HP wants you to print things through its cloud service, wherein you pay a subscription fee for ink and your usage is routed through its servers. To encourage you to do this, it covers the USB port …
If you need a printer, spend a little extra money on one that is actually used in an office. A nice mid-range laser printer is relatively cheap. They don’t come with the subscription bullshit, they usually work over LAN if that’s a thing you want, and generally Just Work™.
Consumer inkjet printers are cheap for a reason. If you need a printer, get one that won’t give you endless headaches.
As someone working in hardware support, I did exactly this and tell others to do this, especially if they have a kid in middle or high school. Sooo much cheaper to bite the bullet on the front end and then have a printer that’ll last a decade.
I bought a color LaserJet 4 years ago I think. Have yet to need to replace any of the toners.
I’m doing my first swap after about 8-9 years on mine
Yeah, if you only need black and white, strongly strongly recommend a Brother laser, which is only going to be a little bit more than an HP inkjet, be better in virtually every way, including massively cheaper in the long run.
Probably color too, but they’re more expensive and I don’t have experience with them (or have read many people who have).
This 10000%
I’ve got a hp LaserJet that I got back in like 2014 or 2015 when my work was going to ewaste a new printer that got used like twice before they went to a managed printer service. That thing has held up like a tank across 3 or 4 moves, and I only just had to order a new set of toner carts.
I hate inkjets with a passion, and recommend laserjets to anyone that asks (and even some that don’t)
Original post: https://haunted.computer/@netspooky/110832978569741892
Holy hell, why does anyone buy anything from HP?
I’m calling it now, this is just the first step and HP is going to start making printers with no USB port.
A few years back we decided to do a quality of life upgrade from our Brother MFC-J6920DW since it was just time to retire it. I bought an Officejet Pro 7740 because I needed large format scanning and printing. All that thing wanted to do was calibrate. Before every print, let’s spend 2 minutes calibrating! Before and after scanning, spend time calibrating! I was spending more time waiting for it to prep to do any jobs than anything else. Oh, and apparently this “Pro” printer wasn’t in the business tier and didn’t support scanning to a network folder.
That printer was returned back to the store inside of a week.
As it just so happened, at the same time the newer Brother MFC-J6945DW finally came into stock at MSRP on Amazon and I bought it up. That printer is a BEAST and has been going strong for about 2 years now printing random documents, photos, manuals, and sheet music. No excessive waiting for calibrations, just timely printing and scanning. Oh, and after 2 years I finally had to replace one of the original ink cartridges last month.
Don’t buy HP.
Damn straight, Brother all the way. I bought the most basic Brother laser made a decade ago. I think I’ve replaced the toner exactly twice and it never skips a beat.
I like my solution: 15 year old laser printer plugged into a raspberry pi
do people use usb for printers? my hp works fine on ethernet or wireless, no cloud required. SmartTank 7605. It’s a great little printer.
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