Whither HP Printers?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
I am around a lot of printers at work. Epson, Okipage, Lexmark, Dell-branded Lexmarks and, of course, HP.



I have noticed something. Sometime from 1999 to 2001 HP decided "You know what, screw making good printers, let's make them pretty instead."



We have a ton of old-ass HP printers that are absolute workhorses. They are kind of slow now, yes, but they work and work and work and work and work.



Any new HP we get now has colored plastic hanging every which way and it doesn't work for shit. There is one little deskjet where the ink cartridge bay is so delicate I fear even looking at it lest I bounce a photon off it and watch it crumble. Flimsy, putrid garbage.



The big boy laser printers are still pretty good but they are no longer the Rock Of Gibraltar monoliths I grudgingly give up to retirement every month or so.



Not to mention new purchasing habits where everyone gets their own little piece-of-shit inkjet instead of sharing one laser.



I still have some Apple-branded HPs out there churning out page after page without a care in the world. We're stocked to the gills with toner and I'll be damned if you take it from me!



Why did HP do this? Why do they hate me?



WOE!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    Does HP even make real printers anymore? I thought all they made was those wonderful multi-fucktional devices, that randomly refuse to communicate with your computer on a semi-regular basis.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    Damn you Carly Fiorina!!!
  • Reply 3 of 9
    ragexragex Posts: 126member
    As a former HP rep, I can testify to the drop in quality of these products. It's quite sad actually.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Carly gutted the printer division at HP. Because, you know, there was so much more money to be made in PCs. She also killed HP's legendary high-end test equipment division. They've lost a lot of their senior talent in the process.



    If the next CEO has any sense, he'll try to bring them back. They weren't the parts of the company that were doing poorly, and certainly the problem with the company was not that it made really good stuff.



    Part of me is hoping that the next CEO is a woman, if only to shut up the people wondering if OMG WILL NE1 EVAR HIRE TEH WOMAN CEO AGAIN!!!1. As long as they realize, respect and restore what was right about that company.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    slugheadslughead Posts: 1,169member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    Part of me is hoping that the next CEO is a woman, if only to shut up the people wondering if OMG WILL NE1 EVAR HIRE TEH WOMAN CEO AGAIN!!!1. As long as they realize, respect and restore what was right about that company.



    I'm not commenting on this, laughed when I read it





    If this thread is about buying printers, you should probably look up who has the cheapest ink and the best quality..



    I read an article a while ago about it, I know canon was way better than HP (I know because I bought a canon afterwards, after years of being a HP guy), but I don't remember the order exactly.



    Anyways, printers are usually sold at a loss so they can sell ink later, therefore you should probably get a printer that A) suits your needs and B) has cheap ink. I paid $30 more for my canon i960 and have probably saved $100 in the past year on ink as a result.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    There was some anaylst talking about how HP needed to concentrate on their printer business after Carly left. He felt that HP's computers stunk and they needed to go back to basics.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    Funnily enough I hear the HP boxes we get for our avids at work are much better than the compaqs they replaced. Way higher quality.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    That says more about the garbage Compaq puts out than the quality HP puts out. Though if you're going mass-market PC HP isn't terrible.
  • Reply 9 of 9
    I must be biased but I find the majority of PCs to be garbage. Especially in the laptop market.
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