Comments on: HP print cartridges through the ages, a slow-motion ripoff

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:42:00 +0000

That was my first thought, too. They need a creepy little girl in the picture.

By: rausantaella

rausantaella — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:26:00 +0000

It’s mordite! Run for your lives!

By: rausantaella

rausantaella — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:26:00 +0000

It’s mordite! Run for your lives!

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:34:00 +0000

I can find laser MFPs on shelves at my local B&M just fine.

Problem is, people think they need color, and that means you’re looking at $500+, and modern consumer lasers are now pulling the same scam with toner cartridges.

By: Amelia_G

Amelia_G — Sat, 12 May 2012 05:29:00 +0000

Years ago, before I switched to a laser all-in-one, I was poking around inside my oversized HP inkjet printer and found to my horror a fist-sized pile of half-dried ink. The printer had been just spitting it out in an empty space to the right of the actual printworks. I walked over to a nearby Office Whatever and checked their inkjet printers and found the same thing.

By: ponzicar

ponzicar — Sat, 12 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

I agree. The amount of ink, as well as how much printing can be done with that ink, is what needs to be tested. It is not scandalous by itself for HP to save money by using a smaller amount of material in their cartridges unless the consumers are getting shafted in the process.

By: Anne Noise

Anne Noise — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:28:00 +0000

Agreed. We made the upgrade to a halfway decent printer after years of shitty, cheap “replacements,” and have had much better luck with print cartridges with a slightly larger investment. (Plus it replaced our aging fax machine, too.)

By: Anne Noise

Anne Noise — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:26:00 +0000

I’m horrified. Why wouldn’t they just want you to destroy your printer and upgrade? Seems like better business, since both options will piss off a ton of customers, haha. I think my dad uses an HP printer, I’ll remind him to keep an eye out for those.

By: Sam Pourasghar

Sam Pourasghar — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:10:00 +0000

That’s freakin’ terrible. My Dell printer at work is constantly (CONSTANTLY) trying to sell me ink from their official website, plus it claims it’s out of ink when it’s got a good 100 pages left. Every day I have to say “Fuck off, printer. Don’t try to sell me shit, I know how to fucking buy ink.”

By: Sam Pourasghar

Sam Pourasghar — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Photos for mah albums and frames, photoshops for bday cards, photocopies for legal documents (like taxes and shit), sheet music (and scripts and shit).

There is one print job I need to do but it’s gotta be right, I know I can email an image from my phone to my printer so it comes out even when I’m not home. I gotta be having a video skype with the missus when she’s at home and talking to me in the telly, then I say “MACFRYY!!” and then “YOU ARE TERMINATED! READ MY FAX!” then email the “YOU’RE FIRED!” image through to her. Man, that would be sweet. I wouldn’t actually fire her of course.

By: catherinecc

catherinecc — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:01:00 +0000

I have a laserjet 3p, it still runs. The laserjet 1020 ain’t going to last nearly as long either.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:06:00 +0000

This just reaffirms how much I already despise HP printers, especially the “all in one” crapsters they sell. Horrible printers that often will have the scanner disappear for no reason, won’t share between PC and Macs, etc, etc.

Screw HP Printers to hell. Total ripoff.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000

I got rid of mine. I printed so infrequently, the cartridges had always dried out. I had to buy new cartridges every time I wanted to print something.

By: steveboyett

steveboyett — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:29:00 +0000

I made a living word-processing off and on for 20 years. A print cartridge for the classic HP LaserJet III cost $79 and was good for 5,000 printed pages. A print cartridge for the LaserJet 1020 is essentially the same, costs the same, and prints 2000 pages if you’re lucky. They long ago have adopted the “razor blade” business model of making the holder cheap and charging a fortune for blades.

For inkjet cartridges, though, Lexmark is the worst offender., in my experience.

By: C W

C W — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:27:00 +0000

“You can buy printers that are not loss-leaders and for which the supplies are not ridiculously priced, you just have to make the decision up front to pay $500 instead of $125 for the printer.”

Or pay 125 for a laser printer. Who really needs color for their prints aside from every once in a while? What consumers, and even small businesses need “giclée” printing?

By: C W

C W — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:23:00 +0000

“I mean I get just as many prints”

Not really.

By: C W

C W — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:22:00 +0000

Not to mention that it begins drying up the moment you take that label off. I only bother with laser printers for that reason.

By: keplers

keplers — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:03:00 +0000

me. i print out images + text for artwork and academic/long articles to read (reading on a screen sucks) at least once a day.

my canon pixma printer has held up well since 2005; it’s slow but it gets the job done.

By: keplers

keplers — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:03:00 +0000

me. i print out images + text for artwork and academic/long articles to read (reading on a screen sucks) at least once a day.

my canon pixma printer has held up well since 2005; it’s slow but it gets the job done.

By: James B

James B — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:49:00 +0000

I don’t always shave. But when I do, I use a single blade safety razor. Pretty much the same reason I use a laser printer with “Replace Supplies Override” enabled.

By: James B

James B — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:49:00 +0000

I don’t always shave. But when I do, I use a single blade safety razor. Pretty much the same reason I use a laser printer with “Replace Supplies Override” enabled.

By: James B

James B — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:49:00 +0000

I don’t always shave. But when I do, I use a single blade safety razor. Pretty much the same reason I use a laser printer with “Replace Supplies Override” enabled.

By: xian

xian — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:01:00 +0000

Many inkjet printers come with starter cartridges which yield far fewer prints. This may not be as good an idea as you think – not to mention how wasteful it is.

By: alfanovember

alfanovember — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Well, in one corner, we have a company that was a founding pillar of the tech industry, started by two titans of modern management, which sold the canonical device in nearly every category for over 4 decades… and in the last 15 years has suffered near-fatal hemorrhaging in people, product, and profit. The entire global enterprise shambles forward, zombie-like, sustained by only two products – commodity IT servers and consumer inkjets.

And in the other corner, there’s everybody else.

By: robbersdog

robbersdog — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:58:00 +0000

Hey, I’m a printer by trade so I know the situation is pretty bad. What really bugs me here is that there would be so many ways to legitimately show the downward spiral, but the size of the sponge just isn’t one of them.

By: gellfex

gellfex — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:56:00 +0000

What most people don’t realize is that you only get that number of prints from an inkjet cart if you print them all at once. If you print a few pages here and there like most of us a huge proportion of the ink ends up in the cleaning pads. 100% of laser toner ends up on the page.

My $90 HP mono laser works wonderfully and cheaply with 3rd party carts for about $20. Inkjet is tech whose time has definitely gone.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Another alternative is to use laser for text, and those special photo printers for images. The latter uses a process closer to what you get at the photo shop than laser or ink.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:46:00 +0000

I get the same impression with laptops. My parents have a Acer laptop aimed at the business marke, and it keeps on going. But Acers aimed at the consumer market seems to die within a week of the warranty running out.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:44:00 +0000

The free handle, expensive blade way of things seems to have permeated the tech industry. Cheap computers, expensive accessories. Cheap TVs, expensive cables. And the dance goes on and on and on…

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:42:00 +0000

They do, becuase that is what they find as all in ones stuffed on shelves at their local brick and mortar.