HP To Buy Samsung's Printer Business For $1.05 Billion (usatoday.com) 111
HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP's history. USA Today reports: "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6,500 printing patents as well as 1,300 researchers and engineers "with advanced expertise in laser printer technology." While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung's mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it "suddenly burst into flames."
Should have bought Lexmark (Score:1)
The way things are going, they could have gotten Lexmark for less.
Stop with the unrelated topics, please! (Score:1)
What do batteries catching fire have to do with printers?
NOTHING!
Please stop with the stories that are off topic with themselves.
Re:Stop with the unrelated topics, please! (Score:5, Funny)
lp0 on fire
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BeauHD has been to journalism school; that is how they teach them to pad out stories these days. And it is totally relevant coz he posted links, that means (s)he did his/her research.
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What do batteries catching fire have to do with printers?
One-time thermal printers!
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Connection? (Score:3)
I doubt there is much more connection between Samsung's printer and cell phone divisions than there is between their printer and guided missile destroyer units.
sPh
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Well, there is one connection, the money from the sale of the printer division to pay for the losses of the built in battery division. I wonder how much Samsung saved in battery manufacture by having non user removable batteries, compared to how much they lost as a result of having non user replaceable batteries, youch, decades of claimed battery savings down the drain and no where near paying for the whole bullshit marketing about built in batteries being better than user replaceable ones. I guess the Sam
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Terrible printers, last I checked. I went around at a trade show a few years ago to look at laser printers, and the Samsung impressed me by being the only one whose output was actually worse than not having output at all. The printed photograph that they used for a demo was a dark, blotchy mess, with nonexistent gradients.... It was so bad that I almost wondered if it was somebody's idea of abstract art.
Then again, I can pretty reliably recognize HP-printed photos from several feet away by the banding,
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The thing is, the Samsung laser printer wasn't *that* much cheaper than the bottom tier of Brother or Konica Minolta laser printers, both of which were miles better.
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This is like comparing a Pinto to a Corvair.... :-)
My favorite HP experience involved a set of... IIRC three different HP printers (multiple models in the same series) at my former employer with duplexers. If you loaded them up with 11x17 paper and told them to print double-sided, you had to send them exactly two pages (one physical sheet) at a time. Otherwise, the stupid printers would start feeding the next page before it finished printing the previous one, resulting in a paper jam every single time.
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The 8150 laser printer was a really good printer, built to withstand a nuclear blast in its vicinity. Ours got too long in the tooth. We replaced it with a P4515. It works okay, but it is built to withstand a low velocity wind storm, anything greater than 15 mph wind will probably cause it to lose plastic parts. I expect the next printer we get from HP (if we get one from them) will probably drop its parts on the floor every 10 pages.
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The average 3 year old with a box of crayons produces a better result than the average HP printer. And faster, too. Not to mention that the crayons will last longer than the ink. Yes, even if the crayons and edible and made of sugar.
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It does. And they are great for what they are. Cheap like heck, decent priced consumables, support for Samsung Print Language widely available in Linux. Some even have PostScript Support. I'll still using the cheap Samsung Laser printer I bought a decade ago just fine. For inkjet, if you still care about that, the best brand IMO is the Canon bubble jet line.
HP is good at office departmental printers. They're fine at this but its way outside my small office budget.
GODDAMMIT, HP, YOU KNOW BETTER! (Score:2)
Of all people who should know better, it would be you. *sigh*
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RIP cheap toner (Score:1)
samsung's printers were one of the few remaining product lines you could reliably use third party or remanufactured toner cartridges in. first thing HP will do, no doubt, is nix that, either by "redesigning" samsung's models with DRM, issuing a 'critical' firmware fix that does the same thing, or flat out killing-off the samsung models completely.
captcha: frugally
i guess that leaves brother as the best choice for lower-end lasers (and inkets for that matter) that happily use cheap non-OEM consumables.
Oh god dammit - there go some great printers (Score:4, Insightful)
Samsung laser printers are cheap and just work. The ones at work (and the ones I have at home) just WORK, the only time they don't work is when they're out of paper. You can always print to them, and it's reliable.
On the other hand, the HP printers on the same work network are pieces of crap that get 'lost' all the time ('Printer is not online'), probably because of how terrible the HP drivers are. And those HP drivers nag you all the f@$ing time to install the rest of the HP bloatware.
So now they're going to slap their shitty drivers on the Samsungs and they'll be completely terrible too, and cartridge prices will skyrocket. There's no upside on this for consumers.
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I still have an old working 4100 with an jet direct card in it.
Re:Oh god dammit - there go some great printers (Score:4, Informative)
Samsung sometimes rebrands other companies' printers, such as xerox. And if you have special requirements, such as PostScript or PCL, look elsewhere. These are supposed to be cheap printers
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> Samsung sometimes rebrands other companies' printers, such as xerox.
You got that backwards: laser printers sold as Xerox are usually re-badged, made by Samsung devices, with a bit of luxury firmware (PS support, more refined PCL support, sometimes more onboard memory and a faster embedded CPU).
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My Samsung laser has both PS and PCL... network card, duplex, etc etc.. and was miles ahead in price. Secondly, they weren't COMPLETE BASTARDS for DRM locking their toner carts.
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I thought that to make CUPS work with a printer it must have support for it, so you just can't "add PostScript" support to a printer that won't understand it?
We have an old ibm iseries server that needs PCL support on a printer in order to be able to print anything besides text.
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Samsung laser printers are cheap and just work. The ones at work (and the ones I have at home) just WORK, the only time they don't work is when they're out of paper. You can always print to them, and it's reliable.
Had exactly the same thought, guess this means I should pick up a couple of more laser printers before HP gets their hands on them. Every person I've recommended them to vs any brand of inkjet has been very happy with them. The HP bloatware is probably the worst thing out there, you'd think after people complained about how shitty that stuff was ~10 years ago with HP printers they would have listened. NOPE gotta double down, make it even worse and hide the "install driver only" options.
pc load letter what the fuck does that mean (Score:2)
pc load letter what the fuck does that mean
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While this is sad, this shouldn't really be a problem if you've already got a Samsung printer; it's going to outlive you anyway so you weren't going to buy a new one anyway :p
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My bad. Commenting to remove negative vote.
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This looks like a transaction that should not be approved.
In this case, a monopoly may actually benefit consumers, since at least the ink cartridges will be interchangeable.
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How does that help consumers? Do you really see HP/Samsung releasing twice the number of printers they individually do now, or will they simply gut Samsung brand as a play to buy them out of the market? My money is heavily in the second outcome.
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The most hilarious part is that, while this is happening, Apple removes the headphone jack and suddenly everyone is freaking our like it is the fucking end of the world.
Sense of proportion. Get some.
Hopefully the headphone jacks are fireproof. The headphone jack outrage has quieted down a little bit now. since there's a good comeback.
And it's all Apple's fault that that little boy burnt himself on that exploding Galaxy phone. He was listening to music, and his parent's gaddamned iPhone 7 didn't have an earphone jack to plug his Dora the Explorer headphones into. Fscking hipsters anyhow!
HP LaerJet (Score:2)
Still running HP LaserJets made in the '90s in production. These things still work like champs, AND still have drive support up through Windows 10.
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Unfortunately, HP learned from their success, and has chosen to make their printers shitty since then so to force regular upgrades. I kinda wish that I hadn't given up my old 4simx, but when I moved into a 526 square foot apartment, I didn't want my printer taking up half my floor space. That thing was built like a tank.
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Print Innovation (Score:3)
Look, I just want the machine to put ink on paper. I don't want any innovation here, and certainly not from HP's driver team.
Re:Print Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, I just want the machine to put ink on paper. I don't want any innovation here, and certainly not from HP's driver team.
Ain't that the truth! HP puts more crap in more places than anything else I've seen except maybe Office. and some of the old Norton's AV stuff.
Nothing like a Revo uninstall to illustrate that.
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They're buying Samsung because Samsung are soooo good at software. The marriage of those crappy devs and HP's massive bloatware is just what the industry needs!
We have an HP all-in-one 'pro' printer at home. It's actually pretty good, but the scanner stopped working the other day, just saying "cannot connect to server". Some googling turned up some settings clearing and rebooting, but nothing worked. Just one comment said "it could just be HPs servers are down". Thankfully there were some workarounds (shock
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They're buying Samsung because Samsung are soooo good at software. The marriage of those crappy devs and HP's massive bloatware is just what the industry needs!
We have an HP all-in-one 'pro' printer at home. It's actually pretty good, but the scanner stopped working the other day, just saying "cannot connect to server".
I have one too, and it's been okay except that the power supply puts out way too much RFI. Now that's a niche problem, and I just unplug it when I use the affected item. Earlier HP printers had a problem of locking up when there was a printer issue, then randomly printing out what was causing the problem later.
But yeah, its kinda hard to come up with the next big need in printing. Its not that everything is solved, but we're pretty darned far along the path of diminishing returns.
Damn it (Score:2)
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Me, too. I have a CLX-6220FX and really like it. I have been thinking of upgrading to a faster and more capable model (although it could be argued that the one I already have is overkill for a home office) but Samsung has been letting their printer division languish lately, at least where workgroup printers are concerned. I don't care too much for HP since Carly's ruining everything that made HP great (make HP great again? ;)) so I'll probably look at Xerox (I've previously had a 6180DN) or Ricoh.
What I lik
I miss Samsung "magic RAM" and hard drives (Score:2)
Seagate bought their hard drive business, and apparently shut it down, rather than use Samsung's superior tech and facilities, to keep churning out crappy drives based on Maxtor tech and dirt floor factories. I have yet to have a Samsung drive fail, some of my drives have over 40000 hours.
As for the memory... WTF happened there? For a while, the best, cheapest 4GB DDR3 modules on the planet, and then.... poof.... they ended production and have never made that sort of impact on the market since.
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA: "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement.
Huh? Can a Professor of English please parse that gobbeldey-gook sentence for me? Is it even a sentence?
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I am not a professor of anytighing -- but --
"The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement.
What that means is "We ran out of ideas and suckers - er, I mean - customers - and had to buy our next generation of printers from someone else to turn a quick buck. Y'know, because we fired all our competent engineers eons ago to make a quick buck which we then squandered away."
"security" was thrown in because it's a current buzzword.
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FTA: "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement.
Huh? Can a Professor of English please parse that gobbeldey-gook sentence for me? Is it even a sentence?
Syntactically, it is a sentence, just like 'Sarah fluxes the pineapple with the clitoral differential monkey which decorates entropic synergies up to the donkey." :)
In other words, it is meaningless bs that has been beautifully constructed.
The important thing (Score:3)
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If it does, it'll require a proprietary driver that comes packaged with a confusing management console that rarely works well, if at all.
Two points (Score:2)
Two points I'd like to make;
1) the reliable early HP laserjets were actually built around a Canon engine. Anyone who used to bag on Canon LBP then rave the virtues of HP Laserjet were promptly despatched red faced back to the mail room.
2) Fuck printers, watch 'em burn.
Is actually a sensible Move from HP (Score:3)
Most of HP Ink (pun intended, remember that the HP of Yore split into HP Enterprise for Big Iron and Services, and HP Inc for desktops and Printers, tickers: HPE and HPI) Laser printers, even from the begining of "Laser Time" time, use laser printing Engines from other manufacturers (In the begining, mostly Canon, nowadays, they use Samsumg Engines too). So HP gets the Laser engine from a 3rd party, slaps a Microcontroller, some plastic, writes a bloated driver, and of you go.
Samsung and Canon, on the other hand, do all that, but also make the laser engines...
Also, HP Ink is not Strong in Multifunctional Lasers for SOHO/Prosumer/Office/BigCorporates. And has no presence Whatsoever in the Copier business.
For HP this deal means: ... even Dell
1.) Get rid of a competitor, actually, they probably got Samsung because it was the weaker of the lot, or for the other reasons detailed here. No worries, we still have Brother, Lexmark, Canon, Xerox,
2.) Verticaly integrate the Laser Engine into the production, with the associate cost savings. Sorry for Canon, no more HP bussiness for them in the medium term... (contracts will not be renewed, or renewed in shorter terms than without this deal, new products will be based mostly on Samsung Laser tech).
3.) In the medium term, deny other competitors (Dell, for example) of Said engines (Dell uses Samsung laser engines on many of their house brand lasers printers) or, having competitors using their engines to actually put money on HP's Pocket. Again, most likely contracts will not be renewed, or will be renewed on shorter and/or more expensive terms. If I were Dell, I'd rush to Canon's HQ and invite them some niguiri and Sake to, you know, discuss things.
4.) While the product overlap is Huuuuuge, the Market overlap is not, both Geographicaly (think, for example APAC, not only US) and client wise (enterprise vs consumer vs prosumer/soho). That means that HP Ink printers can reach places were samsung is strong, and Samsung printers can reach places where HP Ink is strong.
5.) Cross selling (Mr 500 employee office, here are your printers, can I interest you in some workstations/desktops/laptops? Mr. 800 employee office, here are your Workstations/desktops/Laptops, can I interest you in some printers to go with them?)
6.) "Cost saving synergies" (i.e Layoffs/Pinkslips/Redundancies).
7.) A nice throve of patents with which to defend from (don't even think on suing me, I have my patent's and Samsung's), or harass (hey, Sign this cross-pattent agreement with me, or we'll sue), or even get royalties money from competitors.
8.) Get a presence in the copier business.
Now, is that worth $1.05*109?
Only time will tell.
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My Dell 2130cn was a rebadged sammy. The new series 2142/H625/H825 are rebadged Ricohs or Xerox... I forgot what the Tier 3 tech said when I couldn't get it to connect to my AT&T router.
Every dell printer is a pure rebadge with a different case.
BigCorporates? (Score:2)
I've been working big corporate for the last 15 years. I've seen more HP printers and plotters used in a corporate environment that probably any other, so I am not sure how they are weak. I would say their corporate business is much lager than even their personal business. When I first started we still had an old Tektronic thermal printer I used (which was fun and used colour wax).
As to if they are any good or not, well we've had our share of issues but probably no more than anything else. Largest share of
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Printers and plotter (though this acquisition is about printers only), Yes, MULTIFUNCTIONAL printers for corporates, not sure (here in LatAm, canon and Xerox). What about printer rental?
Also, which region is your region? LatAm (that's were I am)? NAFTA? EMEA? APAC?
Samsung printers are garbage (Score:1)
So HP's solution to their poor sales is to buy the guys that make the worst printers in the market.
Samsung's printers are outperform in everything by even generic crapware printers. They aren't even good for storing the paper since the tray is usually the first part to break due to the use of ridiculously cheap plastic.
And the connection is? (Score:2)
What the hell is the connection between Samsung printers and smartphone batteries that overheat? Is this new style of non-sequiturs an attempt at looking clever without actually making a serious effort at understanding the subject? Are we going to see things like "Gravity waves have been found, as predicted by Einstein, who famously never wore socks"?
In this case there is an excellent opportunity to comment on a variety subjects:
1) HP's and Samsung's financial trouble and the future direction their products
Dealing with market contraction (Score:2)
One of the things I've noticed lately is the tendency for people to get so swept up in trends that they forget about the overall market. PC and printer manufacturers need to come to terms with contraction of a mature market, and I think HP is doing that in this case. Yes, of course, fewer people are buying PCs and even fewer are buying printers for home, but that does not mean the market is totally dead. All it means is that you're selling fewer of them, to people who actually need them for "real work." Pap
Samsung (Score:1)
Bonus time (Score:1)
Re: How to profit (Score:1)
As if millennials are working on or with printers...
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As if millennials are working on or with printers...
Indeed. My daughter is a millennial, and the only time she ever printed anything was for school assignments. Then her school figured out web submission of homework, and even that stopped. Now we only use our printer for printing crap to mail to the government, so some bureaucrat can read the form and manually type it into their computer.
Re: How to profit (Score:4)
Because Congress Cut their Budget and will not spend any money on computer upgrades that would save money in the long run?
No, because Congress gave them $8B to upgrade their software, they hired Oracle as a contractor to implement the upgrade, now all the money is gone, and nobody knows why.