cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1962740
also from r/StallmanWasRight
// removed invalid link
Meanwhile, I’m laughing all the way to the bank with my Brother color laser.
Yes, the printer didn’t have a low subsidized price up front. But now I can enjoy big toner cartridges that seem to last forever. And I can use all the knockoff ones I want. And the printer itself is bulletproof.
Huge fan of Brother!
Just make sure you get the older Brothers, pre-subscription model.
We actually moved to using Brother lasers after dealing with HP’s anti-consumer nonsense one too many times. They started to refuse to distribute offline capable installers for their drivers, so we returned the rest of our stock and swore them off.
Yes, the printer didn’t have a low subsidized price up front.
This is brought up in every thread about printers by vigilant Brother customers roaming the internet spreading the gospel. Is there is actually any proof that HP prices are subsidized? What’s to stop them from having regular margins AND subscriptions (like everyone does these days) while Brother gets away with inflated margins claiming that others are selling below cost? This way both HP and Brother win.
I don’t like HP either but I find ot a bit suspicious how every time Brother is mentioned its always with the remark about how their prices are totally ok.
I don’t own a printer but to me does it really matter which way it’s going?
HP printer: $50 Brother printer: $150 HP ink: $40 Brother ink: $20
If the brother is cheaper to run daily. Then eventually assuming the same lifespan for both the brother will be cheaper in the end.
I made up random number for my point I have no idea how much any of this actually costs so I could be way off base.
I wanna know: Where is the better business bureau? Do they do any actual work to protect consumers from these shady business practices? Where’s the legislation to protect consumers from this bullshit? The better business bureau isn’t very useful. This type of stuff should be illegal.
You do understand what Instant Ink is, right? You’re not buying cartridges, you’re buying how many pages you can print. If you cancel your subscription and run out of pages to print, it no longer lets you print anything. Call me crazy but that makes sense.
This is pretty awful in the sense that it generates waste but it’s also necessary for people not to abuse the system. Think about it like this, I buy 1 month of the cheapest plan, it costs me less than 1 cartridge and 1 cartridge can print more than the maximum amount of pages of my plan, I cancel said plan and keep using cartridge. Do you see how you could “game” the system to buy insanely cheap cartridges?
There’s probably a better solution though. For example, they could try to come up with a way to identify people and/or printers used in the way I described before and prevent them from signing up to the service again.
I know a better solution! Just don’t have this kind of subscription! It’s wasteful, takes advantage of consumers, and it’s difficult to understand. It’s totally inappropriate to sell a printer to someone and limit / control their use of it with a subscription. The world of printing at home with HP needs a reboot, restarting again from: buy the printer and the supplies for it, print the things. This is why I’ve been using printers that are not HP since forever. In the old days, HP ink was the most expensive to buy but the printers were very cheap, the cheapest you could find at any store. This company has spent decades and decades controlling the ink and trying to get people to pay for the ink. It all started with being the cheapest printer at the store and being the most expensive ink at the store. 30 years or so later (plus or minus) we have this insanity. I like my setup for home printing. My printer, my ink, my paper. I print all I want.
It’s optional. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. You can’t complain because the service works as described.
IMO this subscription model only makes sense if you have a business and print a lot of pages per month. For a normal user it doesn’t make much sense.
Stop with this bullshit. This is exactly the kind of bullshit subscriptions this community is against.
k buddy
Oh brother…
Sigh
Do not ever buy an HP printer, they are fully bloated
Wait…you guys still use cartridges? We’ve had an Epson ET-4550. No cartridges. No subscription.
Brother printers are decent too, and no subscription either
Have they moved away from cartridges to ink tanks? We buy bottles of ink for our printer that last for a long time.
They’re probably talking about laser printers. So technically cartridge I guess, but the toner lasts so long it’s pretty affordable.
The ink tank printers sound interesting, but I don’t print very often. Do the heads still dry out on them?
Funny how different the same company can appear to different people. My current printer from HP (maybe 2 or 3 years old) is the best I ever had. Sure, it offered a subscription for the ink, but after a quick calculation I knew that I would waste my money with that so I chose not to sign it. And now I have the first printer I’ve ever seen that answers “I don’t care about yellow, the text is blank and white” with “okay” and starting to print.
And that is not even something positive, just not a negative thing. Thats what should still be treated as the default behaviour.
Oh yeah, this is awful.
I recently bought a new printer, and getting something like an HP set up on Linux was a heart-breaking experience.
It’d be really nice to have a Kickstarter for an “open-source” printer, where cartridge standards can be produced and you can buy them and use them freely.
My HP Deskjet network printer was recognized automatically by Linux Mint. I had to do nothing.
The main problem I had was that newer HP printers require it to be connected to the network using their mobile software, which was pretty janky and froze during the pairing process.
Just pay the premium for a brother printer m8
Yeah, made a huge mistake there
Bought a cheap HP printer about 10 years ago, max usage is maybe 50 prints a month, most months maybe less than 10, most times 0. Sits there and indeed it’s bloaty software is the most painful.
