still working fine and an HPCP1518n1 laser jet on my left that I got from govt surplus used in 2017, and it is a work horse that prints beautiful brochures for me.
I use aftermarket toner and ink with zero issues in bulk.
I had a LaserJet4M I’d trashpicked from a university. The odometer had rolled on the page counter, and it needed a new set of rollers. Ten bucks got it back to new condition. The main issue was that the toner (even aftermarket) had shitty or dry-rotted squeegies that meant toner leaked during use, and pages came out grey. I used that damned thing until I got in trouble in grad school for handing in grey pages.
Laserjet 4Ms were incredible printers. Rock solid, reliable, cheap to run. I used to work at a place that did personalised junk mail stuff, and they’d do it by laser printing in b+w over pre-printed colour, using a giant shelf covered in Laserjet 4M+s (with ethernet cards). They could churn out hundreds of thousands of custom pages per day with that batallion of printers, and ran it all with one teenager and a cupboard full of old printers used to donate parts.
They were constructed like consumer electronics aren’t any more - a thick, sturdy bent steel chassis with plastic panels over the top. You could strip the whole thing down and rebuild it without very much specialist knowledge, and parts were cheap.
I took one of those printers when I left and continued to use it for many years. The only real issue with it was it was kinda slow and a bit noisy, otherwise it was perfectly usable. Eventually got rid of it when I moved in with my partner, but my dad still has it. I bet it still works.
If you purchased a fucking game and they take it away because you didn’t play it for X period of time, that is absolutely fucking illegal. Like, regardless of current practices, that is fucking illegal. You own what you buy, and everyone who says otherwise is just trying to scam you.
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