"Never own a printer again."

HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee. HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment.

#technology #tech #hardware #computers #printers #subscriptions #hp

  • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Personally I was rather disappointed with my Brother laser printer. Hardware wise, sure, it’s still going after a long time and is still on its first toner cartridge. Software wise, I can’t recommend it. Will not print without first running a printer troubleshooting process on the computer. At least I have a workaround that works 90% of the time, but a printer that will only wake from deep sleep mode when the troubleshooter forces it to isn’t a printer I’d recommend.

    Not that I have any better suggestions. Every printer I’ve ever owned has sucked in at least one way. For some reason no manufacturer has ever succeeded in creating a printer that isn’t evil.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I feel ya. If the printer drivers aren’t OS-native and extremely basic, they’re usually a bloated, buggy mess.

      I’ve used mine on Linux with CUPS and it works great. Brother actually provides a .deb installer for the drivers which is amazing, but I think I successfully used the “universal” HP LaserJet 4200 driver before I installed that (I swear, that driver works for almost everything). Pretty sure I only installed the official driver to get the duplexing option to work.

      The only major difficulty I had was getting the scanner drives working with SANE. Connecting over USB was easy, but getting it to scan over the network was a bit challenging. A few years ago, I built a scan server as a Docker image that had SANE, the Brother scan drivers, and the proper config. Now I just point SANE on my PC to that and, like magic, it works – don’t even need to install the scan driver locally.

      • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I don’t even have that problem, since the computers around my house use various versions of Windows. So it’s not like a lack of OS-native drivers is the issue. It’s just not a very good printer.

        My experience is generally that the drivers and software for HP is better, but the hardware and value for money is better with Brother. That said, I also have to give a thumbs up to the third party ink supplier I’ve been using for the HP printer (which I bought because I needed colour printing for the pre-degree course I did last year), who replaced all of my cartridges free of charge after a firmware update snuck in even with auto-update turned off.