Well if you buy a supertank printer, prices for everything all of a sudden seem a lot more reasonable, but you have to pay $200 more for your printer. Now your printer costs the $300 it seems like it should cost based on all the mechanical parts and technology inside of it.

It's because we finance our printer purchases with future interest payments in the form of ink.

You can also buy a cheap printer and hack it with a CIS. I have an old Epson with that setup, and a program some friendly Russian hackers made to disable the cartridge chip DRM. I also mix my own ink, 50% dilution is perfect for text and makes the already cheap bulk ink even cheaper --- I haven't calculated the exact cost but it's probably even cheaper than dot matrix.

(I bet that really irritates the corporate scumbags...)

> a program some friendly Russian hackers made to disable the cartridge chip DRM.

Open source, or some binary/blob? I'm increasingly less willing to run binary only code from entities I don't have a way to sue or have some legal recourse against if they do something against my interests.

Not open-source, but I trust them because I learned of it from some long-lost forums (which also had hacked printer firmwares to patch out such things), and others had also not experienced any problems. I trust the community far more than the manufacturers (who are certainly doing things against my interests), it reminds me of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994

I did sniff the communications it did with the printer, so I could probably write an open-source version if I really wanted to; but I don't think there's all that much value in doing so.

...but someone did think there was, so there's this: https://github.com/lion-simba/reink

Do you really have recourse against HP? I don't think they would have pulled this bait-and-switch if we did.

Well, in my case it's probably the difference between buying a printer or not, not buying HP or not. My wife has a printer (Epson) for her home business, and I'll have her print me something occasionally, but for a business I'm willing to make some allowances. For personal use, I've been so disgusted with the printer market for decades that removing those companies from all aspects except manufacturing and initial purchase is the only thing that makes that purchase palatable.

So, the question becomes, what's the cost of removing those companies and their supply chains/software after purchase? If it's well trusted software that doesn't require constant attention, that's attractive. If it's random people providing binaries in a country that I may or may not have any chance of getting recourse if they harm me (that is, trajan horse or exploit, not accidental hardware bricking/breakage), then I'm left wondering whether it's worth it.

Of course the DIY hack has always been there, but there is also a value of your time issue too. Like black ink bottle that lasts for 5000 pages costs like $15. For many here having a new maintenance job of maintaining their DIY hack version that breaks more, is less color accurate and is more fragile to move around is not worth the $100-200 your saving from just buying a supertank upfront.

There are plenty of companies from which you can buy printers that don't do this shit. Just don't buy HP products. Problem solved. Of course I also think that this practice should be illegal, but you're overstating the problem by a fair margin.

The solution to companies continuously eroding our rights to own things by first moving to licensing for digital goods long ago, and now moving to licensing for physical goods, is not to just ignore it and use another company, because them doing this allows them to extract more money than they otherwise wood, making this a lucrative strategy. Strategies that make money don't go away.

The way to deal with business practices that harm the consumer or public is to regulate or legislate them in some way. This is why we don't allow child labor. We didn't just tell people "well, choose a company that doesn't employ little children".

Antitrust enforcement would also help. Also anti-competitive patent cross-licensing agreements create a virtual cartel of printer companies.

The patent deals started with HP, Canon and IBM having a cross-license. Lexmark inherited that deal and was able to enter the market after it spun out from IBM but took the printer patent licenses with it. Things evolved a lot since then, but the same tactics are employed to keep out new entrants.

I don't agree. If this detestable practice causes a lot of people go buy Brother printers, then HP will make less money, not more. It seems like your whole argument rests on this flawed notion that licensing practices are always more profitable, but it just isn't true. They might be unit profitable, but it doesn't help if you move much fewer units.

> If this detestable practice causes a lot of people go buy Brother printers, then HP will make less money, not more.

Except that Brother can do the same if they want. Also, lets me clear to talk about profit, and not sales, as "money they make" can be interpreted either way, and locking someone into your product is a classic way to increase profit. Even if brother sells twice as many printers, and makes three times as much money in profit on hardware sales, are they really better off than HP if HP is making even more money by locking people into ink sales and making 6x the hardware cost on ink?

Vilifying behavior doesn't incentivize companies to stop doing it, it incentivizes them to keep the public from learning about it or making it so they can't do anything about it once they do.

Capitalism and the free market are predicated on accurate information that people can assess in a timely manner. When that breaks down in some way, whether it be negative information being hidden until it's too late or information that is just very hard for the average person to acquire and assess, that's where the government comes in.

> They might be unit profitable, but it doesn't help if you move much fewer units.

It depends entirely on how much more profitable each unit might be, and how much having guaranteed ink sales can be used to leverage other opportunities, and other opportunities that may come up from having a captive customer base.

Changing the terms yea, but the practice of selling things as services, no. People are shocked at first because they couldn't imagine ink was a service but eventually, it'll become normal and nobody will get ripped off.

Great analogy, and like the estates that didn't innovate the corporations that don't innovate will die. The HP printer business is dying like a lot of the hardware world.

The slow regression to serfdom.

If you ever fold usury and debt bondage into your thesis, please cc me.

What about birth control pills? Or any prescription, for that matter?

These do not pretend to be free. You pay for them directly or through medical insurance.

I've seen large signs at several drug stores "Free flu shots!"

Small print: "Flu shot is free only if your insurance covers all of it."

So, yeah, pretending to be free has spread to that industry too.

> "Flu shot is free only if your insurance covers all of it."

More accurate would be "Flu shot is free if you already paid for it through the insurance contributions that are reducing your take-home pay"

I don't think the comparison to digital streaming services holds up, there are plenty of subscription services that send you products and it's pretty silly to say that you don't own products that are being sent to you. It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received. The issue here has nothing to do with subscription services themselves and everything to do with HP arbitrarily changing the terms of a deal to mandate a subscription service.

> It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received

That is literally what they are doing through printer firmware. They are literally preventing you from printing freely.

HP also region-lock their ink like it’s a dvd or something.

As I discovered when my UK printer was accidentally shipped with US ink. The printer permanently locked itself and refused to accept any HP ink sold in the UK.

Will never buy anything from HP ever again.

And they can continue to do it, even revoking their own print cartridges if they want to. "Oh, that's 2020 ink, it won't print in 2021."

Shhhhhhhhhhh, don't give them any ideas.

It'd be way too easy to claim that the ink is past it's best-by date, and that they want you to have a trouble free experience with their ink, so they are disabling that bad expired ink.

Doesn't ink expire normally after a few years?

toner cartridges last forever. I've only used 3-4 over the past 20 years, including the replacement stored for years after I bought it my printer because I assume they would pull that intro-cartridge horseshit but they didn't - they still won!

It's horrifying to think that any ink that I might have stocked up maybe 2 years ago during a sale could be unusable.

Plus, since it's a consumable, it's much harder to return a defective ink cartridge once the packaging has been opened.

"Oh, not ink bought in Utica, no, only Albany ink."

Lexmark already does this with their toner cartridges on mid-size business machines.

“Oh that’s Word 8, it doesn’t work with Windows 10.”

Well I must say, after coming back to check the thread later on I've learned a lot about HP's awful business practices. Based on the article (and the fact that I've had the same HP printer for over a decade now) I had no idea that they were using DRM in their ink cartridges. I guess when I finally update my printer I'll be switching to a different brand.

> It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received.

Actually, it's exactly like that. HP cartridges can and do expire, and printers will refuse to work with them even though they are still full and functional.

I have an HP printer/scanner from ~2007 and when it eventually dies I plan to replace it with a similar unit of the same vintage, because it seems the ink shenanigans have only gotten worse with newer technology. I can at least still buy 3rd-party refilled cartridges online without worrying about them getting deactivated.

My dad's printer is affected by this news, and between this and other recent issues it's having I doubt he'll ever buy a new HP printer again. He's been a lifelong (dare I say lifetime) customer since buying his HP 12C calculator in the 80s, and has owned only HP printers since his first DeskJet 697c in '96.

>I plan to replace it with a similar unit of the same vintage

Buy a non-shit brand that doesn't connect to the internet, eg. something from Brother without internet connectivity.

My recent experience with Brother was decidedly shitty: an inkjet printer that died after a few months.

On the other hand, I have a Brother laser printer that's still working after 17 years - and they still manufacture toner cartridges for it. (It's so old that it has a parallel port[1] in addition to a USB port.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port

The one I have sets up its own wireless network which is definitely a security risk, but it doesn't connect to my LAN or the internet. I've seen newer ones that do connect to the internet and it only seems like trouble.

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago because I found an identical printer at a thrift store for $4. I didn't get it but thought it would be nice to be able to keep using my stash of 3rd-party cartridges.

Also, forgot you mentioned Brother. I decided not to get another yet printer because I already have a spare Brother MFC with just USB and parallel connections. I've had worse experiences with Brother software than HP, but it still seems to work with my computer.

I also have a dot matrix printer with enough ribbon to last me a decade or so. So I really don't need to look for another printer for a while.

The problem is that in the modern world, a printer needs some sort of net connection, even if just to the local router. People aren't just printing from their computers; they need to print from their tablets and phones too.

I'll have to check, but I don't think mine is connected to the router at all. Pretty sure it sets up its own ad-hoc network for wireless printing, which I would imagine has its own vulnerabilities but at least requires an attacker to be physically trespassing on my property. :-)

Well sure, if you want to print wirelessly, you're going to need wireless (LAN is enough, no need for WAN though) :)

I always put our printers on a separate vlan that only accepts connections from our primary vlan. No magic firmware updates anymore.

Second that, owned several Brother things, never had trouble or any shenanigans like HP does.

To be fair, the 12C is pretty amazing.

I've got a couple of pre-2008 HP scanners and laser printers that I intend to keep going as long as at all possible, because the alternatives are just so horrible. Fortunately, they're pretty repairable, and all the consumables are still reasonable. And, frankly, I don't print that much any more. SCSI is getting slightly more interesting to support, but not unreasonable.

Agreed on the 12C, I hope to inherit that someday.

That first DeskJet lasted us around a decade until we replaced it with a couple of DeskJet 3500s that didn't need a parallel port and were cheaper than new ink. I still have one of those squirreled away just in case.

Those printers are refreshingly simple, with no screen or wifi and only one button (power) and one port (USB).

Just make sure to change the batteries periodically in that 12C. About the only thing I've found that can kill an old school (pre-2008) 12C (and the 16C and the rest of the series) is leaking batteries.

I have a relatively new printer and it accepts cartridges from whatever I happen to click on Amazon, no problemo. I think it's just shittiness unique to HP (maybe some other brands?) - avoiding them would avoid the trouble.

Yes but that's not really the case here

It's important as HP has done it before and will do it again. This is just a new variation of that same mentality.

Fool me twice, can't get fooled again except ink.

>Fool me twice, can't get fooled again except ink.

This is a common saying in Texas, apparently.

> It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received.

Except they’ve done exactly that. Twice. Issues as “security” updates no less.

well they were securing their future revenue streams, so accurate just not the reasonable interpretation.

> It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received.

It is exactly like that. If you unenroll a printer from Instant Ink, it will no longer accept the cartridges provided under that program.

I use the service and like it - for photo prints, where the per-page pricing model works in my favor; for documents, I have a monochrome laser. But outside my specific and very narrow use case, it is a terrible deal.

Hp can revoke that liscense, though. They put drm chips in the cartridge and your printer will refuse to work with them.