I would expect sufficient ink for the number of pages I signed up for to appear periodically until I have a large surplus, at which point I can either reduce my subscription, or cancel it.
I wouldn't expect that ink to retroactively be bricked.
Laser printers are far, far better in terms of consumables, as long as you avoid the very lowest cost units, and DRM hobbled units.
The ink is only valid during your subscription period, like most other service subscriptions. When you cancel your phone, you don't to use the excess minutes. When you cancel your insurance, you don't get to make a claim for an event after the expiration date. It's 10 pages a month (or whatever plan you sign up for), so you didn't print and the month is done, so is your ink. You can put in a regular cartridge if you want regular rules, but $1/month to maybe print and they'll send more ink when it dries up seems like an ok deal to me? (Was better when it was free, but they got bills, I guess)
Frankly, I don't expect ink cartridges to work after a month or two if I haven't printed anything, either. I'm happy with the color laser I got from CDW Outlet, but while discounted, it was still probably the cost of 4 inkjets and I don't know if I'll really use it enough to justify. But other than some duplexing oddities sometimes, it just works and that's really nice.
I have a Deskjet 4515 for a decade or so. I use regular ink cartridges with it, and even if I don't print anything for three months, it just prints fine. Sometimes a couple of nozzles get clogged, but printing or a quick clean restores them to perfect order. When you're printing in "Normal" quality, these clogs are tolerated somehow, so you don't see the degradation in the quality either.
Modern HP printers came a very long way since 500C/550C days. These are resilient machines now, even if they're made to home-duty level of robustness.
HP may have many quirks and unethical practices around ink, but ink quality and machine resilience is not two of them.
The first one was given away because I got a Canon bubblejet for free, and that was really unreliable and expensive.
I got my second HP with my money, and gave it away for a HP scanner/printer combo which again I got free with a laptop purchase.
The one I broke was this combo, which was worn away in a decade. I probably used it beyond its designated life, and it was a bottom of the barrel machine.
I'd have said the same thing for Samsung lasers, but they have stopped making them. I'm hoarding some spares for mine. These things are also built like tanks. They were jointly built with Xerox, so they were something.
I'm not a person who replaces all IT equipment every year, and I'll accept a higher TCO if I can keep the machine for a longer time, and can buy its spares for a considerable amount of time. Also, as a person who mingled with inks and printers for a long time, I'd not buy off-brand ink for my devices. It just doesn't worth it.
I got fed up with overpriced HP ink cartridges that clog up; so I paid about £120 for a Samsung mono laser (I hardly ever need colour, and if I do I can walk to a local print-shop with a memory stick).
A couple of months later I discovered that Samsung's printer division had been borged by HP. Happily, toner is reasonably priced, and 5 years on the machine works fine. If it ever breaks I'll just chuck it in the skip - I'm not going to tangle with HP support.
Please don't override drum over-use protection, because it also holds the waste toner unit. If it explodes, your machine is done.
I have a spare drum unit and plan to buy three more large toners for mine, so I can use it for 7-8 years more at least. Then we'll see what happens.
The cartridge that came with it seems to have been less than a quarter full; it lasted a few months. Since then, the full replacement cartridge is still going strong.
The upside is, everything inside it can be changed, incl. rollers, so as long as I have spares for it, it'll live on. Mine also supports AirPrint, so anyone can print from anything (Android has an app/driver for it, too).
Name one other subscription service that sends you physical stuff every month that they remotely disable all of when you cancel.
My trash service will come and pick up the cans when I cancel service.
The fact that there’s physical ink cartridges involved is neither here-nor-there. It’s a practical requirement, nothing else.
Rental cars these days will disable themselves if you don’t return at the of the rental. The SIM card in your phone stops working when the subscription ends etc etc. There are plenty of services involving physical assets that stop working when you stop paying.
Also how much printing do you do? I get an ink cartridge maybe once a year.
What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
With my SIM card, that's actually the case, too: It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.
Not making a judgement either way, just adding more data.
Obviously not. You’ve paid for food delivery, you got what you paid for, why would they take it back? It’s not like you’re paying for cooked meals.
> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
Have you ever read or tried to signup for the service? Literally everything is priced per page. A no point do they say you’re getting a subscription ink service, it’s quite explicitly a per page printing service.
I’m sorry, but you bought a service that clearly sold and priced as “$X per month for Y printed pages”, and misinterpret that as “$X per month, for Y ink”, then that’s on you.
Printers, and their manufacturers sucks, and HP is the worst of the bunch. No one should ever even try to defend them, there is nothing defensible about them.
Especially considering you can now buy printers that only ever work with instant ink and reject all other cartridges.
(Btw, I'm using a modded brother printer)
Where does that expectation come from, exactly? The name?
The pricing page is clearly and explicitly all about pages per month [1].
> It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.
So you're comparing a different type of plan here.
Prepaid mobile plans like this are akin to Amazon's "subscribe and save" program: they'll charge and send you a cartridge on whatever frequency you like, regardless of usage. Choose too frequent and you'll amass as huge stockpile; too infrequent and you'll run out of ink.
Instant Ink is like 'regular' mobile plans: you get x GB per month for a certain price. If you cancel your plan, even though you only used 5% of your data for that month, you don't get to continue your plan.
HP's FAQ even say this [2]:
> If you decide to cancel your HP Instant Ink, you can go back to using HP original Standard or XL cartridges. HP Instant Ink cartridges will not work after the end of the current billing cycle in which you cancel. To continue printing after your billing cycle ends, make sure you have standard replacement ink cartridges ready to use in your printer.
The alternative to all this is to just buy regular cartridges as you need them.
[1] https://instantink.hpconnected.com/sg/en/l/v2?jumpid=af_e1d0...
[2] https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/instant-ink/faq.html#:~:te...
Incidentally you can still install standard (non-subscription tied - e.g. bought at Costco) cartridges and the subscription status is then irrelevant (but of course you pay for those cartridges so they're yours to do with as you please unlike the rented subscription ones), but that's not the point (for the most part).
I find it handy for super low volume printing needs at home.
The ink is what?
Don't want to pay for subscription ink? No problem, get the regular ink. Have some account problem and can't pay for subscription ink, you can still get regular ink and use that (subject to the usual inkjet printer woes that come with not printing much).
Seems like leasing a car and complaining you're expected to return it after the lease.
If instead of giving the car back so they can resell it, you had to crush it or replace the engine oil with sodium silicate, then you'd be absolutely right to complain. Useful things should never intentionally be forced to become waste just to protect a business model.
All the while, we as individuals are pushed harder and harder to be more efficient, more environmentally conscious and less wasteful.
How about super markets stop selling peeled oranges in plastic packaging?
Wow that's actually a thing in the US... mind blown
HP also use much larger capacity cartridges for this services. So under normal circumstances there’s less ink and fewer wasted hunks of plastic floating around. Not sure how you provide this service if signing up for one month got a years worth of ink, and no obligation to pay anymore.
I expect them to stop sending me more when I stop paying, not to sabotage what I had left.
Technically you are just renting the ink.
I use this service for years. I use the legacy free plan and have been printing for free for years.
As soon as somebody develops the technology they will make all the ink on your already printed documents turn invisible too.
It's only half a joke, if this becomes feasible I'm sure the business and marketing folks will have some urgent meetings to bring this along ASAP.
Our financials focused system is good at exerting pressure for people to do stuff, anything, but it fails miserably in promoting reason, instead creating narrow minds narrowly focused on The System itself rather than on the broad set of inputs our minds were originally evolution-made to handle. No wonder that than in turn those narrow minds are much more easily replaced by automated processes.
well, different times and standards etc. but there is a quite bit of difference between brutal genocide to get out of debt vs. not allowing your printer to work unless you keep your subscription with our company so our revenue keeps coming in.
No, same mechanism. Yes, different contexts lead to different outcomes, why would that even need to be mentioned? Did you read what I wrote? Sometimes I hate Internet discussions. Instead of working with one another, the goal seems to be trying to find an interpretation that make sit possible to attack a post/position. If only I can find one flaw in your argument - by using my own most uncharitable interpretation that you forgot to explicitly prevent with several pages of small print - I'm contributing!
How do the different outcomes due to different contexts, which obviously will turn out very different in almost every single different context, make my statement less valid?
But that said I do think they actually are a bit different, lots of people won't kill someone even if they will pick up a wallet on the street and take the money instead of giving it back to the people. Your example implies people who will do one bad thing for monetary incentives will do the worst thing. Which is why I found it funny and pointed it out, not to imply that people don't do bad things for monetary incentives, just genocide probably needs a little extra push than that.
Because your statement is black and white. By your logic, if we don't provide literally 100% of everything needed to survive without requiring anything back at all for every person the system is evil.
Real life is shades of grey. Society requires some incentive for people in it to work in order to function. Of course, we can argue about the specifics, but you'll quickly release that if we provide everything for everybody that there is nobody left to do the providing (at least with today's technology).
I wonder if it's at all possible for us to develop and install a system that prevents us from exhibiting behaviors learned the hard way by our ancestors (most of which were not even human).
Maybe our digital descendants are able to get it right, if we don't also ground them in survival!
Capitalism is a brutal system. It’s becoming more obvious the longer it runs. I don’t have answers, sadly. Only the ability to see and recognize the failure.
I personally abuse the hell out of HP subscription service as I’m on their legacy free plan. 30 pages a month, and run a full set of cleaning cycles each time because I print so infrequently.
My body, my choice.
And you would throw it all away because of some personal libertarian principle? This isn’t only about what you would like to be able to do in any given moment, it’s what this ability does to society as a whole. Your ability to someday be able to sell yourself into slavery has some value (for the principle of the thing, if nothing else), but it is certainly not worth the above-mentioned effects on society.
(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131936>, from two years ago.)
My body, my choice.
day after my death: huh, Bill Gates didn't pay, but luckily my wife can always sue for the money!
Fighting a billionaire is fun!
Now we have something else to aim for rather than policing people's bodily autonomy.
It's morally repugnant and unambiguously reprehensible to buy any of the flesh of another person.
A market with only sellers and no buyers is ineffective at best, and given the moral reprehensibility of any buyers that do appear, the entire market is tainted and wrong. Any and all of the infrastructure to support such a market is wrong. Anyone involved in buying, aiding, or abetting slavery or organ running is guilty of committing one of the most grievous and wretched offences known to humanity.
But yeah, it's absolutely your right to do with your body what you want. It's just a complete wrong for anyone else to do what they want with your body.
In Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, Frederick is indentured to a band of pirates until his 21st birthday.
That particular wording coming back around to bite him when it's pointed out that he was born on February 29th in a leap year...
What if I pay $1, run the ink cartridge dry the first day, then immediately cancel?
If I rent a car and stop paying for it, if I were to say "I expect them to leave me with the car I rented and just not provide a replacement when it needs to be replaced" people would look at me like I was trolling. The nature of renting a car, and the prices involved in renting vs buying are great enough that people understand the market.
With ink, they are doing something similar. You aren't paying $1/month (their lowest tier plan) to buy a cartridge of ink until it runs out. That pricing would be unreasonable compared to the current market price of ink (regardless of what that market price should be if we had better competition). Anyone thinking they found a hack to get HP to give them ink cartridges for $1 is like my example thinking I found a slightly used 2022 car for $500 because I can rent it and then stop paying and get to keep the car.
In this specific case, they aren't taking the ink back, not worth it, and instead creating waste by disabling it. We could say there market shouldn't exist and outlaw it to reduce waste, but that's a different argument than to argue they are selling you a cartridge of ink (technically 2+ for black and color) for $1.
1. Pay $1 for a subscription, print like crazy until your first set of cartridges are empty, then immediately cancel
2. Pay $1 for a subscription, immediately cancel, then keep printing with your first set of cartridges until they're empty
Today, HP allows 1 but not 2. Why?
The same thing that happens when I sign up on amazon for a 'subscription' of diapers or dog food.
When I stop the subscription, I expect them to stop sending more. I don't expect them to take my child...
(Admittedly it's towards the end of the page.)
How does HP Instant Ink work?
HP Instant Ink is based on pages, not cartridges. Choose a plan based on the number of pages you would like to print monthly. Your monthly fee allows you to use our subscription cartridges to print your plan pages and includes ink or toner, delivery and recycling.
Can I still use my Subscription Cartridges if I cancel the service?
From the moment you insert the first service cartridges received with your Welcome Package, all following cartridges received will be Subscription Cartridges.
If you cancel the Service, even if the Subscription Cartridges provided with your subscription are not empty, they will stop working in your printer and you will have to replace all of them with standard cartridges.
Yes, it's not ideal to waste the remaining ink, but that's such a non issue as you can still use it by paying the subscription until it runs out (which is basically equivalent to paying for the ink they sent you).
I guess very few people read past the title, as usual.
This is actually not always true. When I was looking at a printer on Amazon I noticed in the small print of the description that it had to have the subscription ink and there was no alternative. It was a printer that was on massive sale and it looked like a great deal but I'm very glad that I passed up the opportunity.
I print maybe 20-30 pages a year, mostly return labels, around 4 years ago I had to print around 200 pages which it did without a hiccup.
Once a week it wakes up and does its maintenance and I truly love it when it does it.
During these 23 years I've bought 2 sets of 20 inks at less than 15€ per set (2010 and 2014, which reminds me that maybe it's time I buy another one). The printer itself did cost 160€ in 2010.
I think I'll never get as lucky again as I did with that printer.
And inkjets are such a PITA for low volume printing. I wish dotmatrix printers would come back. The output quality is poor, they're loud, the paper is iffy, but ink ribbons last a pretty good amount of time for low volumes, and there's near zero warm up time; and you can print banners!