Stay away from these printers. I needed a printer last year and made the mistake of buying one. Despite working with computers my whole life I couldn't get it to print. I'd installed the stupid app on my phone and computer, I'd enabled the wifi (it had no ports on the back), and it just wouldn't print. I finally called support. Two hours I spent talking with them. Firstly I needed to create an account to 'activate' my ink trial. That remotely unlocked the ink cartridges. It didn't solve the problem though. We checked router settings, went through the setup a dozen times, took paper in/out etc etc. Eventually he told me he'd call back tomorrow (he didn't). I had to give up, return the printer, and cancel my ink trial. It's a shame because in 2017 I bought a HP printer (USB, not wireless, no remote ink activation) and it just worked. It worked so well that I bought HP this time without giving it a second thought. Never again.
I just replaced my inkjet printer, and my #1 requirement was "not from HP". HP has made some great products, but this anti-competitive tying (to prevent the use of competing ink cartridges) is unacceptable. HP, please do better.
The trouble is there is no quality control for aftermarket ink.
HP’s salespeople will try to point out to commercial customers that aftermarket ink has a high VoC content and will contaminate your office.
What I know is that people are often complaining on forums about inksplosions they have when they try to do borderless printing, the lowest common denominator is that they were using third party ink. Ink has to do a lot of things, and cooperating with the system that cleans up overspray is one of them.
I had a low end Epson tank printer and found six months later that the ink faded horribly, it would have been possible in theory to find a third party ink that was more lightfast but impossible in practice as that kind of information is not documented and most people just don’t care. I upgraded to the next step up of tank printer which has much more persistent ink, at least I could point to results where people made prints and tried accelerated aging them.
Curious what people's use-cases are for inkjet! I can't see myself ever wanting one. I use an old Brother laser printer personally (full-duplex, color, and wired networking) - it's very economical, the quality is good enough for recipes, notes, and official forms, which are the only things I print. Laser printers historically haven't been very expensive, I think I got mine around $100 and it's lasted over 10 years now; all I've done is replace the black ink twice.
I could see if I was printing super high-quality photos on special paper I might want a dedicated photo inkjet; but given that I'm buying it specifically because I care about getting the highest quality over a cheap color laser printer... I don't think I'd be persuaded to save money on off-brand ink for something that's bought specifically for making the highest-quality photos at home.
Which use cases are best served with an inkjet using off-brand ink (assuming the off-brand ink still works properly, of course)?
I get through life fine without my aftermarket products being policed. You try different stuff, check reviews and the like. Some are worse than the manufacturers, sometimes better eg some Anker stuff.
not everybody agrees with their methodology but they're pretty much the only game in town. Their testing is expensive so it only happens if a big player is paying for it.
My experience is that the vast majority of people who post reviews on sites like Amazon of this kind of project are not qualified to have an opinion. I remember Best Buy having a prominent review of a printer about what a piece of crap it was that had a picture of a print they made that came out terrible, it looked just like what you get when you print on photo paper and put it with the wrong side up. (I've made that mistake too but I blamed myself and not the printer)
The one thing I did learn from reviews about ink for my old printer was that people will fill it with "transfer ink" and are happy with the results they get printing coffee mugs, T-Shirts and such. Overall though I'd be a lot more inclined to trust third-party inks if there were reviews I trusted.
The alternatives are certainly worse. Hp, Canon and such do research on their products, so far as I know third-party ink companies just get the cheapest thing from China that's roughly the right color. See
Roughly there is no mechanism by which third-party ink vendors can prove the quality of their products so it is a "market for lemons".
As someone who has a habit printing photographs, art reproduction, and anime art I'm amazed at the high quality output that I can get if I use quality materials. You'd better believe that photo and quality matte paper are not a scam and get better results than you're going to get on cheap paper. The same is true about the ink except there isn't any mechanism to enforce the quality of ink.
As much as I think third-party ink is suicide, I will grant that HP and their ilk seem to be trying as hard as they can to piss people off, have a lawsuit, congressional hearing and all that.
They call the chips “security chips” and the scheme “dynamic security”, but it’s absolutely not to protect the printer or the consumer: off-brand manufacturers have every incentive to make cartridges that mimic (or exceed) the behavior of HP cartridges, not to damage the printer or ruin print jobs.
10 years ago HP printer made a fool from me in front of whole office floor by enclosed driver installer >>demanding<< to have the network printer shared by whole floor connected via USB during installation on EACH computer. After 2 hours of attempts to install enclosed driver I was forced to come back again next day and install generic PCL drivers which actually supported installation via network without connecting printer via USB. Never I would touch HP printer again.
Only give your money to businesses who don't pull this stuff, like Brother. For $500 you can get an amazing laser printer / scanner combo from them that "just works", even wirelessly. I highly, highly recommend Brother.
They will keep doing this as long as it's profitable. They lure you in with a cheap printer and they're trying to make their money after the initial purchase.
Create a crypto currency wallet controlled by a quorum of about 5 somewhat trustworthy online tech people. Allow everyone who has been wronged by HP to willingly chip in a few $ worth to the pot. Publicly state that the quorum will award the funds to the first person to crack the security and defeat the cartridge. Precisely define the terms and acceptable attack vectors. If no one has a total defeat within say 1 year award the bounty to partial hacks that e.g extend the cartridge beyond the original uses, etc.
Another poster below mentioned Brother. I second this, I've owned cannon most of my life, but my best friend's parents hp. As the "Rev come fix our x guy", hp troubleshooting has 9 out of 10 times come down to crappy software and post purchase monetization. Both hp and Canon companies have gone the route of requiring nasty software to leverage basic functionality. Canon is way less egregious, but the point I'm getting to is support the company doing things you feel best. Brother printers have become the only choice in my household.
people have been crapping on HP printers since at least 2003. On every single ancient forum, on every single message board, on digg, Reddit, etc.
it's quite literally on "you" if you're still buying HP printers at this point. You have absolutely no one to blame but yourself. This is what they do. This is how they operate. So stop giving them money. There are so many great alternatives. go get a Brother laser printer.
