Turns out it’s not Ink Jet, it’s HP. Lessons learned.
The printer worked flawlessly until I went through my first toner cartridges (the carts shipped with the printer are intentionally smaller so you have to replace them)
I noticed the 3rd party replacements were $80 for a full set whereas 1st party were $200. I got the 3rd party. It’s been such a headache ever since. The MAJORITY of prints from my iMac fail. Google suggests the Mac drivers have a bug that cause OOM errors on the printer. Funny thing is it always succeeds from Windows or Linux. So I half bought it, and just put up with it.
Fast forward a few years (a week or two ago) and my wife points out that there was an HP update and the printer works perfectly! Yay! The color cartridge is basically empty and needs replacing. Worked perfectly for a week until the printer popped up an error message “non-hp chip”.
All speculation and anecdotal, but I just can’t help but feel like they’ve ended their charade and are actually being “honest” with me now…
My next printer is going to be Brother; that seems to be the only honest printer manufacturer out there.
Only issue is that the printers themselves are really hard to get now. In particular the colour lasers. If I find them it's at a crazy price. So I bought a b/w again. Must be the supply chain thing.
PS the old one was not even broken after 10 years but I got sick of not having network printing :)
Someone in Germany made some open source drivers but it didn't work properly for me. Eventually I found a networked one on sale and I gave the old one away.
Eventually someone made open source drivers but half the time the printer wouldn't respond.
It's now in the hackerspace where they use it for making overhead sheets for PCB printing. So it's still having a purpose in life, I didn't throw it away :)
I guess my next printer will be a Brother, if I ever need a new printer.
I was really disappointed when HP took their printers over.
We replaced it with a color laser (Canon MF632Cdw) because my wife wanted to print sewing patterns, and I'm not near as impressed with it. No real problems, though, other than the mess that seems to be UFR II on Linux.
As for fading, one sheet that's been outdoors for two years has faded about 75%, but nothing not exposed to bright sunlight has.
Runs OK on Linux over WiFi. Used to also work on USB, but that stopped working reliably at Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Also, on WiFi it phones home and tries to download firmware updates.
... but there's still plenty of room for money-making racket unless you get one with a user-emptyable waste ink tank. (end of advice)
My ET-14000 apparently has 11 ink-absorbent pads in the base which are fed ink used when cleaning the jets. The printer kept track of how much ink was pumped away and then refused to do anything until it was emptied. I found the service manual and to reach the pads I would have had to disassemble the entire printer, including all sorts of tape and instructions as to how many Newtons tight each screw should be. Oh, and if I got Epson to do it, that wouldn't be done under warranty because I had used all sorts of non-Epson inks. Day-glo and invisible UV ink is cool!
Anyways, I got a 'printer potty' which is an external waste ink tank, and a fairly reasonable product: of course I could have made my own, but they had done all my homework for me (including telling me which way the ink flows, which is not obvious, and would have been very messy if I'd done it backwards).
Then here comes the racket: To reset the waste ink counter, which can only be done by special Epson software, I can instead pay €10 per reset per serial number to some clever Ukrainians who have reverse-engineered all that Epson software.
Fortunately I was able to pirate the Epson software and do it myself, but ... sheesh!
The fun part is I'm going to filter all of my waste ink back into the black tanks and then watercolor over wet prints, expecting some neat results there.
Still arguably better than the ink cartridge thing though, I guess.
Pretty cool what custom ink stuff you can do with it!
I really need to set up an auto job that just prints a test page once a week to save ink on cleaning. But I still haven't had to buy more ink after a purchase over a year ago, even with all that cleaning I've had it do.
So I ended up with lots of ink in the trash in the end.
HP's software is also incredibly slow. I think it asks a server for something when I open it, which is unnecessary.
Is there some brand you can buy where this doesn't happen? Happy to pay up.
In fact, it works so well that I almost feel bad that I'm not rewarding Brother by throwing down over £250 on a set of 4 cartridges, but there are limits, when the off brand ones are £5 a throw.
Works swimmingly with Linux, mac and phones (both ios and android) without any special software.
3rd party cartridges just work.
It. Just. Works.
I heard good things about Brother, and 2022 will be the year that we get a Brother laser printer. I refuse to buy one single more ink from HP.
Right now, my favorite printer is an Epson.
Honestly, it's not HP or Epson or Samsung or Canon. The entire printing industry is a giant scam.
The point is, ink extortion seems to thrive on pricing tiers for different markets, just like content extortion does.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john...
Could this format be designed to satisfy some local expectations as to the look and feel of a "quality" book?
It’s not "some" books get one and others get the other. All books get out in a first format decided by the publisher. There’s no "default" format; it can be big or small depending on the author/publisher’s choice. Then, later, you have reprints, which are often (but not always) in a cheaper format, the one we call "livre de poche" and which sells for less money. But this reduced price has little to do with the format; paper doesn’t account much in what you pay for a book. When you do reprints you have reduced costs everywhere because the text is already there: no need for a translator, reviewers, etc; also, there’s no marketing and the author’s fees are usually lower. In fact, in Italy, reprints are cheaper even if they are usually printed in the same format as the first edition.
A lot of the keys sold on various sites come from those regions, some companies iirc Ubisoft started implementing region locks.
Region locks on DVDs other than due to issues of distribution rights especially for dubbing and subtitles followed the same logic especially in Russia where region locked DVDs were released much earlier and for much cheaper as piracy was far more common there than in the west.
And a dire warning about where the book may be sold.
Turned out that the starter cartridges that came with it were US region coded and the printer was now permanently locked to US ink.
Hated that thing with a passion - the crunch it made hitting the bottom of the e-waste bin when it finally broke was deeply satisfying.
I’ll never purchase an HP product ever again.
Some retailers care that the products they're selling are conning people; especially if it results in returns.
Can you explain why it is a stupid claim?
High humidity is known to affect things such as ink drying time which can affect print quality, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that it would be stupid to have different ink formulations for different climates.
Edit: note that I'm not saying that HP was telling the truth. I just wanted to know how the very idea that of different inks for different climates is apparently stupid.
Yes, in most places the humidity varies a good amount. But there are regions where it tends to be high most of the time, and regions where it tends to be low most of the time. It doesn't seem inherently absurd that an ink company might have say low, high, and regular humidity ink formulations designed for areas that are persistently low, persistently high, or neither.
You might expect this to be pointless because humidity often swings a fair amount each day, but that the way humidity affects printing is by changing the moisture of the paper. A place where humidity swings from low to high and back on something like a daily cycle is likely to have much smaller swings in paper moisture content. The paper will remain closer to the some sort of weighted average of past humidity.
It is clearly a bald faced lie, coming from the least trustworthy source. If they told me water was wet, I'd double-check.
It's for price localization - sell at what the market will bear, and different regions have different price points.
Sure, but I would assume that the US is a single region for the printer cartridge DRM's purposes, but you can easily find both areas of rather high and rather low humidity in the US.
I don't think the parent you're replying to is saying that the idea that things perform differently in different climates is a stupid claim, but that it's essentially impossible that's the reason why HP region-locks their cartridges, and claiming such is indeed stupid. (Or just flat out rude and disrespectful of the support person.)
There is only one US region cartridge and the US includes Alaska and Florida, or the high plains and Florida. The difference in humidity in these regions is massive. I would need different ink in the summer and winter in my upper Midwest state.
It doesn’t pass the smell test. Humidity probably does affect printing on some level, but that is irrelevant to the HP support person’s claim about why cartridges are region locked. They’re lying about why the region locks exist, this isn’t hard to understand.
During 2020 there was a shortage in my country of inks, no local suppliers - official or unofficial - had any. He found some on eBay from another EU country, but when they arrived the printer wouldn't accept them. Apparently the inks are region locked, and the only way around it would be replacing the main board of the printer to change it to the other region.
The previous hp printer refused to accept new ink. The significant other threw out the empty cartridge needed to bring the cursed thing back to its senses. It hilariously still prints out the test page flawlessly with the new ink.
It does help to complain there, I've done it to for effect too. It's the only reason I still have a Twitter account :)
I had no idea I was buying “out-of-region” ink cartridges and I also had no idea such a thing could possibly matter. I called HP and the tech support person had the gall to tell me they have different ink for different regions because the climates are different. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the stupidity of such a claim.
They offered nothing until I started telling my story on Twitter, and suddenly a Support person messaged me on Twitter offering free replacements. So not only do they have an indefensible strategy of region-locking ink cartridges, they also train you to whine as loudly as possible to get any sort of recourse.
The entire printer industry appears to be running one scam or another.