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.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Can you share what competitor you bought and some of your findings?
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.
+1 for Brother HL printers. 2 toner bars got me through 3 years of nursing school.
If I need something printed in color, I'll just let a professional do it.
And it's extremely easy. Upload the PDF, wait for your mail. Thanks. The last time I needed something printed in colour was years ago, and the money and hassle I saved myself by buying a monochrome laser printer isn't offset by this one print job I had to pay for.
They've got color laser printers too, just bought a HL-L3290CDW last week to replace my roommate's cheap Canon printer that I got tired troubleshooting every time we needed to print something. Absolute monster of a print device: color laser printer+scanner+copier+fax machine and a seamless printing process to boot.
If you need a inkjet printer buy one with an ink tank. Like Epson’s EcoTank line. Much cheaper in the long run, since 3rd party refill bottles are super cheap.
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A Canon!? how in the world!
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Hold up, HP printers don't let you SCAN without ink? You can make up some believable bs argument about why DRM ink is necessary, but there's no way you can convince anyone that scanning needs ink.
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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.
Exactly. I wish the Soviets made laser printers because then I'd get one from a car boot sale and it would probably outlive my grandchildren
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?
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...
Jeez… with that you might as well do as I do and just go to Staples and print from there. No need to buy a machine or paper and it’s cheap.
Why is this video on a porn site?
aint you never watched halo noscopevids on porn hub? reliable, robust, usually pretty anonymous video hosting breh.
Well yeah I mean it's a shitty service but... why would you buy a printer like that?
I mean that's a really shitty thing for the environment, but I thought when you sign up for their ink subscription, you authorized them to lock any remaining ink if you ever cancel. The reasoning is probably to discourage people from cancelling right after getting a new cartridge and being able to use a full cartridge of ink. Might be unethical, but not illegal.
If the business model doesn’t allow them to have those situations written off as a loss leader then they need to reevaluate the business model.
The vast majority of the people should forget to cancel and the cost should be enough for you to manage, for some of your customers to get amazing Utility from your service, and for most of your customers to consider your service so valuable they couldn’t think to get rid of it, even if they don’t utilize it fully.
Disney offers meal plans with your vacation. Most people don’t use all the benefit, some people do, and even less people manage to eat at all the most expensive and prestigious places for their meals because they knew how to utilize their benefits to their maximum potential.
Same with game pass, Amazon prime, and basically any prepaid service. The whole thing is balanced to be enticing, convenient, and potentially a massive value prospect to keep people in that golden spot of FOMO so they buy in and not cancel, but not such a great value that you cannibalize your other monetization streams.
Here they made it apparent that it’s not a good value, there is no situation where i can come out on top, so instead of losing on my monthly sub, they also lost unit sales and any good memories and associations I had with their products and services in the past.
There are plenty of things that aren’t illegal but are counter to your intended goals.
Edit: sorry for the wall of text, you caught me with lots to say I guess.
That's a good way of putting it, and it says a lot that they would happily take a loss if it means that there's no chance you could get an edge over them.
I have an old canon pixma MG 25505 Printer/Scanner combo i bought for £15 on facebay I have a cartidge refiller kit i bought on ebay for like £10. I'm set for all my printing or scanning needs for the foreseeable future
There are printer ink subscriptions? And here I thought, ink printers couldn't get more annoying (dried out every time I wanted to print, cartridges costing as much as the printer itself).
This is why I am hesitant to buy a printer, I‘m still using a 10+y old laser printer. Only thing I miss is printing from Wifi, but hey, I‘d rather dig this thing out of the closet and connect with USB each time than be forced to make an account.
also have old USB printer, but i have it connected to a PC that is always on and print over network using CUPS
its connected to my NAS, but I used raspberry pi before
That video site feels slahdotted...? Can't get it to load properly.
Is the original content available in another way as well?
... in another browser (desktop instead of mobile), I get "Video not found" now...
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