users can sometimes find themselves in the situation where supplies cost more than a replacement printer

True, and not unique to HP. But the cartridges in new printers are generally only half-full.

Yes, but what would the extra cost be if they were full? Next to nothing, I would bet.

Ink's where the money is, since the printer companies insist a printer should be purchasable for £50, even though it's a mass of moving parts with astonishingly small tolerances, even after tens of thousands of operations. Everything else in computing has gotten cheaper and easier to make over time, but printers really haven't at all. It's still a hard job to precisely place ink on page at great speed with any degree of reliability.

If the printer making companies had the sense to fix the prices of printers closer to the manufacturing cost, they wouldn't need to pull these ink related stunts, but they've al tried to under-cut each other (and make it up in ink) for so long the home printer market is just screwed.

Not unique to HP. But HP were always the worst for it in my experience, and IIRC they did it first.

That and forced crapware with driver installs, and trying to make people install their HP Cloud Print app

So block your printer at your firewall -- who needs internet access to it (other than HP)?

Brave of you to assume it'll work without internet access.

That is a good question -- do these things insist upon being able to "phone home" before they'll work at all?

I assign such devices to a non-routable segment of my network that neither sees nor can be seen by the outside world but, as another commentor remarked, that's not necessarily something every user has the capability or capcity of doing. And, of course, there are downsides to not being able to upgrade firmware when something goes sideways.

Ah, HP, what has happened to you? You were once so wonderful.

Once upon a time you made great test equipment and some pretty nifty computers and calculators (I treasure my poor battered HP-16C "Programmer's Calculator" I bought somewhere around 40 years ago). Now all you do is chase the dollar.

Sad. Just sad.

Ah, HP, what has happened to you? You were once so wonderful.

Carly Fiorini happened and set up the merger with Compaq which started the death spiral off, and that was only done so that HP could have a range of Windows servers to sell and some better desktop PC's.

The crazy thing was that at that time HP had both the engineering talent and capacity to design, build and bring to market their own range of Windows servers within 3 years whilst improving their existing desktop PC offerings, and subsequently do as well if not better than Compaq. From there it just got worse as all the core values which HP was built on were essentially thrown out and the primary focus of all their business units became, "Increasing revenue for stakeholders."

What's left of HP now is essentially garbage and is a massive insult to the memory of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

The average punter isn't going to be able to do that and these days you've got to be a very average punter to but this kit.

So, just don't set the connection in the first place.

*Not* doing something, although at times hard, is attainable by most users :)

HP business printers don't work if the internet goes down. Thats step 1

Step 2, you can't then stop them from updating, as firewall blocking = no internet = printer stops working

Step 3. The printer reports home how often it is used (i.e. how vital it is) and will brick itself with updates, forcing you into an expensive emergency call-out to repair. Or you could wait 3-5 business days for your business-vital printer to be fixed under your already paid warranty option!

ALSO how come HP printers used by UK government departments ALL send copies of internal documents to various outside IP Addresses? Surely HP wouldn't be stealing potentially confidential information they could use for profit would they?

Again if you block these IP addresses for outbound traffic, Blam! printer stops working with comms errors.

I had this fight with a client printer last week. 90mins to install because it kept deciding it was not online. Yet the router saw it, the PC could ping it, I could login to the webpage on the printer... but the dumb thing refused to see the internet. Three reinstalls later running loops around with that "HP Smart" mess on Win10 that keeps trying to grab personal data and link up to online services. Trying to sell toner subscriptions which we kept declining has he already had a spare.

Gawd only knows why it worked the third time.

In the old days you just added a driver and plugged a cable in.

I told the client "HP" stands for "Hopeless Products" or "Hire Purchase". And a good advert for other brands.

Rather than by word of mouth or ‘telepathically’ one assumes

Quick, run an ad campaign pretending that we are [1]a lovely honest company that everyone loves

That worked for Amazon, didn't it?

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/07/hp_made_to_be_less_hated/

I really hope my 15 year old Epson carries on for a while longer, as its from a time when printers didn't require an internet connection, and it works with 3rd party inks which i can pick up for less than £3 a cartridge on ebay. And it still prints great quality photos after all these years and I have it plugged into a router running OpenWRT so i can print over the network to it.

If it doesn’t, just replace it with an Epson Ecotank version. I’ve had one (two actually), sitting in a cupboard, switched on, printing the odd document here or (several) reams of UNI online learnings there (we just had to have a copy apparently). Refilled it with ink once. It can go months without a thought, then just fires up on demand. Hasn’t stopped, jammed, dried out or complained yet. It just works… amazing.

you pay peanuts, you get monkeys

While deploring HP's vile practises I have only qualified sympathy for recent purchasers of their printers, for many a year it has been clear that they are not to be bought by anyone valuing their pockets or privacy.

Why does a printer need to upgrade it's software? It's not as if the alphabet's been reinvented.

Epson decided to study our Brazilian market, and simply had to drop every single ink racketeering scheme HP used if they wanted to survive. People were modding their printers' cartridge to suck paint straight out of a GALLON installed outside the printer with IV lines drawing it in. It worked flawslessly.

Epson then made a printer where you buy a liquid vial and squeeze it on the printer tank. You buy a 75cc vial of ink for 5 dollars. No more cartridges.

Now considering that ink for printers cost CENTS PER GALLON, they are still overcharging it by 1000% or more and making due profit, but not in the level that HP is doing on the rest of the planet.

It was a massive piracy industry that drove every single HP inkjet model out of business. It hit so hard that even they had to launch bulk ink models on these parts. And because it is a LIQUID, you can't put a chip floating in a liquid, altough with nanomachines they may try to dilute them on the paint.

Epson recovered market from the pirates, with due merit, but I refuse to buy a HP inkjet printer ever again.

I've used quite a few inkjet printers - HP, Epson, Canon - and had poor luck with replacement cartridges or inks. Since I don't use them that much, mainly for things with color, official cartridges aren't THAT onerous an expense. If I want to print out lots of something, that's what the laser printer is for.