Technology

We have around 250 HP Laserjet 1320 printers in our company and while they are generally quite reliable, their age is slowly taking the toll. Each one prints 50-200 pages a week and their guts are becoming a bit loose. So number of paper jams, mispicking, and other breakings increases every month... In near future we'll be probably forced to replace them, but with what?

These were pretty cheap printers back then, aftermarket toners are dirt cheap and it is still possible to buy parts for self repairing online. Bosses won't allow the replacement to be some fancy expensive printers or cheap ones that turn to shit in months. These HPs are running for maybe ~10 years? What is the brand/model I should check nowadays? Bearing in mind we'll have to run hundreds of those? I'll appreciate any input you might have.

PS: located in EU

I think it's time for an open source 2d printer project, we have open source 3d printers and the technology is much more complex than 2d. Time to put HP to sleep

There are relatively recent refurbished Brother laser printers on NewEgg for under $200.

You can get a used older model on eBay for under $200.

And the chances that used older model will work just fine for you for years to come is high.

My Brother is between 15 and 20 years old, only on its second toner cartridge, and still working like a charm.

There are a lot of options to do color printing for cheap if you only need it very occasionally like most people. The local public library may even offer free color printing.

I got a Pantum laser printer and it's free of all the rent-a-printer crap that the big ones are pulling now. It was easy to set up with my Linux system too.

I have a brother laser printer that I love. I just fill up a tub with generic toner and it keeps printing for almost a decade now. I'm old and like to print things. I think it's much easier to read on paper and I'm happier to print out a 150 page book than read it on a Kindle lol. I've also broken multiple ereaders commuting on trains but still have all the papers I saved in binders I printed and really enjoyed reading and will last nearly forever.

HP is so desperate for money that this is what they need to do to survive.

What does HP (hardware) actually do these days? Where do they compete (and I mean compete, not have products in)?

They ruined Compaq.

They killed their golden goose printing business with bullshit like this.

They killed their server hardware business with bullshit like locking software, drivers and firmware behind support contracts.

As somebody who always bought HP and advocated for their hardware (many years ago), I would never buy anything they make today.

Weren't they from the start, more or less?

Has always been meme

The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,” trades on the idea that printers are frustrating commodities. The company’s configurator page mentions bonuses like “continuous printer coverage” and “next-business-day printer replacement,”

Our printers are unreliable pieces of absolute shit guys. But if you do the subscription we'll replace your shitty broken rental printer next day. Never worry that you can't print when you need to print. Mindblowing.

Just make reliable printers that work, dumbasses.

I can see it being an option for some people. If you print low volume but regularly every month. And you need a printer that always just works. The problem is the monthly limits! The base package is 20 pages per month, just printing out a pdf manual or something would eat that up in a minute. I would want unused prints to be added to next month.

Otherwise it is very similar to how it works for businesses having larger office printers.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The company debuted a subscription service today — just like CEO Enrique Lores said it would last month — called the HP All-In Plan.

So if you decide HP All-In isn’t for you after all, you’ll have to return the printer and go back to rubbing elbows with everyone else at FedEx whenever the need to print arises.

That way, if a firmware upgrade blue-screens your printer, at least you have some recourse that doesn’t involve driving to a store to buy a whole new one.

And receiving ink before you run out is great if you are, like me, the kind of person who ignores the “low ink” warning all the way until I’m fully out and am actually printing something critical, rather than coloring pages for your kid, for once.

But those are mostly functions of the fact that I don’t really print that often and rarely encounter the annoyances of printer ownership.

One is HP’s plan, which appeals to the frustration of user-hostile experiences like scanners that don’t work because you bought third-party ink and printers that become unusable without some serious effort because you moved overseas.

The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!