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HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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WTF, I thought HP had the MOST hated printers?
Epson is getting away with its ecotank models, and Brother lasers have been the go to for a lot of people.
Brother is the go to because their stuff is basic and functional.
All the other companies have "innovated" to the point where their shit is unusable for daily use.
Yep, Brother rocks.
Too lazy for my usual lengthy monologue about Brother when this comes up, but works well with Linux, far more reasonable ink cost than any other brand I've tried, and the even low end 'inkvestment' model we have has really lived up to its claims regarding ink longevity. It doesn't even hassle you when you use off brand ink, but I only tried hat once since I had so little complaint about the Brother ink. You do lose ink level indication, which is annoying, but that's it, and manually checking level is also easy with this style of printer.
If you're talking about the laser printers, the toner level is available in the printer's web UI and via the network. I have mine integrated into Home Assistant.
It has a web UI?
Yes!
Oh that's neat. How did you accomplish that?
It's a built-in integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/brother. For me, Home Assistant automatically detected the printer on the network and showed a notification in the app / on the site about a new device being found.
It provides pretty much all the data you'd want... Remaining drum life, toner level, page count, status (sleeping, idle, printing, paper jam, out of paper), and I think a few other things.
My kids started school and I had a need to print lots of medical forms and other paperwork, I bought a brother laser printer. Because it was basic and functional and didn’t try to force me into an ink subscription that gave them permission to disable my hardware.
I have a cheap Canon Pixma inkjet that doesn’t seem to be enshitified. Probably about 3 years old at this point though.
Shoot ink on paper. That's all you need to do. Don't give me a built in screen, or onerous firmware, or any of that nonsense.
I got my ecotank two years ago and haven't had a reason to buy ink since. I still have plenty of the ink that came with it. The most frustrating thing has been that I have to let it run through a cleaning cycle when I haven't printed in a while. Well, that and the fact it took me a second to realize it doesn't support WPA3.
The cleaning cycle thing is pretty common with any inkjet. My old HPs all do it when I havent used them in a while.
I want to love my ecotank Epson. The software is butt ugly, but works. The printer itself isn’t the nicest looking, but works.
But man, the print quality. No matter how many times I run a cleaning cycle, it’s still a smeary mess within two pages and the deep clean doesn’t work. Neither the instructions in the manual nor found online work.
I think that's just how epsons are. My first two printers were Epson and they both started smearing ink after a few years.
They must be going for the mainstream audience that just knows printers suck. That, and anybody who knows enough to see how funny that sentence is, has already sworn off HP forever.
I have a Epson L1300 ecotank, and never managed to get that poop work on Linux and the software is annoying on Windows... And every time printing, I need to start with cleaning the nozzle multiple times before the print quality is even half decent
Absolutely the most hated. The marketing chuds are gaslighting by claiming to be less hated. Nah, nah brah. Seriously the most hated. By FAR.