this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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So my mother recently bought an ET-2800, By HP we had an HP printer before and we got a new one because the old one would not work with my sister's Windows 11 Laptop. So I had to set it up for my mother, the manual said you can use it without the app. But there was no way to physically do that. Anyway, I downloaded the app on my phone (android) and the app would not connect to the printer. So I used my mother's iPhone and it would connect. The setup process was stupid proof. And after I got it all full of ink, it was very painless. However, this is where the H in HP should stand for HELL. Because a few months go by and my sister and my mother need some papers printed. No problem. I thought to myself, so my sister tried to print it wirelessly. Couldn't find the printer, I said ok maybe it's a dumb driver, USB didn't work either. I asked my sister to send it to me, so I can print it on my w540 running rocky 9. Rocky picked up that I needed drivers and installed them. Wireless didn't work but wired showed up, I thought sweet I can just print the paper and get back to what I was doing. However, when I clicked print, the printer would grab the paper and run it though but not put ink on the paper. My mother asks me to forward the email to her to try to print it on her phone. I send it, and it prints, and the paper come out how it should with ink and the paper is finally printed.

After this experience with this printer, it makes me rather aggravated at this purchase, and no longer want to buy from HP. I have looked at Brother printers and there are no Proprietary ink cartage, and or laser printers. I purely wanted to talk about my experience with HP printers and would like to know what others have for a printer for recommendations, for when eventually HP kills support and makes it a paper weight, I've read many negative experiences with HP printer, specially from Lois Ross man and their anti consumer products.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It was fine before Carly Fiorina took over and brought in the 1980s MBA style of management (the same that killed or nearly killed quit a lot of household names).

Think of it as the first wave of enshittification, back in the 00s.

Ever since then, HP consumer-grade products have generally been pretty bad, especially (but not only) their printers.

Interestingly, the business-grade stuff was still pretty decent, but I'm not up to date on whether that is still the case.

[–] RanchOnPancakes@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. Ever since we left behind parallel ports and drivers that could fit on a single floppy.

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[–] fubo@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

The HP LaserJet 4MP was pretty decent, but that came out in 1993.

[–] ccunix@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Laserjets up until generation 5 were amazing. There are laserjet 4s still trucking away churning out pages. I personally had a LaserJet 4MP that I sold when I got married due to its extremely low wife acceptance factor (it was huge, loud and ugly. We both regret that decision because 20 years later it would probably still be working.

Basically, what Brother lasers are now is what HP laserjets used to be up until ~2004. We can debate the exact switchover year ad nauseum, but you get the idea.

[–] CobraChicken@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

When you said 20 years later I genuinely thought you meant like early 90s

On a related note my Brother 2270DW has been working flawlessly since 2012. It survived two moves just fine. Toners are cheap and widely available

I have it hooked up to my wifi and any new pc or mac connected to the wifi can print effortlessly

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Their old dumb monochrome laser printers were great. I still have one

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[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

HP's inkjets have always been cantankerous, but the business printers they made in the late 90s were tanks.

[–] gearheart@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah it's bad .... Now many hp printers require Internet connectivity and an active subscription for you to be allowed to use the ink you purchased.

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[–] Aloha_Alaska@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well yeah, I mean not always but for probably 20 years their laser printers have been terrible, and their inkjets have been not consumer friendly for even longer than that.

For instance, I once had an HP color laser printer that was designed in a way that toner dust would build up on the prism and mirror, causing streaks and splotches to be printed on the page. The official recommendation was to buy a new printer, and the local repair shop said is it even though it’s a known issue and they’re capable of fixing it, getting it apart and putting all the pieces back together is such a time consuming hassle that it would be just as cheap to buy a new one. A $300 color laser printer. If I did it successfully, I would need to do it again in a year or two anyway. I now have a Brother; it’s black and white only but has been rock solid.

I did see on The Other Site a discussion from a year or two ago that Brother isn’t so great anymore, but the consensus seemed to be that they’re still better than anything other than maybe those Epson printers with the ink reservoirs.

I remember that my high school, college, and first couple of jobs had amazing HP laser printers, but sadly those days are gone and the company is a shell of what it used to be. I would not buy an HP printer at this point.

Sorry for your suffering but welcome to the club.

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[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once upon a time, Hewlet Packard (HP) made great kit. Unfortunately that hasn't been true for at least the last 15 years. Nowadays everything they make, that I've looked at, seems to be utter trash. Brother is currently a good brand for printers if your in the market for one though.

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[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We have bought a HP printer about maybe 7-8 years ago(don't know the model) and it just works. No annoying drivers, no "can't do shit because of low ink" and you can even use non HP ink cartridges. The only problem is, that sometimes the scanner doesn't work properly so that the document is literally unreadable. After cleaning the scanner glass 7 times it may work. Luckyly this doesn't happens very often.

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[–] plantedworld@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I worked for HP for a while in college. HP Rep. It paid like 14 an hour when minimum wage was 6 and I just got to stand around in best buy or office max, etc, selling printers and training staff on features. It was retail but without all the bullshit like cleaning the bathrooms or running the register or needing to hit sales targets, etc. It was a real kushy job.

About halfway through my time there HP started pushing ePrint, or other cloud features, and ink subscriptions, etc. That was about the time I think their quality really started to nosedive. Printers have always been printers (brother notwithstanding, but now it's starting to slip with inclusion of more invasive drm and ink subscriptions) but before the onset of cloud based stuff, it seemed, I dunno, better? Not great, but better

[–] CyberTaco@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The HP LaserJet 4 series was their last good printers. They were discontinued in 1995, and everything from them has been utter shit since. You mentioned you were looking at Brother printers - go for it, they make good printers.

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[–] NENathaniel@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Anyone have printer brand recommendations?

I have a Brother and like it but, is that he only decent option?

[–] ji88aja88a@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an Epson ecotank.. you pay upfront for the printer and on the flipside the ink is about $15AUD per bottle..but that will get you 5000 sheets.

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[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an Epson EcoTank printer. It's a colour inkjet printer but it came with these ginormous bottles of ink that you pour into a tank. I've printed thousands of pages for three years and I still have around a quarter of the included ink left.

I didn't need to install any drivers on Linux or Windows, just adding the printer was enough. It connects to your WiFi network and works as expected. My only complaint is that after not using it for a few weeks, you'll need to run the "clean print head" utility on the printer and might need to realign the print heads. But other than that, it's great. Photo quality is pretty meh though.

[–] Kerrangutan@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago

I have two EcoTank printers, one is set up with normal ink and the other one gets used by my partner for sublimation printing for her crafting projects, they're absolutely the next best thing to a laser printer.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes.

Back when they were Hewlett-Packard, maybe not, but HP have basically always been shit.

[–] anothermember@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Never bought a good printer since 2003. In 2003 I remember you could get a good printer for a reasonable price with reasonably priced cartridges. Ever since then printer technology doesn't seem to have improved but they all seem to have become much worse quality and incredibly scammy.

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[–] danielfgom@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yup all HP printers are like this now. But so are all the others. I bought a Canon because it said it had support for Linux but about a month later they retracted support for Linux and it wouldn't print properly anymore. Only black and white.

So I've had to install windows 10 in a VM just so I can print in colour 😡

I think ALL the printers are now a scam. Like shaver cartridges.

In future I'd rather buy a dedicated scanner and use an external service for printing.

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[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

LaserJet 4 was a tank. Everything since has been various flavours of mediocre. Buy Brother.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

They went to shit when they switched to a massive, bloated shitty software and driver package instead of just drivers. Wish I could remember what year that was, but it was like a 500MB download. I think remember I saw the package was over 1GB at one point. To run a f’n printer. And of course it was shitty. Connection problems, wouldn’t print when you sent the job, shitloads of useless tools that constantly wanted you to buy or subscribe to printer ink sales, etc. They made the driver harder and harder to find and pushed their bloatware.

Now you can find just the driver, 81MB or so, but they’re fucking with you over printer ink by trying to prevent you from refilling with 3rd party ink, using 3rd party cartridges, making it so you can’t print just black if you’re out of other colors, etc.

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[–] super_user_do@feddit.it 6 points 1 year ago

I have an HP Printer and it sucks. It deliberately decided not to print anymore if I don't pay them 3,99€ a month

[–] Slovene@feddit.nl 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] sagrotan@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I remember a needle printer from my work in the early 90s that worked endlessly. I think it was from the early 70s.

[–] ZzyzxRoad@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have the same problem with mine. It literally never recognizes the printer wirelessly unless I turn it off and on, unplug, push the wifi button, and cancel and restart the print at least a few times.

I also found out that I'm being charged by the number of pages I print. When I signed up, I was under the impression that I would be charged for the printer ink. Apparently it's $4/month for 20 pages or some shit like that and then $1 per every ten pages after that? How the fuck can they charge per page? Aren't the ink cartridges what run out and need to be repurchased? But even though I get charged every month automatically, whether I use the pages or not, I don't get sent new ink until I request it. Or buy it? And I magically lost some discount I was supposed to get after purchasing through Amazon.

The whole thing has been a shit show. Plus the printer itself is the flimsiest piece of thin plastic that weighs nothing. I hope the FTC sues the shit out of them.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Why would you give them your bank information? Do they send an attendant to assist for every print?

Buy a printer, buy ink, buy paper. No subscription about it.

[–] kitsuneofinari@yiffit.net 5 points 1 year ago

HP inkjets are horrendous. I absolutely refuse to buy them because they are absolute junk. They have always worked, and I could connect to them with no problems with Android atleast. Windows finally could connect once I had assigned it a permanent local IP through the router. Though Linux had problems...

But the build quality of HP inkjets are absolute horrendous and I probably can only get 6 months out of them and probably spent more on ink cartridges in a year before the stupid printers suffer a complete hardware failure and need to be replaced.

The HP mfp 183fw colour LaserJet printer however... It is my second forray into HP laserjets since my dad's original black and white Hewlett Packard LaserJet beast from the early 90's.

But I feel like I got incredibly lucky after doing some research into it (plus only thing I could get locally at the time since I needed a new printer immediately.) It cost more than any of the inkjets I have owned in the past. The toner carts definitely cost more... But it is still going strong a year and a half after purchasing it and I have only had to replace the black toner cart only a week or two ago. Have not had to replace the colour toner carts yet. It also just works on Linux which I am happy about.

Like I said, I may have just gotten incredibly lucky though, I mean getting a year and a half out of it is still more than I expected and the money I saved because toner lasts much longer than ink.

When and if this printer gives up, I will probably get an Epson laserjet.

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