HP Discontinues Online-Only LaserJet Printers Amid Backlash - Instant Ink Subscription Gets the Boot, Too (tomshardware.com) 51
An anonymous reader writes: Per a report from DruckerChannel, HP has finally been forced to discontinue its cheaper e-series LaserJet printers due to customers experiencing problems with their online-only and always tied to HP+ subscription requirements. Among other things, HP+ requires a permanent Internet connection, and customers only use HP-original ink and toners, not allowing for third-party alternatives to be used at all. There are benefits to HP+, including cloud printing and an extra year's warranty, but the forced online requirement for a cheaper printer left a bad taste in the mouths of many consumers.
In any case, it's important to clarify that this discontinuation of HP printers will only impact HP LaserJet printers that have an "e" added to the end of their model name to denote the alternative business model. So, the HP Laserjet M110w is unaffected by this, but the HP LaserJet M110we and M209dwe, two cheaper always-online alternatives, will no longer be produced or sold by HP. Another critical point of clarification is that the existing HP e-series LaserJet printer models in the wild will still function exactly as they did when they were purchased. No software updates are forthcoming to unlock the true potential of the hardware, so existing customers will have to deal with it and HP+ until they can replace their printers entirely. At least they'll still get HP+ benefits, but after such backlash, it'd be nice if HP acknowledged its mistake enough to remove some of the restrictions on e-series printer users.
In any case, it's important to clarify that this discontinuation of HP printers will only impact HP LaserJet printers that have an "e" added to the end of their model name to denote the alternative business model. So, the HP Laserjet M110w is unaffected by this, but the HP LaserJet M110we and M209dwe, two cheaper always-online alternatives, will no longer be produced or sold by HP. Another critical point of clarification is that the existing HP e-series LaserJet printer models in the wild will still function exactly as they did when they were purchased. No software updates are forthcoming to unlock the true potential of the hardware, so existing customers will have to deal with it and HP+ until they can replace their printers entirely. At least they'll still get HP+ benefits, but after such backlash, it'd be nice if HP acknowledged its mistake enough to remove some of the restrictions on e-series printer users.
Forget HP (Score:5, Insightful)
I refuse to do business with a company that would try to blackmail its customers and change the terms of service after the sale.
I've got a 5-year-old Brother laser here that has never complained and continues to churn out page after page of good clean copy -- whilst every single one of my HP printers has ended up either dying or bitching about the fact that I (as the owner of the printer) choose to use a third-party consumable.
HP today is *NOT* the HP of yesterday. My original HP Laserjet printer was a fantastic machine -- today they're selling junk and extorting huge sums by way of their constantly changing (worsening) policies on consumables.
Goodbye HP!
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LaserJet 5L was the one that made me say "bye" to HP.
Been a Brother laser in this house ever since (and 5L was a long time ago.)
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I still use my 1515n that i have bought in 2008. Two of the toner cartridges are still the same that came with it, only needed to clean the drum once in a whle. Not really happy with the printer, though, but as long as it works...
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I miss my 4050. I don't remember now what its problem was, but it couldn't reasonably be fixed and I was sad to see it go. I'll likely never again have a printer that good./p
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I'm still running a LaserJet 1320 that I bought back around 2006. The only print problem I ever had with it was resolved with a new toner cartridge. I've maxed out the RAM and added a print server (built around an OG Raspberry Pi, and shared with a Zebra LP2844 that prints shipping labels) to put it on my home network. It's speedy and has a duplexer. It replaced a thrift-store Brother HL-630 that was just getting to be too slow for my print needs at the time.
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Re: Forget HP (Score:2)
The Kyo 2020,3920,4020 were the pinnacle of home printers, just rock solid and a doddle to work on.
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HP became what it is now over the course of the 1990s.
Re:Forget HP (Score:5, Informative)
HP became what it is now over the course of the 1990s.
More like the early 2000s. Blame Carly Fiorina.
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HP hasn't been HP since Agilent.
Re: Forget HP (Score:3)
I get you but the fact here is that hp specifically didn't change the terms of service after the sale.
They stopped selling some products, but owners of said products continue to enjoy (or suffer) the same service.
They did the same for instant ink. I subscribed for the free tier a few years ago (15 pages a months, I don't need more). When they killed it (I think they were forced to, it was deemed illegal), and replaced it with a 1â/ month price, they didn't change it for existing subscribers. I've been
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Brother has crap software. Also likes to call home. Also tries to lock you into their ridiculously priced toner. Still I'd rather deal with them than HP.
Re: Forget HP (Score:2)
You don't have to install the entire Brother software stack such as the monitor and so on. You can install just the drivers. They work fine in my experience with my previous MFC-9840CDW and current MFC-L8850CDW.
Been a Brother user a long time. More than 15 years. Would still be using the 9840 if not for the faster scanning on the 8850.
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I refuse to do business with a company that would try to blackmail its customers and change the terms of service after the sale.
So... 99% of the software industry? Every EULA says they reserve the right to change their terms of service at any time, because fuck you.
All of this needs to be illegal. We all know HP (and everyone else) is already cooking up their next scheme to blackmail customers, and the laws will do nothing about it.
There are still people buying HP printers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess some people just live under a rock. These have been a bad deal basically since forever.
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They are prominently placed at Costcos and Sams Clubs.
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That explains a lot.
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Consumer HP printers often have the lowest sticker price at the store. On the business side, HP is the kind of brand people don't get fired for buying.
Assuming you don't intend to mess with your consumables and buy official (a good chunk of the population, Slashdot is not very representative), it may not even be a bad deal depending on your use case.
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In any case, it's important to clarify that this discontinuation of HP printers will only impact HP LaserJet printers that have an "e" added to the end of their model name to denote the alternative business model.
The "e" business model being "extortion".
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HP printers are everywhere though - they're cheap, so people fall for them. Hell, around where I live, even the charity shops won't take them any more because they've got too many. You can't move for "cheap" HP printers.
sad (Score:5, Insightful)
HP Laserjet printers were once the industry standard and best. Sad how far they've fallen in the name of quarterly profits.
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HP Laserjet printers were once the industry standard and best. Sad how far they've fallen in the name of quarterly profits.
When was that, exactly? I'll grant you that they were bought in large quantities, but they've always been pretty terrible, in my experience.
Their support for gradients has horrible banding compared with almost any other printer I've used, and that's true of every HP printer that I've ever seen, whether color or black and white.
One entire series of printers that we had at work had a bug in the duplexer support that never got fixed, such that if you sent 11x17 pages to it with duplexing turned on, it jamme
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Laser Jet 4 may have been the last one. Its been a minute since HP made good printers. I have not used an HP printer in at least a decade. HP business equipment was really good quality in the 80s and into the 90s.
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LJ4000 gets described as a bedrock workhorse, but that was 25 years ago
The guts of it were also built by Canon.
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I blame Carly Fiorina [wikipedia.org]
Warranty? (Score:2)
What warranty? If you're renting a service then they need to provide the service, which means providing replacement equipment if it fails at any point during the service period.
Oh Brother. (Score:4, Funny)
Just sayin'.
Greed kills...I hope (Score:4, Interesting)
The best colour laser printer I ever owned was a huge HP ColorLaserjet 5M I got for free. The secretary at a university where I used to work wanted it out of her limited space, and her boss agreed. There were a couple of administrative hoops to jump through, but basically nobody else wanted it, either. There was a print shop on campus if they wanted to crank out three or four hundred seventy-five page booklets, which was kid's play for this monster. Toner came in big, half-litre bottles, and they gave me three spares of each plus five black. It served me for more than 10 years without any problems whatsoever, then I passed it on...to save space. As far as I know, it's still flawlessly printing in full colour at acceptable speed, and with half-decent graphics.
I'd have been a loyal HP customer for life if they hadn't started pulling this lock-in garbage. Instead, HP is dead to me, and my old workhorse got replaced by a reliable little Brother that works just fine, accepts off-brand toner, and is good with photos (which the HP couldn't do very well).
HP is dead to me.
I love my HP printer (Score:3)
CP2025dn. Of course, this model dates from 2008 and I got mine in 2010. Wow, fourteen years ago and running strong! It likes cheap 3rd party toner from Amazon too.
Refurb units are available online. I'd buy one of them before anything with a 2024 manufacturing date.
Sometimes, old is good.
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Carly Fiorina started HP's decline (Score:5, Insightful)
HP was one of the truly great tech companies under the leadership of Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Then, in 1999, subsequent to a boardroom coup that completely removed the Packard family from the company's management structure, and the 1997 spinoff of all of the sprawling corporation's non-computer, non-printer-related lines of business into the then-largest IPO in Silicon Valley history, the venture-capitalist-heavy board of directors signed Carly Fiorino as CEO, awarding her the largest signing bonus in the tech industry to that time.
FIorino went through HP's management team with a meat axe, removing many of its longest-serving and most engineering-oriented managers and replacing them with hotshot MBAs and accountants. She spent the next two years working on what turned out to be a disastrous merger with Texas-based Compaq Computer Corporation at the height of the tech sector meltdown that followed the bursting of the first Internet bubble. The merged entity had extensive duplication of product lines (especially PCs), and Fiorina opted to cut headcount, rather than axe or merge the redundant product lines.
She single-handedly demolished an established corporate culture focused on engineering excellece that rewarded company loyalty and dedication to "the HP way" in its tens of thousands of employees, replacing it with a Darwinian culture of internal competition focused on cutting costs and increasing profits by preying on its legendarily-loyal customer base.
Every CEO that has succeeded her has been cut from the same rotten cloth, and every engineer still employed by the company despises the ground over which they ooze. It's the fault of the board of directors, and there will be no change at all in HP's behavior until those scumbags are thrown out on their asses - which, let's face it, isn't going to happen.
What is going to happen is more of the same lack of management scruple and contempt toward its customers until it loses all of them, and the vulture capitalists acquire HP's rotting corpse, sell off all its remaining assets, drain its retirement fund, load it up with a mountain of bad debt, and ship it off to the land of Chapter VII.
Or, to put it another way, end-stage capitalism business as usual ...
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You can blame Jack Welch for this crap. He was the original role model for the locust CEOs.
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dunkelfalke observed:
You can blame Jack Welch for this crap. He was the original role model for the locust CEOs.
Absolutely.
And you can blame Milton and Rose D. Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics for Neutron Jack - and Ayn Rand for all three of them and their short-sighted management philosophy ...
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I was there. Through the whole Bell Labs/USL/Novell sequence of events, I landed at HP in the mid 1990s. The stories about how great HP was to work for were true. I loved it there. The people were great, the processes smart, and the work interesting and fun. They had a pension on top of the 401(k) match, and generous stock options and profit-sharing bonuses.
Then Dave Packard died, and Lew Platt let himself be convinced by the board and greedy large shareholders that HP was too steeped in the HP Way (i.e., c
Really? (Score:3)
Another critical point of clarification is that the existing HP e-series LaserJet printer models in the wild will still function exactly as they did when they were purchased.
So current owners lose no functionality, got it.
No software updates are forthcoming to unlock the true potential of the hardware, so existing customers will have to deal with it and HP+ until they can replace their printers entirely.
So owners will continue to have a product that is exactly what they bought...
At least they'll still get HP+ benefits, but after such backlash, it'd be nice if HP acknowledged its mistake enough to remove some of the restrictions on e-series printer users
Why? Isn't it enough that consumers retain 100% of the functionality they bought? Let's compare this situation to the one where Sonys speaker owners found their expensive speakers rendered useless when the manufacturer dropped all support for them.
They bought reduced-price hardware, agreed to some restrictions, and now even as HP discontinues the products current owners are not impacted - why do they deserve improved features? It would be *nice* if HP did that, but I suspect the whole product line was a money loser, why spend more money on engineering and then have to support random non-technical users trying to do a firmware update on their printer? Public relations? I think we all know that ship left the HP consumer printer division years ago...
Re: Really? (Score:2)
PR would have been smart after alienating these users. Instead they left them with a lasting bad impression.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
That's what I thought too. HP killed a bad product, while not affecting existing customers. That's a good thing, but the editor has to spin it in a bad way to make hp appear evil.
Hp is evil, they do plenty of awful stuff, no need to be dishonest to turn one of the few decent things they do into an evil one.
O Brother, Where art thou? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would anyone buy HP? They are even worse than Lexmark ever was.
Pay a fair price for a Brother printer.
They make their profit on the sale of their product and have no need for these shenanigans.
When the printer tells you the toner is empty and it won't print, you can just tell it "nope, go ahead and do your best with what you got" and it will.
No hacks, or monkey business; it's your printer and it does what you tell it to do.
Buy third party refills; they work just fine.
If someone at Brother reads Slashdot (Score:2)
This discussion is a goldmine of satisfied customer testimonials.
Re: If someone at Brother reads Slashdot (Score:2)
Yup. Brother really is it today.
The HP Deskjet 500 was revolutionary for me in the early 1990s when it replaced my dot matrix printer.
That was a hell of a long time ago.
What's a good color inkjet printer? (Score:2)
I have a really low volume need to print and scan, but when I do print I often need reasonably good registration and double-sided printing. It would be nice if I could print on heavy card stock paper, but that's not absolutely necessary.
A small and light Brother All in One with fax? (Score:2)
Does it exist? They're so big and heavy. :(
Hmm (Score:2)