Modern product (as opposed to service) subscriptions exist to extract more cash from the consumer rather than a real tangible benefit (I don't count the marketing benefit). Printer ink (especially HP as the ink cartridge usually contains the print head too), coffee pods (complete with DRM!), air fresheners (at least one brand has DRM here too), sealed laptop and phone batteries and dozens of others are designed to get lock in and more sales/profit. Other industries and products are adopting the same model.
Ties in well with the materials used in consumer products to ensure they need periodic replacement. eg 60s Hoovers were rubbish, but could easily last 50 years, current Hoovers are far better vacuums thanks to Dyson, but are near (or past) end of life by 5 years as the plastic is disintigrating. They're often real terms cheaper, but now objectively too cheap, and there's no better made alternative offered. Even premium brands are now "cheap".
It's a profligate waste of money, packaging and environment. If a product isn't under this model it's easy to get the feeling it's only because they haven't figured out how to get away with it yet.
I'd prefer a saner balance on most of these things.
- disposable cartridges with printheads (what most people have at home), here we have to recoup the cost of the disposed silicon printhead and the low initial price of the printer
- permanent printheads (what you're asking for) and disposable ink "tanks" of various capacities, here the challenge is to make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined before the printer gets replaced. Third party ink can be a contributing factor to printhead health
We now also have an ink-subscription model where you pay at some anticipated level of ink use and you get a replacement cartridge when we think you need it.
Yet somewhow they aren't offered for sale in Europe?
Instead we get the subscription model, which involves yet more data (printer usage, ink levels) disappearing off to someone else's servers.
Then pay a reasonable price for cartridge with printhead ongoing, otherwise, if I'm successful keeping the printer as long as possible, I'm still recouping the low cost of the printer long past the point I bought enough ink to do so.
I don't need high throughput, heavy duty, as I don't print that much any more, so buying from the business range isn't usually sensible.
It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.
It's only a year old and now it won't suck up the paper properly. I have to literally stick my hands into it and feed the paper in page-by-page.
The thing has successfully printed less than 20 pages and it's already not working.
It's 2016 and Samsung can't make a rubber roller that works. And I don't want to buy another just to have the same thing happen.
That was a mistake.
Ethernet is. Most WiFi gear is.
For most video equipment there exist some kind of adapters.
That said, I switched to a laser printer from Samsung for any printing that I still do. I had a HP photosmart printer for photo prints, but at the volume of a photo a year, it is cheaper to have the photo printed at walgreens, CVS or any other printing place than it is to buy new ink cartridges, even remanufactured ones.
Isn't that exactly what HP is doing now when they sell a cheap printer with replaceable cartridges that contain ink and a print head? Are you saying the "plumbing" is the difficult part?
I suspect "economics" in this case means they weren't making huge margins on ink cartridges.
How does a head get "ruined"? If its clogged can't it just be cleaned? Perhaps by flushing through with a solvent. I call shenanigans.
I didn't bought it because it was too big to fit on my desk and I don't know if I will buy an other Epson because they drivers are bad on my Debian. I should try to upgrade them. HP is pretty terrible but the Linux drivers are impressive.
I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well.
However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do.
And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer.
And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper.
So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.
Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.
It auto cleans head while plugged in, can take a3 paper, in emergency can print decent photo in slow(best) mode, has huge black tank, and the size is not much different from other brands a4 inkjets. It weights a ton, though
I didn't consider buying HP for a second not because of their drivers but because I have an association of HP producing total garbage.
It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?
I've got a 7 year old black and white laser multi-function and am on toner cartridge number two. Never had a problem and it plays with my router for printing over WiFi. I've had good luck with it in Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows.
Pretty sure I spent $149 with it on sale at Fry's when I bought it nearly a decade ago.
I assume they refurbish and refill them and then sell them again.
Every time you have to “throw away” something that looks 70% reusable (or in the case of printer ink, not even fully empty), it’s aggravating. We really need to push all companies to build reuse deeply into their products so that none of them feels pressured to go that route just to stay competitive. And if competition is not an issue, and it really is just a scam for more money, executives need to be going to jail.
It is not hard to imagine a slightly modified printer cartridge that saves virtually all of the electronics and casing, and just plugs in a new ink pod; or, one that has a “gas tank” kind of port where you can add more ink. They just need to do it.