HP insists you must use their cloud printing service, covers USB port with sticker

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.

I would hate and love if this were true.

🤣

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.

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.

Brother is no longer allowing 3rd party ink and toner too so do your research there as well.

Hell yeah, brother

FUCK YEAH, I got one last month. Best printer I've ever had. No, I'm not being paid to say this. Fuck HP!

Bought a laser printer in early 2020 and am still on my first toner cartridge lol

Or just use linux with CUPS and you never have to let hp install spyware on your computer.

Best trick is to not buy HP.

I just learned how to manually install PCL5 from the "Professionals ONLY!" Section of their driver download page.

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.

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.

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.

My guess is they will tell customers it's "easier" just to sell them a cloud subscription for something they do not need whatsoever.

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

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.

Oh Brother

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!

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.

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

They've been doing bullshit like this for 20+ years

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.

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.

Don't worry. Some MBA types are working on it.

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.

Probably easier to make a replacement control board.

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.

I humbly think the reasons other people have to print something is none of your business. And your personal story is no one else's. Many people, myself included, need to print stuff on a regular basis, for work, school or whatever. The post is not about that, but the scummy practices of a shitty company.

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

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.