Note: I’ve no idea why the uploader decided to rotate the image, when I’ve tried rotating the original image in a way that’d fix it only to see that it didn’t matter
Note: I’ve no idea why the uploader decided to rotate the image, when I’ve tried rotating the original image in a way that’d fix it only to see that it didn’t matter
Your own hardware as a “service.”
Fun fact: If you cancel your HP Instant Ink subscription, they lock you out of using the cartridges already installed in your printer.
I also gave up on inkjet bullshit and went laser. I use a Canon ImageClass at both work and at home; A single set of toner cartridges easily lasts me for years of home use. Color laser options are also no longer rare or expensive.
The sad part is that inkjets aren’t inherently bad. They’re just a different way to print. They can make some fantastic, deep, high-resolution colors. It just so happens that this type of printing is being ran in such an anti-consumer way that it’s borderline unbelievable.
Ink is cheap. It’s INK. I can go to the art store and find thousands of different types of ink. It’s just water with coloring in it. It’s not special. However, HP sells their ink at a cost that is about 4x the cost of gold by weight. I can understand it being a little more expensive than just ink in a tube, but this is insane.
We should have inkjet printers that have caps on the top of the cartridges to let you add your own ink. No DRM. Buy common ink at the grocery store, and it’ll work with most vendors. Open the lid, add your ink. Dried up? Wash it under the sink. Really dried up? Buy an empty cartridge for $6.
Our society has advanced enough to where this is a solved problem. We have figured out INK of all things. We know what ink is, and we know how to put it on a sheet of paper. Civilization hasn’t been stumped on how to put ink on paper for decades, and it’s not like we’re in a position where only vendors like HP can save us. It’s 100% greed, all of it, and it’s so shameless that it reads like something out of Snow Crash or something.
Imagine if you bought a ketchup bottle from the grocery store, and refilled it with more ketchup when it was almost empty. Then, the ketchup bottle phoned home and figured out that you missed a ketchup subscription payment, so it refused to squirt ketchup. Ain’t it silly when I compare HP’s model to ketchup, yet both circumstances are literally dispensing a liquid?
Now you made me want a printer that can do all the fancy fountain pen inks like Emeraude de Chivor.
And I want a printer that can accept sandwiches and uses ketchup instead of ink
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dbbque0Y4FU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=dbbque0Y4FU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
So, the best printer I’ve ever owned in my life was a Canon Pixma iP5000. And yes, it was an inkjet. It had it all for the time: It made excellent photo prints, did double sided printing, could do borderless even on a full 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and its ink cartridges were literally just boxes full of ink. It had a separate print head below the tanks which was removable for cleaning (!) with no tools (!!) and the ink cartridges did not have any DRM chips or other bullshit in them. I refilled the original in cartridges it came with for years before I finally just wore the durn thing out, and I could not find the parts I needed to fix it.
Then began my odyssey of trying to find something to replace it. No one made a comparable inkjet printer by then. Anything you get nowadays is either missing duplex functionality, borderless, or both, and/or has head-on-cartridge printing, and they all have DRM chips built into the cartridges to prevent you from refilling. I thought the Epson Ecotank line was the answer, but it turns out those are all have trash build quality and while the no-cartridges idea is sound in theory, the way they’re designed means that the things inevitably cack themselves in short order and they’re basically impossible for a consumer to take apart to clean or service. The Ecotank takes the idea of commercial printers with external remote ink reservoirs, but messes it up by building the reservoirs into the printer body in a “consumer friendly” way that leaves the reservoirs not sealed (so the solvent can evaporate out of the ink, and dust can get in) and not removable (so they can’t be cleaned), nor can the print head be accessed in the event that it needs to be unclogged.
I went through three of them under warranty and once my warranty was expired that was it. I had to throw the damn thing away, and then I just bought my current color laser printer. The hell with it.
TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.
I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.
No shit, the cartridges are part of the subscription. If you don’t want that, you can just buy your own cartridges outside of the subscription service