HP actually has a brilliant business strategy.
-
First get a huge customer base via cheap ass product
-
Remove the customers who care about quality
-
Remove the customers who care about reliability
-
Remove the customers who care about price
-
Remove the customers who pay attention to their monthly bills
voila, you have like 3 people left who you can charge infinite money for a lump of shit. Infinite profit margins
-
I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for Brother, I want to add one for Ricoh.
I bought a B/W laser printer from Ricoh (213w IIRC) a decade ago for under 40 bucks and a new generic, no-name Amazon toner refill for 25 like 5 years ago. Printed thousands of pages, just sitting in a corner under the stairs.
Bonus: it uses Wi-Fi (so anyone in the house can print) and is compatible with generic PCL drivers in Linux.
Damn. I don’t print much, but I did get my HP printer dirt cheap. Wish there was some sort of hack around this.
You know why all of the printer companies are so shitty? It’s because they’re in the business of selling printers. That’s why they break and cost so much to maintain. You know why the sewing machine company sells printers that work? Because they accidentally let some of their sewing machine engineers make printers.
in the year of our lord below 2023, it is so easy to just go to a print shop the 0.5 times per year you have to print something
… if you live in a city
Exactly. Everyone needs to live in bumfuck nowhere atleast a year or two, just as a personality building exercise.
deleted by creator
Yeah. Living in a rural area wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t involve living around people like my mom’s redneck siblings.
deleted by creator
I use Instant Ink in the US, and I haven’t received an email about a price increase.
I know no one wants to hear this, based on past experience, but I’ll say it anyway: The plan has worked fine for us. Our ink costs went from $60-$80/year to $12. The printer works fine, too; we’ve not had any problems with it. Obviously we don’t print a ton, but we do print enough that we want to have a printer. If we did print a ton of stuff, I’d definitely go a different direction than Instant Ink, but for our light use, it works fine.
If you were paying $60/year to print, I’d say you were printing a lot.
That’s as much as I ever paid for a printer. I have two currently, a BW laser and a color. Paid $50 for the color used…its 2 years old.
Just can’t see wasting money on inkjets with their issues, and I’ve had many. First was a 1992 HP Bubble jet, which worked great for the time, but died before it ran out of ink.
