Judge Rules HP Must Face Class Action Lawsuit Over Disabled Printers

I made the mistake of recommending Brother printers without identifying the exact version. The Brother printer my coworker bought took a page from HP'd bullshit. He returned it after a week.

Imo - Look for ones that don't need internet or just perform 1 extremely specific thing. Or in my case, I printing a lot of b&w docs as cheap as possible.

My recommendation would be the brother laser printer HL-L2300D from 2014. The 2350DW looks similar and is more recent from 2021 and might be okay too.

I bought a brother laser printer when I started working from home full time over the pandemic. Best printer I’ve ever had. Does it’s job and asks for very little.

It's crazy how as soon as printers became reliable to function, companies purposely made them shit again.

I bought a Brother 2270DW laser printer over a decade ago, and it is still going strong.

I have a 2700DW and have been happy with it for years. I recommend Brother to everyone, but I'm curious what Potatos_are_not_friends has to say about their experience below.

We've got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.

Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don't come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users' only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn't do this, but it's in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.

We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC's for the "scan from console" feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there's evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.

The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.

They were engineers, and made stuff they liked and were proud of, and it showed. When they exited the leadership roles, the MBAs took over and it was all downhill from there.

You still see a lot of businesses today using HP lasers from as early as 1990. Crazy that operating systems today still support some seriously old printers. It's also remarkable how good HP used to be before right around the time they merged with Compaq.

Back in the day we would at least get enough $ to buy a Happy Meal.

Magenta for the magenta god.

I don't care who wins.

I just want HP to lose.

They’ll charge you to print that check

That's literally what the lawsuit is about. Scanning and faxing are disabled when your ink is too low.

Yes. Canon did this shit to me a decade+ ago. Had to go to the store late at night to buy yellow ink so I could scan a goddamned document I needed to send out. Haven't given them another dollar since.

Happened to me in Summer 2020 after printing maybe 100 total pages on a printer I'd owned for two months.

I kept getting emails about the HP subscription program and then my basically new printer inexplicably stopped working. I assumed HP bricked it and, as much as I hated to, tossed it out and told myself I was never buying their product again. Luckily the KC public library has free black and white printing anyway.

Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then.

This is absurd. I would like to hear how this benefits the consumer without attempting to talk about "quality" or something. This would be like my car not starting cause I didn't use Shell gas.

What's more upsetting is that printers are client side all the way. There is nothing about them that needs to reach out to the Internet to print pages. The printer itself handles the "letting you print." So the thing sitting on your desk, that you own, is choosing this for you.

Louder

At this point HP isn't a printer company. They're an (overpriced) ink subscription company that makes DRM-ridden printers designed to keep you on their subscription model.

Given how many other printer companies are following suit it seems that this is unfortunately a lucrative business model.

Nowadays I just use the library whenever I need to print something. Most charge like 10 cents per page but some will let you print for free.

Us nerds called it back when they merged with Compaq. Great, we said, two once decent but now shitty companies can combine their stupidity into one new mega-stupid mega-corporation. They've barely done a single thing right since. It sure as shit didn't take long for us to get proven right, but somehow they're still shambling along. This just goes to show that no matter what nerds think, what's "best" for a product or industry and what actually turns out to be profitable are rarely actually the same thing.