- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
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Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
It sorta did, but pulled back. DaVinci tried selling printers that had chips in the filament spools and used the same razer blade business model as low end inkjets. Anet also sold printers that cut too many corners and they often caught fire.
Then Creality made the Ender 3. I unironically think it’s a brilliant design. It cuts corners just enough to be cheap, but not so much that it’s useless garbage. They had two issues early on: lack of thermal runaway protection in the firmware, and a bad connector to the power supply. Both were fixable by end users, and both have long been fixed in shipping models.
At the same time, companies like Prusa refused to join in that race to the bottom. Good for them. If you’re an established player like that and already have a reputation for quality, never get involved in a race to the bottom. That’s how you become what HP is now.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it’s a big market, why aren’t they getting into it?
Xiaomi makes a couple of expensive standard inkjets, but mostly they make photo printers. That’s the only one I can think of.
It’s really hard to break into it. Being accurate enough to print at 300dpi is very difficult, and that’s not particularly impressive. If it’s color, then the problems are multiplied. You have to precisely align four different print heads (minimum), and the ink needs to be mixed just right for accurate colors.
This is also why you don’t see open source 2d printers like you do for 3d printers. On the surface, adding a third dimension seems like it’d make things more complicated, but 3d printers don’t need the level of accuracy that 2d printers do.
But I would think TVs and microchips are more complicated than printers. And those two have been cracked by the Chinese.
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HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won’t notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a “virus” to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid “instant ink” scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by… not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
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People say that, but…
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you’d installed a new cartridge when you hadn’t, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don’t think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
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They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the ‘T’ part of their SWOT analysis.
That’s interesting! TIL, thanks!
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been “HP CEO admits company’s products are platform for malware attacks.”
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
Inkjet printers as a whole are a bad investment.
Well, I guess it depends on the use case. For me, mine was a damn good investment for sure.
Well if you print lots of photos then maybe but that’s about it.
ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
They were acquired some years ago
Almost 20.
Yeah, Lenovo has owned ThinkPad for ≈ 6 more years than IBM ever did.
I know. Still, that’s the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.
Not anymore. Even those are garbage in the last 5ish years.
Shit build quality and barely repairable
Stay away from modern thinkpads
Check again.
At least the T580 I worked on was the best quality laptop I’ve laid my hands on. My current M1 MacBook Pro is close, to some extent. It’s a great machine too, and obviously better in performance as it’s newer, but in laptop keyboards, ThinkPad’s is still no.1, not to talk about the track point that, to this day, no other manufacturer could properly reproduce. I worked with a Dell Latitude (a couple of years ago they were great), but the track point is shit on it.
Regarding maintenance, Lenovo provides detailed disassembly and repair guides, plus you can get replacement parts anytime.
Of course there are shit decisions on the ThinkPad line as well, but I still only can recommend them.
nope. had a T580 which reproducably crashed when you picked it up by the right side. Likely from mainboard flex. And checking online, it’s not a unique case.
And two months after the waranty, the ssd control chip or something broke which basically shredded any data on the ssd. Repair would have been almost as expensive as getting a new one.
Now I’ve switched to framework for work and personal use and don’t regret it
Hmm that’s unfortunate. Wherever I worked so far, ThinkPads didn’t break, even after the warranty expired.
Well, I wish you better luck with your Framework laptop(s) then.
And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it’s not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I’ve had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don’t print a lot at home so I’ve only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you’re happy with your megatank? I might look into that… I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
Yeah the Canon has been pretty good. I’ve had it for around a year now. I sort of print in batches, like I’ll have a week where I print a few photos then nothing for a month or so. When I had a long break once (2-3 months), the printer started printing streaks so I had to run some sort of fixing cleanup cycle which fixed the issue although it wasted some ink. I haven’t had to buy any replacement ink yet because again I don’t print a lot, but I’m sure if I was using a traditional inkjet I would’ve had to buy replacement ink cartridges a few times already.
Brother printers aren’t even that much more expensive than HP. I think you break even by the time you have to buy like 2 HP ink cartridges. Even the toner cartridges that the brother printers come with last what feels like forever and they’re not even filled up all the way.
Yeah it’s definitely cost effective over time, and the printers generally seem to be higher quality. I’ve heard about inkjet printers breaking a lot during moves, but I’ve moved with my brother printer like 5-6 times and it’s been fine through everything.
For home usage, a later printer toner cartridge will last you years and won’t go bad. Ink jet printer cartridges are way more expensive and dry out which is why they constantly need replacing. Brother is a much better brand than HP.
Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don’t make as much on ink sales so they don’t really care about third party ink cartridges.
You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don’t lock you out of your own printer for doing it.
On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can’t print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
Why do these dumb ass CEO’s keep admitting this type of stuff in interviews? Don’t tell us your evil plans. No one is going to hear this and be more eager to buy your products. They’re so proud of coming up with ways to screw customers that they just can’t help themselves. They have to let everyone know. I don’t get it.
Because that interview is for investors. He’s looking out for the shares price, not his customers. We can always buy other products, like Canon or Epson. It’s too bad because HP printers are the best, but not enough to let us be robbed like other brands.
HP printers and the software with them sucks ass. Never again. Bought a brother laser printer and shit just works without any bullshit.
HP printers are the best
No. Not by any metric.
Buying HP products are a very bad investment, period.
I would never own a printer other than a Canon or an Ink Tank printer and I’m very reluctant to use the Canon Printer.
Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP’s path.
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Yikes, I hope you don’t have a pension.
Most people don’t
Seems like slightly more than half of American workers (56%) participate in a “workplace retirement plan” which I don’t know the definition of. Pension or 401k if I had to guess.
Why research, post a statistical number, and completely abandon reading anything else in the article for context? Stating a number that you have no idea what it’s defining? You’re spreading misinformation for some weird “I was right” gotcha comment. The literal next line where you got 56% from,
Percentage of workers participating in a pension plan: 19
This includes all types of employment, for just private it’s a measly 11%. State and local government employees bump up all of the stats. Nice little tidbit at the end: "A pension plan is a traditional or hybrid defined benefit plan. In 2022 forty one percent of workers in private-sector pension plans were in plans that were closed to new entrants.
How does this vary from previous years? What are the different types of definitions and actual “benefits” that the employee may see. What are the differences in private and public sector “retirement plans” (or contribution vs defined benefits). I’ve been reading through the BLS.gov website in regards to all of this and it’s one sad fact after another. But sure, put a healthy untrue spin on it to win some internet points while completely missing the context, skewed facts have never caused any harm.
Yeah, I stopped researching it. Perhaps we should go back to the more measured approach from earlier in the thread.
investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
Well instead of forming emotional opinions we can try an educated opinion next? You really do yourself a disservice by saying you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Not gonna lie, thought that said “inventors” and I was like, “I’d watch that.”
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn’t make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That’s what all the cool investors care about now, right?
Holy fuck, customers are not an investment!
Not crazy at all. Not sure why there’s a surprise. Advertising is everywhere. Design goes into making buying goods user friendly. The whole point of brands is to build loyalty to it. All of that has cost to acquire customers. So obviously customers are an investment because acquiring them has cost and labor involved.
It’s like selling an iPhone knowing you will eventually make money on app store sales percentage margins.
Later in the interview, he added: “Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire…
Don’t worry, they’ll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
And next time buy a brother printer.
Proud to be a bad investment here 😊
