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0x_rs
markdown
> Don't buy these printers.
Is there a list somewhere of printers that are neither user-hostile nor designed to scam customers out of their hard-earned money?
Rackedup
Really happy with my HP LaserJet Pro M15W Printer so far... Bought it only about 2 years ago but I print almost daily and didn't even have to replace the toner.
seanw444
I hear the cheap Brother ones are decent actually. Not for sure though.
Double_a_92
Mine always feels the need to clean itself once a week. Which empties the ink tanks after a few months.
And turning it completely off is also not an option, because then if feels the need to super clean itself which wastes the ink all at once...
danielrpa
I have had the cheaper Brothers for a while- I upgraded mine to a wi-fi model after the first one broke 10 years in. Pretty happy with it, sure the first one broke after being moved around many times, but I got an enormous value out of it.
spoonjim
The Brother $100 black and white laser is quite civilized. And printers have come so far since the old days. I plug that motherfucker in and I can print to it from my phone, immediately!
BayAreaEscapee
I also own a couple of Brother black and white laser printers. They are quite durable and cheap to operate. Way way way better than any inkjet.
The only complaint I have is that after a large number of pages the printer will insist that the toner cartridge needs to be replaced and will just stop printing, even if the printer output darkness is still acceptable. Quite annoying if you need to print urgently! Fortunately I found a youtube video with a work-around you can enter into the UI on the printer.
zasdffaa
Odd that you had to throw 'hard-earned' in there like it adds anything (unless it does but I can't tell)
A quick search gets prior discussion https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=drm%20free%20printers
the_third_wave
> Odd that you had to throw 'hard-earned' in there like it adds anything (unless it does but I can't tell)
If money fell from the sky in abundance and could be exchanged for new printers there would be no problems with these shenanigans. Assuming that money is scarce and money spent on a printer means something else will have to remain on the back burner does change things.
moistly
> You also cannot use the scanner if it has one when the counter hits the limit
I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a class action lawsuit for that.
smat
Appears to be common industry practice at least for entry level devices. My old HP has the same behavior. Cannot scan with a defective print head.
dang
Submitted title was "Epson Didn't Kill Itself". Please don't rewrite titles like that! It's against the site guidelines, which say "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
emsy
I understand the reason for the change, but thanks for mentioning the original title in the comment. I think it's really funny.
kazinator
Consumer inkjet printers are a giant scam. Buying them is a fool's purchase and servicing them a fool's errand.
If you need a printer for documents, get something that runs on powder toner, like a color LED.
If you want to print photos, send out for it; it will be cheaper anyway.
Lio
If you’re OK with smaller prints then I’d recommend a small dye-sublimation printer like a Canon Selphy.
The quality is not as good as the very best inkjets but it’s good enough if you’re not exhibiting your photos.
The reliability though is amazing. I have an old Selphy printer from the 90s that still works perfectly from certain cameras. There’s nothing to dry out or spill.
It just works.
I have replaced it but only because the USB implementation seems too old to be recognised by many modern devices.
The Selphy I replaced it with I expect to run and run.
For everything else I use a Brother colour laser.
Canon, Epson or HP inkjets are a fool’s purchase. I’ve been that fool before, never again.
exodust
I had the opposite experience. My Canon ES1 Selphy died after not much use. Paper stopped feeding, sounded like grinding plastic gears.
Tried the recommended things to fix but couldn't fix. I liked the quality of the prints even if they were a bit pricey per print.
Upright design of ES1 didn't help, since the paper must do a 90 degree turn like it's performing a stunt! Just to reach the output tray. All in a creaking plastic box. I respect Canon cameras but not my old Selphy ES1. Sorry!
Got an Epson photo eco-tank and it's good. No stress about running out of ink. Nozzles haven't clogged and I like the quality, it is well made printer the Epson ecotank, at least the model I have.
Previous Epson printers - hated the cost of ink and clogged nozzles.
I wonder how much paper I need to go through to get myself an Epson end of life message! I doubt I will print/waste that much paper. Funny how some are concerned about the e-waste implications of printing a truck load of A4.
Lio
No need to apologise, it's useful to hear about another anecdata point (vs my own. :D )
I've only used the CP range of Selphy printers. These are flat, horizontal designs where the paper travels out one side and back again. They sound much simpler mechanically than a vertical machine.
I think I pay about £0.20 to £0.40 a photo (paper + ink) where as my local supermarket prints for about £0.07 each, so there are cheaper options but I'd bet still cheaper than buying and running a high end Epson inkjet.
I buy bulk paper+ink packs and print pretty rarely. Since it never goes off (I've used 20 year old stock before) it just sits in the box until the family comes round.
I'm glad you're getting good service from your inkjet but I'd never buy another one.
What I really hated about my Epson and Canon inkjets is the driver software. It's overly big and very rent seeky. It tries desperately to sell you stuff like ink, paper or photo storage, none of which is competitive price wise. On the Mac I needed third party software to remove it completely.
The experience soured me on both brands, (old Selphy printers excluded).
RajT88
Recently bought an older Laserjet off CL. HL-4040CN.
The autofeed tray was broken, but the manual feed tray still worked.
A steal at $100 and cheaper, easier and more reliable even in the short run than trying to unclog the 2 inkjets my wife and I both brought to the marriage.
Marriage: Pick your battles.
lostgame
Are laser printers still a ‘thing’? I recall having one as a kid and it just wiped the floor against any InkJet printer I’d used - holy crap.
It was limited to black and white though.
Jedd
What do you mean 'a thing'? They're hugely popular in offices and increasingly in residential environments as people (very) slowly pick up on the offensive economics of feeding a bubblejet.
I picked up a Brother (L3510CDW) colour laser + scanner a few years ago. It was slightly more expensive than a bubblejet, but consumables and maintenance will mean TCO is way lower. Brother seem to have some of the better support for GNU/Linux & CUPS these days - this thing Just Worked (over the network, too) on Debian with I think one package from the standard repos.
Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
lostgame
>> What do you mean 'a thing'?
I meant ‘are they being produced anymore’, ‘would you still recommend them’, etc.
>> Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
I wouldn’t have known - it’s not exactly like I was the person purchasing the toner, and I was simply told by my Dad that it printed in black and white only.
At that age, I was just grateful to be able to print my Winnie-the-Pooh fan fiction. :P
Rebelgecko
IMO if you print only occasionally at home, laser printers are the way to go. No more frantically realizing that all my print heads are gummed up 2 days before taxes are due.
dghughes
Or an hour before an interview "Oh they want a paper copy of my résumé/CV!"
merry_flame
Laser printers are really bad in terms of energy use if you don't turn them off (the toner is kept warm at all times) and interior air pollution, two problems inkjet printers avoid entirely.
Ekaros
Yes, don't expect photo quality from them, but if you want some documents, or tickets or what ever in paper form they are perfect. And you don't need to care about drying up ink.
mullingitover
They're the best thing. They print at screaming high speed, with none of the problems of inkjets. Every inkjet printer I've ever owned has ultimately made me want to throw it in a wood chipper. I got a Brother HL-L2300D a couple years ago and have been thoroughly impressed, no wood chipper impulses so far.
I've had zero cases where I needed to print color. If I want to print photos I just order them at Shutterfly and pick them up in less than an hour at the Walgreens around the corner.
kevin_thibedeau
Yes. They can be purchased new with color or B&W. Old HPs from 20+ years ago are still running fine as well. Modern color lasers have the same problem as inkjets with tracking dots printed on every page so there is utility in keeping a B&W laser around.
noisy_boy
I was thinking about a color laser printer - didn't know about this issue - thanks
bediger4000
I just bought a new Kyocera ECOSYS P2235dw laser printer. Still black and white, but I haven't had a paperjam yet, unlike my HP5600, which has a ceremonial paper jam every time it wakes from a deep sleep, or my old HP 1606n, which occasionally just couldn't print a particular PS or PDF. Didn't need Windows to get the Kyocera on my network, and they provided a .ppd that works with CUPS. Hasn't automatically upgraded itself over the network either.
kristopolous
Buy exclusively laser.
The manufacturers generally don't fuck around with their laser lines.
If it's color and they don't have a machine identification code (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code) then you have a real gem. They actually respect you as a customer.
hayyyyydos
Former printer tech here - waste ink pads are common in inkjets, and definitely not an issue exclusive to Epson. After all, the ink that it sucks through priming on start up/shut down/idle has to go somewhere.
It's not that straightforward to modify the machine to make the parts user replaceable. I know in Canon inkjets, at least, this was my least favourite job - the entire printer has to be disassembled from the top-down (including a number of springs and the decoder strip) to get to the pads. Most of the cost is in labour, not the parts.
edf13
So why would the scanner also be disabled?
hayyyyydos
> So why would the scanner also be disabled?
I'm not aware of that happening.
Looking at the video linked in the article showing Epson waste ink pad replacement, it actually looks like a pretty simple process with a couple of screws. Much easier than Canon's procedure of disassembling the whole unit from the top down.
But if you add in even just 20 minutes of (messy) labour in the Epson scenario, that's where the cost becomes more than replacing the unit.
It's unfortunate, but at least they don't do what HP does with their inkjets... if we're accusing anyone of malice when it comes to inkjets, it should definitely be HP.
rambojazz
They should simply make the part easily replaceable in a way that does not require a complete disassemble of the printer from top to bottom.
ferongr
Waste ink pads are a necessary evil for inkjet printers. Cheap home printers don't get use replaceable ink pads for cost reasons. The Epson Workforce line that uses high capacity ink pouches does (they're called "maintenance boxes"). I don't get the outrage in the article, as filling the ink pad even in consumer printers takes tens of thousands of pages, even hundreds of thousands for sprinter used multiple times a day that doesn't need to flush ink.
skyyler
The outrage is that these machines are designed to fail. If it's a wear part, make it user replaceable. Programming the printer to just stop working is horrible.
nickff
Replaceable wear parts cost extra money, and consume extra resources (which cost is a great proxy for). Many consumer products will never be used enough to make user-replace-ability cost effective or an effective use of resources. If you want to find evidence of this, look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items (thrown out due to changes in preferences, obsolescence, or poor maintenance).
skyyler
>look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items
One of my hobbies is rescuing these devices from E-Waste, so I'm acutely aware of them. The huge difference is that these devices are usually pretty out-of-date.
Sure, that first generation iPad that went into an otterbox on day one is just fine, mechanically. But can a normal person use it to do much of anything useful? The youtube app doesn't work. Safari won't load any webpages. The app store loads, but most apps (even compatible ones!) won't install.
Not even just things being "too slow", they can't speak modern protocols.
Printers haven't changed that much. When's the last time there was a change to PostScript that made old printers not just obsolete, but unusable?
kevin_thibedeau
In this case it amounts to a replaceable sponge. Inkjets already have elaborate mechanisms to support replacement of cartridges. There is no cost justification for omitting something so simple other than driving future demand with forced obsolescence.
williamscales
I think a fine compromise would be simply disclosing the expected lifetime of the wear parts when you purchase the printer. Epson could say "the lifetime of the ink pads is around 100,000 pages" (or whatever).
blendergeek
The outrage is not that Epson doesn't make it easy to replace the part.
The outrage is that Epson printers (might?) have a secret page counter and the printers kill themselves after a certain number of pages whether or not the ink pads still work. Even if the user replaces the ink pads, the printer will still refuse to work because the counter is used up.
This sort of behavior is unethical, user hostile, and should be criminal.
tengwar2
Tens of thousands isn't a large enough number to be reassuring. I use an Ecotank 4500, and because of the nature of my work buy paper five reams at a time. So far I have 13k sheets on the clock. If the printer fails at 20-30k, I'm going to be seriously annoyed. Fortunately it seems that aftermarket waste ink collectors exist, though there is always a concern that Epson might shut these down with legal or technical measures. However this doesn't address a major concern: I bought this printer for availability. Cheaper running costs are important, of course, but what really matters to me is that it should not suddenly refuse to work. Yes, I have another printer on a different site, but I don't want to have to trog over there late at night because some damn fool has (a) not designed for maintenance; (b) put in a misleading error message; and (c) not designed in a warning of the lines of "this printer will cease to function after approximately 5000 more sheets.
14
Why does the scanner need to stop working then? It is independent and requires no use of ink. There is no confusion why this is the way it is to anyone here thinking critically for 2 seconds.
tinus_hn
People would probably consider it more fair if the part just broke instead of the firmware seizing up after a fixed number of prints.
wmf
Just document it!
ajsnigrutin
Isn't this a design flaw, and such printers can be returned in (atleast most) EU countries? If there is a flaw, that existed when you bought the device, that prevents you doing the thing you bought the device for, you can return the device to the seller to get them to either fix it or to get a refund.
If every time some manufacturer decided to do stupid stuff like this, 80% of their customers returned the devices to get refunds, they would maybe actually stop with the shitty behaviour.
jjk166
But what fraction of people are actually going to take their device in to get a fix or a refund? In the EU your right to a refund for a malfunctioning product only lasts 2 years, so only the fraction of users who notice a problem before that time limit would even have the opportunity to bring it in. Then there is a decent chunk of the population that doesn't want to go through the effort of turning it in (which also incentivizes overly burdensome return workflows). Then there might be some people who notice the problem and would be willing to go through the effort of returning it, but mistakenly believe that the problem was their fault instead of a defect (incentivizing arcane error codes and unintuitive maintenance procedures). The real refund percentage could easily be low enough that the increase in sales from bad design practices is still worth it. And of course that's assuming the company selling it is a single rational entity - if the product development head gets rewarded based on short term sales and won't suffer the consequences of returns months or years down the road, then even a high refund rate won't necessarily stop bad behavior.
userbinator
It's interesting how a market has also formed around offering services (often pay-per-use!) to reset the counter. I'm ambivalent about that; on the one hand, they did do some RE work to figure out how to reset the counter, but on the other hand, it seems just as predatory --- and I'm honestly surprised that there doesn't seem to be many who have sniffed the communications necessary to do the reset and published it freely yet. Here is one of the few projects I found; note the very short list of supported models:
https://github.com/lion-simba/reink
Likewise, custom firmware for printers is an equally underdeveloped niche.
neodypsis
It would be cool that someone made a crowdsourced, open-hardware, open-source printer that people can self-service using refillable cartridges.
midoridensha
You don't need a crowdsourced, open-source, open-hardware printer. Just buy a decent laser printer off-the-shelf with proprietary hardware and firmware. You can buy 3rd party cartridges (or even just toner to refill your existing carts) for dirt cheap on Ebay.
elcomet
This works if you're just trying to solve the problem for yourself. The suggestion from the parent is if you're trying to help other people
pxeboot
I think the overlap between people with the skills to do this and who care about printing is close to zero.
I suspect this is also why printer software/firmware is so terrible to begin with. The best, or even just decent developers are not working on printers.
bediger4000
I've long noted that NOBODY says they are proud to work on printer soft or hard ware.
userbinator
You can buy something like that; they're just a few orders of magnitude more expensive than the majority of people would be willing to pay for a printer.
I'm referring to industrial machines using bulk ink (by the barrel), which come with full service literature and have parts availability. Unfortunately, besides the price, they are also relatively low resolution and designed for volume instead of print quality.
buildbot
This would be a huge deal for more rare/advanced types of printing such as Piezography
Oddly it seems like a simpler problem than 3d printers? You could literally even expose a sheet of photo paper pretty well with a formlabs printer if the paper was UV sensitive.
petra
Modifying some printers to use an external ink waste bottle is possible, and using the counter reset software is easy too.
If there was demand I'm sure you could get that from China. But it comes at a price.
midoridensha
You're assuming there's a huge army of volunteers available to tackle these problems. Most likely, any open-source developers irritated by this crap simply don't buy Epson printers, knowing this about them, or better yet just don't buy inkjet printers. You can get laser printers rather cheaply these days, even with color, and avoid all the problems inherent in inkjets.
userbinator
On the other hand, there seems to be no shortage of 3D printing projects; yet I find myself using a 2D printer far more often than I have ever had a need for a 3D one.
Lio
I would imagine it’s because it’s easy to buy a printer that works from someone other than Epson, Canon or HP.
When I got fed up of poor quality multi-megabyte driver downloads and cartridges that dry put after a month of inactivity I bought a Brother laser printer.
It prints from Windows, Linux and macOS without a driver download and it never dries out.
johnwalkr
3D printers are much simpler than 2D printers, in terms of manufacturing the parts. Aside from the extruder area, the parts are simple mechanical off the shelf (or at least simple to manufacture) parts plus some machined or 3D printed interface parts. Most of the complex parts are not unique to a 3D printer and thus they are mass produced and cheap.
Many of the important parts in a laser or inkjet printer Have traits like tiny, precise, fluid-tight, even high voltage. And they are only made for printers, they aren’t commodity parts you can just buy. Just getting the parts to make one printer would probably cost 2 orders of magnitude more than buying a printer.
darth_avocado
I’m also surprised why there isn’t any disruption in this space. If planned obsolescence in printers is so obvious and problematic, it would seem to me that creating a printer that doesn’t follow the dark patterns would just sell like hot cakes?
merry_flame
Epson actually has a line doing this, the Epson EcoTank series. They're excellent. The fact that Epson is playing both games clearly means that many consumers are not taking the long-term view here.
wmf
Kodak [1] tried that and gave up. Maybe it wasn't profitable enough.
[1] or some company using the Kodak name
matkoniecz
Brother laser printer fit this description. At least when I bough one several years ago.
hnbear
I’m firmly in the laser camp here.
In college I bought an HP LaserJet 5. It was old then, well past EOL, but was fully functional and previous owners had added a network card, so Icould add it to my appartment’s network and we all shared it. It printed thousands of pages with no trouble at all.
Recently after starting to WFH I realized how much I like reading contracts or longer docs on actual paper, and how much the kids ask to print work out. I’ve never had an inkjet last more than a year. I found a Canon C743 online second hand, and it’s printed flawlessly and quickly for several years now. It was $175 down from $450, not much more than a high end ink jet. I scan a lot more than I print too, so the AIO is great.
Lasers have quick print times, even better in volume, much more serviceable, don’t dry out, ink lasts ages, etc. the biggest issue with inkjets is that you need to use them often or they dry out, and the cartridges don’t hold much either. To infrequent printers they’re effectively single-use.
Inkjets typically sell themselves on photo quality, but photos are far more economically printed at better quality and consistency at a CVS or Walgreens. Typically our local stores do same day printing of basic photos for very very little, far less than inkjet ink.
merry_flame
Lasers have quick print times, even better in volume, much more serviceable, don’t dry out, ink lasts ages, etc. → all these problems have been solved by the Epson Ecotank series as far as I'm concerned. Laser printers are terrible in terms of interior air pollution and idle current.
tinus_hn
Note that the old LaserJets consume a very large amount of energy, even when not in use.
pkulak
I only did laser too, for years, until I checked out the new high capacity ink jet printers. It’s pretty much just an ink jet that you pay full price for (over $300), and it has huge buckets each of CMYK. When they run out, you buy new ones in bottles the size of a small mustard container for under 20 bucks.
Now I get color on every page, and those wonderful, ink jet blacks I’ve been missing. And per page, it’s cheaper! Those laser cartridges are really expensive.
Sure, it’s slow per page, but I only print a page or two at a time.
Oh, and you refill the ink, not replace the cartridge. So if the printer company ever decides to charge $100 for a refill, sourcing it somewhere else should be trivial.
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walrus01
at this point I don't think there is a single inkjet printer manufacturer that is not highly abusive to the consumer.
buy a brother black and white laser printer and just don't print stuff in color (or better yet, try really hard to find a reason not to print things at all).
CharlesW
FWIW, I've had a Brother color laser printer for years and continue to be pretty happy with it.
jonahhorowitz
Or buy a color laser, which aren't even that expensive and work great too.
cat_plus_plus
I would be super happy to have a water heater that shut itself down before it got worn out and leaked water all over my floor. A reset utility that kept it running for a few weeks more till I arranged for service or replacement would be even better. And sure, I am against paternalism and unprotected water heaters / inkjets should be available for those either knowledgeable or stupid enough to want them. But a default consumer product should shut down before it's at risk of doing something horrible, like spilling inks that are designed to be permanent over an expensive carpet.
djmips
They aren't comparable to a water heater rupture. It's like comparing a heart attack to a tiny splinter. My anecdata tells me this isn't a big issue (ink spillage). I've taken old printers apart and yes I got ink on my fingers from the soaked pads but I wasn't in anyway thinking OMG - this thing is about to blow!
cat_plus_plus
Presumably you were not taking printers apart on top of your grandparents' heirloom dresser than you didn't wish to get stained. I would rather my gadgets disable themselves than spoil my furniture or give me splinters, when these are foreseeable possibilities.
ssl232
How many printers have a fault condition involving spilling ink on the carpet?
hayyyyydos
When waste ink absorbers are full, a fault condition is spilling ink out the bottom of the printer... mainly when (some) non-genuine inks are used. I've seen it happen a few times.
dukeofdoom
Someone recommended a Brother laser printer on here and supper happy I switched over. All my printer problems just went away.
Ink Jet, and Spirit Airlines are how the market figured out how to exploit people's cheapness.
miked85
I did the same by buying a Brother B/W laser printer. I think it may be the only reliable printer I've ever owned. The rest (both expensive and cheap) were junk.
RachelF
HP did the same with their CD writers in the late 1990's. They would only write a certain number of CDs and then would fail. Reflashing the ROM counter would fix the issue.
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Consumer, commonly found inkjets are absolutely crammed with.. I was going to say "dark patterns", but it's an euphemism when your product is being rendered unusable due to a fixed number in its firmware, so maybe.. criminal? They've been doing this for more than a decade and an half, and the rationale behind the ink pads does not hold up, at least in my experience.. being an incredibly easy replacement if they ever were a problem, you still have to get it officially serviced to have the page count reset, at an hefty price from what I recall. You also cannot use the scanner if it has one when the counter hits the limit. Luckily, there exist programs that give you ownership of the machine back, one of which I recall being named antipampers, that you can find un-demoed online too, and it sure came in handy all the times I had to resort to it for myself and others. Don't buy these printers.