Judge Rules HP Must Face Class Action Lawsuit Over Disabled Printers
Judge Rules HP Must Face Class Action Lawsuit Over Disabled Printers
The suit, filed earlier this year, argues that HP all-in-one printers stop all functions when ink levels reach some arbitrary point.
If you don't need an all-in-one printer, then the Brother HL-L2350DW is great. The best thing about it is that it prints. These accolades are really the bare minimum you'd expect from a device called a "printer", but that's where we are in the world of consumer electronics.
I made the mistake of recommending Brother printers without identifying the exact version. The Brother printer my coworker bought took a page from HP'd bullshit. He returned it after a week.
Imo - Look for ones that don't need internet or just perform 1 extremely specific thing. Or in my case, I printing a lot of b&w docs as cheap as possible.
My recommendation would be the brother laser printer HL-L2300D from 2014. The 2350DW looks similar and is more recent from 2021 and might be okay too.
L3210CW owner here. Awesome printer. Maybe in retrospect I would have bought the one that did duplex but it's not a concern really
I have the MFC 2750 and I'm extremely happy with it. It's a rock solid all in one laser.
I bought a brother laser printer when I started working from home full time over the pandemic. Best printer I’ve ever had. Does it’s job and asks for very little.
It's crazy how as soon as printers became reliable to function, companies purposely made them shit again.
You're certainly not wrong. I have two Okidata 320 Turbos in my basement that were manufactured some time in the late '80's that still work just fine, if I ever have occasion to fire one up (which is almost never). They don't need a single damn thing, ever, except some tractor feed paper and a ribbon. They'll probably outlive me.
I have a 2700DW and have been happy with it for years. I recommend Brother to everyone, but I'm curious what Potatos_are_not_friends has to say about their experience below.
Some Brother printers received a firmware update that locked out 3rd party toner supplies. Wasn't a nice thing to do.
I still recommend them, but less enthusiasticly then I did. It's not the sure-thing no-shit printer brand they used to be, but they do make some great printer models if you get the right one.
I bought a Brother 2270DW laser printer over a decade ago, and it is still going strong.
We've got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.
Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don't come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users' only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn't do this, but it's in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.
We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC's for the "scan from console" feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there's evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.
The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.
That doesn't seem to be an all in one though? It looks like just a BW laser printer. I ended up with a really cheap epson that meets my limited needs but those can be hit or miss and the ink sure isn't cheap if you use a lot, which I do not. It doesn't have the problems of the HP units at least.
Thank god, this has been one of the most anti consumer things of our time and it needs to stop.
I'm in IT, and anything HP can just fuck off.
Edit to add: Never buy any printer that comes with an ink/toner subscription service.
founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard were so customer trusting and had such probity that it revolutionized corporate america and empowered startups to bootstrap from nothing. if they saw what became of their reputation they would've forced a name change. thanks Carly Fiorina for destroying an amazing institution. I hope your resume refuses to scan.
They were engineers, and made stuff they liked and were proud of, and it showed. When they exited the leadership roles, the MBAs took over and it was all downhill from there.
You still see a lot of businesses today using HP lasers from as early as 1990. Crazy that operating systems today still support some seriously old printers. It's also remarkable how good HP used to be before right around the time they merged with Compaq.
This is great news... if HP loses we might all be rewarded $1.89 for years of extortion-level ink prices! Problem solved!1!!
Finally! This is was a fucking nightmare for any printer user.
I escaped the nigjtmare by buying any other brand.
"Hey, can you scan this document for me?"
I'm sorry, your magenta ink is low.
"But ... I'm not printing anything? None of what I need uses ink."
MAGENTA. I REQUIRE MAGENTA.
Magenta for the magenta god.
Cyan for the cyan throne.
This is great news, but at the same time, I plan on enjoying my Brother printer for the foreseeable future.
This is great, but you really want to go back? I am done using them, they made this decision and mine is to never use them again. I hope everyone else that sees what they did will do the same because they will try something else at some point.
Did they do anything about the cartridges yet? Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then. That's not just with HP printers, but across the board. Even at consumer level, the prices of a cartridge is criminal compared to a bottle of inkjet ink, with enough for many dozen refills.
Cartridge: $50
10 fl oz of printer ink: $12
Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then.
This is absurd. I would like to hear how this benefits the consumer without attempting to talk about "quality" or something. This would be like my car not starting cause I didn't use Shell gas.
What's more upsetting is that printers are client side all the way. There is nothing about them that needs to reach out to the Internet to print pages. The printer itself handles the "letting you print." So the thing sitting on your desk, that you own, is choosing this for you.
What’s more upsetting is that printers are client side all the way. There is nothing about them that needs to teach or to the Internet to print pages. The printer itself handles the “letting you print.” So the thing sitting on your desk, that you own, is choosing this for you.
Seems like one of those things some bearded nerd would get very upset about.
There is one thing that I like and use which is printing remotely on my printer over the internet.
However, I don't need HP's shitty services for that, there are better solutions out there
That's literally what the lawsuit is about. Scanning and faxing are disabled when your ink is too low.
Yes. Canon did this shit to me a decade+ ago. Had to go to the store late at night to buy yellow ink so I could scan a goddamned document I needed to send out. Haven't given them another dollar since.
Happened to me in Summer 2020 after printing maybe 100 total pages on a printer I'd owned for two months.
I kept getting emails about the HP subscription program and then my basically new printer inexplicably stopped working. I assumed HP bricked it and, as much as I hated to, tossed it out and told myself I was never buying their product again. Luckily the KC public library has free black and white printing anyway.
Oh, I can’t wait to get a $10 check while the lawyers get $30,000,000.
I don't care who wins.
I just want HP to lose.
My desires are more complicated.
I want all of HP, Canon, Epson, and Xerox to lose. And more than that, I want them all to go out of business from a sharp plummet in sales.
Brother can claim victory if they want, everyone seems to agree they're the safe choice.
They’ll charge you to print that check
even if you want to print it grayscale it will still require MAGENTA!
I need more.
This whole "buy the whole product but block features from working without paying a fee" bullshit needs to stop. No questions.
Cars need to be next.
HP used to be good circa 2005-8. I used to have a HP mini and it had great build quality. DK what happened after that coz all of the stuff they have sold after 2010 is pure garbage honestly.
At this point HP isn't a printer company. They're an (overpriced) ink subscription company that makes DRM-ridden printers designed to keep you on their subscription model.
Given how many other printer companies are following suit it seems that this is unfortunately a lucrative business model.
Whats fucked up is this type of bullshit has been a damned meme for over a fucking decade and they're just now allowing a class action to go to trial. At this point lots of other printer makers have followed suit in some form or another.
Previous judges have thrown out cases like this. Especially in places like CA. And I thought CA was anticorporate! /s
Relevant/important watch for everyone who's not already familiar: https://youtu.be/AHX6tHdQGiQ "Ink Cartridges Are A Scam"
He talks about basically the computer coding "bricking" the system if you try to do anything other than spend more money on their racketeering; their "razor and blade cartridges" profit model of selling the one item for cheap then price-gouging the fuck out of a required component to keep it working
I noped out of printers a long time ago. Staples prints whatever I need on the cheap, compared to ink cartridges.
Nowadays I just use the library whenever I need to print something. Most charge like 10 cents per page but some will let you print for free.
The most amazing and surprising achievement they have made is to convince customers they are to be trusted. HP has been shit for decades now.
Us nerds called it back when they merged with Compaq. Great, we said, two once decent but now shitty companies can combine their stupidity into one new mega-stupid mega-corporation. They've barely done a single thing right since. It sure as shit didn't take long for us to get proven right, but somehow they're still shambling along. This just goes to show that no matter what nerds think, what's "best" for a product or industry and what actually turns out to be profitable are rarely actually the same thing.
about time
Haven't bought a HP since their support told me to just buy a new printer and that the warning message wasn't going away even though they could not confirm anything was wrong with it
I'm not sure there's a brand out there that's safe at this point, but I don't think I would buy HP consumer products regardless of the price. At some point. Though to counter, it seems any company will do whatever the customers/regulators will let them get away with, especially if people keep buying them.