HP knows people have grown to hate printers. It even knows that people hate HP printers. But based on a new marketing campaign the company launched, HP is OK with that—so long as it can convince people that there are worse options out there.
The marketing campaign hitting parts of Europe aims to present HP as real and empathetic. The tagline “Made to be less hated” seems to acknowledge people’s frustration with printers. But HP’s a top proponent of the exact sort of money-grabbing, disruptive practices that have turned people against printers.
Scharon Harding at Ars Technica
I need to print something maybe a few times a year, and I still hate dealing with my printer more than any other tech item in my house. Everything about them is bad, and no cutesy marketing campaign centrered on them being bad is going to change that.
This is the best advice they could give! Consumer reports covered them and some printers were wasting 50% of the ink just power cycling. Some even have a hardcoded lifetime limit after which they’re designed to fail. Many will refuse to print even in B&W if any of the colors are out (and those colors WILL deplete rapidly whether you use them or not). Granted, I’m not desperate to print color documents or photos, but I’ll never go back to ink printers. I have a monochrome laser printer for legal documents and that covers my needs. It’s so fast, the toner lasts forever, and these days it’s really not that much more expensive (for B&W).
Workgroup printers (ethernet, duplex, heavy duty robustness, unexpensive toners…) are usually OK…
I bought a refurbished one and it lasted for years without a problem until it died. Then I bought a next one and it works for a decade+… Now printing on a daily basis (mainly colouring pages for kids).
SOHO printers are generally pretty terrible IMO.
Yep, when we had a HP LaserJet Pro M479 come in as a “damaged box” unit at work several years ago I convinced the boss to let me buy it once I checked it out and made sure it wasn’t damaged. It’s hands down the best printer I’ve ever owned, and I have yet to change any toner cartridges on it (though my yellow is getting low).
If HP would make their consumer level printers to the same quality and reliability standards as their commercial offerings, they wouldn’t have such a poor reputation. Of course, that would also mean the consumer level devices would no longer be sold as loss-leaders and would cost several times as much as they do now.
We have a bunch of the M404 style prrinters and similar models at work…. for people’s personal printers.
They work great and give few problems.
Then… it happened. We couldn’t get those models so the next gen model we get that and it takes me an HOUR to install the dang thing because it wants an online account and even thought it has a USB port it CAN’T PRINT OFFLINE…. F!@#$%!FA!!!!! It basically locks itself down and will only print a diagnostic page if offline!!! It’s insulting!
cb88,
I’d also be pissed.
This is my biggest gripe/fear for the internet of things. I like having smart devices, but these days it’s almost impossible to know ahead of time if a device will allow you to operate it without being remotely controlled and restricted by the manufacturer.
For example, I was fully aware of these problems and insisted on having a local API with my smart thermostat. The manufacture’s service was discontinued this year, which is unfortunately the way things go when manufactures loose interest, but I anticipated this (or at least I thought I did) by getting a device with a local API. Well I got caught off completely off guard because when the manufacture discontinued their remote service, the god damn thing stopped accepting local connections! Ugh this is so stupid! I hate when products are engineered to fail! And there’s nothing I can do about it. It pisses me off because I did due diligence and still failed to escape this crap.
Incidentally I’m building my own thermostat now. I didn’t want to, but it’s to the point where you can trust anybody’s products anymore.
Edit: …you can’t trust anybody’s products anymore.
My HP Deskjet 895 still prints like its 1999. Any printer bought later has died by now.
I have a printer at home but I haven’t bought I cartridge in years. The few times I need to print something either I do it at work or In a copy shop.
If I’ve learned anything from video games, it’s that companies can treat customers like they’re less than dirt, and they (the customers) will always come back for more.
I understand the problem with video games, because a few select companies have been given exclusive, perpetual monopolies on franchises and ideas. But patents expire fairly quickly, and printers have been around for ages. And good enough too, I might add. So what’s the deal? Why are there no affordable printers that treat customers fairly?
It’s less true that companies have that much control than people think. The companies that made all those classics in the way back times, they didn’t have huge teams. They just had some grit and determination, and maybe a business model that didn’t suck.
There’s so much great work being done in the indy space in video games. I rarely even try AAA games any more (save for the occasional gem, which can be counted maybe on a hand and a half in the last decade, outside of Nintendo releases).
I print so little that I just go to a print shop or stationery shop every time I need to.
I bought an HP Laserjet…not the cheapest but middling after 30 years of having various different ink jets (HP, Canon, Epson). IDK why I waited so long. The downside is that I don’t have color. The upside is that when I want to print, I can actually print. With a printer, I rarely need it, but when I do, I want it now… and with inkjets sitting unused for months…well forget about printing…the ink is toast. So, with an inkjet, nearly every time I wanted to print, I had to go buy cartridges at $60 a set.
Other nice thing…the page feeder on the scanner does both sides at the same time. I probably use the scanner more than the printer function.
moronikos,
Yep, I’m in the exact same boat!
And if you only have to print a couple pages here and there, a very significant portion of the ink gets lost to power up cleaning cycles and never touches paper. We were actually paying significantly more to print pages at home than going to a professional print shop.
I actually need a scanner. I have one sitting on the shelf that I can’t use anymore because once again I find myself with an unsupported device and old drivers that don’t work in current versions of windows. The solution is to throw away and buy again, but I hate being a part of that cycle. As poor as cameras are for “scanning” documents, I cannot in good conscience continue to contribute to e-waste with my wallet. Unless I somehow find a decent scanner with open source linux drivers that I can use indefinitely, I’m not going to buy another.
” need to print something maybe a few times a year, and I still hate dealing with my printer more than any other tech item in my house.”
Go Japan. I have an outstanding experience with Brother printers. I currently own three: a black-white laser printer, an ink printer, all-in-one, and a label printer. Also, I had good experience using OKI color-laser printers in the past.
Seconding this. We have two Brother laser printers (monochrome and color). They’re wonderful. We get toner in generic cartridges and it lasts practically forever, and we can print our own photos, invitations, greeting cards, and coloring pages for the kids. Wins all around.
We have a couple ink tank Brother printers at work that are all going strong.
Oh and the reason we bought them was… they were the only printer at a reasonable price that could print and scan tabloid 11×17 size we use for manufacturing drawings etc… you’ll see them every now and then around $300 when anything else that can do that is way more.
Thirding this. My brother (the sibling) prints maybe 20K pages a year (he’s a lawyer, and courts here refuse to go digital), and he never buys anything other than Brother (the printer), after he tried hp, canon, epson and so on all.
I bought an HP 1020 monochrome laser printer in 2006. It still works as well as the first day, and has gone through several cartridges. I dread its eventual demise. I gave up on ink-jet printers in 2006 after a very bad experience with Epson.