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 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.