Yes, HP has amped up its war against third party ink, to the point of actually blocking non-conforming cartridges now. We switched our main printer to a Canon inkjet, and our next laser will be ANYTHING BUT HP. That’s extremely sad as an original owner of a HP LaserJet in 1985 - back then they were really only QUIET AND FAST replacements for text projects as replacements for daisywheel noise makers. I think they cost us around $3000-3500 for the first one ($8400 in 2023) but the quiet alone was worth the conversion, much less the speed.
I am an infrequent print user and inevitably every time I needed my inkjet printer (any brand) the ink would be dried up. I tried all the tricks, cleaning and taping up the jets, refrigeration, inside a sealed ziplock baggie after squeezing the air out as best I could, etc. At most they somewhat extended the life, often only partially with just some of the jets clogged and substandard printing, and inevitably again I would have to go out and spend $20 or $30 for a darn black ink refill because I didn’t have time to search online to get the cheapest deal and they were always out of stock on the cheapest options at Walmart or Best Buy or whatever place was local.
Since I only really need black and white I got a refurb Brother laser printer last year. The starting cartridge will probably last me 10 years. I’ll recoup the money in two or three years compared to buying inkjet refills.
As a bonus it has built-in AirPrint and I can simply turn it on and print from my iPad, no screwing around with setting up & connecting to a wifi network or anything. No muss no fuss with downloading printer drivers again for some weird reason after a Windows update and have it not being able to find them, requiring me to do it manually with an entire half-gigabyte utility package full of cruft that I didn’t need…
Anyways, for black and white occasional printing with the bonus of AirPrint, which I will never go without again, a refurbished/sale laser printer is the cat’s meow.
/end gripe
2 Likes
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
3
Three words are terrifying HP right now: ink tank printers. HP is losing the ink battle with ink tanks taking the market by storm. This is a last ditch effort to save their crumbling kingdom which is built on ink cartridge sales as many people are moving to ink tanks from Epson and others. And as they always do, the third-party cartridge manufacturers will only find another workaround in their gatekeeping.
We have an Epson at home and its awesome. At work, we have a network copier/scanner/printer and 3 HP P1006 Laserjets. The hub does all the work. We rarely have to change a cartridge.
We still have to supply the Court with hard copies of motions, briefs and all trial documents, so true paperless is not possible. But, I review all documents on the tablet.
My gripe is hardware, but windows specific. Why is it that even though we are at now at Windows 11, it’s still cr@pshoot as to what happens as far as window placement, proper resolution etc. when you connect a second monitor?
I’m probably a bit of an edge case as I frequently connect to lots of displays/projectors. But OTOH Macs haven’t really had an issue with this since the early days of OSX. In fact the only time with OSX I’ve seen an issue is when the monitor has never been connected previously.
2 Likes
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
8
So true, and the pain points show even with Microsoft’s own software frameworks like .NET Core that one would think intuitively would just work with Windows’ native display management. I learned over the last few years that a multi-windowed .NET Core-based Windows application will not assign its secondary windows across multiple displays unless both displays have the same DPI settings. Otherwise, it will refuse to move the full-screen windows to the secondary displays. This is especially problematic if a program in its desired application or use case uses low-resolution display(s) hooked up in tandem with a UHD monitor. Remember this next fact as it is important to note: Windows will not let a sub-HD secondary display have a scaling setting any higher than 100%.
You can see where I going here? The main UHD display typically works best at 200-300% scaling. So your kiosk must set the first UHD display to 100% to match the lower resolution, lower scaled secondary display(s). Now the pain really sets in. That means the font instantly becomes minuscule, tiny, nearly illegible on the main UHD display. So to compensate for the scaling decrease, the first window on the main UHD display then needs to be adjusted in the program code to be a larger font size. Why can’t Windows just let the other windows move to the other displays if the DPI scaling does not match? Good question, as developers have gotten crickets from Microsoft and their support teams about this seemingly simple expected behavior that remains unresolved for years now.
Meanwhile I’m still waiting to be able to change my external monitor brightness from within my OS. I think @Desertlap said there is a protocol that allows this for some monitors (right?), but I have yet to see it anywhere.
1 Like
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
10
Well, following (Bill) Gates’ Law, every other major Windows release is good, and usually, a good deal of goodies of wishes are granted when that next good release comes along. So maybe Windows 12, expected to release in 2024, will fix many of our issues here?
