Expected: I cancelled our subscription with HP and they blocked us from being able to use the rest of the ink in our cartridge.
Expected: I cancelled our subscription with HP and they blocked us from being able to use the rest of the ink in our cartridge.
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
I got curious how that works, thanks for piquing my curiosity.
I have even gone one step further I don’t have a printer at all. If I want anything printed, I will either do it when I’m at the office or get it printed by a stationary store for a small fee (like .05 USD per A4 page in local currency where I live).
I can count with one hand how many times I needed hard copies in the past couple of years.
I hate multifunction printers. They try to do everything but end up sucking at doing everything.
I ended up getting a separate, high speed Fujitsu scanner with built in auto file naming and OCR and it’s been fantastic. I can just scan in all the things and shred them. Less paperwork cluttering the place.
Yeah, I used to have a lot of goodwill for HP. They used to be good print quality at a good price. I remember many print projects I was stupid proud of with HP, but after I fell out of printer use and saw what they had been up to, from initially shorting the included cartridges to using DRM to lock out perfectly good cartridges, I vowed I wouldn’t buy a product of theirs for myself when I did need one again.
On a side note, I just realized you said “an HP” and it made me realize that an is usually used before vowels but H isn’t a vowel, but it was grammatically correct to the ear, but ambiguously correct on ‘paper’ when it dawned on me that we say HP as “Ay-tch Pee” and it suddenly made so much sense, and I wondered if there was a name for that exception in English.
.
Except some parts of UK pronounce it Haitch Pee, so a HP would make sense in some areas and an HP in others
It’s worse than it sounds… You’re not actually paying for ink, you’re paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped “free” when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you’re ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it’ll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you’re a member of the residual income brigade…
If the business model doesn’t allow them to have those situations written off as a loss leader then they need to reevaluate the business model.
The vast majority of the people should forget to cancel and the cost should be enough for you to manage, for some of your customers to get amazing Utility from your service, and for most of your customers to consider your service so valuable they couldn’t think to get rid of it, even if they don’t utilize it fully.
Disney offers meal plans with your vacation. Most people don’t use all the benefit, some people do, and even less people manage to eat at all the most expensive and prestigious places for their meals because they knew how to utilize their benefits to their maximum potential.
Same with game pass, Amazon prime, and basically any prepaid service. The whole thing is balanced to be enticing, convenient, and potentially a massive value prospect to keep people in that golden spot of FOMO so they buy in and not cancel, but not such a great value that you cannibalize your other monetization streams.
Here they made it apparent that it’s not a good value, there is no situation where i can come out on top, so instead of losing on my monthly sub, they also lost unit sales and any good memories and associations I had with their products and services in the past.
There are plenty of things that aren’t illegal but are counter to your intended goals.
That video site feels slahdotted…? Can’t get it to load properly.
Is the original content available in another way as well?
also have old USB printer, but i have it connected to a PC that is always on and print over network using CUPS
its connected to my NAS, but I used raspberry pi before
Who would spend their free time writing printer drivers/software?
It’d make more sense to work on software for a paperless world
Who would spend their free time writing printer drivers/software?
eh, judging by the size of this list you couldn’t be more wrong
also, I’d argue most free software today isn’t written by hobbyists on their free time, but by corporations instead
Just buy from Brother. They’re not over priced, reliable, and don’t pull with nickel and dime shit.
I’ve had my laser printer for 16+ years without issue. And everyone I suggested get a Brother as well have all been happy.
I bought an Epson ecotank that I haven’t had issues with
They don’t make their money back on the ink cartridges and instead price the printer as a printer actually should be
Think ink has lasted me for a while but I’m personally not using it everyday to print
The ink isn’t cartridges but it comes in bottles you can buy to refill ink tanks on the printer
If I have any issues then I will update my recommendation but the printer has been good for me personally