It is disconcerting to buy new OEM toner for my color laser printer (HP 2025dn) at a cost that is more than I paid for the printer with toner already in it. Yes, the new printer came with "starter" toner cartridges, but still...

Combine that with HPs over-aggressive toner management and operating costs soar. My printer, along with most of the newer HP models, keeps track of how much toner is dispensed (it isn't just counting the number of pages) and when it determines that any one of the four cartridges is below the minimum level, it shuts down the printer. You can't even print in black and white mode.

Hidden deep within the menu structure on the front panel there is a workaround for this. You can set your printer to "Cartridge Out Override" and it will continue to print, even if your cartridges are really empty and you are just putting out blank pages.

The reason this is useful is that when your printer says the cartridge is empty and when the cartridge is actually empty are two different things. My "starter" black cartridge went "empty" at 504 pages. After setting the Cartridge Out Override, it continued to print up to 863 pages, at which point there began a very faint mottling of large black areas.

Obviously HP is of the Gillette school of marketing, give the printer away and make money on the toner. But for them to cry "empty" when I got more than 70% additional pages is unconscionable. For those who would like to really use all their toner, the menu selections for the Cartridge Out Override is below. It won't be exactly the same on all HP printers, but it should get you into the ballpark enough to find it on most of theme.

Configuration
Cartridge Out Override can only be enabled from the printer's control panel menu.
1. From the main menu, press (RIGHT ARROW) to System setup and press Check Mark button (SELECT).
2. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Print quality and press the Check Mark button (SELECT).
3. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Replace supplies and press Check Mark button (SELECT).
4. Press (RIGHT ARROW) to Override out and press Check Mark button (SELECT).
5. Press (Check Mark button SELECT).
If Stop at out is selected, the printer will stop printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point. If Override out is selected, the printer will continue printing when a cartridge reaches the recommended replacement point. The factory default setting is Stop at out.

tanstaafl.

I will never buy another HP printer. The quality is merely adequate, and the software might just be the industry's worst (huge bloat and terrible reliability). Thanks for the tip, though, I might need to use that for my clients at some point.

Not to take this off topic right away, but along the same lines:

I recently set my mother up with a Brother laserjet. It was super cheap, and this time I started my printer shopping by always looking at how much replacement cartridges cost. I think the Brother is a winner. First, it's $89 for the printer. Normally I see a price like that and I think three things:

1- super cheap quality
2- no features
3- I'm getting an invisible "printer subsidy" because I'm gonna get screwed on toner prices

In this case, I encountered these three things:

1- the quality is more than satisfactory. it's not like it was made by Apple or anything, but it's just a tad more than I'd hope from an $89 printer
2- this is an $89 printer with wireless/wired networking, and - to my amazement - duplexing!
3- not only is the toner not more than the original price of the printer, it's half for the "high"-yield, 2600-pages cartridge.

When/if I need to replace my own printer, if I don't need color I'm going with this model. It blew me away.

High volume HP printers (46xx, 81xx, for example) behaved very very well, at work, even under very heavy usage. I'd recommend those.

Low volume / small office / personal HP laser printers, are instead just awful. As Matt said, I also experienced very poor software but, much worse than that, even very poor drivers for any Windows platform later than XP.

For small offices (two or three desks), we are very happy with Dell Laser Multifuncion printers/scanners/fax. They just work, and in those rare occasions when thet needed it, Dell tech support was as always (in my experience) just flawless.

For my home, I got a Dell 1235CN (Samsung rebranded) and I am quite happy with it. I'd say it's been perfect so far if it wasn't that Dell(Samsung, actually) released a firmware upgrade which broke it and some internet search and hacking was needed to bring it back to life and eventually upgrade it. Disappointing, for a machine which has been working flawlessly for the last two years on a daily basis; in any case, it was an easy fix and it keeps doing its job happily.

It's too bad, too, because HP used to make good quality printers. I suspect Compaq has something to do with this.

I would guess it's because they are really cheap now. You couldn't buy a color laser for 100 dollars a few years ago.

Nope. In the merger, the HP printer group stayed very much the same as they were a golden child group. I'd lay the blame more directly at Carly's feet, probably trying to milk the consumables for all the profit she could, to the point of making the printers go downhill. Pre merger Compaq mostly relied on Lexmark printers, rebranding some as Compaq units.

I've been generally pleased with my HP Color Laserjet 2600n I bought ages back though. I have no clue about their Windows software, but printing from a Mac has always been pretty painless with HP. Just find the printer advertising via Bonjour, and let the OS find drivers automatically. No manual download, no crapware, and more recently, much better integration with OS X tools for the multifunction printers. So far my upkeep costs have only been a little bit of paper, though thats due to my former roommate also being an HP work from home employee. That allowed him to get a free set of toner cartridges for it, along with free paper from time to time. My print volume is so low, the initial cartridges and the one set of replacements have lasted 8 years now.

I suspected it had more to do with culture than actual engineering groups. Of course, that culture is probably more Carly than Compaq, Compaq itself being merely a symptom.

Carly was quick to try and impose her view of HP culture on the entire post merger company, to the point where it felt there were little acts of rebellion here and there. If you watched a post merger Proliant at boot closely, there were several times the firmware would intentionally spit out Compaq onscreen in red text, before quickly changing to the blue HP text.

One move that really affected morale at pre merger Compaq and DEC sites was the credit union situation. Compaq was fine with leaving DCU in places it had already existed, but HP post merger pushed to get rid of them all and replace them with Addison Avenue branches. Almost everyone I knew with DCU accounts kept their paychecks going there, instead of switching over to Addison. The only people who used the local on site branch were newer post merger employees.

She even went as far as replacing everyones employee badges as quickly as possible, with new landscape ones, nicknamed "the Carly badge". You had to know you worked for HP as quickly as possible. Compare that to some of my employee paperwork in 2000 still said Digital on it, 2 years after the Compaq/Digital merger.

Very little of the Compaq culture survived the merger, outside the strong enterprise business groups.

That's true. I've dealt with many 46xx printers over the years, and they're real workhorses. They remind me of the Laserjet IIP my family used to have that was a total tank of a printer. They don't make them like that anymore.


More accurately, it seems they didn't do as well in making their printers cheaper as their competition. Like I said, the Brother I just installed for my mother is great, and I've worked with Samsung and Dells (basically the same thing) and they're both very good. Far better than HP in the consumer space.

I just can't stand those gigantic software installs. They take about 40 minutes most of the time, install a ton of crap nobody needs, and usually the software breaks anyway.

Dragging up an old thread here, I'm entirely happy with my Samsung CLP-620. The thing is built like a tank, unlike my earlier cheapo Xerox/Samsung CLP-300. I have every reason to suspect that the CLP-620 will last for years to come. Among other things, it has a much better web interface that tells you what's going on with the printer.

It's also nice to be able to crank out 20 ppm in full color and duplex. I still don't print very much, but when I do, I don't generally like to wait around.