HP insists you must use their cloud printing service, covers USB port with sticker
HP insists you must use their cloud printing service, covers USB port with sticker
HP tech here. Stay FAR away from any of their consumer-grade devices. They're cheap, poorly built, and difficult for even HP techs to work on. Save your money and get something with better build quality.
Their business-class devices are okay, because most of those actually have decent build quality and are easily repaired. But stay away from their cheap devices, especially their printers (obviously).
We are also an HP/HPE shop.
Like you said. Not the cheap shit. And definitely not the cheap printer shit!
ProDesk or EliteDesk (maybe even used?)Thanks for this, good to know. I’ve had nothing but problems with my HP and had many a day of wanting to schwing it out the window.
Any particular brand out there that’s still known for decent build quality? I feel wary of them all now.
Get an older version of the HP printers if you like that brand. I've had Officejets 6900 and 7500 and 8500 series. Cartridges still widely available and the printers accept mortification for external tanks. I only have the 7500 now in the wide format and it's still going strong. Easy to maintain too. I do have a laser printer as well which I only use for b/w printing. Have had experience with fixing other brands in the past and by far the Brother is the most user friendly I guess. Epsons are okay and easy to find parts for.
Brother.
The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.
Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.
Hewlett-Packard is just an unhinged ad campaign for Brother.
I would hate and love if this were true.
🤣
I will never buy any HP product, just out of principle. Every single of their printers I've ever owned had broken down in elaborate ways no one understands, and what only makes it worse, is that the ink costs more than the actual hardware. Obviously it's because they're using only the most premium and exotic materials to make it.
What really nailed the coffin for the final time was my printer refusing to accept the black cartridge, claiming it was not a legitimate one, so it locked down the whole printer into some sort of self-repair loop that it never exited
I have never bought a new, consumer HP printer. Ancient business HP printers though, I have on several occasions. Those are pretty good actually, they work when you need them to, (third party) toners are plentiful, and they're cheap. Much better value than a new one.
You don't fuck with enterprise consumers. They will drop bank on anything that will just consistently work. Regular people don't do that, so you gotta find a new way to rob them
Swore off HP many years ago when my laptop began overheating in minutes. Opened it up, looked at the video card heatsink and duct and saw LIGHT in between. Ended up bending the duct ever so slightly and ground a pre1983 penny down to act as a heatsink and fill the gap. Yeah, a penny filled the gap. This after I owned a 1990s desktop where they cooled the processor by using a case fan and plastic ducts to remove the heat. No heatsink whatsoever. They will cut every corner they can.
When I need to sign something that isn't DocuSign. Which, is more often than I'd like.
I just scanned my signature and stamp it as a Jpg, then flatten the PDF and save as a new file. "I printed, signed, and scanned it again, sure..."
The first issue was buying a cheap printer.
The second issue was buying cheap HP printer.Buy brother or do your research. If it says on some page "No USB only wireless" just don't buy it ffs!
Brother is no longer allowing 3rd party ink and toner too so do your research there as well.
Yes and no.
Allowed? Probably no 1st party vendor allows/wants it.
Can do? Yeah sure.
Will I get warranty for violating some kind of EULA (or some other equivalent) for using 3rd Party? Probably not.As an IT helpdesk we usually just tell them to get 1st party as the toner is not that expensive for that volume and just eat it. At least they have warranty for the 11k of printed papers.
Fuck HP.
This post was brought to you by the Brother Laser Printer gang.
Hell yeah, brother
Bought a laser printer in early 2020 and am still on my first toner cartridge lol
I guess I'm not understanding all the comments saying "why is anyone buying printers anymore? What do you need to print at home? Just buy a Brother or don't buy one at all."
Do you really need to understand why someone wants or needs a printer? Do people need to be explaining their purchases so we can all decide if they deserve to get scammed by HP or not? It doesn't matter why they bought it, whether it's a want or a need, whether it's the "right" brand, etc. They still don't deserve to get scammed out of their money by some bullshit company that can brick their device whenever they feel like. If you pay for something, it should belong to you. Period.
Best trick in the book is to download the Windows 7 version of the drivers or software package as it is all prior to this cloud BS. Install that in your windows 10 or 11 and it will all work as intended.
Best trick is to not buy HP.
Obviously I meant to whom owns one though...
Best trick then it to trash it and buy a new printer. Done keep on sending them money for ink.
I just learned how to manually install PCL5 from the "Professionals ONLY!" Section of their driver download page.
He's using a Mac, they can't run Windows 7 drivers.
Terrible printer. Among the worst purchases I've ever made. Stunningly anti-customer design choices. I will never, ever buy another HP anything.
HP is doomed, sadly. All our parents who slaved and sweated blood to build their wonderful tech, wasted, their lives pointlessly ruined. All thanks to the horrible directors and management of HP. If you know anybody who works for HP today, make sure to victimise, ostracise, belittle, denigrade and castigate and bully their entire families into submission. No mercy for these fuckers and destroyers of all that is decent.
As if any other conglomerate is any better. Just don't buy the cheap bs and do your research before buying shit... >_>
Can someone explain why there's a cloud printing service involved here at all? We've been able to print over WiFi for a decade now.
Data collection is the current in trend for most tech companies. They cant scrape any data if you don't download their spyware app on your phone or use their cloud servers. Any little scrap of data they can gather from you they will sell to anyone and everyone.
Companies been after the new gold for ages. Any excuse to mine your data.
That way they can lock you in making it difficult to transition. All those icloud users locked into the Apple ecosystem. They make it easy and then you are stuck.
Be careful with your data.
Because they want you to subscribe to their ink cartridge auto-ship service that will send you a new one and charge your credit card any time one is empty, clogged, or just because they feel like it.
I think it is just monthly, whether you printed or not
The only use I've found for cloud printing is how it would identify all the printers on the uni network and allow me to print on them with no hassle compared to manually adding the printer with the correct driver and IP.
My use case is for printing things at home while I am not at home.
I haven't really had a need to do it since I've been out of school but I used my all in one printer a lot while I was in school. I don't print at home anymore because the ink/nozzles are all fucky, but I do plan on replacing it because it's annoying having to go to the library for that
You could remote desktop in for free and do the same thing.
My own printing is so rare that the most cost effective option is to just go to Staples the rare times I do need to print something. I don't think I've spent more than $5 in the last few years.
Just stop buying their product. Issue fixed !
If only life were that simple. Whose laptops am I going to buy?
Dell: Marks up replacement SSD prices by 10x (including the predatory behaviour of embedding QR codes to these in the bios to be shown in error states)
Apple: ...
Lenovo: History of installing literal spyware
Microsoft: Bad products
HP are on the top of my shitlist. Every day I hear a new reason to keep them there!
Symbols on sticker from top to bottom:
- WiFi
- no USB
- peel here
Sounds more like "This printer has WiFi, no need for USB, peel here otherwise".
But still stay away from HP consumer shit, I wouldn't even let it connect over USB.
I had a customer come in on Friday because they couldn't get their brand new printer to work. When I pulled the sticker off a new hp hater was born.
Man, this isnt just evil, that's stupid and lazy evil
Can't wait for either open source community, or the pirate community, for starting to jailbreak HP printers. To be honest, if I was more savvy with tech, I'd probably start taking that as a fun little challenging hobby.
The open source community would tell you to get an ancient LaserJet 4 (or, more likely at this point, a Brother printer) instead.
Aside from that, there's a worrying increasing trend in the amount of stuff that ought to be getting jailbroken, but isn't for some reason. Smart TVs, for example. I think that the community of people with the skills and willingness to do that sort of thing is too small, and is getting spread too thin to keep up with the fire hose of Tivoized products coming out these days.
If you want a solution for this nonsense, call your congressman and ask for consumer protection legislation, 'cause I don't think the hackers are going to be able to save us from the prevailing trend of the entire consumer electronics industry.
There printers more than 2 decades now. There's no printers jailbreak trend whatsoever. What makes you think it can happen in the future?
Printers are almost useless these days. I mean who uses a printers today anyway? Everywhere and everyone, including government accepting mail today. If I need to print something which happens once a year at best I either go to a photo store or print at work
I mean the sticker has a peel up icon on the corner. They're obviously not trying to hide this, they're just pushing the user towards wifi.
Also a custom firmware bound by serial number ranges would be even cheaper than the sticker. Logic doesn't hold up
You are absolutely correct.
It's not very expensive not to populate the USB receptacle on the the PCB.
Sealing the hole in the case would be easy. You could have an removable insert in the case's injection mold so there's the option not to have the hole.
If they thought two case parts were too logistically complicated, or they already made the mold and don't want to mill it out to make space for the insert, they could insert plastic plugs with permanent snaps.
If they really didn't care, they could even just put they sticker over the hole in front of an unpopulated port.
Yeah, but we can't be angry about that.
They're all as bad. Brother just sent an update to my laser jet and now third part cartridges won't work.
Apparently if you try to use the USB port it’ll stop after having printed 20 or so pages, telling you you need to setup WiFi and install their bloatware app.
What happens if you factory reset the printer?
When HP shows you who they are, believe them.
HP has such a storied legacy in electronics and computers .. I still use my old 48GX .. It's so sad to see this.
I've never seen a good HP product in my entire life. Really makes me wonder why people still buy it.
They stopped making them in the 90s and early 2000s when they quit making calculators. They made the absolute best RPN calculators that have ever been made, but shut down their calculator division. I prefer RPN, but I guess TI has a stranglehold on the market selling calculators without innovation for years and years. Ah well.
From what I remember it was when Carly Fiorina took the helm as CEO that the company turned from Quality-Driven to Marketing-Driven.
After she left it just kept being managed in 90s' MBA style, just like a lot of companies of the time many of which eventually went bust or massivelly shrank (GE is a great example).
Well back in 90 the dot matrix printer my family had was an awesome workhorse of a printer. WE got rid of it not because it broke but they stopped making new drivers it around windows 95.
Okidata drivers work for it forever.
I dont know the technical knowhow or how complex will an open source printer hardware and software could be ? Like nobody ever tried building one ?
I've thought of doing hardware design attempts on this before. My rough mental notes:
.
Ink:
- Ink tech is mostly the heads (either piezo or thermal). There are some projects on the web where people repurpose these for other stuff, so it's doable, but you then have to rely on parts from 1st party printer makers (?)
.
Toner (aka "laser"):
- Toner and drums are cheap and made by many 3rd parties. Design around whatever models are easiest to get clones of, don't reinvent the wheel.
- Similar for coated fuser rollers (hot rolly bit that melts the toner to the paper).
- To put the image on the drum you will need either a high res LED bar (only available 1st party?) or a spinning prism + laser (probably easier to get parts for to make).
- Work around prism spinning stability issues by attaching a honking great rotational inertial mass to it.
- Stick to single colour (single laser, single drum, single toner) to begin with; colour is the same thing x4
.
Paper path:
- Modern printers folder the paper over several times in complicated ways. It's very space efficient.
- Stuff that: do everything flat and linear. The printer will be an awkward shape (long and thin) but will be many times easier to work, test and modify.
.
Electronics:
- Chuck a small SBC on it and keep the software as portable as possible to other platforms (not tied to the one micro/brand/peripheral set). This means using simple GPIO for paperpath sensors and standard buses like I2C for digital sensors. (My current work project has been burned by a microcontroller going out of stock, it would have been much better if we threw a more generic SBC at the problem).
- Best interface to throw high bandwidth sync'd laser pulse data (image) out of? For compatibility and headache reduction maybe a USB bridge chip to some simple SRAM that gets dumped as a row when the laser starts a row across the drum. Maybe that doesn't exist.
.
Extras:
- A printer that scans and prints with almost the same mechanism. Feed a page over the drum where the laser hits, record the reflected light intensity, produce a B&W (or maybe even grayscale) image from this.
.
Legal:
- Do it in a country where you are free to break patents for non-commercial use
- Commercial attempts: LOL I suspect the existing printer companies will own patents on everything including the concept of human vision. Be prepared to spend your entire life savings (and lifetime) in courts. They do NOT want more competitors.
if you mean computer software and driver stack, there's unix cups and various open source printer firmwares for linux.
The problem for me is scanners. I need a printer with a scanner, but scanning seems to require installing proprietary drivers :(
So I realized I probably need a printer that doesn't require a computer to use. It's ridiculous that it came to this, but there are printers that can print from USB and scan to a USB device. They seem to be rare though.
Probably easier to make a replacement control board.
My family doesn't print in color anymore so we just have an InkJet that works wonders. Printers do not need to have an app, they don't need to be subscription based, or require you to buy specific ink/paper
Don't worry. Some MBA types are working on it.
I am sitting here with HP's very first printer / scanner copier the PSC1200 on my right from well over 20 years ago still working fine and an HPCP1518n1 laser jet on my left that I got from govt surplus used in 2017, and it is a work horse that prints beautiful brochures for me.
I use aftermarket toner and ink with zero issues in bulk.
I had a LaserJet4M I'd trashpicked from a university. The odometer had rolled on the page counter, and it needed a new set of rollers. Ten bucks got it back to new condition. The main issue was that the toner (even aftermarket) had shitty or dry-rotted squeegies that meant toner leaked during use, and pages came out grey. I used that damned thing until I got in trouble in grad school for handing in grey pages.
Laserjet 4Ms were incredible printers. Rock solid, reliable, cheap to run. I used to work at a place that did personalised junk mail stuff, and they'd do it by laser printing in b+w over pre-printed colour, using a giant shelf covered in Laserjet 4M+s (with ethernet cards). They could churn out hundreds of thousands of custom pages per day with that batallion of printers, and ran it all with one teenager and a cupboard full of old printers used to donate parts.
They were constructed like consumer electronics aren't any more - a thick, sturdy bent steel chassis with plastic panels over the top. You could strip the whole thing down and rebuild it without very much specialist knowledge, and parts were cheap.
I took one of those printers when I left and continued to use it for many years. The only real issue with it was it was kinda slow and a bit noisy, otherwise it was perfectly usable. Eventually got rid of it when I moved in with my partner, but my dad still has it. I bet it still works.
How often do you guys need to print anything anyway? When my last printer broke I just bought a dedicated scanner and have been going to my local library on the rare occasions when I need to print something. If you're pissed off at HP (and other printer companies) for doing stuff like this, just ask yourself if you really need a printer at all. There's a good chance you don't.
i do fairly often. just because you personally don't need to print stuff doesn't mean no one has to.
College students still need to print stuff, some more than others. Especially if you're like me and the only way you can retain information is to take handwritten notes, physically highlight, and write in the margins. I don't know why, but ebooks and PDFs just don't stick in my brain. There's a printer in my department, but not that convenient when you don't live on campus, and the library charges you like you're at a Kinkos.
I'm amazed that these printer companies feel they can pull this kind of shit though. You'd think they'd be doing everything they can to keep the 10 people who still need home printers and scanners.
I sell stuff on eBay enough that having a printer is worth it so I can buy and print shipping labels at home, that way I can use USPS package pickup to ship stuff from my front door without needing to leave the house.
i need things to be in physical form so that i can write on it. it's the only way that i can organize information and learn.
Print prices are so high in London, that it's cheaper to buy a new printer every 30 pages or so.
This is what I do. On the rare occasions I need to print something, I just pop down the street to the library and do it there.
I print stuff all the time, I also send people personal letters to their mailbox so maybe I'm just old.
I just got like 2 mi to the local fedex office and print from there. That said in the last decade the most common thing I print off is D&D sheets for a con I go to
Graphic designer here. I've used their shitty consumer grade laser and inkjet printers with USB and they have had many problems. I HATE their wide format inkjet printers with a passion..... They work great for a few dozen prints and then decide to have random problems that take a few hours to fix.
Their inkjet Indigo digital presses..... are freaking amazing. The color they produce is far better than any laser digital press I've seen. They required a trained operator and is MUCH more expensive than the shitty consumer level stuff but they last forever when easily maintained.
I think I have the same model (dont judge me, didnt pay for that shit lol), but no sticker here. Not using cable anyway Im thinking should I toss it after reading about hp
Same, bought an HP a few years back without knowing about their shady business practices.
Eagerly waiting for when it kicks the bucket so I can get a Brother printer.
HP bricked my printer after about 100 pages in 2020. I bought one when my office went remoted, and even then their subscription service was clearly predatory.
Hated having to do it, but I threw it out. I just use the library printer now.
I really don't understand why people keep buying HP printers. There are so many better options and you end up paying far more in ink with these shit brands.
We're talking about the same company that tries to "gift" free months of ink in exchange of buying only genuine (and overpriced) HP ink for the rest of the printer's lifetime, and obviously if you accept you can't use the printer offline.
I still have an "old" HP printer and, as long as it works, I'll keep it, but seeing their practices I don't know if I would choose HP again for a new printer
I used to work for a company that HP contracted us as reps to stand around best buys and office depots and such and sell HP. I remember sometime after the 02 inks went away reliability really took a dump. But 02, while more reliable in my experience, took 5 different color cartridges. Pricey (though I'd get free ink sometimes from the job).
Toward the end of my time there the printers were just hot garbage, and I went through two HP laptops in a short time (got a big discount on number 2).
I won't buy HP anymore.
the Epson with the refillable tanks are good, but because the ink lasts so long for me I usually have to do a head cleaning every couple weeks or so and that wastes a lot of ink. I still like the printer for printing photos but a color lazer printer might be good. The initial price for the Epson is high, but I have had mine for over 2 years and only went through 2 black tanks and 2 cyan maybe, 1 each of the others.