will I purchase HP anything. Printers, monitors, computers both laptop and desktop, anything at all with the HP logo. Congrats, HP, you are now part of the marketing and sales teams of Brother, Epson, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, Apple, and even (ick) Dell.

I need to replace my old monitor for my home desktop. I had three monitors on my shortlist. One was from HP. Now I have two monitors on my shortlist.

Go forth and multiply, HP. Do it now.

"printer owners can't claim damages for being overcharged under federal antitrust laws because consumers who buy products from an intermediary can sue the manufacturer for injunctive relief under those laws, but they can't sue the manufacturer to recover damages resulting from an alleged overcharge"

Surely the whole argument is that HP delivered this firmware update without a contractual agreement? How does this statement address that?

Surely the onus is on HP to demonstrate that the update did not block use of ink that had previously been usable in the printers. If they cannot prove that then they are guilty and need to open their wallets

I can see this getting enough traction and generating negative news coverage to the point where people stop buying HP printers - even if HP win the actual case. You can imagine the thought process: Yeah, I think I heard some nebulous thing about HP breaking printers with software updates and there was a court case, not sure what that's all about, doesn't sound great, maybe I should buy epson or canon or dell or something instead. Seems not unlikely that they end up losing more money from customers buying elsewhere than they make out of lock-in.

Except when companies have had bad publicity in the past their sales have risen as the company name is in the media, plus mainstream media don't cover it and people just buy what's the cheapest....

I ditched HP for an Epson EcoTank model. Ok, so 300 quid is a bit steep for an inkjet MFD but it came with 6000 pages of ink (Colour and B/W) and a replacement set of refills costs a whopping £30.63 for Epson branded or £16.14 (Amazon prime pricing)...and a 3 year warranty.

HP can do one!

Printer owners could club together to hire some programmers to make replacement firmware. The new firmware would not require HP ink and could pretend to be an unbranded device to avoid HP firmware downgrades.

I'm guessing you're unaware of the difficulty of writing firmware for a product full of trade secrets and "documented only inside HP" timing requirements. This is not a simple problem, and neither is "cracking the firmware" to remove the ink checks. This could also easily hit the "DMCA takedown" level of hack, especially as HP considers this a "security feature".

> … to let customers know its printers are intended to work only with cartridges with an HP "security chip."

Just visited PC World, none of the HP printers on display or in their (HP) shipping boxes carried any label to this effect.

As these shops store both OEM and third-party inks, the normal member of the public would assume the printer can take any displayed cartridge that claimed compatibility with their printer.

Also the “security chip” was only introduced to prevent customers from using third party inks…

This kind of contract is illegal in most countries outside the US. Even in the US there's case law against this kind of restrictive practice. However, as usual, it will take a big enough class action suit to make them change their practices. They should just hope they're caught colluding with other manufacturers to try and make the subscription-model, the only model.

The arguments being put forth by HP's lawyers are probably going to do more long-term harm to the HP brand and printer business than just paying off the plaintiffs. I know they think they have to challenge these in court of they encourage other people to file similar lawsuits, but it'd probably be better for them overall if they just paid off a few grifters looking to make money on top of the efforts of people who were actually aggrieved compared to basically admitting in legal filings that you're a bunch of shysters.

And this is why I bought a printer that cost a little more but most importantly doesn't use cartridges at all (Epson ET-2850). You just get bottles of ink and squirt it into the comparatively huge ink tanks. I've no idea if I've compromised quality or longevity but I've had it a year, it prints just fine, and the ink tanks are still all 3/4 full.

I bought a Canon printer and their ink is very reasonable.

Bit more than aftermarket but not enough to not buy them.

When it breaks I would buy another.

Is software similar to ink?

On top of that HP hasn’t updated firmware to work with mesh routers. You can do “right “, including using their cartridge, and HP will still brick your machine because the spyware can’t report your status to Death Star.

I bought some ink off Amazon that was half the cost of hp branded ink. Interesting that the ink would not flow correctly until I "cleaned" the cartridges. About every ten pages. Since I'd bought the same brnd before and never had to clean the cartridges, it makes me wonder if the printer was intentionally choking the cartridges.