Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users Owners of HP laser printers are complaining about a firmware update that stops the hardware from printing, where the toner cartridge is not recognized even when they've got the expensive HP version installed. Reports are growing on the printer maker's online community pages and elsewhere about the machines throwing an "error …
Unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, operation of computer, etc.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;
(b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and
(c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies.
(2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act—
(a)to impair the operation of any computer;
(b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; or
(c)to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data; or
(d)to enable any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (c) above to be done.
(3)This subsection applies if the person is reckless as to whether the act will do any of the things mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (d) of subsection (2) above.
(4)The intention referred to in subsection (2) above, or the recklessness referred to in subsection (3) above, need not relate to—
(a)any particular computer;
(b)any particular program or data; or
(c)a program or data of any particular kind.
(5)In this section—
(a)a reference to doing an act includes a reference to causing an act to be done;
(b)“act” includes a series of acts;
(c)a reference to impairing, preventing or hindering something includes a reference to doing so temporarily.
(6)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—
(a)on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding the general limit in a magistrates’ court or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(b)on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(c)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or to a fine or to both.
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If they could easily work out how to stop people refilling their HP "large tank" printers with non-HP bottles, you can bet they'd start charging subscriptions there, too.
Epson may, or may not, have worked out how to do that with EcoTanks, but the solution there is to first refill the OEM bottles and then use those to fill the printer. Honestly though, Epson ink is so much cheaper than HP retail, that it's probably worth paying for the genuine stuff.
> no different to having a choice of using BP, Shell, Sunoco, Wawa, Royal Farms, Apple Green, Tesco, Costco etc to buy your gas/petrol/diesel ??
Not sure about left of the pond, but on the other side it’s actually all the same petrol because it all comes from the same local refinery. It would be nice if printer ink was the same, it can’t be that different Shirley …..
>> How about going back to decent, robust products?
Because the modern MFPs HP churn out are just rebadged Samsungs. They bought Samsungs print division a few years ago.
Anyone who has experienced the joys of owning a Samsung dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, or fridge will know how great HP printers will be.
I had a Samsung laser printer for home use more than 20 years and it was a very good printer, very reliable, and didn't give me any trouble. I just plugged it in and it was instantly recognized by the OS (Linux), and printed whenever I wanted to print anything. The toner cartridges lasted for quite a long time.
However, age eventually caught up with it and it wouldn't feed reliably (the rollers had gone hard and wouldn't grip) and nobody around here seemed to sell them anymore, so I looked for alternatives. I looked for a Brother as they are highly regarded, but the ones on sale here seemed to be just the more expensive models meant for business use.
I ended up buying a Pantum and I'm quite happy with it so far. The shop assistant told me that Samsung had been bought by HP and a lot of customers these days want nothing to do with HP. I replied that I wouldn't touch HP with a barge pole (the Samsung had replaced an HP printer).
I haven't had the Pantum long enough to form a definite opinion on it (I'll wait a few months before that), but so far I just had to plug it in and the OS recognized it immediately and it worked flawlessly and printed what I needed to print.
I'm of the opinion that unless you have a special use case there's no reason to buy an ink jet printer these days. A B&W laser printer does the job for most people and is much cheaper to run because the ink (toner) cartridges won't have dried up and needed replacing whenever you need to use them.
TBH I was also looking at Pantum to replace my Oki (not that it's as bad as HP, but the formula they used for their magenta cartridge is arse and turns the toner powder into clumps of rocks in the hot and humid climate of Malaysia. Also their Linux support is kind of atrocious with a barely working community made driver that seems to have been abandoned). Pantum apparently uses PostScript 3 which should be compatible with a lot of ancient, exotic and modern systems across the board.
Also ran into this issue, in the case of my Kyocera recovered from the WEEE bin the thing had a paper feed issue.
Asked the guy, he happily took my £5 'donation' to make the printer vanish.
Used it for many a project, actually made some Press & Peel back in the day because the toner stuck really well.
Alas entropic decay caught up with it one day and sadly that was that.
Ended up salvaging the HV bits, laser assembly etc for 'Projects'.
Quite. Our Samsung fridge (bought new in 2022) has been good ... so far.
HOWEVER, the bloody thing does insist on bone fide Samsung water filters; yes, the ones with the chip in it.
Remember when your ice maker was just those little blue plastic cube trays, and if you wanted cold water from the fridge you kept a pitcher in?
Nowdays every "appliance" is also a "gadget" which insists on phoning home to work properly (at all). Honestly, I fail to see the improvement.
Had a Samsung washing machine, functionality was fine but it was rendered useless at 4yr old by some minor fault in a random little circuitboard which was too expensive to bother fixing.
Replaced with a Meile after much deliberation, if you judge on weight alone it's about 100% better than the Samsung.
Gather round children and let me tell you a story of when HP printers were great printers and it was a solid business choice to buy them as they just worked.
But the youngest spoke up and said "Nah, get away with you old man, pull the other one its got bells on, HP is a right dodgy company, forcing people into subscriptions, not letting you use any ink you fancy, even if their ink costs more per gram than Columbia's finest marching powder".
I told the youngest oik, "No, it's true, the old HP 1 printers were dead good so long as you had the new font cartridge and you could even print Elvish for fun on them".
The rest of the kids started laughing and saying how my memory must be playing up and that I was talking a load of old crap.
I sighed, turned away and rummaged in the bottom of my drawer and pulled out my 1984 thesis on "Garbage Collection in Lisp Interpreters" printed on an HP 1 printer and showed it to them.
They laughed at me and danced away into the night.
Bastards!
The only person I know who bought one, had previously worked for HP Enterprise/Tandem, so supporting a company he probably still had stock in made sense to him. Not to me, but hey, he didn't ask.
I still own one, and always click "no" when asked to allow firmware updates so I can keep using the 3rd party ink I currently have. Stupid that they actively add security problems to their security updates. If a printer can refuse to print due to "improper cartridges", it can easily do so even when "official" cartridges are used. HP will probably blame suppliers for shipping "counterfeit" toner, when it's actually on HP for being too greedy with consumable prices.
I have a Canon colour laser which is supposed to be OK with 3rd party toners, although ive only had it a few months so not used up the original toner yet to see if that is actually the case or not.
But you can be damn sure that ive blocked it from downloading automatic firmware updates from the internet. Its a printer so it doesn't need internet access as im over every printing to it over the LAN.
When the world was young I had a decent HP A3 printer. I use Brother now and wouldn't touch an HP. This fault is karma.
Not that I have any experience with these underground commie dark web inks you rapscallions purchase from gentlemen on street corners. My butler would be fired if he didn't purchase an official toner cart.
Have a Brother laser. Functionally it's good and has been reliable. Even surviving an extended stay in a less than dry storage unit for 18 months.
But Brother toner is insanely expensive at about £400 for a full set. Luckily it does accept the cheap stuff but then we've seen in El Reg just recently Borther being busted for putting out firmware that degrades prins from non-OEM carts.
Oh and the software it comes with suck goats but then I've never seen a printer Manufacturer supply software that isn't shit.
As for HP I'm old enough to remember the Laserjet 4, which is up there with the Nokia 3310 in terms of survivability. I doubt many modern printes would survive years in a garage workshop like they used to.
Today I needed to print something, I was really surprised to find works Windows 11 laptop recognised my HP Laser Printer and printed to it (which is more than I could get when it was Windows 10) , less surprising was printer printed OK, despite toner being over a decade old. The printer was brought around 1998 and to connect it I have to use a USB to parallel adaptor, which was brought back in 2009 when I first go a PC without a parallel port.
I'm in no hurry to replace it - not doing much printing now.
I had a HP6L printer that I finally had to replace after 25 years. Toner is no longer available.
Replaced it with a HP M404dw.
As mentioned elsewhere, automatic firmware updates have been turned off, it works fine and doesn't need any "improvements" from HP.
Home printers as an example. Start at £38.99 (2810e No wireless) and £58 (6120e wireless).
The quote from the article "if a customer HP has invested in doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment.".
What exactly have they invested? If they are selling them under cost price it must be pennies. Are they trying to say they have done people a favour by selling them a printer? In the olden days when you could pick up a printer for like £30 or even £20 I might agree and say yeah you want some return but even then it wasn't much.
I get it. They are talking about the bottom line for the shareholders who want maximum returns on every single printer sold. Tough shit. That's how you lose customers.
Creating firmware updates you haven't even tested on your own ink that bork printers loses you customers but hey I bet it stopped brand-x ink working.
How did this happen? Back in the day a company would load the firmware onto an actual device and check it. I'm guessing these days it's all AI and automated emulation for reduced costs and staff. Oh well.
HP wants to sell their printers cheap, and make it up with subscription consumables. Most of their models are at least somewhat cheaper than comparable Epson/Brother/Whatever ones. The rest of them price their printers to make a fair profit regardless of whether the customer purchases official supplies or not. There's a very fair suspicion that HP's cheap printers aren't quite as "comparable" to the others, and they're still making a good profit on the printers themselves, and the retail ink price is so high to help convince people that the subscription model is "fair" when it's actually just "about the same as any other manufacturer if you buy those manufacturer's official supplies".
You may jest but my parents HP printer tells them every time it needs a refill which HP printer or Photo paper to use. It's only a matter of time you have to scan a special QR code on the pack to validate that papier. Are you a soothsayer?
I did advise against that purchase btw but parents being parents.
I've set up our home HP 282fdw colour laser as a wired network printer, and recently it ran out of paper - we normally use generic supermarket brand A4. Desperately looking for some paper to complete my kid's homework one evening, I found an old and partially used ream of HP paper at the back of a cupboard and dumped it in the printer.
My computers are all Linux and use HPLIP to handle the printer. When resuming the printout, I noticed in the Mate control center printer setup that the paper was reported as HP original plain. Odd thought I, but let it contiinue. Later at the weekend (mainly due to one of those nagging "what if?" thoughts floating around in my head), i removed the HP paper and put in some used generic paper - just to see if the paper reported would change to non-HP plain. Low and behold, it did, and it changed again when I put the HP paper back in! A WTF! moment, which I've not followed up with as it got lost in everyday life. I don't know how it detected the paper type, or even if this was some sort of flukey software thing, but yeah - weird! I might just dig deeper this weekend if life allows some spare time.
I also use third-party toner cartridges. The XL cartridges were about 60% of the price of HP's normal size (this was about 18 months ago). Apart from the printer nagging when first inserted that the new cartridges are not HP approved, no problems.
In the olden days when you could pick up a printer for like £30 or even £20 I might agree and say yeah you want some return but even then it wasn't much.
Devil's advocate; I remember back in the late 90s/early 2000s when Lexmark were selling those shitty "disposable" printers (*)- the ones where they made money on horrendously overpriced replacement cartridges- for prices like that.
However, that was over twenty years ago, and inflation has approximately doubled UK prices in the past two decades. So in real terms, £20 and £30 back then is much the same as the £38.99 and £58 you quoted today.
(*) If you're like "Lexmark... whatever happened to *them*?" Apparently still around but not in that market any more. A few years back I read somewhere that they were outcompeted by other manufacturers adopting the same tactics. It might be ironic that Lexmark were driven out of the "razor blades model" dirt-cheap-crap-quality-printers-with-price-gouging-replacement-carts market they popularised and were once synonymous with... but it's certainly not sad.
I abandoned Lexmark around 2007, when they started pulling a similar egregious stunt with their toner. The colour printer itself did a perfectly decent job, BUT replacement cartridges arrived with a countdown timer that 'end of lifed' the cartridge regardless of how much toner was left in it. That 'EOLed' my relationship with Lexmark. Idiots.
That's what pissed me off. I know people who bought new printers because they were cheaper than buying replacement carts, and the old one became- of course- landfill e-waste. Fuck *that* right off for being obnoxiously wasteful in its own right.
But the thing is, even if you don't care about that and you plan on buying a dirt-cheap new printer every time because it's cheaper than a set of carts, that's still not a smart financial decision. Because your new "cheap" printer will also- I assume- be sold on the same overpriced carts model, you'll have to do the same again next time.
And even if it's cheaper to spend (say) £40 on a new printer rather than £50 on a complete set of carts, that's only because you keep buying printers whose price-inflated carts cost £50 a set. (I've actually called this "Lexmark logic" in the past).
Whereas if you'd paid a bit more in the first place for one that didn't have such overpriced carts, you might be able to get them for (say) £20 a set and you'd come out far ahead in the not-so-long term.
It wasn't easy to work out the trade-offs, even given the ink cartridge cost and printer cost, it's still hard to work out exactly how much "printing 1000 pages" will cost using any particular printer.
HP attempted to solve this by making people purchase "pages per month" instead of "ink cartridges". This unfortunately moved the problem from e-waste, to customer annoyance and e-waste. And of course backlash from tech people who know that ink, while not easy to make, is not actually worth the same as luxury perfume per ounce.
I worked on the German translation of the owner's manual for a "Windows Printer", which was cheap because almost all of the processing of the data to be printed was done by the PC, and the printer was just sent the raster image directly. Didn't really catch on, because Windows at the time wasn't great at real-time processing.
Microsoft seems to have completely disavowed knowledge of such a thing, but it definitely existed. Note: Microsoft Windows is translated to Microsoft Windows, not "Fenstern", no matter how much I wanted to get that past the project review as a joke...
HP were in this game. HP LaserJet 1000 (the original one, not the re-branded Samsung one) was a WinPrinter soooooo dumb, that it only had enough firmware to bootstrap a load of the real firmware down the parallel printer port (it didn't have a native USB port, but did come with an HP badged USB to parallel adapter). This required you to have software on the PC it was attached to to provide the firmware (honestly, how much does an EEPROM cost, even then!). Once loaded, the image was rasterised in the PC and sent as a bit mapped image to the printer.
There was, and this was a real surprise, a set of Linux print drivers produced BY HP(!) that enabled the Linux PC to provide the firmware, but it was a real faff setting it up, as it was provided as source in a tarball that had to be unpacked and compiled!
I bought one at a car boot sale for a few quid, and the person selling it said it wouldn't work with Windows 7 or later (which is why he was ditching it), which I took as a challenge to get it working from Linux. Came as a real surprise when I had to compile and install actual software rather than just the relevant PPD files to get it working, but get it working I did.
Used it for a couple of years attached to an equally obsolete Asus EeePC 701 (with extra memory and running from a microSD card) running Ubuntu as a network attached printer until I needed the space (I found I had amassed about 8 printers of different types, and eventually had to rationalise [because of the wife complaining], which resulted in several working but obsolete printers being sent to the tip).
"Microsoft seems to have completely disavowed knowledge of such a thing, but it definitely existed."
Yeah, IIRC the proper title was Windows GDI printer, GDI being Graphics Device Independen[ce|t]. About as much fun as a WinModem., and as you mentioned, not only was Windows not good at real time processing, the underlying hardware often wasn't fast enough to process the data into the dumbed down form the dumbed down cheap hardware could use. I could easily imagine a high specced 486 or early Pentium choking if downloading via a WinModem while trying to print to a GDI printer at the same time :-)
I am happy for them to do that by selling me a printer at a price that does that.
When I need a new printer I look ink vendors' web sites and work out the printing price per page and chose on that basis. I do not care who makes the ink/toner.
I would be very happy to buy printer manufacturer supplies as long as they are competitive.
Summary: I am happy for the manufacturer to make a profit but not a killing.
Alas, as Corey Doctorow is in the habit of explaining, the corporate enshittification process inexorably pushes the company into ever more rapacious, exploitive behavior to feed shareholders' insatiable demand for more profits every quarter. And the regulatory guard rails that would stop that slide have incrementally been eliminated. The DMCA made it all much worse, as it empowers all sorts of anticompetitive crap; it's now a felony to bypass the toner-cartridge lock-in features, as that's a "protected work."
I, too, am happy to repay a manufacturer with a decent profit for a decent product, but not to be endlessly squeezed for more by increasingly abusive practices.
I bought one of those printers last year. I just checked it and it's got that poison firmware update, but is currently still working (with the toner cartridge that came with the printer).
While I've avoided HP printer products for many years, this one was an irresistible bargain at Walmart, $89. At the time I needed a compact, low-duty cycle laser printer, so I went for it.
This printer must be connected to the internet to work, and there is no way to turn off firmware updates. So here's hoping that HP issues the corrective firmware release ASAP.
Ah you only bought our standard cartridges which are only guaranteed for 3 months after purchase then we kill them, for your comfort and convienience. If you want you cartridges to last longer you need to subscribe to our Premium Plus Exec Gold cartridge plan where we will supply you with new cartriges at our desirable premium prices every 6 months whether you need them or not.
HP is committed to Zero waste donchaknow
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