Thank you, and now i wont allow anyone willing to listen to me, to buy hp. Cause i actually didnt know this. And their fu***n ad worked too, i was thinking i might give em a try for the next scanner/printer down the road. The very idea that a scanner wont work without ink, or that the printer will need ink from exclusively hp, that hadnt even crossed my mind, cause its just so absurd. Wow... Just wow...
My Epson needed black ink. So i put in a new cartridge. Then when i went to print in black it wouldn't print because the colour ink timed out. All the Brother machines we have don't do that BS
Independent computer consultant with over 800 customers, I take it a step further, not only do I not recommend HP printers, I don't recommend a single HP product to any of my customers. At the end of the day their products are purposefully bad, even if you play ball with all of their BS.
I have to concur that even if they might have some division with actually great products, their brand name has already become a huge negative point after some experience with HP printers (and also a laptop).
I am a consultant, as well and have refused to purchase any HP gear for 20 years. A server salesman said it wasn't reasonable to hold him responsible for bad HP printers. As long as the HP name is in the box, it's no good.
@@SunriseLAW Brother branded printers, always the recommendation. Affordable supplies, better customer support. Most importantly the software is good, and the products work as advertised.
I honestly really liked the keyboard on one of their laptops. Felt pretty good to type on, but it was horrible for repair as the entire top of the chassis was one solid unit. I also felt it necessary to apply a few generous layers of epoxy resin to the bottom panel to help solidify it against drops because it wobbled like a manila envelope.
I stopped using HP printers about 15 years ago because of how bitchy and finnicky they seemed to be. Now, knowing what you've put out into the world, they weren't finicky. They were engineered to extract an obscene amount of money from their customers which they clearly hated. This was also evident because I'm an HP authorized tech and on almost every repair job they would try to make me upsell vastly unnecessary plans.
I remember the original ink cartridges that could be used, taken out, and left sitting around for months. When you were ready to use them again you wiped off the dried ink with a wet paper towel and they were good. Once I owed the first inkjet with the cartridges you have to puncture a plastic seal and then the cartridges dry out while in the printer I stopped using inkjet printers and I never buy HP even for lasers.
Sounds like a number of Briggs and Stratton engines I have encountered over the years. That said, I've only ever owned used HP printers that dated back at least twenty years ago. The only one in our house now was acquired because we had to clear out an office after an election. It's a laser printer, so I don't think I have to worry too much about the engineered anti-consumer crap here. Most of our printers were typically Japanese brands so Canon, Epson, Brother, Kyocera Mita...yeah. In that time period we had an an el-cheapo Lexmark, it was a supermarket special and maybe a handful of used printers, one or two from HP.
Same here, I used the first DeskJet models in the 90's and at one point not after long, realised that I use more time cleaning print heads and going to buy ink, than actually printing. That was it for ink jets for me, never have used them after that, just lasers and even now rocking with a Lexmark E321 desk laser from the beginning of the millennia, going strong and the 6000 page toner cartridges have lasted forever in my use, still using the third such cartridge. Even when the printer turns on the toner low light, I can still print hundreds of pages. Sometimes the printer is unused for months, then I just turn it on, print, turn off. Never ever one second needs to be used with doing anything for cleaning print heads, losing ink for 'cleaning' process of the printer etc. Ink jets are such a scam!
HP is really making an argument that we should: 1- Never buy their products, buy from competitors; 2- Never upgrade the equipment if it breaks, try and get it repaired by a third party; 3- Trust hackers more than the company to provide software that lets you scan without having any ink. My mom still has her 15 or so-years old HP Multi. She scans and prints on a daily basis, never had any problem with scanning whenever there's no ink. Louis, were that piece of actually good equipment fail, should she replace or repair it? I know you said to not give HP more income, but this one is a good piece and example of when they had quality standards, a multi that hasn't broken in 15 years of constant use.
@@adamyoung6797 Probably because I edited it minutes later. Still, yes, HP isn't going to get a cent from any repairs it might need, so it's good to repair.
If you can repair it, that's fine. I would say if you want a decent printer, think Japanese. Canon, Epson, Brother...they all seem to be fine for most people.
@@WJCTechyman - I have a Canon printer that refuses to do anything, gives a meaningless (to me) error code, gives no clue as to why it fails power up test. No more Canon for me.
Fun fact, in Brazil we had a band called "inimigos da HP" which translates to "HP enemies", it was created by some engineering students that hated HP. They were big in the 2000's.
@@dmitripogosian5084 No, apparently, from the ads I've read, many of their newer model lasers are doing the same "proprietary cartridges" thing. For example, the specifications on Amazon Canada state, for the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw Wireless Laser Printer, "This printer is intended to work only with cartridges with original HP chips or circuitry and will block cartridges using non-HP chips or circuitry. Periodic firmware updates will maintain the effectiveness of these measures."
@@alfonsomurolo1811 to be fair, I use my Laptop HP since college at 2014 and still work fine even now, but the battery have been replaced twice but still work fine for me. can't really do hardcore job though since it's only i3 gen 4. I can't speak for the latest release though
Their printers are extra bad. I have the displeasure of working with them in a professional setting and holy fuck i have never had more headaches with getting a printer working than hp.
I work in school IT support. We have an ungodly amount of HP printers floating around. What's infuriating is that they more or less force you to setup an HP Smart account just to even print! Our "brilliant" food services dept. thought it would be a fantastic idea to waste thousands of dollars about a year ago to upgrade the simple, yet functional, B&W Brother laser printers the cafeteria managers have with color HP MFPs that cost over $500/each. They didn't consult with us in IT until they arrived and wanted us to install them.... Great. I learned that simply installing the print driver isn't enough. When I went to print a test page, even though the printer was installed successfully in Windows and its status showed up as "Ready", the test page wouldn't print. I wouldn't get any error message, neither on the computer nor on the printer. It wouldn't even print its own network config page from the printer itself. We then found out that the only way to get it to print was to setup an HP Smart account and then register that printer to that account. Absolutely insane and annoying.
@@jrstf An air-gapped computer or network is one that has no network interfaces, either wired or wireless, connected to outside networks. In short you can have LAN only network with no internet access. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)
Sounds like 99% of my customers that tell me "I'm having an issue with my printer..." and of course, it's a brand new HP printer that requires that horseshit "HP Dumb" and requires a fucking account just to use your fucking printer that you literally just purchased. HP sells these things for less than $100.00, and the end user goes to Staples or Best Buy and trusts the non-tech wearing the blue or red shirt because they have the marketing budget and therefore think that those people can be trusted - when they can't. So these fake-ass "techs" tell the customer to purchase those shitty $89.00 HP printers and leave them and us real techs holding the bag. Bullshit all around.
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@@cooldamienthat isn't the question jrstf is asking. He asks how one can use a Combo printer from HP in an air gaped computer/network environment if it's necessary to have a HP account for setup and using it.
I have a pile of HP inkjet printers I've purchased on special deal over the years. They're a great source of stepper motors, belts, gears and other components that would have cost me more than the printers to buy. I *never* buy replacement catrtidges for these printers -- I do all my printing on a Brother Laser. Thanks for the below-cost supply of lots of cool maker-parts HP!
In all fairness, HP's ad stated that you'll hate their printers LESS. That's a tacit admission that they recognize that their customers are still gonna hate their products...but maybe they'll hate them just a little bit less. That tells us everything we need to know about HP
Had teh same thought. And if HP Smart reliably makes installs work well, yes, I will hate them less. I won't recommend them to anyone, to be sure, but if they want to self-sabotage, it will be a 10% less bad decision.
I first thought those ads are a parody. But it is kind of sad that a company that big is actually advertising the fact that they are hated by customers.
Yes. Normie customers will take the statement as HP poking fun at themselves, when really it is a carefully crafted statement they can use in court to weasel their way out of justice.
It's weird when companies switch from providing the best, to enforcing their control upon the user, to rake the money from them. Do they seriously think there's more long term profit in that?!?!?!
@Louis Rossmann It is directly because of you and your previous videos on HP that I skipped buying another HP printer and instead bought a Brother laser printer. I cannot begin to say how happy I am with that purchase. The Brother printer just works, all my devices easily connect to it, and it is far easier to use than my previous HP. I never knew it was possible for printers to just work and not have stupid baked in like my previous HP. Thank you so much!
I used to work for HP and their founders would cry if they could only see what has happened since they passed away, having once left us their much respected "The HP Way".
Yeah, that's kinda sad. HP used to make some pretty good lab bench equipment, calculators, their inkjet printers, even though they soaked the page in ink were real work horses, along with the LaserJet 4 and 5 models I could remember seeing in various computer labs when I was in elementary school and high school. That said, I have an HP EliteDesk tower computer and still find it to be well made, yes, it's probably 13-14 years old at this point, it still does what I want it to do. I don't know whether to say that it is a true HP business desktop as the innards and BIOS/EFI interface kinda scream Compaq Deskpro to me.
This happens to a lot of large companies once the founder sells/dies. The business was built by a person who saw an actual human at the other end, and is now operated by someone who is blinded by dollar signs at the final destination instead. *stares at Disney*
The first thing to go is going to be the power supply and it's going to take the motherboard with it. Make sure you have your data backed up. None of that Best Buy level garbage spent the money on a solid power supply that will last 20+ years.@@WJCTechyman
You don't need to find another example of that, HP is practically the prime example. Carly Fiorina was one of the all time worst perpetrators of this.@@ShanesGettingHandy
@@ShanesGettingHandy Disney’s always been like this. The only thing different is blue and red sides have switched positions on their approval and disapproval.
My friend had this scenario. He's captain of a transport vessel going around the world. He had this HP MFC printer - don't remember the model, but it's HP... you know their modus operandi. He had a stock of many original cartridges he bought with a printer in the EU (because he's on the open sea, and it's not good to run out of ink). Then came the day that he ran out of the cartridges and the vessel at that time was in China. He sent a procurer in China to an HP store to buy original cartridges for his printer... you see where this is going... Printer wouldn't accept the cartridges because they were for another region. After calling the support (few hours later), somehow, remotely, they changed the printer to accept the cartridges, but they said that this should be done again if the cartridge's region will change again (when he will run out of original but chinese cartridges)... so the printer in the next port was thrown in garbage... Yes, HP cares about the planet...
From my own experience, I remember owning an HP printer around 2019/20. I've encountered the same issue where that if I want to just use it for scanning things, it required me to put an ink cartridge in it which I found very annoying. I can also vaguely remember trying to get this printer to work wired as I wanted to use it offline in case the internet goes out. It worked for a while, then later on, it started requiring me to use the internet even when it was WIRED. I've been unable to resolve this issue for quite a while that eventually, I've stopped using the printer and gave it to my mother. I don't know what issues she was dealing with but she had such a hard time with it that she ending up breaking the glass for the scanner on accident. It just shows to me that HP was meant to be hated.
My aunt bought a printer from HP a while back. It was one of those wifi deals, and she called me to help her set it up. I looked on the back of it, and there was a USB port of the back of it that had a literal sticker over it with a notice that said that you should set it up on wifi. I tried it anyway, since I was not about to install an HP app on her phone, and the PC did not even show the printer in the Device Manager. *It actually has a useless USB port on the back of it.* The next thing I tried was to hard-wire the internet to it, since it had an ethernet jack as well. The device was not found on the network while hard-wired. Only wireless through the phone app. 30 minutes later, I was setting up her new Brother printer.
When my mother was getting a new printer I actually warned her: If you get an HP, I won't help you when it stops working. They're terrible. So of course, the salesperson convinces her to get an HP... Now when it drops from the wifi/randomly loses the wifi settings/randomly needs the drivers reinstalled and she asks why it keeps happening: Because you didn't listen to me and bought an HP, that's what they do.
Is your Mother my Dad by chance? Despite the fact that I own a successful small business (computer repair/IT), if some "salesman" says otherwise - he takes their bullshit "advice" over mine. Then he wonders why he has problem after problem.
@@Solo413I finally managed to convince my father to buy a brother laser printer. He's very happy, and has said he wonders why he didn't do it earlier. Now I'm the go-to consult on most electronic purchases in my family and friend group... and very amateur sysadmin, because I have to.
@@Solo413 Maybe you should buy a Geek Squad Tshirt for the 'authoritative source' mojo. "Hold on while I put on my shirt. Now what did you want to know?"
Right on Louis. I went through this HP circle jerk for my widowed 74 year old sister-in-law. In addition, I have a HP 281 FDW Laser Jet that stopped working on the 10th month of the 12 month factory warrantee. They basically told me to get lost. After threating that I would take them to Michigan Small claims court, They finally sent me a refurbished machine. They sent it with no power cord or cartages, along with a threating note that if I did not send the defective printer back within 10 days, they would charge my credit card full retail price. They would not send me the replacement printer without me giving them a valid CC. What a sad corporation. I will never buy another HP product.
all the more reason to use the privacy site that Louis is always talking about, Valid credit card for them to ship, then turn it off. What are they gonna charge? nothing
If one scum corporations pulls that CC bullshit on me, I’ll give them the number, wait until they send me the tracking info for the package, the call the card provider and tell them the card was lost. They’ll reissue for free, or for a few bucks, depending on the provider. Then wait for the arrogant asswipes to call you back kissing your ass for a valid CC number “ go f*ck yourself” is the proper response......then sell the replacement on Craig’s list and buy someone else’s product 😈
That does sound like something that a german court would have a field day with. I'd actually call them and be like "Yo, thanks for the evidence, gonna report you now :)"
I used to work for HP Louis. You would not believe the amount of engineering that goes into the printer DRM. No one seemed to have much of an issue with it there. Miss working with wafers but I don’t miss what those wafers were for
I've worked in computers/software for almost 35 years. I have started to hate the profession. The thing that I used to love and enjoy is now used for so many negative things that are called "progress" or "safety". As musk said: Virtue signalling being good while enabling absolute evil.
You’re right, I feel a lot of guilt for letting a friend buy an HP printer. And I feel annoyance because I get called every time there is an issue with it.
You're absolutely wonderful human being, thank you for being honest and taking care of us. I wish you and all decent Americans all the best from Prague, Czech republic! 🇨🇿🗽🇺🇲
Ahh old the days as a college student I unfortunately had one. The "magenta" ink ran out for whatever reason, and I couldn't print my report due that afternoon that only used BLACK INK. As soon as I got more magenta ink later on, it worked fine. It was just *extremely irritating* to not be able to print my report, which required zero magenta ink in the first place. I've since switched to brother printers and never had such an issue and am much happier. Though honestly, even years later I still dread printing anything, even though HP is gone, they've scared me for life.
We use a HP in work. Almost the entirety of our 200 A3 page/day output is B&W. We always run out of a colour first. The ink & toner drums are all the same size. I believe it mixes black with the colours first. When one colour runs out it refuses to print, until we switch to "Print in Grayscale". Works a charm until the black is empty, but less rich.
Last HP printer I had… I became so infuriated with it that I ripped it out of the wall while it was still printing and took it straight outside to the garbage can with nothing but a towel on at 6 in the morning dropping expletives all along the way. I bet the neighbors still remember that day. #neveragain
@@Molon_Labe1776 I agree in part with your sentiment. It doesn't belong in a landfill to be buried in our earth along with the 75% of consumer waste wrongfully landfilled instead of properly recycled. Especially during a time in history when the global waste stream is at the highest it's ever been and raw materials are being depleted when they often exist within the products that are landfilled. Other nations aren't burying it at all they just throw it in their waterways or set fire to it which adds to the pollution WE in America are being blamed and taxed for. If anything the device belongs back in the manufacturer's lap where they are required to responsibly dispose ie recycle the device. Mind you I am not a tree hugger I actually do board-level repairs like Louis and I grew up around a very well known recycling industry ie automotive scrap so I understand actual recycling as an industry. If the company can make billions or trillions a year and can use investor money and pay dividends while producing devices in a communist country for pennies on the dollar it sure as hell can afford to be responsible with its own item when it's no longer usable. Then the manufacturer would make more careful choices of development knowing it has the devices' end of life on it's shoulders as well. A practice with German carmakers in Europe some 20 years ago required them to design the vehicle with its end of life in mind where all components had to be marked with the proper recycling identification symbols. Upon scrappage the vehicle would be highly recyclable and with the ease of sorting identification for anyone to understand. I know it's a pipe dream and all about the money which is what killed & corrupted most legitimate recycling. The lobbying of government for the green light to turn a blind eye to its malpractice while the citizens were asleep, but it's still a pretty good idea much as Right to Repair is. I always viewed this as a home country business that could be applied to a workforce of those in the prisons, homeless, disabled etc. As taxpayers we sure spend a lot of "taxes" in various ways to support so many people we never know or see. Why can't we get them to earn it and get something out of our waste as well? We are going to be drowning in our own or others' waste in the near future with all the convenient online purchasing while we are already eating some of that waste in certain foods we consume as it is.
I tell everyone in the market for a printer: For the vast, vast majority of people, don't look any further than a simple basic Brother laser printer. Either monochrome or color, depending on your needs. Brother is the only one left that will sell you a normal, regular printer that accepts aftermarket toner, will work any time you need it, and is completely bulletproof-reliable. Everyone else has fallen off, and it'll be a really sad day if Brother ever does too.
I can confirm this, I was so glad getting rid of that trash HP printer, I replaced it with a Brother Laser printer and I'm finally not annoyed to print stuff any more because it just works and doesn't pester me with dumb subscription models are trashy apps.
I bought a mobile inkless printer that fits in my desk drawer when not in use. It does require thermal paper but considering that I print something only once or twice a year, the 200 sheet ream of paper I purchased should last me until I die.
For small things I'me also running an older Samsung laser model. They've been very reliable, and there's a whole maintenance book on how to dissasemble it piece by piece.
This isn't a new thing. And I know that legal issues can take years to reach a conclusion. I myself was reasonably well off when this happened to me. About 15 years ago I'm guessing. Owned a scanner/printer by HP. Cost me £200 or more iirc. It ran out of ink because we had stopped using it as a printer. Tried to scan and it wanted ink to be able to scan. Unplugged it, walked to bin with it, and dumped it straight into the bin. Made mental note to self never to buy anything by HP again. I've kept my vow.
I used to have an old Brother all-in-one inkjet printer that worked of more than a decade as a scanner only, without ever having to replace the empty ink cartridges, after I acquired an old used Laserjet 6P for printing purposes. The Brother Control Center app would even allow me to make direct copies from the scanner straight to the HP. And the fax function (that's how old it was) would also work fine for sending out faxes, without requiring any ink present. When I moved, I left them behind and replaced with a brand new Brother all-in-one laser printer, that has never given me any issues over the last five+ years. I would never buy or recommend any new HP product ever again.
Yeah, the Brother software plays nicely with other devices - I've experienced that too when I printed from my laptop at a friend's house who owned a Cannon printer.
The entire brand deserves everbit of it. The laptops are trash too. I bought o e last year just to stream. Literally nothing but watch movies online and it constantly freezes and shuts down.
We have an HP plotter in the office, and honestly we never tried third party ink because it has to be 101% reliable, and since it doesn't do anything more than print it doesn't have the problem of stopping working without ink. BUT what is really annoying is that cartridges have an expiring date, you can at least use them after they expire, but you keep getting a message that you are using an expired cartridge, and you loose the ability to check ink levels unless you really dig in the menus. They are 100% designed to be annoying
For decades I had HP printers, then the cartridges cost more than an epson ecotank printer. I bought a ET-3830 reluctantly and was absolutely astounded. Epson or aftermarket ink not problem. You look AT the printer from ACROSS the room and can see exactly how much ink is left! You press print and EVERY F'ING TIME it prints what you tell it to without screwing around for half an hour, smudging needed new cartridges. It was astonishing! Great picture quality and all I do is dump in picture paper and hit print. One picture from 3 different HP printers that would fail in sequence routinely took four (4) hours. Now I am the slowest factor in pulling out plain white and putting in photo paper. Even my technologically hostile wife can use it without any assistance. I have yeeted all my HP printers, one I smashed to hell with a sledge hammer the other I ran over with a tractor. I now use the epson and my hair is growing back because I am not pulling it all out and it is getting LESS grey every day! I would not let my worst enemy buy an hp printer!
I bought an Epson ET=16600 and was shocked that it could actually scan 90+ pages without a problem! HP conditioned me to have to scan like 3 to 4 pages at a time, and even the same page multiple times, all because their sheet feeds would never work properly. My wife constantly is having reinstall the HP drivers, reboot her laptop a few times to "find" the HP printer, and is constantly raging over how horrible it is. Not to mention the cost of replacement HP ink! Yeah, Epson, with the ecotank is amazing and I'm far less stressed over using it. I totally hate how much money we've wasted over the years on HP...
I think the real big problem is short-sightedness on the part of the consumer. They sell these printers at a loss, and then recoup the cost with ink. I looked at buying a printer with no drm restrictions and refillable ink, but I didn't get it because it *seemed* too expensive.
Bought an HP parallel port inkjet 25 years ago, and it was a workhorse, with print cartridges that worked for hundreds of pages, and just required basic maintenance on the part of the user. Loved that printer. Then I bought a 3 in 1 HP that was reliable, but went through cartridges at a rate of knots. I'm only an occasional print user, one or two pages a week at most, so having to replace a cartridge every six months didn't seem too bad, until I did the maths and realised I was just getting 50 pages per cartridge. I replaced it with an HP Envy, and that POS worked for a month. Since then, you put a black cartridge in, print the alignment page, and then it will tell you the cartridge is empty. It's basically just a scanner now. I now use a Brother laser printer.
That sounds like my story . I bought a HP Deskjet 512C then a 520C. Best printers ever . Then I went through some Canons which were ok before landing on HP 2 years ago and it has been a complete sh%thole. I am getting rid of this piece of scrap and never buying HP ever again.
I used the HP 520C in my university days. The best printers ever. I even bought a second one while doing a second degreee some time later. I used it for years with after market ink while searching for a job and for home use. Then HP became crap and I've since moved to Epson. @@crBudgetWatches
@@ongtengkee9225 I was lucky (lucky?) in that I got that HP Envy, just before HP completely turned to the dark side. They still had one tiny iota of humanity at that time.
I literally spent twice the money to get a brother laser printer. It was the only option that doesn't require special drivers, would work with linux and had no ink DRM. It's actually been the best printer scanner I've ever had. My home server and router log network activity and all it does is occasionally check for firmware updates but won't even download them without your permission. Brother toner isn't even that expensive but they don't stop you from refilling them or using third party products.
I spent stupid money on my brother color laser all in one. It was the best money i ever spent. i have purchased ink for this unit ONCE in five years. Seriously.
what i remember from brother over a decade ago is you needed to replace the drum seperately from the cartridge. where as hp both are contained. not sure how often that would need to happen though.
HP (when I was a child of the 80s) used to be a company to look up to, they would educate, gladly share information with a young student, and they would lead the way with test-instruments for an young engineer to aspire and grow with, until HP died. HP was never the same again after 2K. They became a different company, outsourced their products, service and used inferior parts. They forgot everything about what it is to be proud of their products, and now it was sell at any cost, deny anything and everything, grab as much as you can. And in the end they dressed up as sheep, trying to pretend they are still good - when they know they were already dead 20 years ago.
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5 years ago I was still using HP laser made in 1997 in France. I was using LPT to USB port adaptor. 6 pages per minute, but the DPI was incredible. You could print incredibly small sharp letters. Those were the models that were made to last not the shit they are producing today.
Every great company goes to shit when the founders leave the company. At that point, they're much less worried about building it up for the future and much more worried about extracting maximum money from it. HP, Google, Dell, QualComm, etc etc etc. The only ones that don't do this are the ones owned by the customers, like REI or mutual insurance companies.
HP and companies like Xerox from the 80's through the late 90's about when i started my tech school of choice, as a dedicated laser printing device were as good as you could possibly get in terms of being repairable and reliable. Devices that involve multi-color or inkjet/bubble jet is where the printing industry started to go very very wrong.
As a former HP employee, I could not agree more! The only thing in your statement that is not quite right is the date at which HP started to go wrong; it was 1998 (with the hiring of Carly Fiorina). I worked in several different operating divisions of HP during my 18 year tenure, and all of them were (for the most part) run with integrity and the customer's best interest at heart. All of that changed the Day Lou Platt retired and Carly took over as CEO!
I got a Brother laser printer because I needed ink for my inkjet again and remembered you mentioning their brand. Best choice I ever made. The whole printer was the same price as replacement ink for the inkjet and for $30 I get four toner cartridges that print 2,400 pages each VS MAYBE 60 pages off of $100 worth of ink. Not to mention you use like a quarter of a cartridge when the print head gets dry or dusty because the printed paper is garbage so you have to retry a bunch before cleaning the print heads which prints like an entire page worth of moist ink blots. Printing a bar or QR code no longer takes 6 minutes, it takes 3 seconds, and I was even comfortable enough to print out a service manual for my dishwasher with it. The experience is so much better and I feel super silly for assuming that laser printers were only for commercial use despite working in the IT field. It's one of those things you get gaslit into from past experience back in the day when that WAS the case and a laser printer cost both arms and a leg so you'd either get an inkjet or go to a library to print things. As you've said in previous videos regarding other topics, when you stick the tip in far enough that loyal customers start seeking alternative means of getting the same task done and find out you've been screwing them for years when they could have continued paying you money for an objectively worse product and remained blissfully unaware of it, you blow your cover wide open and you are never getting those customers back. That's the boat I'm in. Inkjet printers have become so dodgy that the next major inconvenience had my brain go "Hey, didn't Louis talk about this a bunch?" Lo and behold I do a quick search for a new printer instead of new ink, immediately recognize the Brother brand and see they're extremely popular, do some more research for exactly what type of printer I need, and here I am. No more inkjets. Good riddance. So thank you for that.
I retired my HP inkjet about ten years ago when it ran out of black and color ink at the same time... which would have cost me the same $69 as my Brother MFP was to buy new. Since then, I get a set of cheap $12 Amazon cartridges about once every two years, and replace them all as a set when one shows empty.
@@weir-t7y I believe they are referring to the toner cartridges, specifically third party aftermarket units. A set of colour toner cartridges for my Brother are $90 Canadian in aftermarket. The OEM cartridges would be similar to buying a whole new printer at $450 Canadian but I am also impressed with this printer and happy I bought it, even compared to the business grade Kyocera-Mita I had before it that had the same processor that early iMacs and the Gamecube used. I don't know what's in the Brother but it prints incredibly fast and automatic duplexing (2-sided printing) as well as Wi-Fi and Ethernet is standard. The printer also showed up automatically ready for use on my Ubuntu computers without installing drivers.
I bought a Xerox 3025 laser multi 3-4 years ago and am super pleased with it. Works with aftermarket toner (that's 1/4 the price of original), scans when there's no toner, requires no account with Xerox, no internet connection to set up; in fact you can still install it and use all the functions by pointing the add printer wizard to the driver files, if you don't want any of their software installed.
If you even order online from HP, their order cancellation is a "request to cancel" order, meaning they'll still send out the order after you requested to cancel. From that point on, if you return the item, they'll charge you $100 for a restocking fee no matter what.
0:55 Louis. As a Geek Squad agent, I can tell you with confidence that it does work. So many customers come in with problems with their HP laptop or printer and I always try and explain why it’s HP’s fault and how to fix it (and also how to get rid of hp) and they usually go on the Apple rant about how good it’s been for them for the last 15 years and so on. It definitely works as unfortunate as it is.
It's crazy how many people see companies as single entities and not as a corporation with ever-changing policies. 15 years is enough for the leadership to change drastically and to pull all sorts of anti-customer shenanigans.
I remember owning an HP laptop that had Windows Vista. It was like a double barrel shotgun aimed at my will to live. It did inspire me to buy a MacBook Pro and I haven’t looked back.
This also connects with your videos about piracy and what some streaming companies do by removing content that has been purchased. You purchase a product, but it's not fully yours as long as the manufacturer has influence on it's functionality, while the device is physically located inside your home. That's very intrusive.
Thank you for your video! Way back in 1996, I was a Structural Engineer and used HP plotters for about 10 years. The print quality was fine. The ink cost was acceptable. They had printer drivers that often did not work. I had to explain to more than one IT manager: The only way to make an HP plotter work on a network, is to directly connect the plotter to an old Windows 7 computer, then hook that PC into the network. Because HP printer drivers did not get updated for many years, that would make your think your plotter was broken. Never buy HP. I own an ink jet printer from another company that has not clogged in 2 years and prints and scans 13"x19".
I'm a power user myself but never had a printer before until I needed on during the pandemic. So glad I did my research and got a Brother multi-function device. What was surprising is that it literally worked out of the box with my work computer (which runs Linux) and my gaming PC (which runs Windows). No drivers or pesky software whatsoever. Just connected it to my router with an ethernet cable and all devices just saw it. Scanner works out of the box too which is typically a nightmare to get working on Canon and HP. I use NAPS2 on Windows for scanning and the built-in Gnome scanning app on Linux.
My Laserjet 4000TN works also very well after at least 25 years. It saw many ink pisser come and go. I have an old Dell color laser, if I really need color but that's rarely the case.
HP LaserJet 4+ still going strong here. It has millions of copies and has been left in damp outbuildings for years - never once failed, never required special drivers and works across any grown-up OS still in use today. Pry it from my cold, dead hands HP.
This sort of thing makes me quite sad. When I was in IT part of my job was helping to maintain a bunch of HP Unix servers, and the relationship we had with the HP people, service managers, technicians, tutors, Business Continuity staff, etc., was wonderful. Before all that though my first printer was an HP 550C which, for the time, was a pretty good printer. I've had a couple of HP laptops since and was more than happy with them. Sadly as time passed I became less happy about what HP seemed to be doing, and how they did it (the high-ups, not the poor 'grunts' that I met) and I now avoid HP kit, especially printers.
I have a story about HP from the early 1990's. My company intended to buy a IR spectrometer , we had got down to two choices. The HP sale staff visited us and the arrogance they displayed was off the scale , so they were removed from the short list, leaving Varian as our choice .. the interaction with their single salesman was so cool and the software options sold it
Same here. We had a bunch of GC’s from HP. Eventually a dog get fed up with beatings and either bites you or runs away. We have never looks back and last week we upgraded out of our last HP lab piece. Happy days!
I've had the same canon pro9000 mk2 printer for like 10 years and haven't had a single problem with it other than the cost of ink. I haven't used it as much in the past few years as I did 5-10 years ago but I still print something off at least once a month. Best part the printer was practically free when I bought a DSLR and lens.
Thank you Louis, I have known of HP ink scams for decades (exorbitant prices, blocking after market inks) but in a moment of weakness I almost signed up for instant ink. Fortunately my printer was not compatible so I had a narrow escape! Never again, and the next one will be another make.
Had my fair share of companies that are very anticonsumer but treat their corporate clients well. HP is one of those that treat both equally. Didn't took long for our fleet of Samsung printers to become a liability once HP bought them and retroactively provided HP level support. Fujitsu at least is honest about their hostility.
I remember the halcyon days of HP. Then Carly Fiorina who, in six year, destroyed the company that had taken and, after huge problems, and turned it into the **** show that it is today. And it's only gotten worse over time. The corporate crap-fest that is HP now isn't grandfather's HP. It's not my father's HP. It's not my HP. It's not my daughter's. It will never become my grandchildren's.
I am very aware of the legend of Carly, but I do not know more than what various tech publications and have published about her (good and bad). By all accounts the company tanked hard on her watch and bad decisions were made, like merging Compaq and HP.
In the 1990s we had an HP printer running on windows 3.11. Throughout my entire childhood it actually never ran out of ink, because it came with so damn much of it. 20 years later I got rid of my last HP all-in-one printer, because all of them have the same behavior: 1) After a few years, they will stop printing correctly and everything look shitty until you (if possible on that machine) do a factory reset. Then the pages look normal again. 2) HP printers will never scan or copy without ink. 3) HP printers will "clean" themselves until the ink is gone after a few weeks, even if you don't use them at all. So you must always disconnect them from power. 4) HP printers will annoy you with warnings when you don't buy insanely expensive original ink from HP. This is my personal history of what I have witnessed and suffered through when using HP printers. Now I switched to another brand, which I will not mention here in order to not make it sound like advertisement. However, many IT professionals like myself know this other brand and you can ask anyone which one it is. But for the love of god, don't make yourself suffer through an HP device. It's not worth your nerves.
In the interests of balance if they don't run cleans all the time the cartridge clogs up, and if you have an ink tank model that's basically the whole printer goosed potentially within the warranty period so it has to waste ink like a shark has to keep swimming.
Heh does that brand rhyme with "Other"? Bought an all-in-one from them a few years ago after tearing my hair out with hp printers, and haven't looked back since
I bought one several years back. I still have it. I hate that it will not print in black only without colour cartridges with ink. e.g. Run out of yellow? Better get some more because all printing functionality stops. No black printing. Won't be getting another HP. Great video - thanks!
I had an experience with a Lexmark all-in-one printer many years ago. While my friends often used services to refill their cartridges, when I had my cartridge refilled, it didn't work. The chip on it told the printer it was empty, even though it was refilled. This made me angry with Lexmark. Since I don't need to print much, I never bought a new cartridge and used printing services instead. But at least the scanner works without a cartridge, and it can even scan to a USB flash drive or memory card without being connected to a PC.
I had an hp printer. It was around the time hp started to push its “instant ink” subscription about 10 years ago. In the beginning, after installing official drivers/software it ran okay. Did everything I had it do regardless of whether I had any ink cartridge installed or not. I would get occasionally spammed with their ad to get the subscription. After a few years, hp started to lock down the printer using its software. It would refuse to scan or print at all if it detects one of the cartridges is empty or not installed. Like not even b&w print without a color cartridge. Guess what I uninstalled hp’s software and drivers and the printer started working like it did again with windows’ built-in drivers. I lucked out hp couldn’t update the firmware to lock it down on a hardware level.
Whenever I see a HP printer in an office somewhere I pity the owners. I saw the vets practice I go to have one a bit like the one I had. A colour laser and scanner combo which I was happy with the output from but it started taking longer and longer to boot. Eventually after waiting about 5 minutes for it to boot I tried recovering it, tried all the factory reset routines, nothing. So it got thrown away. Utterly shoddy software engineering from HP.
HP laser printers also: - Say they are out of toner based on time, not content. So, in a home environment they tell you that you are out of toner months before you actually run out. - If your laser printer survives a few years, their toner cartridge prices are raised to ridiculous prices, unless you use a 3rd party refill service. - While old models of laser printers used to last for years and years, recent models are designed to break in 2-4 years, even with very light use.
It's not just HP. I had an Epson MFD many years ago which would not send a fax when it was out of yellow ink. It soon experienced a rapid and permanent disassembly and I have not ever purchased a MFD again.
Long ago HP use to make great laser printers. I bought an HP LaserJet Series II new in 1988 and got 17 or 18 years of use out of it before junking it when the heat roller died. I tried a couple of ink jet printers from HP and they were junk. My last HP printer was an 1102W laser which I got some years of use out of before it finally stopped feeding paper reliably. Current printer as of earlier this year is an Epson Ecotank...I don't print much any more, but so far it seems to be okay. Why anyone would put up with paying a license fee to print from a printer they already "purchased" is beyond me! Thanks Louis, your videos have been quite eye opening!
All printers I owned were HP until a certain point. Multiple inkjet/deskjet machines and one combi device. Lovely machines, never any trouble with them, worked as they should and were cheap enough. Now it's all Brother and Ricoh at the office. Well. And that super old dot matrix printer I still have and that somehow keeps trucking on, even though it's older than I am.
HP and their awful services aren't going to be an exception in the near future. Unless people stop using them, laws are made, and legislation is passed; these anti-consumer practices will slowly start to become more and more common.
@@STONE69_ After changed the thermal paste and HDD to SSD I installed Linux Mint on my mom's HP Laptop with no proprietary software from HP. It works like a normal working Laptop
I discovered years ago (before 2020) that HP locks the scanning when the ink is 'empty'. If I would havfe known about this being not known by most people then I would have shared this information with Louis, but I thought that this was pretty well-known.
Here in South Korea a bunch of small businesses fly under the radar leasing out modified HP printers. They modify the cartridges and attach hoses to massive ink reservoirs (like 500+ ml) that can be refilled with whatever ink you want. You can print to your hearts content and never worry about over paying for ink or running out of ink. The downside I guess is you have to be careful is getting HP firmware updates or connecting the machine to the internet because then HP might notice the machine is modified and block you from printing. But the machine is leased so if anything goes wrong they will come out and fix it or replace it with a similar model. These are everywhere from small businesses to corporate offices and home offices. It's a little expensive if you don't print often but for anyone who does print something at least once a day it's well worth it. I'm surprised no one has started a competitor that would sell a slightly more expensive but no Bullshit printer.
Dear Louis, commenting on phone while watching you on the computer. Love your videos and you taught me a ton. HP is the literal worst I have ever dealt with. I am a visual artist and Just got a Brother brand laser printer to go with my Plustek Optipro for an animation class as well as to print my own art after years of being tortured by HP products. The scanner is amazing and plug and play worked from the default scan app but was old enough to come with an installation disc for all their add on programs for scanning books etc. Brother's took more time to set up but I didn't have to connect an account or deal with anything even close to the HP Smart app bullshit. Also the colors are way more true to the original work than any HP printer ever managed. There are good options out there. They're half way between Ouch and BOING, price point wise, but worth the investment if you would use them a lot.
I had to buy a new printer last December. I very rarely use it and purchased it mainly for my personal tax purposes. I did my homework and went with a no-subscription Epson. I have purchased a full st of inks but I am still using the original start-up inks and probably have enough for this coming tax season. I estimate that I will NEVER need to by ink again. It was relatively easy to set up and have had no problems. The model is "Workforce - WF2950.
I am semi-retired, but still keep my brain occupied working a couple of days a week as a part-time math and science teacher at a very small private parochial school in my town. I bought an Epson ink tank printer (ET-2760) because it's easier for me to print handouts myself instead of making time for using the school printer. The ink that came with the printer lasted me over a year of heavy use printing out math practice worksheets. As another commenter said, make sure you copy or print something once a week just to keep the nozzles from getting crusted over. I have to do that over the summer. If I upgrade to a laser printer, I will consider the Epson models as well as the Brother models. There is a Brother laser printer in my classroom that must be at least 20 years old and it still works great. I guess I just wanted to join in with another satisfied Epson user and add my voice to Louis's about the quality and longevity of Brother printers. There are some annoying limitations that my Epson printer has, like not allowing me to print transparencies with the model I bought. I know, someone is going to scoff and say, "Who uses transparencies anymore Grandma? It's 2023, LOL.." My answer is for you to try correcting coordinate plane graphing exercises. It is so much easier to overlay a transparency to visually scan the work rather than inspecting every single plotted point to find mistakes. I use an inexpensive visualizer to for projecting images.
If you leave for months it may dry out. The print head cleanings will consume ink. Only laser printers can sit around for years and work, but color gets expensive and bad with those.
@@compaqdeskpro5770 I am aware of that and do print a page periodically to keep the heads working properly. I will say that these machines have improved over the years, including the print nozzles.
Long time ago I found LaserJet 5 in a school's basement forgotten. Turned it on - 1,5 mln pages printed, the status page wrote. Problems? Clean dust, wash plastics, dust tray, clean rolers. 👌 later did nothing, printed another thousands of pages with random paperjams but as beginning said - rubber rollers were not changed. 3 years ago bought inktank printer. Problems: paper jam, print head clogging and later was returned under waranty changing to another next release model. Yes, the sencond was also returned under warranty due to local laws requiring to maitain another 2 y after receiving a new one (eternal waranty). Si didn't bother to install the third one as it requires too much care compared to how many pages i got
I totally agree, my granddad bought an HP printer recently and it was nothing but pain. In the end he returned it and bought a different one. He always had an HP printer, so great job in loosing another customer HP, great service.
The last HP printer-scanner combo I bought (also my current) printer-scanner combo) is a... HP Deskjet F2200. It can use 3rd party cart replacements and no such scan lock out. I would 100% tell people I know to avoid modern HP inkjet printers and go with an older one like I have. And to AVOID buying official replacement HP ink carts because they're barely filled (and never have the amount of ink in it you paid for.)
What upsets me is the fact that my HP M476NW is such a good bit of kit - lasted me for 8 years, tens of thousands of documents and A4 pictures, and yet not a single issue. Third-party cartridges work great. Software is good enough. It's just so sad to see companies going down the shithole for no reason other than petty profit.
I've had good luck with my current and last HP. I guess the last one lasted 10 years and I didn't replace it because it was broken, but because I wanted a new one that would connect via wifi. I think my new model is the MFP M227fdw. It's been very reliable for the couple of years I have had it. I don't really mind being forced to pay for their toner. I just want it to work. So many of my printers from years ago (lexmark, other brands) just didn't work. And I freaking hate inkjets now because of so many problems with them. Maybe if I had to deal with HP's customer service I'd hate them, but thankfully I haven't had to so far.
Classic HPs were pretty good. Loved that old 2100. You could tell it was running out of toner when the prints got lighter. When you got sick of gray prints, you'd put in a new toner and have perfect prints again without ever missing a beat. What a novelty! These days printers just turn off on a counter, and every company seems to do this. So much for "green tech," because it's beyond wasteful to throw out what's working fine. (Also, all toners should be EASILY refillable. It's corruption that they are designed otherwise.)
Not every company. Epson EcoTanks warn you (for your own protection) to check the levels on the front to not run it dry, but resetting is easy. Buy it once, then it just works. Put ink in it every year or two. When I have nothing to print, I print "a" page once a week (or ten days) to keep everything flowing. Easy peasy. A free HP printer would be thrown away. I would not give it to anyone, not even an enemy.
I still have a very old HP laser MFC, from around 2006/2007, it's a colour laser printer and i can get a whole set of toners for around 40€, which last 3000+ prints. It doesn't use any special HP Smart app, just bog standard old drivers with a separate scanning application. I...JUST...WORKS. I can't stress it enough, the old HP printers from the early 2000's are still good, especially the laser ones. I'll keep using this bad boy until it gives out its last breath and then i'll do my best to fix it up, because i love this old thing. Never going to a new HP printer, ever... We had one at work, brand new model, colour laser MFC, you couldn't get fake toners for it and original ones were expensive. The whole set cost around 450€ before tax...not only that, the same issue happened, we mostly used BW printing, yet we ran out of cyan first,....for whatever reason...and the thing wouldn't do ANYTHING because it was out of Cyan... We tossed it out and bought a 2 year old Brother printer...best decision we've ever made. Never going back
Have been using HP for years. I spent over two hours total in to different customer support calls because of a defective cartridge which after the first hour agreed to replace. About a week later I received the cartridge which said instant Ink on it. I installed it and it would not print so my second call began. I was flat out told that I had to enroll in their scam instant inc program for my printer to work as it would not work with the cartridge they sent me because the printer is programmed not to work.I told them I do not print often enough to warrant a subscription. They didn’t care. Enroll if you want to print😮I now own a different printer instead of being held as a hostage. Liberation🎉
Yeah, the firmware makes sure to get shittier every year even when you don't use the printer, so that you are forced to buy a new one or be annoyed ever more so. I did what they wanted me to do - I bought a new printer. From Brother.
I use an Epson ecotank. Best decision ever. Bought literally two to three eyears ago and still haven't needed to replace the ink. The ink doesn't dry like it does in cartridges, and the tanks hold so much. Massive savings compared to when I was with HP.
The ecotank units suffer from dried out print heads as well if you don't print regularly. At work we bought a $1000 Epson model that had 11x17 paper capability and the cyan stopped printing and no amount of maintenance cycles would correct it. The black also stopped printing about 2 years later even though we used black all the time. Trying to unclog the cyan print head with syringe, rubber tube, and alcohol did not work. We needed an 11x17 capable printer the same day the black stopped working and unfortunately, HP was the only brand in stock locally so we went with it.
When I was new to being responsible for my tech, my brother's last advice was to avoid HP. That was 15 years ago. I guess they're cheap, so when you're on a budget, everyone tells you to get something HP. My experience has been to aim for the brand/product that's one step above the lowest range. At least that class tends to have actual function, whereas the bottom rung is pure junk.
Was an HP fanboy for years. Computers, calculators (HP48GX got me through my BSEE), and printers. NEVER again. Including the HP48GX. Bought a Brother color laser about 4 years ago. No regrets!
I used to live by HP all in one equipment untill I had one that quit scanning and faxing because I needed to spend $450 in print heads for a $150 printer.... Now I went back an OkiData laser printer and a Brother all in one.
I have one HP printer that I love. Designjet 500plus. It is like 15 years old, you may spot one somewhere on the streets like I did. Works great on Linux and you could probably run in on old versions of WindOS if you are lucky to find drivers. I spent hours trying to make it work on WindOS10, it is just like some libraries are missing or something...
Did you try emulating an old WindOS installation? You could use the printer that way in Win10 if you can't solve the drivers issue. You need a Virtual Machine with ports pass-through. I think VMWare Desktop Player free allows that. So the VM "sees" the printer when you "capture" the device on it.
I used to work at HP building computers and servers at their Houston location. All the main components were proprietary. Motherboard, power supplies, CD ROM etc. This means that if something broke you could only use HP components to fix it. This was a good 20 years ago. Maybe things have changed since then, but I seriously doubt that..
I bought an HP printer a few months ago. The copy function was disabled because my printer wasn't connected to the Internet. I thought it was just an issue with setup or something so I called customer support and it ended up taking 2 hours to connect it to my computer. There was an included USB cable and the customer service rep told me that that USB cable is only for setup and that the USB port does not work for anything else. I asked the service rep what I would need to do if I changed the computer it was connected to. He said I must call HP support to set it up if I want to print from a different computer. Absolutely ridiculous. The rep also said that everything would be easier if I subscribed to HP+
I have a view HP printers at work. At our office we mostly print text in black and white but it prompts us to replace the CMYK color cartridge to print in black and white.😂
I thought the scam with HP printers was the obscene cost of ink jet cartridges when the printers go on sale for like $20 along with how fast they dry up if you're not actively using them. A few years ago I was stuck getting an HP scanner and printer and almost smashed the thing when it obsessed with going online and installing some stupid software in order to function. Luckily I got it to work under Linux with the scanner. My good printer was in storage at the time and I had no real options. My good printer, a Canon laser printer (3 in 1), the demo toner cartridges just ran out last month, and it was all the colored ones. The free toner that came with the printer lasted over 2 years and the black one is still working, but I bought a new one 2 years ago just in case. You would never have a HP printer function with the same inkjet after 2 years. It also functions in black and white without color toner, something that used to be rare for HP, but likely non existent now. So in comparison a laser printer that costed $300 costs $60 to replace the CMYK (all 4) collection and will last a long time, even if not used. If not on sale HP will cost around $100 and cost $60 color and $50-$60 for black. I have no idea how long they last as I never used up a whole inkjet as they always dry up. That's why I stopped using HP and really thought it was inkjet for a long time. Seems now they're really about being the #1 hated company, so that ad makes sense, lol.
I remember the days when Epson was the bad guy, they were the first to start adding chips and counters to their cartridges... HP, obviously, surpassed their inspiration over time... If you really, really need a printer, get a color laser from Brother and you won't be a victim of vendor lock-in...
HP printers used to be good back in the '80s. I had their original LaserJet and LaserJet 2 printers when they were a good company. But more recently I have switched over to brother color Laser Printers and they have been fantastic. Very little maintenance required and they always work.
@@kber6288 I'm extremely happy with my Brother MFC-L8900CDW color laser, scanner fax that I bought in 2018 for $499. I'm STILL on the starter pack of toner carts! I've printed thousands of pages since I bought it. It just runs and runs with no complaint.
You are right ! Even tiring to hook up an HP printer to a computer is a nightmare. Tried to help a friend hook a new printer to an older computer forget about it ! Throw it in the trash and by a different one ? He bought to be wireless for the while family only got it to hook up to the USB and was useless ???
BEFORE you buy a printer, shop around to see if you can get GENERIC REFILLABLE ink/toner cartridges. I have a 15 year old laser printer that works just fine and I can refill the toner cartridge for a fraction of what it cost to buy a new one. THANKS LOU ROSSMAN for what you do!
You know, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers at HP are actually disgruntled with management and sales and say "You know what, they want us to slowly ream the customer a new one and take their wallet whole while telling us to build a crapier product, so why don't we double down on this so we either go under, or the public sends these corporate buttholes flying and gets us some usefull management installed?"
As a former sales rep at Staples, I used to love HP and Instant Ink. It was a great concept, and I even subscribed to Instant Ink myself for a few years. But it's far from perfect. Rendering cartridges that are full completely worthless unless you're subscribed. It'd be better for them to just take the hit and let people freely use the cartridges even once their subscription runs out. It's not like the person who cancelled won't be buying full-price ink again anyways, unless they just scrapped their HP once the ink ran out. Ink cartridges are just way too cheap for them to make for them to be THAT concerned with you using cartridges that you paid a subscription for.
The printer scanner thing wasn't as far as they wanted to go, they wanted to win this fight here and normalize it so that down the road they can mix it with the expiring ink cartridge meta in order to force people to buy ink every time they want to scan because their ink is always going to be expired because it's so rarely used.
Bought an HP computer a while back. As soon as it left warranty the charger “broke” anytime it was charging the CPU would be capped at 33% an HP employee said the only way to fix is it to buy a new charger. 30 minutes on the internet and a little faith in humanity later, I installed a program called throttlestop which does exactly what it says on the tin.
The way things are going it's really going to be a matter of finding which printer company isn't a real scumbag as opposed to reviewing them all. Because at the end of the day, their business model is focused on one single thing, and that's selling ink at ridiculously inflated prices. Same thing with Ink tank scanners - They discharge all the extra ink from cleaning into a tiny foam square at the back of the printer and then charge you for a new printer when it gets full. The way I see it, learning to hack printers is probably going to be a necessary skill.
I'm not really sure if they were the ones that started it, but my favorite example of that kind of "security" comes from Microsoft and their "security patches". Some of them do what you think they would, but if you look at the patch notes for a lot of them from back in the day, there's more feature implementation for various DRM support than actual features for you. So it's security for the other companies, that you were expected to blithely install out of your own free will. These days they are doing their best to not even allow you that.
We have a HP printer at work and after installing new cartridges. I have notice the ink dropping for no reason. The yellow was the first to go in a month and we barely used it. We have another printer with a year old cartridge and it still works.
My go-to is a Brother black & White laser printer . It was so reliable I bought a used Brother Color laser toner that has a few sprinkles on its prints. HP is the GM of printer companies. GM makes the good looking Traverse/Equinox SUV that are built so that changing a water pump costs three times as much as Ford SUV. Oh yeah, the engine chokes itself at about 60K. The wonderful GM Engineers created a breathing system that clogs easily and literal blows gaskets . Your car starts to mysteriously " burn oil ", at 60 K.
I have HP instant ink and I was totally unaware that having this would compromise my ability to use aftermarket ink cartridges. One things for sure this is going to be my last ever HP printer!
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Brother over everything. My mom bought a brother printer roughly 20 years ago. It still works like a charm. The HP fancy one she bought 5 years ago hardly gets any use as a printer. We just use it to scan and even that is a pain in the ass.
I have an HP printer. The cartridges are insanely expensive. Alternative brands of cartridges seem to be deliberately failing every time - randomly only printing parts of the pages. I have never had issues like this with other printer brands and various brands of cartridges in the last 4 decades. Never buy HP! Why is this racketeering allowed to continue?
Thank you, and now i wont allow anyone willing to listen to me, to buy hp. Cause i actually didnt know this. And their fu***n ad worked too, i was thinking i might give em a try for the next scanner/printer down the road. The very idea that a scanner wont work without ink, or that the printer will need ink from exclusively hp, that hadnt even crossed my mind, cause its just so absurd. Wow... Just wow...
This is the way. Thank you!
Yay! I’ve known this for many years and exclusively use Brother! But I am SO glad you are now well informed!
My Epson needed black ink. So i put in a new cartridge. Then when i went to print in black it wouldn't print because the colour ink timed out.
All the Brother machines we have don't do that BS
@@rossmanngroupCareful louis! HP might sue you for defamation... They are an EVIL company
Holy shit. How can someone buy anything from HP after that?
Independent computer consultant with over 800 customers, I take it a step further, not only do I not recommend HP printers, I don't recommend a single HP product to any of my customers. At the end of the day their products are purposefully bad, even if you play ball with all of their BS.
I have to concur that even if they might have some division with actually great products, their brand name has already become a huge negative point after some experience with HP printers (and also a laptop).
I am a consultant, as well and have refused to purchase any HP gear for 20 years. A server salesman said it wasn't reasonable to hold him responsible for bad HP printers. As long as the HP name is in the box, it's no good.
Ok, so what do you recommend and why?
@@SunriseLAW Brother branded printers, always the recommendation. Affordable supplies, better customer support. Most importantly the software is good, and the products work as advertised.
I honestly really liked the keyboard on one of their laptops. Felt pretty good to type on, but it was horrible for repair as the entire top of the chassis was one solid unit.
I also felt it necessary to apply a few generous layers of epoxy resin to the bottom panel to help solidify it against drops because it wobbled like a manila envelope.
I stopped using HP printers about 15 years ago because of how bitchy and finnicky they seemed to be. Now, knowing what you've put out into the world, they weren't finicky. They were engineered to extract an obscene amount of money from their customers which they clearly hated. This was also evident because I'm an HP authorized tech and on almost every repair job they would try to make me upsell vastly unnecessary plans.
@@GH0STST4RSCR34Mthey do seem to have adopted the same type of bloatware and pay us forever plans.
I remember the original ink cartridges that could be used, taken out, and left sitting around for months. When you were ready to use them again you wiped off the dried ink with a wet paper towel and they were good. Once I owed the first inkjet with the cartridges you have to puncture a plastic seal and then the cartridges dry out while in the printer I stopped using inkjet printers and I never buy HP even for lasers.
My sysadmin used to call HP "High Price"... about 15-20 years ago.
Sounds like a number of Briggs and Stratton engines I have encountered over the years. That said, I've only ever owned used HP printers that dated back at least twenty years ago. The only one in our house now was acquired because we had to clear out an office after an election. It's a laser printer, so I don't think I have to worry too much about the engineered anti-consumer crap here. Most of our printers were typically Japanese brands so Canon, Epson, Brother, Kyocera Mita...yeah. In that time period we had an an el-cheapo Lexmark, it was a supermarket special and maybe a handful of used printers, one or two from HP.
Same here, I used the first DeskJet models in the 90's and at one point not after long, realised that I use more time cleaning print heads and going to buy ink, than actually printing. That was it for ink jets for me, never have used them after that, just lasers and even now rocking with a Lexmark E321 desk laser from the beginning of the millennia, going strong and the 6000 page toner cartridges have lasted forever in my use, still using the third such cartridge. Even when the printer turns on the toner low light, I can still print hundreds of pages. Sometimes the printer is unused for months, then I just turn it on, print, turn off. Never ever one second needs to be used with doing anything for cleaning print heads, losing ink for 'cleaning' process of the printer etc. Ink jets are such a scam!
HP is really making an argument that we should:
1- Never buy their products, buy from competitors;
2- Never upgrade the equipment if it breaks, try and get it repaired by a third party;
3- Trust hackers more than the company to provide software that lets you scan without having any ink.
My mom still has her 15 or so-years old HP Multi. She scans and prints on a daily basis, never had any problem with scanning whenever there's no ink.
Louis, were that piece of actually good equipment fail, should she replace or repair it? I know you said to not give HP more income, but this one is a good piece and example of when they had quality standards, a multi that hasn't broken in 15 years of constant use.
He liked your comment but didn’t answer your question, very sad. I say try to repair. A good scout is conservation minded
@@adamyoung6797 Probably because I edited it minutes later.
Still, yes, HP isn't going to get a cent from any repairs it might need, so it's good to repair.
probably but not from HP.
If you can repair it, that's fine. I would say if you want a decent printer, think Japanese. Canon, Epson, Brother...they all seem to be fine for most people.
@@WJCTechyman - I have a Canon printer that refuses to do anything, gives a meaningless (to me) error code, gives no clue as to why it fails power up test. No more Canon for me.
Fun fact, in Brazil we had a band called "inimigos da HP" which translates to "HP enemies", it was created by some engineering students that hated HP. They were big in the 2000's.
In fairness, the band’s name referred to the calculator.
Printers companies need to face severe penalties for the consumer scam they have been carrying out
HP has been bad for a very long time in the printer realm. The reverse psychology ad campaign is to me a desperate move
They are OK in laser printers
@@dmitripogosian5084 No, apparently, from the ads I've read, many of their newer model lasers are doing the same "proprietary cartridges" thing.
For example, the specifications on Amazon Canada state, for the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw Wireless Laser Printer, "This printer is intended to work only with cartridges with original HP chips or circuitry and will block cartridges using non-HP chips or circuitry. Periodic firmware updates will maintain the effectiveness of these measures."
They are bad in laptops too
@@alfonsomurolo1811 to be fair, I use my Laptop HP since college at 2014 and still work fine even now, but the battery have been replaced twice but still work fine for me. can't really do hardcore job though since it's only i3 gen 4. I can't speak for the latest release though
Their printers are extra bad. I have the displeasure of working with them in a professional setting and holy fuck i have never had more headaches with getting a printer working than hp.
I work in school IT support. We have an ungodly amount of HP printers floating around. What's infuriating is that they more or less force you to setup an HP Smart account just to even print! Our "brilliant" food services dept. thought it would be a fantastic idea to waste thousands of dollars about a year ago to upgrade the simple, yet functional, B&W Brother laser printers the cafeteria managers have with color HP MFPs that cost over $500/each. They didn't consult with us in IT until they arrived and wanted us to install them.... Great.
I learned that simply installing the print driver isn't enough. When I went to print a test page, even though the printer was installed successfully in Windows and its status showed up as "Ready", the test page wouldn't print. I wouldn't get any error message, neither on the computer nor on the printer. It wouldn't even print its own network config page from the printer itself. We then found out that the only way to get it to print was to setup an HP Smart account and then register that printer to that account. Absolutely insane and annoying.
How does one use them on networks not connected to the internet?
@@jrstf An air-gapped computer or network is one that has no network interfaces, either wired or wireless, connected to outside networks. In short you can have LAN only network with no internet access.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)
Sounds like 99% of my customers that tell me "I'm having an issue with my printer..." and of course, it's a brand new HP printer that requires that horseshit "HP Dumb" and requires a fucking account just to use your fucking printer that you literally just purchased.
HP sells these things for less than $100.00, and the end user goes to Staples or Best Buy and trusts the non-tech wearing the blue or red shirt because they have the marketing budget and therefore think that those people can be trusted - when they can't.
So these fake-ass "techs" tell the customer to purchase those shitty $89.00 HP printers and leave them and us real techs holding the bag. Bullshit all around.
@@cooldamienthat isn't the question jrstf is asking. He asks how one can use a Combo printer from HP in an air gaped computer/network environment if it's necessary to have a HP account for setup and using it.
AFAIK you can't. When (not 'if') the internet fails, most of everything will collapse. Most of EVERYTHING.@
I have a pile of HP inkjet printers I've purchased on special deal over the years. They're a great source of stepper motors, belts, gears and other components that would have cost me more than the printers to buy. I *never* buy replacement catrtidges for these printers -- I do all my printing on a Brother Laser. Thanks for the below-cost supply of lots of cool maker-parts HP!
hp secures your balls and owns them once you sign up so please for the love of god do not ever sign up to hp ever
madly based
I have tried this and these days they come with cheap DC motors and encoder strips. Not much to scavenge.
In all fairness, HP's ad stated that you'll hate their printers LESS. That's a tacit admission that they recognize that their customers are still gonna hate their products...but maybe they'll hate them just a little bit less. That tells us everything we need to know about HP
Underrated
Had teh same thought. And if HP Smart reliably makes installs work well, yes, I will hate them less. I won't recommend them to anyone, to be sure, but if they want to self-sabotage, it will be a 10% less bad decision.
I first thought those ads are a parody. But it is kind of sad that a company that big is actually advertising the fact that they are hated by customers.
Yes. Normie customers will take the statement as HP poking fun at themselves, when really it is a carefully crafted statement they can use in court to weasel their way out of justice.
It's weird when companies switch from providing the best, to enforcing their control upon the user, to rake the money from them.
Do they seriously think there's more long term profit in that?!?!?!
@Louis Rossmann It is directly because of you and your previous videos on HP that I skipped buying another HP printer and instead bought a Brother laser printer. I cannot begin to say how happy I am with that purchase. The Brother printer just works, all my devices easily connect to it, and it is far easier to use than my previous HP. I never knew it was possible for printers to just work and not have stupid baked in like my previous HP. Thank you so much!
I used to work for HP and their founders would cry if they could only see what has happened since they passed away, having once left us their much respected "The HP Way".
Yeah, that's kinda sad. HP used to make some pretty good lab bench equipment, calculators, their inkjet printers, even though they soaked the page in ink were real work horses, along with the LaserJet 4 and 5 models I could remember seeing in various computer labs when I was in elementary school and high school. That said, I have an HP EliteDesk tower computer and still find it to be well made, yes, it's probably 13-14 years old at this point, it still does what I want it to do. I don't know whether to say that it is a true HP business desktop as the innards and BIOS/EFI interface kinda scream Compaq Deskpro to me.
This happens to a lot of large companies once the founder sells/dies. The business was built by a person who saw an actual human at the other end, and is now operated by someone who is blinded by dollar signs at the final destination instead. *stares at Disney*
The first thing to go is going to be the power supply and it's going to take the motherboard with it. Make sure you have your data backed up.
None of that Best Buy level garbage spent the money on a solid power supply that will last 20+ years.@@WJCTechyman
You don't need to find another example of that, HP is practically the prime example. Carly Fiorina was one of the all time worst perpetrators of this.@@ShanesGettingHandy
@@ShanesGettingHandy Disney’s always been like this. The only thing different is blue and red sides have switched positions on their approval and disapproval.
HP is one of the best examples of a company working diligently to put itself out of business.
It worked for IBM and Compaq PCs.
it is not business anymore... it is mafia and they are in the "social" club
The German way.
I wish them great success in that indivior!
...while being too big to fail.
My friend had this scenario. He's captain of a transport vessel going around the world. He had this HP MFC printer - don't remember the model, but it's HP... you know their modus operandi. He had a stock of many original cartridges he bought with a printer in the EU (because he's on the open sea, and it's not good to run out of ink). Then came the day that he ran out of the cartridges and the vessel at that time was in China. He sent a procurer in China to an HP store to buy original cartridges for his printer... you see where this is going... Printer wouldn't accept the cartridges because they were for another region. After calling the support (few hours later), somehow, remotely, they changed the printer to accept the cartridges, but they said that this should be done again if the cartridge's region will change again (when he will run out of original but chinese cartridges)... so the printer in the next port was thrown in garbage... Yes, HP cares about the planet...
From my own experience, I remember owning an HP printer around 2019/20. I've encountered the same issue where that if I want to just use it for scanning things, it required me to put an ink cartridge in it which I found very annoying.
I can also vaguely remember trying to get this printer to work wired as I wanted to use it offline in case the internet goes out. It worked for a while, then later on, it started requiring me to use the internet even when it was WIRED. I've been unable to resolve this issue for quite a while that eventually, I've stopped using the printer and gave it to my mother.
I don't know what issues she was dealing with but she had such a hard time with it that she ending up breaking the glass for the scanner on accident. It just shows to me that HP was meant to be hated.
My aunt bought a printer from HP a while back. It was one of those wifi deals, and she called me to help her set it up. I looked on the back of it, and there was a USB port of the back of it that had a literal sticker over it with a notice that said that you should set it up on wifi. I tried it anyway, since I was not about to install an HP app on her phone, and the PC did not even show the printer in the Device Manager. *It actually has a useless USB port on the back of it.* The next thing I tried was to hard-wire the internet to it, since it had an ethernet jack as well. The device was not found on the network while hard-wired. Only wireless through the phone app.
30 minutes later, I was setting up her new Brother printer.
When my mother was getting a new printer I actually warned her: If you get an HP, I won't help you when it stops working. They're terrible. So of course, the salesperson convinces her to get an HP...
Now when it drops from the wifi/randomly loses the wifi settings/randomly needs the drivers reinstalled and she asks why it keeps happening: Because you didn't listen to me and bought an HP, that's what they do.
Is your Mother my Dad by chance? Despite the fact that I own a successful small business (computer repair/IT), if some "salesman" says otherwise - he takes their bullshit "advice" over mine. Then he wonders why he has problem after problem.
@@Solo413I finally managed to convince my father to buy a brother laser printer.
He's very happy, and has said he wonders why he didn't do it earlier.
Now I'm the go-to consult on most electronic purchases in my family and friend group... and very amateur sysadmin, because I have to.
DO NOT get printers that connect to the internet, a printer with USB connection is always better
@@jeffsinclair3994 It's because you don't have a blue or red shirt on and the marketing budget of those glorified salesman.
@@Solo413 Maybe you should buy a Geek Squad Tshirt for the 'authoritative source' mojo. "Hold on while I put on my shirt. Now what did you want to know?"
Right on Louis. I went through this HP circle jerk for my widowed 74 year old sister-in-law. In addition, I have a HP 281 FDW Laser Jet that stopped working on the 10th month of the
12 month factory warrantee. They basically told me to get lost. After threating that I would take them to Michigan Small claims court, They finally sent me a refurbished machine. They
sent it with no power cord or cartages, along with a threating note that if I did not send the defective printer back within 10 days, they would charge my credit card full retail price. They
would not send me the replacement printer without me giving them a valid CC. What a sad corporation. I will never buy another HP product.
all the more reason to use the privacy site that Louis is always talking about, Valid credit card for them to ship, then turn it off. What are they gonna charge? nothing
If one scum corporations pulls that CC bullshit on me, I’ll give them the number, wait until they send me the tracking info for the package, the call the card provider and tell them the card was lost. They’ll reissue for free, or for a few bucks, depending on the provider.
Then wait for the arrogant asswipes to call you back kissing your ass for a valid CC number
“ go f*ck yourself” is the proper response......then sell the replacement on Craig’s list and buy someone else’s product 😈
That doesnt seem good enough. i would have proceeded with the small claims court.
That does sound like something that a german court would have a field day with. I'd actually call them and be like "Yo, thanks for the evidence, gonna report you now :)"
EPSON does that, they go as far as putting a hold on the card until they receive the printer during the exchange process.
I used to work for HP Louis. You would not believe the amount of engineering that goes into the printer DRM. No one seemed to have much of an issue with it there. Miss working with wafers but I don’t miss what those wafers were for
made to not be hated sounds to me HP is trying damage control for their printers being mean to people.🤣🤣🤣
I've worked in computers/software for almost 35 years. I have started to hate the profession. The thing that I used to love and enjoy is now used for so many negative things that are called "progress" or "safety". As musk said: Virtue signalling being good while enabling absolute evil.
Of course since fucking over the consumer is vastly more important than making even a pathetic product
@@vincei4252if you have spare time you can try to contribute to good open source softwares
You’re right, I feel a lot of guilt for letting a friend buy an HP printer. And I feel annoyance because I get called every time there is an issue with it.
You're absolutely wonderful human being,
thank you for being honest and taking care of us. I wish you and all decent Americans all the best from
Prague, Czech republic! 🇨🇿🗽🇺🇲
Ahh old the days as a college student I unfortunately had one. The "magenta" ink ran out for whatever reason, and I couldn't print my report due that afternoon that only used BLACK INK. As soon as I got more magenta ink later on, it worked fine. It was just *extremely irritating* to not be able to print my report, which required zero magenta ink in the first place. I've since switched to brother printers and never had such an issue and am much happier. Though honestly, even years later I still dread printing anything, even though HP is gone, they've scared me for life.
We use a HP in work. Almost the entirety of our 200 A3 page/day output is B&W. We always run out of a colour first. The ink & toner drums are all the same size. I believe it mixes black with the colours first. When one colour runs out it refuses to print, until we switch to "Print in Grayscale". Works a charm until the black is empty, but less rich.
@@EaterOfBaconSandwiches duly noted. I'll change our documents to all black. Thanks for the tip
@@EaterOfBaconSandwichesyou’re an mvp!
Last HP printer I had…
I became so infuriated with it that I ripped it out of the wall while it was still printing and took it straight outside to the garbage can with nothing but a towel on at 6 in the morning dropping expletives all along the way. I bet the neighbors still remember that day. #neveragain
LMFAO 😂
I pulled an Office Space on my last HP Inkjet.
It was very cathartic.
HP belongs in a landfill.
@@Molon_Labe1776 I agree in part with your sentiment. It doesn't belong in a landfill to be buried in our earth along with the 75% of consumer waste wrongfully landfilled instead of properly recycled. Especially during a time in history when the global waste stream is at the highest it's ever been and raw materials are being depleted when they often exist within the products that are landfilled. Other nations aren't burying it at all they just throw it in their waterways or set fire to it which adds to the pollution WE in America are being blamed and taxed for. If anything the device belongs back in the manufacturer's lap where they are required to responsibly dispose ie recycle the device. Mind you I am not a tree hugger I actually do board-level repairs like Louis and I grew up around a very well known recycling industry ie automotive scrap so I understand actual recycling as an industry. If the company can make billions or trillions a year and can use investor money and pay dividends while producing devices in a communist country for pennies on the dollar it sure as hell can afford to be responsible with its own item when it's no longer usable. Then the manufacturer would make more careful choices of development knowing it has the devices' end of life on it's shoulders as well. A practice with German carmakers in Europe some 20 years ago required them to design the vehicle with its end of life in mind where all components had to be marked with the proper recycling identification symbols. Upon scrappage the vehicle would be highly recyclable and with the ease of sorting identification for anyone to understand. I know it's a pipe dream and all about the money which is what killed & corrupted most legitimate recycling. The lobbying of government for the green light to turn a blind eye to its malpractice while the citizens were asleep, but it's still a pretty good idea much as Right to Repair is. I always viewed this as a home country business that could be applied to a workforce of those in the prisons, homeless, disabled etc. As taxpayers we sure spend a lot of "taxes" in various ways to support so many people we never know or see. Why can't we get them to earn it and get something out of our waste as well? We are going to be drowning in our own or others' waste in the near future with all the convenient online purchasing while we are already eating some of that waste in certain foods we consume as it is.
I tell everyone in the market for a printer: For the vast, vast majority of people, don't look any further than a simple basic Brother laser printer. Either monochrome or color, depending on your needs.
Brother is the only one left that will sell you a normal, regular printer that accepts aftermarket toner, will work any time you need it, and is completely bulletproof-reliable. Everyone else has fallen off, and it'll be a really sad day if Brother ever does too.
I can confirm this, I was so glad getting rid of that trash HP printer, I replaced it with a Brother Laser printer and I'm finally not annoyed to print stuff any more because it just works and doesn't pester me with dumb subscription models are trashy apps.
I've heard Brother have started blocking aftermarket toner
@@ellenorbjornsdottir1166 I just bought a brand new HLL3290 and it supports aftermarket toner. But maybe some of their most recent models do?
I bought a mobile inkless printer that fits in my desk drawer when not in use. It does require thermal paper but considering that I print something only once or twice a year, the 200 sheet ream of paper I purchased should last me until I die.
For small things I'me also running an older Samsung laser model.
They've been very reliable, and there's a whole maintenance book on how to dissasemble it piece by piece.
This isn't a new thing. And I know that legal issues can take years to reach a conclusion.
I myself was reasonably well off when this happened to me. About 15 years ago I'm guessing. Owned a scanner/printer by HP. Cost me £200 or more iirc.
It ran out of ink because we had stopped using it as a printer. Tried to scan and it wanted ink to be able to scan. Unplugged it, walked to bin with it, and dumped it straight into the bin. Made mental note to self never to buy anything by HP again. I've kept my vow.
I used to have an old Brother all-in-one inkjet printer that worked of more than a decade as a scanner only, without ever having to replace the empty ink cartridges, after I acquired an old used Laserjet 6P for printing purposes. The Brother Control Center app would even allow me to make direct copies from the scanner straight to the HP. And the fax function (that's how old it was) would also work fine for sending out faxes, without requiring any ink present. When I moved, I left them behind and replaced with a brand new Brother all-in-one laser printer, that has never given me any issues over the last five+ years. I would never buy or recommend any new HP product ever again.
Yeah, the Brother software plays nicely with other devices - I've experienced that too when I printed from my laptop at a friend's house who owned a Cannon printer.
I respect, appreciate, and most importantly admire your hate boner for HP because I have it too.
Hate boner. Lol. Phrase added successfully.
In the market where printers in general have bad rap, HP seriously decided to go out of their way to be on top of the list
after owning one singular HP product (a laptop), I agree wholeheartedly
The entire brand deserves everbit of it. The laptops are trash too. I bought o e last year just to stream. Literally nothing but watch movies online and it constantly freezes and shuts down.
Its an infectious hate boner. I hate HP with a passion now too.
We have an HP plotter in the office, and honestly we never tried third party ink because it has to be 101% reliable, and since it doesn't do anything more than print it doesn't have the problem of stopping working without ink. BUT what is really annoying is that cartridges have an expiring date, you can at least use them after they expire, but you keep getting a message that you are using an expired cartridge, and you loose the ability to check ink levels unless you really dig in the menus. They are 100% designed to be annoying
For decades I had HP printers, then the cartridges cost more than an epson ecotank printer. I bought a ET-3830 reluctantly and was absolutely astounded. Epson or aftermarket ink not problem. You look AT the printer from ACROSS the room and can see exactly how much ink is left! You press print and EVERY F'ING TIME it prints what you tell it to without screwing around for half an hour, smudging needed new cartridges. It was astonishing! Great picture quality and all I do is dump in picture paper and hit print. One picture from 3 different HP printers that would fail in sequence routinely took four (4) hours. Now I am the slowest factor in pulling out plain white and putting in photo paper. Even my technologically hostile wife can use it without any assistance. I have yeeted all my HP printers, one I smashed to hell with a sledge hammer the other I ran over with a tractor. I now use the epson and my hair is growing back because I am not pulling it all out and it is getting LESS grey every day! I would not let my worst enemy buy an hp printer!
I bought an Epson ET=16600 and was shocked that it could actually scan 90+ pages without a problem! HP conditioned me to have to scan like 3 to 4 pages at a time, and even the same page multiple times, all because their sheet feeds would never work properly.
My wife constantly is having reinstall the HP drivers, reboot her laptop a few times to "find" the HP printer, and is constantly raging over how horrible it is. Not to mention the cost of replacement HP ink!
Yeah, Epson, with the ecotank is amazing and I'm far less stressed over using it.
I totally hate how much money we've wasted over the years on HP...
I think the real big problem is short-sightedness on the part of the consumer. They sell these printers at a loss, and then recoup the cost with ink. I looked at buying a printer with no drm restrictions and refillable ink, but I didn't get it because it *seemed* too expensive.
Bought an HP parallel port inkjet 25 years ago, and it was a workhorse, with print cartridges that worked for hundreds of pages, and just required basic maintenance on the part of the user. Loved that printer. Then I bought a 3 in 1 HP that was reliable, but went through cartridges at a rate of knots. I'm only an occasional print user, one or two pages a week at most, so having to replace a cartridge every six months didn't seem too bad, until I did the maths and realised I was just getting 50 pages per cartridge. I replaced it with an HP Envy, and that POS worked for a month. Since then, you put a black cartridge in, print the alignment page, and then it will tell you the cartridge is empty. It's basically just a scanner now. I now use a Brother laser printer.
my star LC-10 nine needle printer still works.
It's loudness is still able to put Manowar in place.
That sounds like my story . I bought a HP Deskjet 512C then a 520C. Best printers ever . Then I went through some Canons which were ok before landing on HP 2 years ago and it has been a complete sh%thole. I am getting rid of this piece of scrap and never buying HP ever again.
I used the HP 520C in my university days. The best printers ever. I even bought a second one while doing a second degreee some time later. I used it for years with after market ink while searching for a job and for home use. Then HP became crap and I've since moved to Epson. @@crBudgetWatches
the problem is I cannot use it as scanner only without ink
@@ongtengkee9225 I was lucky (lucky?) in that I got that HP Envy, just before HP completely turned to the dark side. They still had one tiny iota of humanity at that time.
I literally spent twice the money to get a brother laser printer. It was the only option that doesn't require special drivers, would work with linux and had no ink DRM. It's actually been the best printer scanner I've ever had. My home server and router log network activity and all it does is occasionally check for firmware updates but won't even download them without your permission.
Brother toner isn't even that expensive but they don't stop you from refilling them or using third party products.
I spent stupid money on my brother color laser all in one. It was the best money i ever spent. i have purchased ink for this unit ONCE in five years. Seriously.
Also have a Brother printer/scanner running on Linux. Love it. Had some issues interacting with the phones but they fixed the app so all good.
Heck, the increased price pays for itself in ink in just a few refills
make and model ?
what i remember from brother over a decade ago is you needed to replace the drum seperately from the cartridge. where as hp both are contained. not sure how often that would need to happen though.
HP (when I was a child of the 80s) used to be a company to look up to, they would educate, gladly share information with a young student, and they would lead the way with test-instruments for an young engineer to aspire and grow with, until HP died. HP was never the same again after 2K. They became a different company, outsourced their products, service and used inferior parts. They forgot everything about what it is to be proud of their products, and now it was sell at any cost, deny anything and everything, grab as much as you can. And in the end they dressed up as sheep, trying to pretend they are still good - when they know they were already dead 20 years ago.
5 years ago I was still using HP laser made in 1997 in France. I was using LPT to USB port adaptor. 6 pages per minute, but the DPI was incredible. You could print incredibly small sharp letters. Those were the models that were made to last not the shit they are producing today.
Every great company goes to shit when the founders leave the company. At that point, they're much less worried about building it up for the future and much more worried about extracting maximum money from it. HP, Google, Dell, QualComm, etc etc etc. The only ones that don't do this are the ones owned by the customers, like REI or mutual insurance companies.
HP and companies like Xerox from the 80's through the late 90's about when i started my tech school of choice, as a dedicated laser printing device were as good as you could possibly get in terms of being repairable and reliable.
Devices that involve multi-color or inkjet/bubble jet is where the printing industry started to go very very wrong.
once pretty good, now absolutely frustratingly shit. For printers, Brother are the clear winners. won’t touch anything HP.
As a former HP employee, I could not agree more! The only thing in your statement that is not quite right is the date at which HP started to go wrong; it was 1998 (with the hiring of Carly Fiorina). I worked in several different operating divisions of HP during my 18 year tenure, and all of them were (for the most part) run with integrity and the customer's best interest at heart. All of that changed the Day Lou Platt retired and Carly took over as CEO!
I got a Brother laser printer because I needed ink for my inkjet again and remembered you mentioning their brand. Best choice I ever made. The whole printer was the same price as replacement ink for the inkjet and for $30 I get four toner cartridges that print 2,400 pages each VS MAYBE 60 pages off of $100 worth of ink. Not to mention you use like a quarter of a cartridge when the print head gets dry or dusty because the printed paper is garbage so you have to retry a bunch before cleaning the print heads which prints like an entire page worth of moist ink blots.
Printing a bar or QR code no longer takes 6 minutes, it takes 3 seconds, and I was even comfortable enough to print out a service manual for my dishwasher with it. The experience is so much better and I feel super silly for assuming that laser printers were only for commercial use despite working in the IT field. It's one of those things you get gaslit into from past experience back in the day when that WAS the case and a laser printer cost both arms and a leg so you'd either get an inkjet or go to a library to print things.
As you've said in previous videos regarding other topics, when you stick the tip in far enough that loyal customers start seeking alternative means of getting the same task done and find out you've been screwing them for years when they could have continued paying you money for an objectively worse product and remained blissfully unaware of it, you blow your cover wide open and you are never getting those customers back. That's the boat I'm in. Inkjet printers have become so dodgy that the next major inconvenience had my brain go "Hey, didn't Louis talk about this a bunch?" Lo and behold I do a quick search for a new printer instead of new ink, immediately recognize the Brother brand and see they're extremely popular, do some more research for exactly what type of printer I need, and here I am. No more inkjets. Good riddance. So thank you for that.
I retired my HP inkjet about ten years ago when it ran out of black and color ink at the same time... which would have cost me the same $69 as my Brother MFP was to buy new. Since then, I get a set of cheap $12 Amazon cartridges about once every two years, and replace them all as a set when one shows empty.
Where are you getting Brother printers for $30? They are hundreds of dollars
@@weir-t7y I believe they are referring to the toner cartridges, specifically third party aftermarket units. A set of colour toner cartridges for my Brother are $90 Canadian in aftermarket. The OEM cartridges would be similar to buying a whole new printer at $450 Canadian but I am also impressed with this printer and happy I bought it, even compared to the business grade Kyocera-Mita I had before it that had the same processor that early iMacs and the Gamecube used. I don't know what's in the Brother but it prints incredibly fast and automatic duplexing (2-sided printing) as well as Wi-Fi and Ethernet is standard. The printer also showed up automatically ready for use on my Ubuntu computers without installing drivers.
HP = Hateful Pestilence.
On a different note, 2 million soon Mr. Rossmann! Congrats in advance!
I bought a Xerox 3025 laser multi 3-4 years ago and am super pleased with it. Works with aftermarket toner (that's 1/4 the price of original), scans when there's no toner, requires no account with Xerox, no internet connection to set up; in fact you can still install it and use all the functions by pointing the add printer wizard to the driver files, if you don't want any of their software installed.
If you even order online from HP, their order cancellation is a "request to cancel" order, meaning they'll still send out the order after you requested to cancel. From that point on, if you return the item, they'll charge you $100 for a restocking fee no matter what.
0:55 Louis. As a Geek Squad agent, I can tell you with confidence that it does work. So many customers come in with problems with their HP laptop or printer and I always try and explain why it’s HP’s fault and how to fix it (and also how to get rid of hp) and they usually go on the Apple rant about how good it’s been for them for the last 15 years and so on. It definitely works as unfortunate as it is.
It's crazy how many people see companies as single entities and not as a corporation with ever-changing policies. 15 years is enough for the leadership to change drastically and to pull all sorts of anti-customer shenanigans.
I remember owning an HP laptop that had Windows Vista. It was like a double barrel shotgun aimed at my will to live. It did inspire me to buy a MacBook Pro and I haven’t looked back.
the only good geek squad member lmao
This also connects with your videos about piracy and what some streaming companies do by removing content that has been purchased. You purchase a product, but it's not fully yours as long as the manufacturer has influence on it's functionality, while the device is physically located inside your home. That's very intrusive.
Thank you for your video! Way back in 1996, I was a Structural Engineer and used HP plotters for about 10 years. The print quality was fine. The ink cost was acceptable. They had printer drivers that often did not work. I had to explain to more than one IT manager: The only way to make an HP plotter work on a network, is to directly connect the plotter to an old Windows 7 computer, then hook that PC into the network. Because HP printer drivers did not get updated for many years, that would make your think your plotter was broken. Never buy HP. I own an ink jet printer from another company that has not clogged in 2 years and prints and scans 13"x19".
I'm a power user myself but never had a printer before until I needed on during the pandemic. So glad I did my research and got a Brother multi-function device. What was surprising is that it literally worked out of the box with my work computer (which runs Linux) and my gaming PC (which runs Windows). No drivers or pesky software whatsoever. Just connected it to my router with an ethernet cable and all devices just saw it. Scanner works out of the box too which is typically a nightmare to get working on Canon and HP. I use NAPS2 on Windows for scanning and the built-in Gnome scanning app on Linux.
I am still using my Laserjet 4 printers and they work beautifully. Hp used to be a great company, sad what has happened to them.
My Laserjet 4000TN works also very well after at least 25 years.
It saw many ink pisser come and go.
I have an old Dell color laser, if I really need color but that's rarely the case.
HP LaserJet 4+ still going strong here. It has millions of copies and has been left in damp outbuildings for years - never once failed, never required special drivers and works across any grown-up OS still in use today. Pry it from my cold, dead hands HP.
This sort of thing makes me quite sad. When I was in IT part of my job was helping to maintain a bunch of HP Unix servers, and the relationship we had with the HP people, service managers, technicians, tutors, Business Continuity staff, etc., was wonderful. Before all that though my first printer was an HP 550C which, for the time, was a pretty good printer. I've had a couple of HP laptops since and was more than happy with them. Sadly as time passed I became less happy about what HP seemed to be doing, and how they did it (the high-ups, not the poor 'grunts' that I met) and I now avoid HP kit, especially printers.
I have a story about HP from the early 1990's. My company intended to buy a IR spectrometer , we had got down to two choices. The HP sale staff visited us and the arrogance they displayed was off the scale , so they were removed from the short list, leaving Varian as our choice .. the interaction with their single salesman was so cool and the software options sold it
I am so old I remember Varian selling computers.
They were OEM HP2100 machines with Varian badges on them :)
Steve Job's mother was a book keeper for Varian. @@andrewallen9993
Same here. We had a bunch of GC’s from HP. Eventually a dog get fed up with beatings and either bites you or runs away. We have never looks back and last week we upgraded out of our last HP lab piece. Happy days!
I've had the same canon pro9000 mk2 printer for like 10 years and haven't had a single problem with it other than the cost of ink. I haven't used it as much in the past few years as I did 5-10 years ago but I still print something off at least once a month. Best part the printer was practically free when I bought a DSLR and lens.
Thank you Louis, I have known of HP ink scams for decades (exorbitant prices, blocking after market inks) but in a moment of weakness I almost signed up for instant ink. Fortunately my printer was not compatible so I had a narrow escape! Never again, and the next one will be another make.
Had my fair share of companies that are very anticonsumer but treat their corporate clients well.
HP is one of those that treat both equally. Didn't took long for our fleet of Samsung printers to become a liability once HP bought them and retroactively provided HP level support.
Fujitsu at least is honest about their hostility.
I remember the halcyon days of HP. Then Carly Fiorina who, in six year, destroyed the company that had taken and, after huge problems, and turned it into the **** show that it is today. And it's only gotten worse over time. The corporate crap-fest that is HP now isn't grandfather's HP. It's not my father's HP. It's not my HP. It's not my daughter's. It will never become my grandchildren's.
I was going to comment that back in the 80s and 90s, HP was a great company to buy stuff from.
I am very aware of the legend of Carly, but I do not know more than what various tech publications and have published about her (good and bad). By all accounts the company tanked hard on her watch and bad decisions were made, like merging Compaq and HP.
In the 1990s we had an HP printer running on windows 3.11. Throughout my entire childhood it actually never ran out of ink, because it came with so damn much of it. 20 years later I got rid of my last HP all-in-one printer, because all of them have the same behavior:
1) After a few years, they will stop printing correctly and everything look shitty until you (if possible on that machine) do a factory reset. Then the pages look normal again.
2) HP printers will never scan or copy without ink.
3) HP printers will "clean" themselves until the ink is gone after a few weeks, even if you don't use them at all. So you must always disconnect them from power.
4) HP printers will annoy you with warnings when you don't buy insanely expensive original ink from HP.
This is my personal history of what I have witnessed and suffered through when using HP printers. Now I switched to another brand, which I will not mention here in order to not make it sound like advertisement. However, many IT professionals like myself know this other brand and you can ask anyone which one it is.
But for the love of god, don't make yourself suffer through an HP device. It's not worth your nerves.
In the interests of balance if they don't run cleans all the time the cartridge clogs up, and if you have an ink tank model that's basically the whole printer goosed potentially within the warranty period so it has to waste ink like a shark has to keep swimming.
Heh does that brand rhyme with "Other"? Bought an all-in-one from them a few years ago after tearing my hair out with hp printers, and haven't looked back since
I bought one several years back. I still have it. I hate that it will not print in black only without colour cartridges with ink. e.g. Run out of yellow? Better get some more because all printing functionality stops. No black printing. Won't be getting another HP. Great video - thanks!
I had an experience with a Lexmark all-in-one printer many years ago. While my friends often used services to refill their cartridges, when I had my cartridge refilled, it didn't work. The chip on it told the printer it was empty, even though it was refilled. This made me angry with Lexmark. Since I don't need to print much, I never bought a new cartridge and used printing services instead. But at least the scanner works without a cartridge, and it can even scan to a USB flash drive or memory card without being connected to a PC.
I had an hp printer. It was around the time hp started to push its “instant ink” subscription about 10 years ago. In the beginning, after installing official drivers/software it ran okay. Did everything I had it do regardless of whether I had any ink cartridge installed or not. I would get occasionally spammed with their ad to get the subscription.
After a few years, hp started to lock down the printer using its software. It would refuse to scan or print at all if it detects one of the cartridges is empty or not installed. Like not even b&w print without a color cartridge. Guess what I uninstalled hp’s software and drivers and the printer started working like it did again with windows’ built-in drivers. I lucked out hp couldn’t update the firmware to lock it down on a hardware level.
Whenever I see a HP printer in an office somewhere I pity the owners. I saw the vets practice I go to have one a bit like the one I had. A colour laser and scanner combo which I was happy with the output from but it started taking longer and longer to boot. Eventually after waiting about 5 minutes for it to boot I tried recovering it, tried all the factory reset routines, nothing. So it got thrown away. Utterly shoddy software engineering from HP.
yeah those poor poor souls😭😭😭
and for god sake think about the children😭😭😭
@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Yeah, imagine all the money wasted on HP printers that could have been spent on basically any other part of the school.
HP laser printers also:
- Say they are out of toner based on time, not content. So, in a home environment they tell you that you are out of toner months before you actually run out.
- If your laser printer survives a few years, their toner cartridge prices are raised to ridiculous prices, unless you use a 3rd party refill service.
- While old models of laser printers used to last for years and years, recent models are designed to break in 2-4 years, even with very light use.
It's not just HP. I had an Epson MFD many years ago which would not send a fax when it was out of yellow ink. It soon experienced a rapid and permanent disassembly and I have not ever purchased a MFD again.
Long ago HP use to make great laser printers. I bought an HP LaserJet Series II new in 1988 and got 17 or 18 years of use out of it before junking it when the heat roller died. I tried a couple of ink jet printers from HP and they were junk. My last HP printer was an 1102W laser which I got some years of use out of before it finally stopped feeding paper reliably. Current printer as of earlier this year is an Epson Ecotank...I don't print much any more, but so far it seems to be okay. Why anyone would put up with paying a license fee to print from a printer they already "purchased" is beyond me! Thanks Louis, your videos have been quite eye opening!
All printers I owned were HP until a certain point. Multiple inkjet/deskjet machines and one combi device. Lovely machines, never any trouble with them, worked as they should and were cheap enough. Now it's all Brother and Ricoh at the office. Well. And that super old dot matrix printer I still have and that somehow keeps trucking on, even though it's older than I am.
HP and their awful services aren't going to be an exception in the near future. Unless people stop using them, laws are made, and legislation is passed; these anti-consumer practices will slowly start to become more and more common.
Best thing to do when buying an HP Computer is to do a fresh install to get the HP out of the system.
@@STONE69_ After changed the thermal paste and HDD to SSD I installed Linux Mint on my mom's HP Laptop with no proprietary software from HP. It works like a normal working Laptop
I discovered years ago (before 2020) that HP locks the scanning when the ink is 'empty'. If I would havfe known about this being not known by most people then I would have shared this information with Louis, but I thought that this was pretty well-known.
Here in South Korea a bunch of small businesses fly under the radar leasing out modified HP printers. They modify the cartridges and attach hoses to massive ink reservoirs (like 500+ ml) that can be refilled with whatever ink you want. You can print to your hearts content and never worry about over paying for ink or running out of ink. The downside I guess is you have to be careful is getting HP firmware updates or connecting the machine to the internet because then HP might notice the machine is modified and block you from printing. But the machine is leased so if anything goes wrong they will come out and fix it or replace it with a similar model. These are everywhere from small businesses to corporate offices and home offices. It's a little expensive if you don't print often but for anyone who does print something at least once a day it's well worth it.
I'm surprised no one has started a competitor that would sell a slightly more expensive but no Bullshit printer.
Great video! I just got an Epson inkjet and blocked wan access at the router, so there won't be any surprise firmware "upgrades" ..
I don't think HP knows just how meta their ad is
Dear Louis, commenting on phone while watching you on the computer. Love your videos and you taught me a ton. HP is the literal worst I have ever dealt with. I am a visual artist and Just got a Brother brand laser printer to go with my Plustek Optipro for an animation class as well as to print my own art after years of being tortured by HP products. The scanner is amazing and plug and play worked from the default scan app but was old enough to come with an installation disc for all their add on programs for scanning books etc. Brother's took more time to set up but I didn't have to connect an account or deal with anything even close to the HP Smart app bullshit. Also the colors are way more true to the original work than any HP printer ever managed. There are good options out there. They're half way between Ouch and BOING, price point wise, but worth the investment if you would use them a lot.
Wow!🤣
I had to buy a new printer last December. I very rarely use it and purchased it mainly for my personal tax purposes. I did my homework and went with a no-subscription Epson. I have purchased a full st of inks but I am still using the original start-up inks and probably have enough for this coming tax season. I estimate that I will NEVER need to by ink again. It was relatively easy to set up and have had no problems. The model is "Workforce - WF2950.
Those are really great, but you should print some thing once a week, so the ink does not dry out. That is what causes most people problems.
I am semi-retired, but still keep my brain occupied working a couple of days a week as a part-time math and science teacher at a very small private parochial school in my town. I bought an Epson ink tank printer (ET-2760) because it's easier for me to print handouts myself instead of making time for using the school printer. The ink that came with the printer lasted me over a year of heavy use printing out math practice worksheets. As another commenter said, make sure you copy or print something once a week just to keep the nozzles from getting crusted over. I have to do that over the summer.
If I upgrade to a laser printer, I will consider the Epson models as well as the Brother models. There is a Brother laser printer in my classroom that must be at least 20 years old and it still works great. I guess I just wanted to join in with another satisfied Epson user and add my voice to Louis's about the quality and longevity of Brother printers.
There are some annoying limitations that my Epson printer has, like not allowing me to print transparencies with the model I bought. I know, someone is going to scoff and say, "Who uses transparencies anymore Grandma? It's 2023, LOL.." My answer is for you to try correcting coordinate plane graphing exercises. It is so much easier to overlay a transparency to visually scan the work rather than inspecting every single plotted point to find mistakes. I use an inexpensive visualizer to for projecting images.
If you leave for months it may dry out. The print head cleanings will consume ink. Only laser printers can sit around for years and work, but color gets expensive and bad with those.
@@compaqdeskpro5770 I am aware of that and do print a page periodically to keep the heads working properly. I will say that these machines have improved over the years, including the print nozzles.
Long time ago I found LaserJet 5 in a school's basement forgotten. Turned it on - 1,5 mln pages printed, the status page wrote.
Problems? Clean dust, wash plastics, dust tray, clean rolers. 👌 later did nothing, printed another thousands of pages with random paperjams but as beginning said - rubber rollers were not changed.
3 years ago bought inktank printer. Problems: paper jam, print head clogging and later was returned under waranty changing to another next release model. Yes, the sencond was also returned under warranty due to local laws requiring to maitain another 2 y after receiving a new one (eternal waranty). Si didn't bother to install the third one as it requires too much care compared to how many pages i got
LaserJet5 was made to last universe. So apparently HP has knowledge how not to make e-waste
I totally agree, my granddad bought an HP printer recently and it was nothing but pain. In the end he returned it and bought a different one. He always had an HP printer, so great job in loosing another customer HP, great service.
The last HP printer-scanner combo I bought (also my current) printer-scanner combo) is a... HP Deskjet F2200. It can use 3rd party cart replacements and no such scan lock out. I would 100% tell people I know to avoid modern HP inkjet printers and go with an older one like I have. And to AVOID buying official replacement HP ink carts because they're barely filled (and never have the amount of ink in it you paid for.)
What upsets me is the fact that my HP M476NW is such a good bit of kit - lasted me for 8 years, tens of thousands of documents and A4 pictures, and yet not a single issue. Third-party cartridges work great. Software is good enough. It's just so sad to see companies going down the shithole for no reason other than petty profit.
I've had good luck with my current and last HP. I guess the last one lasted 10 years and I didn't replace it because it was broken, but because I wanted a new one that would connect via wifi. I think my new model is the MFP M227fdw. It's been very reliable for the couple of years I have had it. I don't really mind being forced to pay for their toner. I just want it to work. So many of my printers from years ago (lexmark, other brands) just didn't work. And I freaking hate inkjets now because of so many problems with them. Maybe if I had to deal with HP's customer service I'd hate them, but thankfully I haven't had to so far.
Classic HPs were pretty good. Loved that old 2100. You could tell it was running out of toner when the prints got lighter. When you got sick of gray prints, you'd put in a new toner and have perfect prints again without ever missing a beat. What a novelty! These days printers just turn off on a counter, and every company seems to do this. So much for "green tech," because it's beyond wasteful to throw out what's working fine. (Also, all toners should be EASILY refillable. It's corruption that they are designed otherwise.)
I wouldn't know the first thing about how solid toner even could be refilled but all inkjet ink cartridges should be easily refillable
Not every company. Epson EcoTanks warn you (for your own protection) to check the levels on the front to not run it dry, but resetting is easy. Buy it once, then it just works. Put ink in it every year or two. When I have nothing to print, I print "a" page once a week (or ten days) to keep everything flowing. Easy peasy. A free HP printer would be thrown away. I would not give it to anyone, not even an enemy.
I still have a very old HP laser MFC, from around 2006/2007, it's a colour laser printer and i can get a whole set of toners for around 40€, which last 3000+ prints. It doesn't use any special HP Smart app, just bog standard old drivers with a separate scanning application.
I...JUST...WORKS.
I can't stress it enough, the old HP printers from the early 2000's are still good, especially the laser ones. I'll keep using this bad boy until it gives out its last breath and then i'll do my best to fix it up, because i love this old thing. Never going to a new HP printer, ever...
We had one at work, brand new model, colour laser MFC, you couldn't get fake toners for it and original ones were expensive. The whole set cost around 450€ before tax...not only that, the same issue happened, we mostly used BW printing, yet we ran out of cyan first,....for whatever reason...and the thing wouldn't do ANYTHING because it was out of Cyan...
We tossed it out and bought a 2 year old Brother printer...best decision we've ever made. Never going back
Have been using HP for years. I spent over two hours total in to different customer support calls because of a defective cartridge which after the first hour agreed to replace. About a week later I received the cartridge which said instant Ink on it. I installed it and it would not print so my second call began. I was flat out told that I had to enroll in their scam instant inc program for my printer to work as it would not work with the cartridge they sent me because the printer is programmed not to work.I told them I do not print often enough to warrant a subscription. They didn’t care. Enroll if you want to print😮I now own a different printer instead of being held as a hostage. Liberation🎉
I still dream of a printer that just plugs in and prints stuff without 4 hours of troubleshooting every time I want to use it.
Yeah, the firmware makes sure to get shittier every year even when you don't use the printer, so that you are forced to buy a new one or be annoyed ever more so. I did what they wanted me to do - I bought a new printer. From Brother.
A 5 year old brother laser printer usually does that.
I bought the Brother HL-L2350DW last year. 5 minute setup and it always just works. No matter if I use my phone or PC, USB or Wifi.
Your dream is HP's nightmare.
My family has a Lexmark printer and I've rage at that thing before. Whenever (If ever) I'm in the market for a new printer Brother is getting my money
I use an Epson ecotank. Best decision ever. Bought literally two to three eyears ago and still haven't needed to replace the ink. The ink doesn't dry like it does in cartridges, and the tanks hold so much. Massive savings compared to when I was with HP.
The ecotank units suffer from dried out print heads as well if you don't print regularly. At work we bought a $1000 Epson model that had 11x17 paper capability and the cyan stopped printing and no amount of maintenance cycles would correct it. The black also stopped printing about 2 years later even though we used black all the time. Trying to unclog the cyan print head with syringe, rubber tube, and alcohol did not work. We needed an 11x17 capable printer the same day the black stopped working and unfortunately, HP was the only brand in stock locally so we went with it.
When I was new to being responsible for my tech, my brother's last advice was to avoid HP. That was 15 years ago. I guess they're cheap, so when you're on a budget, everyone tells you to get something HP. My experience has been to aim for the brand/product that's one step above the lowest range. At least that class tends to have actual function, whereas the bottom rung is pure junk.
Was an HP fanboy for years. Computers, calculators (HP48GX got me through my BSEE), and printers. NEVER again. Including the HP48GX. Bought a Brother color laser about 4 years ago. No regrets!
I used to love HP printers back in the 90s. Man, those LJ4s were tanks.
I used to live by HP all in one equipment untill I had one that quit scanning and faxing because I needed to spend $450 in print heads for a $150 printer.... Now I went back an OkiData laser printer and a Brother all in one.
I have one HP printer that I love. Designjet 500plus. It is like 15 years old, you may spot one somewhere on the streets like I did. Works great on Linux and you could probably run in on old versions of WindOS if you are lucky to find drivers. I spent hours trying to make it work on WindOS10, it is just like some libraries are missing or something...
Did you try emulating an old WindOS installation? You could use the printer that way in Win10 if you can't solve the drivers issue. You need a Virtual Machine with ports pass-through. I think VMWare Desktop Player free allows that. So the VM "sees" the printer when you "capture" the device on it.
I used to work at HP building computers and servers at their Houston location.
All the main components were proprietary. Motherboard, power supplies, CD ROM etc. This means that if something broke you could only use HP components to fix it.
This was a good 20 years ago. Maybe things have changed since then, but I seriously doubt that..
To be fair most major pc manufactures did the same thing back then. Most still do with slim pc's etc.
I bought an HP printer a few months ago. The copy function was disabled because my printer wasn't connected to the Internet. I thought it was just an issue with setup or something so I called customer support and it ended up taking 2 hours to connect it to my computer. There was an included USB cable and the customer service rep told me that that USB cable is only for setup and that the USB port does not work for anything else. I asked the service rep what I would need to do if I changed the computer it was connected to. He said I must call HP support to set it up if I want to print from a different computer. Absolutely ridiculous. The rep also said that everything would be easier if I subscribed to HP+
I have a view HP printers at work.
At our office we mostly print text in black and white but it prompts us to replace the CMYK color cartridge to print in black and white.😂
I thought the scam with HP printers was the obscene cost of ink jet cartridges when the printers go on sale for like $20 along with how fast they dry up if you're not actively using them. A few years ago I was stuck getting an HP scanner and printer and almost smashed the thing when it obsessed with going online and installing some stupid software in order to function. Luckily I got it to work under Linux with the scanner. My good printer was in storage at the time and I had no real options. My good printer, a Canon laser printer (3 in 1), the demo toner cartridges just ran out last month, and it was all the colored ones. The free toner that came with the printer lasted over 2 years and the black one is still working, but I bought a new one 2 years ago just in case. You would never have a HP printer function with the same inkjet after 2 years. It also functions in black and white without color toner, something that used to be rare for HP, but likely non existent now. So in comparison a laser printer that costed $300 costs $60 to replace the CMYK (all 4) collection and will last a long time, even if not used. If not on sale HP will cost around $100 and cost $60 color and $50-$60 for black. I have no idea how long they last as I never used up a whole inkjet as they always dry up. That's why I stopped using HP and really thought it was inkjet for a long time. Seems now they're really about being the #1 hated company, so that ad makes sense, lol.
I remember the days when Epson was the bad guy, they were the first to start adding chips and counters to their cartridges... HP, obviously, surpassed their inspiration over time... If you really, really need a printer, get a color laser from Brother and you won't be a victim of vendor lock-in...
HP printers used to be good back in the '80s. I had their original LaserJet and LaserJet 2 printers when they were a good company. But more recently I have switched over to brother color Laser Printers and they have been fantastic. Very little maintenance required and they always work.
my LaserJet 5L is still going strong. and I hope it will keep on as I don't know what to buy as a replacement
@@kber6288 I'm extremely happy with my Brother MFC-L8900CDW color laser, scanner fax that I bought in 2018 for $499. I'm STILL on the starter pack of toner carts! I've printed thousands of pages since I bought it. It just runs and runs with no complaint.
You are right ! Even tiring to hook up an HP printer to a computer is a nightmare. Tried to help a friend hook a new printer to an older computer forget about it ! Throw it in the trash and by a different one ? He bought to be wireless for the while family only got it to hook up to the USB and was useless ???
BEFORE you buy a printer, shop around to see if you can get GENERIC REFILLABLE ink/toner cartridges. I have a 15 year old laser printer that works just fine and I can refill the toner cartridge for a fraction of what it cost to buy a new one. THANKS LOU ROSSMAN for what you do!
You know, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers at HP are actually disgruntled with management and sales and say "You know what, they want us to slowly ream the customer a new one and take their wallet whole while telling us to build a crapier product, so why don't we double down on this so we either go under, or the public sends these corporate buttholes flying and gets us some usefull management installed?"
As a former sales rep at Staples, I used to love HP and Instant Ink. It was a great concept, and I even subscribed to Instant Ink myself for a few years.
But it's far from perfect. Rendering cartridges that are full completely worthless unless you're subscribed. It'd be better for them to just take the hit and let people freely use the cartridges even once their subscription runs out. It's not like the person who cancelled won't be buying full-price ink again anyways, unless they just scrapped their HP once the ink ran out. Ink cartridges are just way too cheap for them to make for them to be THAT concerned with you using cartridges that you paid a subscription for.
The printer scanner thing wasn't as far as they wanted to go, they wanted to win this fight here and normalize it so that down the road they can mix it with the expiring ink cartridge meta in order to force people to buy ink every time they want to scan because their ink is always going to be expired because it's so rarely used.
That is just ridiculous!
Thanks for sharing info about this scam company!
Bought an HP computer a while back. As soon as it left warranty the charger “broke” anytime it was charging the CPU would be capped at 33% an HP employee said the only way to fix is it to buy a new charger.
30 minutes on the internet and a little faith in humanity later, I installed a program called throttlestop which does exactly what it says on the tin.
The way things are going it's really going to be a matter of finding which printer company isn't a real scumbag as opposed to reviewing them all.
Because at the end of the day, their business model is focused on one single thing, and that's selling ink at ridiculously inflated prices.
Same thing with Ink tank scanners - They discharge all the extra ink from cleaning into a tiny foam square at the back of the printer and then charge you for a new printer when it gets full.
The way I see it, learning to hack printers is probably going to be a necessary skill.
I'm not really sure if they were the ones that started it, but my favorite example of that kind of "security" comes from Microsoft and their "security patches".
Some of them do what you think they would, but if you look at the patch notes for a lot of them from back in the day, there's more feature implementation for various DRM support than actual features for you.
So it's security for the other companies, that you were expected to blithely install out of your own free will. These days they are doing their best to not even allow you that.
Brother are under-rated and under-appreciated.
Brother are the official printer of the Fediverse
We have a HP printer at work and after installing new cartridges. I have notice the ink dropping for no reason. The yellow was the first to go in a month and we barely used it. We have another printer with a year old cartridge and it still works.
My go-to is a Brother black & White laser printer . It was so reliable I bought a used Brother Color laser toner that has a few sprinkles on its prints. HP is the GM of printer companies. GM makes the good looking Traverse/Equinox SUV that are built so that changing a water pump costs three times as much as Ford SUV. Oh yeah, the engine chokes itself at about 60K. The wonderful GM Engineers created a breathing system that clogs easily and literal blows gaskets . Your car starts to mysteriously " burn oil ", at 60 K.
I have HP instant ink and I was totally unaware that having this would compromise my ability to use aftermarket ink cartridges. One things for sure this is going to be my last ever HP printer!
sell it right away
HP = Horrible Product
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Brother over everything.
My mom bought a brother printer roughly 20 years ago. It still works like a charm. The HP fancy one she bought 5 years ago hardly gets any use as a printer. We just use it to scan and even that is a pain in the ass.
I have an HP printer. The cartridges are insanely expensive. Alternative brands of cartridges seem to be deliberately failing every time - randomly only printing parts of the pages. I have never had issues like this with other printer brands and various brands of cartridges in the last 4 decades. Never buy HP! Why is this racketeering allowed to continue?