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.
HP haven’t always been this bad, but they are this bad now, and nobody should be giving them money.
Carly Fiorina destroyed HP. She tanked product quality by using cheap plastic parts instead of metal and she can’t manage people. She’s a terrible leader and on a personal level she’s just not right in the head, as she embraces trumpism, is racist, elitist, etc.
Hp printers were shit well before her.
I beg to differ.
The old LaserJet 4s, 5s, the IIs and IIIs, the 8000 series, all those were great, well built printers with metal frames and heavy duty parts. They were made to last.
We still have a LaserJet 5M that prints reports hooked up to an airgapped Linux server. The printer never breaks down or needs anything more than toner. Yes, it’s slow. Amusingly slow. The page count is over 250k. The fuser is starting to ghost but it’s easily replaced. We just don’t care enough to do it right now. The printer doesn’t care.
Try this with any printer built after the Fiorina era and you’d be hard pressed to.
I’m all ears if you have a specific model in mind that was shit before Carly. Because, before her, HP was an industry leader. Now it’s cheap plastic junk, and it’s squarely on her failure as CEO that led to the company’s demise.
I take it back. My recall of that CEO had her more recently (like 2015 or so). Must’ve confused with a different company and incompetent CEO.
Mark Hurd, another former ceo, sexually harassed anything moved.
HP’s ceo hires have been…interesting. They’ve all been pretty bad.
She’s also the only person to lose in the same presidential primary twice!
She lost as a candidate, and then after she conceded, lost again as Ted Cruz’s VP candidate.
I can’t believe the GOP actually pushed her as having “business experience” in her Senate run. She’s often cited as one of the worst CEOs ever. She made HP into another race to the bottom shit company, and it has yet to recover.
Well, I mean, when you look at their other example of “business experience”…
HP was the gold standard back in the day. Money says you can still buy kits and toner for IIIs, IVs, and Vs.
Work gave me a tiny HP laser when we did a refresh, and it’s a damned beast. Probably 12-yo, thousands and thousands of pages, never a glitch or jam. Toner cartridges are $18 and last forever.
I had to stop using my LaserJet 5si. Not because it broke, but because Windows stopped shipping drivers. Could have hacked around it, but I figured that new toner cartridges would be harder to come by if it doesn’t easily work on Windows anymore, so time to move on.
Rule 1: don’t buy an HP printer
Rule 2: don’t buy an inkjet printer
Rule 3: don’t buy a printer unless you absolutely need to.Rule 4. If you absolutely need to, buy a Brother.
*Brother laser printer.
This. Every brother laser printer I’ve ever used (both in my own home and at work) has been reliable and never failed aside from the occasional cartridge change/etc. And even those were proceeded by a dismissible software warning or just caused mild artefacts on the print out. You can still print even when they need maintenance.
Im afraid if we keep sharing this, they might take a dive too.
Brother inkjet really aren’t better than HP. I have one and the scanner doesn’t work if the ink is out. And it reports no ink waaaay too early. I can trick it into printing longer and almost double the life of the cartridges.
Maybe brother laser jet is better? I’m sure hp laser is too though
HP laser is still markedly worse than Brother laser. Much more expensive toner, harder to find and use off-brands, and (in my experience) much higher failure rates.
In general, toner is more robust than inkjet, but also HP is worse than Brother.
Don’t bother, buy Brother.
Whyyyy, brain? Why?
There are good reasons to buy an inkjet. Just not any under $150. Photographers don’t touch lasers, but their inkjets might have 11 ink cartridges.
Rule 3 should be considered more often, though. For what you’re paying for the convenience of printing at home, you can buy a lot of printed pages at FedEx.
Fair, but if you know that much then you know the exception.
Rule #4: if possible, have work pay for your printer and other home office shit.
I 100% agree with this. Sadly, rule #3 applies to me (my job involves dealing with banks and lawyers).
I have had two HP inkjet printers which were unmitigated dogshit. Money-grabbing, thrown together pieces of shit. You get more types of jams than at a craft jam shop.
Five years ago, moved to a Brother laser printer. Little difference in purchase cost. AND IT NEVER FAILS.
I’m now on my second (dropped first one downstairs when moving house) and it is just as reliable.
Each to their own, but for me: Brother Laser Printer every time.
15 years ago HP was among the best in the business. They made workhorse products that did millions of pages (and those old models continue to)
Today HP is a malware and telemetry company who won’t let the average consumer use their printer without a logged-in HP account slurping telemetry about every aspect of their lives. Any consumer who buys a printer with the letter “e” in the model number is paying money to be spied on. Anyone who buys a non-“e” model is still doing so, but in a less VISUALLY obvious, and obnoxious way.
This is not random assumption. I’m a tech. Anyone who buys an HP Printer today and asks me to install them gets a fast education on why they shouldn’t cut the packing tape on that box.
Buy Brother.
15 years ago is almost 2009 now. I remember HP being shit back then already so maybe add another 10 years to that 15.
Maybe I’m misremembering when the old 4100 series dropped, but it was the last of the really great monsters they built.
What do you think of the Epson Ecotank?
I was looking to buy an ET. Then I learned about the sponge. While you’re free to refill the ink at little cost there’s also a sponge that cleans the heads or soaks up excess ink. I have forgotten the purpose, but it’s a 2 dollars sponge, you can easily get something like it and replace it. But the printer won’t reset the counter for the sponge. Unless you want to download sketchy stuff off of a Belarusian website, your only option is to ship the printer to Epson and pay them for the trouble.
That maneuver is about the same price as a new ecotank.
Since writing the above I did some late-night googling, and it seems that Epson US has caught enough flack for this, and now offers a one time key for a reset utility https://epson.com/support/epson-ink-pads-reset-utility-faqs.
If I buy a printer it’ll be a brother laser, or a professional inkjet… And I don’t see the latter happening.
I have an ecotank and I like it a lot. It setup quick and works wired and wireless. The only thing I don’t like is the print quality feels desaturated. Although I don’t print for any art purposes so it doesn’t matter too much.
They look like good machines if you are printing a lot and need an inkjet (like for photo printing)
If you are only using a printer occasionally for letters or shipping labels, laser printers are probably a better option. Sure, they need more space, but they cant dry out and dont require cleaning programs.
Have no experience with Epson outside of 1 complete trash-teir $50 inket, which was hot garbage which of course it was- sorry.
We have one A3 format in the office for 8 months and its been amazing
Yeah, I have a network attached brother black and white printer. It’s pretty great. It handles 98 percent of my printing workload, no fuss, I honestly don’t remember the last time I changed any toner. Has a scanner on top that works if I need it.
If I want something big/nice and in full color I can always go down to the print shop. But for your common printing it’s great.
I’m pretty sure brother does the same shit
They do not, at least at this moment in time. Not even close. Not even in the same solar system.
You shut your whore mouth about brother printers!!!
Yeah, HP are terrible now.
They weren’t always this bad, I had a laserjet 4000 that was made around the turn of the century and it “just worked”.
HP pretty much pioneered enshittification
weren’t a
Average Cory Doctorow enjoy-er
Very Based–edit i accidentally quoted “weren’t a” i enjoy his books, i now realize it looked like i was mocking him. that was not my intent :P
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I still have a LaserJet 2200 and it will be pried from my cold dead hands. The plastic has gone brittle on some spots of it, and the front manual feed cover has long broken but it still dutifully works.
When I worked in IT, there was a LaserJet 4 at one office. That thing was almost 2 decades old when i changed careers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still there.
Their inkjets were always trash fire.
There’s always a post where someone’s asking if HP printers are really as bad as they seem.
Yes. Yes they are. Spread the word. Friends don’t let friends buy an HP printer.
Brother has always been my go-to. I’ve owned exactly two. One I bought in 2009 and one I bought 3-4y ago. They’re basically zero hassle.
Yes! Mine’s from 2008! Zero issues with it.
How’s the Linux and Mac support?
When you ask a Linux head what kind of printer to use, they answer “get a Brother laser printer”. Linux YouTube is what sold me on Brother.
Linux ppl tend to be the biggest shills when it comes to products that respect the consumer.
Should be fine, ours supports standard IPP over wireless. My old 2008 printer needed CUPS on a Pi with QEMU and binfmt-misc to support the old brother i386 unix driver but worked flawlessly with that setup in a docker container.
Linux: fine. The mac’s in my house don’t get to print. Windows: painless.
For well over 20 years, yes.
HP practically invented the concept of “destroy the brand name of your high end professional equipment with the worst consumer garbage ever.” Their inkjets are infamous
They were early pioneers in the art of enshittification.
In the 80s and 90s HP printers were great. They just worked, even in rough dirty manufacturing environments. You could just about drop kick one, and it would still print out a page for you. Now they’re crap. The investment firm that owns the brand is past beating the dead horse, now trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the carcas.
This is so true. In fact I’m still using a 90’s HP laser jet printer and it’s a beast.
The company also prohibits users from trying to use third party inks, right? Also, I am surprised at the app fication of everything. One shouldn’t need an app just to print something. Almost like tech is taking one step forward but HP is taking two step backwards.
Richard Stallman was radicalized into forming the Free Software Foundation after fighting with printer drivers.
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[Citation Needed]
But sir, this is the internet.
Richard Stallman is a bad person but I don’t think we need to make stuff up to prove that. He’s said he’s fine with child pornography (as long as it’s consensual) and might have favorable views on pedophilia (that may have since been backtracked) but that doesn’t make himself a pedophile.
Just a misunderstood crazy person.
Consent can’t occur before adulthood.
Oh, of course. He’s fine with child abuse as long as it is consensual.
I made it pretty clear he’s a terrible person, just for many, many other reasons that are far easier to argue.
Defending pedophiles is not something you should do in public.
Defending a pedophile doesn’t make one a pedophile. That’s the stretch I’m arguing against.
I can’t believe I’m defending Stallman here. He’s got so many other reasons to be hated.
HP doesn’t stand for “Huge Pain”. It stands for:
- H - Fuck
- P - You
That’s the unofficial moto of the HP company - “Fuck you!”.
Seriously, anyone who still buys HP products, they disrespect themselves.
HP used to make good printers… in the 90s
HP laptops were nice … somewhere in 2011.
And I have two HP mice and an HP keyboard (that one is PS/2, so not very relevant, I guess), which work fine.
Yeah. HP products were used to be great. Still have some decade old printers at some place by HP and they simply work.
However, HP printer purchased ~5 years ago simply suck ass. And I will never get back hours that I’ve spent fixing it. Or attempting to fix it. Go to hell HP… ☹️☹️☹️
Nah, I’d say that’s the official motto.
HP use to be good and reliable. Then it all went to hell for some reason. These days just buy that one Brother laser printer everyone has and you are good to go.
That is some glorious DGAF reporting by The Verge there
Yup. And to be honest, I understand the sentiment.
They ain’t wrong though.
I went through OP’s pain about 3.5 years ago. My old, old printer from college (an HP, ironically) that was absolute bare bones (I think I actually got it for free as part of a bundle somewhere along the line) but also somehow (or maybe because of that) also a workhorse that never let me down for like 10 years…well I lost the damn proprietary cable in a move.
So I started shopping for it’s replacement. But before I could, I still needed my printing to be done ASAP, so I went to my parents house. There, we tried printing but their old HP just wasn’t having it. So we bought new ink and tried that. No dice. I tried everything I knew to try and nothing was working.
So I went to my girlfriend’s parents who also had an HP and we couldn’t get that one to work direct either. Had to eventually email the stuff to them to open on their computer and then with it’s hardwired connection, it finally printed for me.
Later that week my parents bought a new printer to replace the old one, and inexplicably, went with another HP. For them it was more “this is what was on sale at Sam’s Club” and less the result of careful review reading. But anyway, my mom, with all the tech literacy of a jug of milk, botched the setup. Called me like she always does, to solve her tech issues with only her horrible verbal translation of what’s going on, we can’t do it over the phone, so a few days later I go there and while it is fucked up, IDK how much of that was HP being shitty and how much of that would’ve worked if it hadn’t been attempted by my mom. Regardless, we finally get printer powered up and talking to the computer and it STILL won’t actually print stuff we’re sending it. Until the next day when my mom says she tried it again and it worked, no issues.
By that point I was fed up with HP, but I still needed a printer, needed color, and was totally against going inkjet yet again.
Ended up with a Brother color laser printer and it’s been the printer of my dreams from day one.
In my cramped apartment, it sits in another room from the rest of my computer stuff, quietly waiting on standby for the handful of times each year that I need it, at which point it quietly comes to life, prints perfectly, the first time, every time, and never causes any issues at all.
No, but they worked hard for it.
Big printer companies need to be regulated better by the FTC. The whole cartridge issue is a waste of resources and costs a lot more than it costs to produce.
Printer cartridges create almost as much waste as Keurig K-Cups cartridges. Both should be banned
I hope GDPR covers the HP’s practice in coming days in Europe. Others might follow.
Once upon a time there was a company called Hewllet-Packard that made the best programmable calculators, vendors made the best demonstration: hitting the calc against the floor, picked up the pieces, assembled it and it worked again! (almost beat Texas Instrument). The same for printers, pcs, laptops, good mainframes (i learned fortran in a hp3000), almost any Hewlet-Packard electronic product was among the best. In 90s became HP, since then everything they made is a shame.
Those original HP lasers were absolute beasts. You could put it outside in the snow and if you even hovered over the print icon it’d start to get ready to serve. I bet there are still many in use today.
Regrettably that era of producing quality is mostly finished.
In recent years I’ve had a lot of good experiences with small Brother and Xerox branded MFP devices. There’s still issues here and there if you rely on wireless printing or huge duplexed jobs, but they mostly just crank away for years if you keep feeding them toner cartridges and occasionally a new drum kit.
hp-48 is 🔥
I will never buy a home printer at this point, especially not from HP. It’s significantly cheaper and more convenient for me to go to a printing center next-door and get everything done for pennies.
If somehow I had to start printing things in mass quantities, the only option I would consider is something like the Epson EcoTank. You can clearly see how much ink is left, and you can refill it yourself too. They can’t randomly just tell you that your cartridges are faulty, brick your device, or ship you a cartridge that has less than 5ml of liquid inside, but one that costs upwards of 50$ a piece
EcoTank printers don’t seem to give a shit what ink you put in them as long as its liquid and preferably the right colour
Epson uses piezoelectric printer heads, which can print whatever flows. They’re popular for direct-to-garment conversion for that reason.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
HP sucks donkey balls. Printer, computer, laptop, all-in-one, doesn’t matter. Friends don’t let friends by an HP.
That said, ET-2800 is an Epson brand printer, specifically the base-model “Eco-Tank” printer that uses bottles of ink instead of cartridges. HP makes a few under the “Super Tank” line. If that’s the right model number, that might help explain driver issues if you have an Epson printer being controlled by HP drivers.
If you plan on keeping it, make sure to set a calendar reminder or set up a task to print at least one color page every month to keep the ink from drying out in the print head. If you decide to replace it, consider a brother laser, especially the black-and-white only models. They are tanks
The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.
If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.
There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.
So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.
OK, I know this post is pretty anti-HP which is totally fair, but honestly just stop buying the cheap inkjet printers. I discovered ink tank printers and they are a game changer.
In all seriousness, you might want to try out the HP Smart Tank printers. Almost exactly 2 years ago I bought a HP Smart Tank 7000. It is awesome, and not at all like you describe.
I wanted to be done with junk printers for good, so I set out to buy a laser jet. I can’t remember how I found out about these ink tank printers, but they have pretty much the same benefits of laser printers. They print reliably and quickly, the ink lasts forever, and is not only cheap to replace, but you can use 3rd party ink (sold by the bottle. No cartridge means no chip!). My wife is a teacher and prints stuff all the time, including in color. 3 kids use it for homework assignments. I literally refilled the tanks 4 days ago for the very first time. (And only 2 of the 4 tanks at that–black and yellow were down to about a quarter tank.)
I use Linux exclusively and the printer works in Ubuntu and Pop OS out of the box, and without having to install additional drivers or some proprietary app that runs in the tray all the time.
Only downside for me is that sometimes it will go to sleep and my computers don’t see it and I have to go over and turn it on/off again. It’s pretty rare, and I don’t know if it’s actually a printer issue as much as a Linux issue.
I liked the printer so much, I bought one for my Mom this year in May. She’s got Windows, and I told her I’d come over and help her set it up some time because she is not at all good with computers. Turns out I didn’t need to because she set it up herself! (I did help her with the Android app though later on).
I can’t help but gush about this thing. Kind of dumb, I know, since in 2023 you’d think all printers should be able to work like this at a minimum.
OK, I know this post is pretty anti-HP which is totally fair, but honestly just stop buying the cheap inkjet printers.
^ THIS!! SOOOO MUCH THIS ^
Inktank or Laser is the way to go!
If you want something that will last forever get an inexpensive laser printer off of ebay.
Even if it’s only USB most routers/NAS offer some way of sharing it.
Hell, if you’re running a Linux NAS you can give it AirPrint via CUPS and then everything else will “just work” with it.
A Laser printer isn’t an automatic fix. My mom got an HP laserjet from her work and it requires the full suite of HP spyware to run. My girlfriend bought a different HP laserjet and it just randomly decided it doesn’t want to print anymore, and we suspect it’s software related.
I have a Ricoh laser printer and it’s amazing though. The driver from Windows Update just works.
I have a very similar story, but I’m 6 months or so into having mine. I went to buy a laser printer, and the salesperson redirected me to the ecotank for upfront savings and similar performance. I hope mine continues to work as well as yours does for you.
A big issue is that we all learned that ink is super expensive. So rather than buy overpriced ink cartridges, you buy the super cheap printer on sale.
But ink is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be (I think? It could just as easily be a “batteries are really expensive so we have to remove them from your loud toy” scenario) and third party solutions work with the vast majority of printers. So you are stuck with a cheap printer with no protection to keep the cartridges from drying out and hate everything.
The latest “meta” is that everyone should buy a laser/toner printer. And those can be awesome and the toner brick will outlive you. But there are a LOT of air quality concerns with those and it still ignores the real issue:
How often do you print? A few documents a month? That is pretty much perfect for a mid-tier inkjet printer. You’ll keep it going often enough that the rollers don’t get dusty and the cartridges don’t dry out.
A few times a year? Just get a library card and a flash drive. It comes out a LOT cheaper.
Personally? I probably should go the library route, but I already have a room that is basically designated to cancer and microplastics with my 3d printer and so forth. And I am old enough that I like to have a paper checklist when I am grinding in a video game or whatever. So I love my laser printer and it always “just works”. But… I am still an idiot who should have just stuck to heading into town for some chicken nuggies and a dollar worth of printing at the library.
I’ve also had numerous struggles with expensive HP products, both laptop ( no sound for intermittent months on end) and printers refusing to pair with certain devices. While signing a document requiring a pint of my blood type to proclaim that I will never buy HP again, is generally thought as stupid and a bad idea, it is something I think about.
