A light of wholesomeness shining in a bleak dystopian hellscape

Printers are the peak of asshole design

191

If you can afford it, cough up the money for a laser printer. I've had mine for years and only changed the ink once. So much better than ink jet printers, which are a total scam

63
- I switched to a Lazer printer last year and damn so so so so much better than that fucking hp inkjet printer I had.
  
  23
- a later printer
  
  Elder printers are well worth the sacrifices one must make to acquire one.
  
  14
- Tried to fire up an older HP monochrome laser printer that is still working perfectly.
  
  The problem? Windows 11 has no drivers, and it literally cannot be used at all. Not through Wi-Fi (old drivers, too), not through the USB port, or my shared through my router.
  
  I mean, seriously, this stuff should work on a generic print driver until the end of time, but nope.
  
  6
- I think the earlier ones were great, too. Jokes aside: people have been saying how much better Brother printers are (used to be?). I only heard positive comments about them, but even my HP laser printer is just a reliable workhorse. Or at least it has been in the last 2 years. I've been trying to convert people ever since (to laser printers, not HP).
  
  5
- The downside of laser printers is that toner is very bad for your lungs.
  
  1
This thing still frightens me and I have no clue how is it legal.

26
- Holy shit, I had no idea. That is crazy.
  
  10
- Did you know some professional photocopiers have 0,5 or 1 tb cache drives?
  
  8
- Okay, thank you for ruining my optimism a bit more. Seriously, can't even trust a printer.
  
  7
Enshittified by capitalism

18
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

9
Assholes are the printers of peak design.

FTFY

7
- Permanently Deleted
  
  3
- Peak are the assholes of printer design
  
  1

Who TF just leaves a printer on the street and just expects someone else to get rid of it for them?!

67

Hahaha. In Germany many people put their not used anymore items just outside of their houses with signs: "to give away". I've found furnitures, books, washing machine??? :D

88
- I've heard stories about people putting out old appliances and furniture out on the curb with a "free" sign. It sits out there for 4 weeks. Then they put out a sign that says "$20. inquire within" And an hour later it was stolen.
  
  75
- Man macht das, ja. Why not? One man's trash is another's treasure.
  
  14
- CR user here. One time we were taking some items out of my house in order to have them recycled for parts. I was taking out an old washing machine we had replaced some time ago, needing some major fixes to go back to usability... it had already been taken away by someone in the five minutes it took me to return back to the front of my house with another batch of things, and I couldn't help to chuckle at the speed in which things got recycled in my neighborhood
  
  4
- We have actual FB groups in many cities in my country where people tell others where there are skips usually accompanied with image. Even my own apartment building allows people to leave things they don't need for other people to take. My rocking chair, hallway table, and a lot of other stuff were found in one of these ways. I think I have bought maybe 5 furniture pieces in my life, the rest are someone's cast-offs although some could be classed as antiques. My dining table was my great grandma's. People don't really leave stuff at the curb here though.
  
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I mean, if it’s a functional printer and they didn’t want it, that’s an easy way to give it to somebody else to use.

23
- The flyer says that it had to be fixed, so the first person just dumped their trash.
  
  5
I live in a rural town and people put items like this in front of their homes all the time. I have fixed washers, dryers, etc and had things picked up. If it's there on trash day it gets hauled off.

16
- That happens a lot here too. Except the trash part, if it's not in the trash or recycle container, it will still be there later. Anything large you have to take yourself to the community waste dump.
  
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It's commonly understood, at least where I live in the States, that if you are getting rid of something that still works you can leave it out on the curb for somebody else to take for free, sometimes with a note saying "Free" but usually without it.

When I was young and struggling I got most of my furniture that way. I still even have some of it

12
- For our senior prank we went around for weeks picking up furniture left on curbs. We managed to set up full living room dioramas in front of the school with couches, recliners, coffee tables, TVs, etc. A bunch of people came back and used the furniture for their apartments when they moved out after graduation
  
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- Just beware what you grab this way as it's a great way to spread bug infestations. A friend of mine kept having to deal with bed bugs and cockroaches in her apartment because a guy living down the hall liked to refurbish free furniture he found on the street and kept bringing new infestations in after they cleared out the last one.
  
  4
Depending on your trash service you can leave larger items just sitting by the cans and they'll throw it in the truck.

That's pretty standard in my area if you're on a route with the guys riding on the truck and not the robotic arm. Also even on the routes with the arm they'll have "large trash pickup" a couple times per year and a seperate "brush truck" after large storms or hurricanes.

Anyway when you set items by the curb if someone wants them before trash pickup they'll take them. If it's metal at the very least a scrapper will take it.

4
The town I live in now has 2 bulk pickup days for heavy items, up to 5 items, a box of stuff counts as one. They usually don't care if you go a little over either. Then theres the pickers, who go absolutely nuts right before. Antiquers fighting over furniture like dogs over a bone, metal scrappers, etc...

Then theres my parent's town, which will pick up whatever you leave as long as it isn't hazardous. And if they won't take it, you leave a sign that says "free" and someone else will!

That's how I built my first pc back in the 90s. I cobbled one together from pcs people junked in my old neighborhood.

4
My town has a "bulk pickup" day where they pick up large trash. Practically, that means that four days every year, there are literally thousands of free items available to take, so long as you beat the garbage collectors. One time I salvaged a whole-ass fridge from the trash. I've gotten so many valuable items from other people's "garbage".

The city the image is from likely has a similar concept. It's not at all surprising that someone threw out a perfectly good printer. If not, then they probably tacked a "free" sign on it and left it out for people to take with a tacit understanding that someone might still benefit from it.

Now personally, I'm more of a "repair it until it explodes" kind of guy, but especially with printers and their intentional annoyingness I could understand others' desire to just be done with the thing.

3
I got a working Playstation off the street, also some chairs, cupboards, a mirror and other stuff.

2
I grew up in a college town and the day after the students left, a huge number of people, myself included, would go to the part of town with all the frat houses and get all kinds of awesome stuff they left behind. We got a mini fridge and a bunch of wine coolers one year. My wife got a necklace she still wears 20 years later.

2
Some places do hard rubbish collection like that, often on specific dates or through prior organisation.

1
In a city like the one in the picture, anything remotely usable you put out will be gone by the end of the day.

1
I saw a desktop PC in front of someone's house once

1
It is sadly extremely common for people to dump their broken or other unwanted goods on the side of the road or a street corner. This is especially true for large items. People do it because they are either too lazy to dispose of them properly (taking them to the dump or scheduling bulk trash pickup) or too cheap to pay for it (you have to pay to dispose of trash at the dump and some places charge for bulk trash pickup).

It's shitty, trashy behavior which taxpayers end up paying for because the city or county will have to send someone to dispose of the garbage.

I wish people in my city would stop doing it. We've got transfer stations (the dump) strategically located throughout the city so that it's never that hard to get to one, and people still dump their trash on the side of the road.

0

Glad to see someone freed up the printer, but gosh I wish we could have open source printer firmware, like DD-WRT for routers.

53

it'd require that all OEM's agree to specific standards and they won't because being closed source = $$$.

likewise why no one is reverse engineering printers, there's no $$$ in it

27
- I wonder how feasible an open source printer would be, like the open source 3d printers.
  
  10
- The demonic summoning ritual involved in bringing a printer to life is awfully hard to replicate using non-proprietary methods.
  
  10

We had an HP Inkjet printer for over 5 years, one of the older ones. Ink was expensive, but tbh everything else worked great.

Then we got our new HP Inkjet. Genuinely the worst machine I have ever owned. I can't fucking scan anything without an HP account, and even then it hardly works. I'm going to buy a Brother laser printer soon, as soon as I bring it home that HP printer is going to be smashed to bits in my driveway.

40

Yes please. HP printers are the dystopia we were warned of. You can't print with the dumb thing even if ink is in it if you don't keep paying for the ink subscription.

16
We use brother printers at work and they're 10/10. Even with a fresh windows install they just work.

12
- I have to second this one: we had HP printers at work which just sucked, so we threw them out. After changing to brother printers everything is so easy now. They just work!
  
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- I second the Brother recommendation! We've had our printer for almost a decade, and it's still going strong. I worked from home during the pandemic and we only had to buy ink twice. Iirc the black is like $25 and the color set is like $40. Sometimes it tries to not let you print if one of the colors runs out. But when that happens we just take out the cartridge and use sharpie to cover the transparent ink reservoir. The computer thinks it's full, so you can literally print until they all run dry.
  
  I believe some of their models use a printing method similar to xerox machines that's even cheaper than ink, long term.
  
  The only downside I've had is that the phone app is finicky and sometimes glitchy. For example, if I want to attach a document to an email I have to open the Brother app first, scan the document, share it to my email, save the draft it generates, exit the app, and then open my email back up and load the draft. I can't attach straight from Gmail. However, I think this might just be a phone compatibility issue. I have terrible luck with phones. But either way, it's still better than having to boot up the computer every time you need to print.
  
  Eventually I'd like to find a model that can print from usb or be hardwired in addition to being wifi, so I don't have to rely on the app or my phone. But there's just no reason to upgrade yet, our printer still works great!
  
  3
If you do a lot of printing, the Epson Ecotank printer is really good. My wife goes through 2-3 boxes of paper per year. I refill the tanks 2 times per year. A full set of bottles is $45-50.

It's nice that the are going directly opposite that HP.

9
- It's nice that the are going directly opposite that HP.
  
  Yep! It's pretty surprising how many people replace their broken device with the same brand that burned them IMO
  
  Be like OP! Speak with your wallets 🤨
  
  6
I use the HP 110, a small laser jet printer by HP. I mostly use it for return labels and random crap once a month. Does the job fine. We also use HP at work, they’re as good as any other. All the HP hate I think comes from folks who don’t buy a laser jet.

As for the scanning I use Micrsosoft Lens app.

1

Hmmm, maybe I've been on the internet too long but the handwriting doesn't look like it was written on a vertical pole. It looks like it was easy to write

36

Just guessing, but she may be a professional pole dancer with a particular skill set

26
- I'd definitely watch that version of Taken, especially if still stars Liam Neeson 😂
  
  8

HP Smart is complete ass lmao. I have an HP laser printer that prints well, but it's always a headache to start printing anything wirelessly from my laptop. Can only ever rely on the ol' USB cable.

30

I am really confused, becuase HP Smart Scanner takes like 2-3 min to Scan a page, GNOMs build in Scanner takes 3-5 seconds with the same printer. Like how is your software this bad.

7
- "Smart" = dumb
  
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If only our old HP (which's server died years ago) wouldn't rename itself randomly on USB.

But seriously, get a Raspi or similiar and create a printserver. Saver too, than HP's built in.

6
HP Smart does suck, although the cheap HP printer/scanner we picked up in 2020 for home schooling has been pretty reliable. A couple of the colour nozzles clogged after an extend period without use, but it's on the £1 a month cartridge rental so I just kept re-running the cleaning cycle until it worked again.

5

Screw HP DRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVWk9Zh82O4

28

Never ever buy an HP printer.

Their hardware is mostly brilliant but the software (drivers, DRM) should make it a stop-sale for most people. It is such a shame that what used to be an incredible engineering company has turned to such shit because of executive incompetence and greed.

21

Let's be honest, probably why the guy was throwing it out lol

9
I'm so glad my old HP printer still works. It has none of that bs and I can use MUCH MUCH cheaper refills, which are somehow even filled more than HP's xl ink cartridges? I want HP to know that I will continue using this printer and they won't ever see another cent of mine.

1