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Expected: I cancelled our subscription with HP and they blocked us from being able to use the rest of the ink in our cartridge. (younsfw.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Can you share what competitor you bought and some of your findings?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.

    It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.

    Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    expired

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    • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Can't believe this is legal.. is there seriously a subscription model even if you've bought a printer? Does this happen with all hp printers?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's worse than it sounds... You're not actually paying for ink, you're paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.

    A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.

    The ink is shipped "free" when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you're ponying up for each page you print.

    Odds are it'll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you're a member of the residual income brigade...

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    • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I'm riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.

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    • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    I'm wondering if there's a open source firmware for printers like openwrt for routers

    Edit: typo

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    [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    is there a printer that ISN'T a scam???

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