I wont ever buy another HP printer again.

[Vogner16]

Ive had maybe 7 or 8 HP printers over the years. every single one has died due to idiotic software written into the printer. most recent one was my officejet pro L7580. worked for years. needed new ink because old ink was "out of date" despite it was not empty and would not print. so I got new ink. next the printheads have issues. so I got printheads. now it just sticks in this "maintance mode" loop and runs for hours cleaning itself. totally useless after the literally hundreds of dollars I put into it replacing the "worn out parts" same thing happened to my old B350 printer and several photosmarts I had before. all the while I still have a good old days HP printer from 1999 that prints fine. slow but works.

This company has gone down the toilet to me recently with total BS fabricated excuses for failure of hardware. the printheads are clean and new. ink is clean and new. internals are scrubbed free of any splashed ink. refuses to work.

DO NOT BUY HP PRINTERS.

I don't even want advice on how to fix this just want ppl to know not to buy them. they are a cancer on the PC world

 

[InvalidError]

I don't know anyone who's got particularly good experience with inkjet printers of any particular brand, especially the more consumer-oriented ones. This gets even worse if you aren't printing frequently enough to prevent the heads from caking up with ink, then you end up wasting most of your overpriced ink on head cleaning.

If you don't print on a regular enough basis to prevent the printer head from getting clogged, save yourself the headache and get a laser printer. Toner cartridges can sit in dry storage for years without problems.

 

[King_V]

Many years ago, my early experience in computers, I got an inkjet printer. It was amazing how fast it would run out of ink given how little I printed.

I learned from that point to go with laser printers. I use a black-and-white, though color lasers have come down in price quite significantly in the last several years.

Even still, I went with black and white because I rarely, if ever, need color printing. If I ever do have to print in color, I'll go to an OfficeMax or some place similar.

If you need color printing often, then a color laser is a good idea. More expensive up front, of course, but in the long term, way cheaper to own.

 

[BFG-9000]

I have dozens of HP printers that still work great, you name it--DeskJets, LaserJets, DesignJets. The thing they all have in common? They were designed when H or P were still alive.

What happened? Carly Fiorina became CEO in 1999. And some people think she should be President.

It's remarkable that these printers, some of which originally came with Windows for Workgroups 3.1 floppy disks and are listed in many DOS programs, still have drivers that work in 64-bit Windows 10!

 

[InvalidError]

It's remarkable that these printers, some of which originally came with Windows for Workgroups 3.1 floppy disks and are listed in many DOS programs, still have drivers that work in 64-bit Windows 10!

The joys of mostly standard (and dumb) printer protocols. You don't need much of a driver to dump raw ASCII onto a character-based dot-matrix printer for basic text output.

For fancier consumer and most office printers, PostScript requires little more than pointing the generic driver to the correct COM/LPT/whatever port, no real need for vendor-specific drivers unless you need access to advanced features like being able to configure double-sided printing from your PC instead of the printer.

The need for printer-specific drivers is something that came with dumb USB raster printers, unusable on their own because a large chunk of the proprietary logic that controls the printer is managed by the host CPU.

 

[BFG-9000]

You are thinking of GDI printers, which were software-based like Winmodems and actually predated USB printers.

I would definitely not call HP's PCL dumb, given that it can do scalable fonts and vector graphics. What it did become is the industry standard, mostly because of PostScript's ruinous licensing fees. In DOS it's ASCII with PCL escape sequences just to handle the formatting.

While PCL is simpler than PS, the biggest difference is PCL uses the hardware in the printer to accelerate printing, so a smaller filesize can be sent to the printer, which makes all of the shading and dithering decisions. If anything, PS is more GDI-like as more processing is done in software by the host computer's CPU, which results in more consistently accurate graphics as they aren't dependent on the printer's hardware. Specifically, the PS driver outputs data that is only translated by the printer into a raster image at the printer's native resolution, which is why it takes more CPU and memory, and is slower than PCL. OTOH a GDI printer driver directly outputs a bitmap of the correct resolution for, and that can only be understood by, that one model printer.

Adobe tried to make a fortune licensing PS but only ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, like Sony. Sony never learned, as they could've owned the VCR format with Betamax (instead of VHS), floppy replacement market with Minidisc (instead of Zip, as well as CD-R. Their DAT and UMD were also flops), and flash drive market with Memory Stick (instead of SD and CF). Instead, each time their restrictive licensing and excessive fees cost them, and limited them to a small market.

At least Adobe had the PowerPC Mac market locked up with PS (Intel Macs have Gutenprint PCL drivers). I do have many PS cartridges and SIMMs for the HP printers. If you need accuracy above all else, PS is just better (generic PCL drivers in particular can be iffy). The speed difference was only relevant back when playing a MP3 used 50% of your Pentium-1's CPU.

As I can buy a used printer that originally sold for up to $12,995, for under $100 and use it in Windows 10, why on earth would I buy a new one? Bluetooth printing? Never once used IrDA which was the ancient equivalent if away from a network. Cloud printing? You don't own anything sent to the cloud so they can use it as they like, which makes printing your taxes over the cloud sound like bad juju. The one exception is probably Airprint/HP ePrint Wireless Direct Printing if I wanted to print from an iOS device.

For Android, ePrint Wireless Direct only allows printing from a few apps, so instead of going through Google Cloud Print or HP ePrint cloud, I would rather pay for Printershare premium to use any old CUPS compatible printer locally.

 

[The Paladin]

unless you really need colours … get a cheap laser printer, 60-80/toner = 1500=1750 prints, uses the standard in printing HP PCl6
I switched to a wifi Samsung Laser printer and have not looked back since, they update the software and firmware to match new OS, and its supported under Windows, mac, Linux and other. out of the box.