I Hate HP Printers
To me HP is like that bad relationship that you’ve cut ties with several times but somehow it keeps creeping back into your life. Years ago I swore off HP vowing to never spend money on their awful products again. Not only had I been burned but my grandfather also had been burned.
My grandfather bought an HP color printer, and figured he might as well buy some extra ink so he wouldn’t have to run to the store in a time of printing need. But when that time came, we discovered that the ink had already expired.
You may ask “Expired, what do you mean expired?” No the ink didn’t dry up, and we didn’t ever take it out of its nice vacuum sealed containers. No the ink simply has a chip in the cartridge itself that says “if you’re past this date, I can’t be used.” Now obviously they did this so you can’t refill the cartridges, and in doing so they’ve ruined legitimate use of official HP products (this amazingly sounds like DRM doesn’t it?).
At any rate, that’s the final straw that broke the HP camel for me, but in a moment of weakness I bought an HP Photosmart C5180 All-in-One printer. I thought at the time it was a wise decision, I mean after all it came with six different color ink wells and it had ethernet, how easy would it be to put on the network and maintain. Logically when I need cyan, I can go get cyan and not have to worry about the other colors. Made perfect sense right?
Well HP got me again, because after only a few months of printing a few pages a month, my ink expired. All of them. All six wells. There’s still ink in them, I can shake them and hear it, but no HP has decided this ink is no longer worthy to touch paper and in my moment of need to be able to print something very important, my printer is demanding that I go spend $20 for a black cartridge and $12 x 5 for color cartridges. And no, just buying the black one and leaving the color ones in there didn’t work, the printer won’t do anything unless all of them are replaced.
So, what shall I replace my HP printer with?