BY PAUL T HORGAN
I inherited my Hewlett-Packard (HP) DeskJet 2600 from a relative. It’s a basic 3-in-1 printer. It can scan, print, and thus take photocopies.
I also inherited the obligation to the subscription service for ink, which now costs over £4 a month. My main use of the printer was to scan texts, and very occasionally some printing. Yet if the printer was switched off for too long, or I did not keep up with the ink subscription, HP would send me a strongly-worded email. I would be unable to print until I ponied up the cash. The money was a small amount in the scheme of things and, on a month-to-month basis, it was cheaper than splashing out on a completely new printer. But that seems to have been the plan.
The printer had to be connected to my wi-fi network. So it was in a position to go on strike when ordered to do so from HP HQ. It turns out that the printer is a loss-leader. HP makes its money from the subscription, This makes a lot of sense. Businesses that rely on a regular subscription for goods and services are more resilient than those that have to chase new sales.
Of course there is another side of the subscription model. The printer would seem to be obligated to report on its ink levels to HP HQ, and HP HQ would be obligated to send out replacement ink cartridges when ink levels ran low. It was therefore with some annoyance that my printer ran out of ink without me receiving a replacement cartridge in the post. The whole point of the subscription was surely that I would not have to chase. To say I was miffed at this breakdown of the subscription model was a understatement.
Then the printer started assuming a split personality. Of course it had to be kept on at all times, even when my PC was switched off. So it started printing diagnostic reports several times in succession, a form of digital epilepsy. Then it would just feed pages through. There was no explanation for this action. HP recommended installing a piece of software call HP Smart to monitor and control the printer. The printer also had its own web server built in which provided an interface to its inner workings and the ability to print reports. None of these explained why my printer had developed this split personality. In the digital age, it is not unreasonable for there to be some kind of error message. There wasn’t.
The tipping-point came when the printer went all Mr Hyde. It was perfectly happy to spit out diagnostic reports, bot requested and unrequested, it was perfectly happy to spit out blank pages. What it absolutely refused to do was to print anything from any program I was using on my PC.
The best advice HP could provide was to take out the ink cartridges, turn the printer off, wait a minute, turn the printer back on, and then reinstall the printer cartridges. No explanation from HP as to why the printer was behaving this way. No error messages on the primitive display. Nothing at all reported by the printer driver, the internal web pages, or this HP Smart program. It is not unreasonable that hardware from the late 2010s would be able to say more about what was going wrong. Instead the printer had regressed to the 1980s.
I lost my patience, though not as much as Michael Bolton in Office Space
So I am buying a new inkjet printer, but not from HP. They have lost my custom.
It turns out that my experience was a known known. Google AI located two websites which bemoaned HP commercial conduct. In 2023, Slashgear.com posted an article entitled This is why so many people hate HP Printers listing all the problems associated with something a person seems to have bought outright being tethered to the manufacturers who are able to impose quite restrictive conditions, most of which seem designed to prevent people who own something that they have bought and thus believe they own outright from using third-party ink cartridges. And when this restrictive system fails, despite legitimate ink being used, the printer is rendered useless.
The second website provided negative user experiences, some of which echoed my own.
Perhaps when a person buys an HP inkjet printer, they do not actually own it. All they have truly bought is a domestic printing service. I am sure that concept, or one like it, appears in at least one internal executive briefing document at HP HQ. A subscription service of this kind, using a remotely enslaved printer, is a licence to print money. However, HP do have to provide a reliable service. The printer has to print what the user wants. HP do have to despatch replacement ink in a timely manner so their slave printers do not run out. The printing system, software and hardware has to be able to manage and report about all system errors.
HP failed on all three counts. This is not acceptable in late 2010s hardware.
The last couple of decades have not been too kind to HP. The killer year seems to have been 2011. HP bought UK software services firm Autonomy for $11Billion but failed in the due diligence. Once the firm was on their books, the opened the lid and found a black hole where some assets were meant to be. HP had to write off $8Billion in the following year.
Also, HP bought Palm, the makers of those pocket-sized stylus-controlled handheld computing gadgets that were so popular from the late 1990s onwards. Palm had been caught out by the smartphone boom and was facing decline. HP thought they could tap into the tablet market using Palm’s software, and launched the Touchpad. However, the bet seems to have been that Touchpad would meet pent-up demand that was not being met by Apple, Windows, or Android tablets. HP lost that bet, and sales figures were apparently so bad that they sold off their entire stock for the knock-down price of $99 just 49 days after the product had been launched.
Cutting their losses so quickly is not as mad as it seems. Had they kept the unsold stock, it would have been rendered unsaleable by obsolescence in time, and by letting go of the otherwise unwanted device so cheaply meant that the amount of time that HP were obliged to provide technical support could be limited to, say, 4 years at the most. So perhaps HP got the pile ’em high and sell them cheap bug from this experience and decided to sell small printers at a loss so they could make a killing on the ink.
The moral of this story? Avoid HP, which is a shame. In my first professional IT job, I managed to convince my employer, a large city firm, to ditch their secretaries’ IBM line printers as for the same price they could get an HP LaserJet IIP, which had better print quality, speed, and the potential to be used for desktop publishing. I was the in-house HP advocate, taking the page printer out of the design and marketing departments and onto the office floor.
The terrible part of this all is that my problems seem to be due to a software failure. The hardware seems perfectly fine, it just will only print what it wants and ignores me. An entirely usable printer is junk because there is some bad code somewhere, and it is not possible to find out where due to a deficiency in diagnostic software.
It also seems that these online ink subscription systems are insufficiently mature. Using a printer through wi-fi is also questionable, especially if the printer is always talking to someone outside your home, and you have no idea what it is actually saying. It could be sending electronic copies of everything you print to who knows where. It seems that the safest approach is to keep printers tethered by USB cable to computers, perhaps for the next few years at least.
Manage your ink supplies and don’t leave it to a machine. Unless you are printing out War and Peace, they do not seem to be worth the money. The machine, certainly if it is made by and managed by HP, does not work. HP want you to subscribe, as this gives them a guaranteed revenue stream to make up for their catastrophic executive decisions. And they might know way too much about what you are printing.
As to the soon-to-be-thrown-out printer? Well it has access to my wi-fi hub and so the firmware retains the login details, which some enterprising hacker could locate. There is a procedure to erase the credentials (press and hold a couple of buttons on the top panel), but do I now trust it? So simply sending it to be recycled poses a security issue. Maybe I will have to go all Michael Bolton on it after all. Or perhaps I will dismantle it, piece-by-piece, using a screwdriver like doing an Airfix kit in reverse. And then burn any micro-circuitry using my crème brûlée blowtorch. Bolton would be proud.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.