HP - Has Problems.
Go into settings and disable auto-updates and never agree to a manual update if prompted.
HP B&W laser printers have always been the best. Their ink jets are nothing special. Canon and Epson will gain here. On the other hand, discount ink jet cartridges are almost always worse than terrible.
I’ll stick with my ten year old B&W laserjet. It costs $80 for a cartridge, but it prints 2,500 pages which lasts me several years.
HP makes great printers.
The consumables market is another story. It’s the Kodak model.
Must use Kodak chemicals on Kodak film, and print on Kodak paper using Kodak chemicals. It was a golden goose until its time had passed.
I don’t necessarily blame HP. Ricoh, Cannon, Kyocera, et al do the same thing.
HP - Has Problems.
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I installed a black HP cartridge in January 2022, but kept the color cartridges already in the printer.
Recently they basically shut down my printer and told me that I was using non-HP cartridges. I called technical support, and informed them that I only used the cartridges they sent. I had to take the cartridges out of my printer and read what was printed on each cartridge.
I also asked why I had not received ink for over a year, and informed them again that I had not put any generic cartridges in my printer.
They then sent me new cartridges, and after they were on the way they sent me an email that told me I would soon reach the limit of pages I was allowed to print during April, and that I would be charged an additional amount for the number over the limit.
It seems that that the pages not printed during the last twelve or so month did no roll over.
HP needs to think about what they’re doing, and how they ate alienating owners. They may end up like Bud Lite, with no users.
Soon they may be monitoring what you print. Talk about Big Brother Tech getting out of control.
I have a very nice now discontinued HP *laser* printer, the P2055dn. It is B/W only, but is fast and does duplexing (the ‘d’ in ‘dn’) very nicely. It can connect via Ethernet (the ‘n’ in ‘dn’), but I only use its USB connectivity, as that eliminates the possibility of an on-LAN malicious bot.
Thankfully, it *doesn’t* support WiFi, which makes it even more secure. (I worry that WiFi enabled devices could find a nearby open access point and report back to whomever.)
I got it mainly because HP printers work well with Linux (some other brands don’t), and there are Open Source drivers for it. (Helps avoid any HP funny business.)
I have been quite happy with it. A laser printer is much better than inkjet for most printing, unless you are doing color photographic work. (I also have a now discontinued Epson R2880 which uses 8 inks and handles paper 13” wide, but I almost never use it any more.)
The P2055dn was on sale, and I traded in my old HP 4M, which had no duplexing and was slow, but had builtin Postscript. It had worked reliably for well over 10 years. (The 4M had cost a lot more than the list price of the P2055dn because in the early 1990s Postscript was not cheap to do.)
Buy your oem ink or the lower cost but as good as oem re-manufactured ink at https://www.4inkjets.com
I have used them since 2007 and the re-manufactured ink is just as good. Sometimes if my Epson inkjet will not recognize the non oem cartridge I just run the steps to clean and it will recognize then.