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Seems this one also is going to be settled, based on an order of the court on 2/7. Barnert v. HP, Inc. Guess it's cheaper to just pay out settlements than redo your business model.
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I've used their Officejet Pro 8600 since 2011 with nary an issue. I do use HP ink, but I buy it deeply discounted, and sometimes slightly expired, online.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I have to play devil's advocate here : Had to buy a hp printer in the lockdown times for school-at-home, subscribed to hp ink because of the usual "print-once-a-month-and-throw-the-dried-cartridge-away scheme", and I am more than happy about it : I have paid something like 5€/year since then, and my printer is always ready-to-go or I have a replacement cartridge I can use.
The backdraws are the necessity to be online to be able to print, and the hp toolchain for printing/scanning/managing that used to be quite good, and that got recently "upgaded" to a POS.
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Their minimum plan here is $12/yr for 10 pages/month and I'm undecided since this isn't a full time location for me. Either pay $30ish for the cartridges or give em $12.
The question is what happens if the cartridges stop printing before the page count is up? Is it a hassle to get them in that case?
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I have 10 pages/month for free, only pay 1€ every 10 additional pages, which I seldom need. (I think now the subscription is indeed around 1€/month)
You get sent a set of spare cartridges in advance, so whenever yours are empty, you can replace them on the spot. I changed my cartridges one time since 2020, and got new ones (i.e. replacement for my spare ones that I put in the printer) a few days after sending back the old ones.
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HP no longer sells printers; it sells ink by subscription. They should follow the Gillette recipe of giving away the handle (== printer), while selling the blades(== ink).
I have also eliminated HP as a printer source for this reason.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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A few years back I bought a HP Color Laser printer. 
It came with the 4 color cartridges, but they where only filled for about 20 %
After a couple of months the 'Toner Low' message appeared.
I used my usual trick: shake the cartridges and happily printed again for a few months.
Then came the day that I had to order new cartridges.
I was shocked to see that 4 color cartridges cost more than the printer had costed me. 
So I ordered some cheap brand cartridges (half the price) and installed them.
To my horror the printer didn't 'see' the new cartridges and kept instructing me to install cartridges.
In the end, I had to order original HP cartridges.
To make it worse they wouldn't take the cheap cartridges back. 
HP makes fantastic hardware, but their 'lock-in' policy is really disgusting. 
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Personally, I like the Sawzall option.
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I too was initially disappointed by this Instant Ink policy, but after a couple of years I have to say that it is really cost-effective, if you know how to take advantage of it. The key fact is: with Instant Ink you pay per page, not per cartridge. If you print a full-page color photograph it will count 1 page. If you print a black dot in a white page it will still count 1 page. So use your HP inkjet where you expect to use a lot of ink, and get a monochrome laser printer for normal text printouts.
Furthermore, all the ink wasted in clean cycles (a lot of ink!) will be paid by HP, not by you.
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Oh Brother, where art thou?
73
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I only buy Canon printers. Only had an issue with one, which I returned and had it replaced.
If I can't buy Canon, I would probably by an Epson.
Never liked HP products since Carly Fiona ran the company into the ground and then wanted to do for America that she did for HP...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I gave my final HP printer to the electronics recycler a year ago after it mysteriously failed, and got an inexpensive Brother b&w laser printer. Unlike HP's notoriously finicky installation procedure, the Brother came right up and has worked flawlessly ever since. I hear Brother toner cartridges are expensive, but I wouldn't know for sure, having not had to replace mine yet. It cost over $100 to replace the ink cartridges in my HP, and when I looked, the toner cartridge for the Brother is only about $70.
It took 20 years of accumulated anger, but HP has lost my business forever.
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I have a Brother Laser B+W printer HL-2320D series
In Dec I bought toner cartridges from Amazon, package
of 4 for $46 Cdn, or $10 each, brand is Inkfirst TN-660
Works great, I still have 3 left!
73
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I'll Pay the Postage !
Been thinking of a new printer I have a Cannon MP 560 it has been great 10 or more years
The issue is the ink is now $65.00 which is half of what I paid for the printer
What Cannon do you have or recommend ? I seldom print more than once a month.
Thanks
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My Canon was a steal; it was a floor model of an image class laser at Office Depot. I had gone in to buy $80 worth of HP cartridges and left with that printer for less than twice the price of the cartridges.
At a glance, the Canon Pixmas look pretty good. Best buy has a decent sale on a few for $100 or less. And the cartridge set for some is only $30. I haven't used a Canon ink jet in years, so I can't compare it to today.
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I understand your frustration, but it is just a business proposition that HP is using to try and make enough money to run their business. A few years ago they had a CEO that wanted to get of the PC business, or the laptop business, I forget exactly; why? because they were losing money at it. The printer business model is to give you a five hundred dollar printer for a hundred dollars and make the difference back on the ink. HP is not the only company that does that. By having a subscription I imagine that their reasoning is that for the low volume users such as yourself that you won't see it as a good value proposition and will go to another printer. That does not bother them because they were not making enough money from your ink buying pattern. Users who print more may find their subscription service quite acceptable. But it is possible that it will piss off all their users and they will have to adapt to stay in business. I remember how pissed off I got when NetFlix changed to streaming from shipped CD's. I didn't get it, dumb me. But now I can't imagine me stuffing a video CD into one of my old players.
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Kevin,
I think my frustration was with the two things. The horrible wording of the email, someone's poor idea of a marketing ploy.
I waited a month before I bit on the subscription free trial. As soon as I signed up, they shipped me two high yield cartridges, with the note to not install them until the printer ran out of ink. That was about two months later. So, I've had an XL set in the printer for just over two months. The existing cartridges are well more than 1/2 full (God knows, you cannot get that info from the printer). So, they'll shut them off if I don't pay; I can go buy a $32 set of original low volume and toss out two cartridges that have more ink left in them than the new cartridges. Not sure I see the sense in that.
It was about $150 when I got it and it has dropped some since. There is no way this is close to a $500 printer. My Canon color laser only listed for four and change; I paid less than half that since it was a floor model that had printed 16 or 18 pages, lol. And they don't play big brother watching, either.
HP needs to be more honest if that is their scheme. Of course, if they put out the "we'll be watching" message in their marketing, they probably wouldn't have much in the way of sales unless they really give them away. Since they sold/split off HPE, not sure what they'd have left.
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I learned long ago to never ever buy an HP printer. It's Brothers for me all the way. They work under Windows and under Linux. Also, there's third party toner cartridges that seem to work perfectly fine in them. I got the wifey a black and white all-in-one and got myself a color model.
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Well according the PR comments, a few other users/devs are super glad for your fix/PR.
Most excellent, I would say. 
Brag away!
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I totally understand your feeling of pride.
I'm still very pleased with myself for finding a similar initialization problem with the ages-old telnet client and submitting a fix to gnu.
You may be smiling about this for years to come.
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We need this to work, the version we are currently having to use has Vulnerabilities that newer versions address but the newer versions had scoping issues when under load.
I really don't want to have to move to another tool.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Proposed for discussion:
The net, “middle of the bell curve”, result of programming by AI will be the further influx of “programmers” who write even more awful code, but work cheap.
First, it was offshoring and hiring cheap H1-B labor for programmers. Taking our discipline from the level of professionals down to assembly line technicians. Non-tech bean counters, MBAs (full disclosure-I earned my MBA), and CTOs looking for better bonuses bought into those sources of reducing the development phase cost of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Now our industry is “et up” with the results - low quality code that drives up the biggest part of the SDLC costs - support and extension. Not all cultures encourage applying excellence and deductive reasoning in their work, but encourage varying degrees of making more money at the cost of excellence and just following “best practices” and other recipe books. The concepts of value engineering and defensive programming are rather alien to the cheap programmers.
If you, as a developer (full disclosure-I have 40+ years experience as a hands-on software developer/engineer/architect, and still going strong) have ever had to clean up (or throw away and start over) on outsourced/H1-B code, you know what I mean. (Full disclosure - I have worked with H1-B and offshore programmers for almost 30 years, and there are some, a minority of them to be sure, excellent ones that do not fit the description)
Now, even less knowledge about the discipline is needed when AI-driven programming just spits it out with even less “thinking with an engineer’s mind” and attention to the full SDLC. Low cost programmers can now be replaced by even lower cost “widget assemblers”. If you think too many software projects go south now (to wit, over-budget, fail to meet deadlines, buggy, high support costs, etc.), wait until the AI-assisted widget assemblers invade, making those CTO bonuses and short term labor overhead reductions even bigger. You know, cut costs and nab the bonus, then leave for another company before the support cost hens come home to roost.
I am not against AI/ML. I love using the AI/ML services in Azure, as well as Microsoft’s ML.NET library. Training an application to be useful and accurate takes a LOT of data, but once trained and including a self-learning routine based on how it processes real world data has very useful application.
AI as it is being used in Visual Studio is sometimes useful in code completion, and sometimes just annoying. MS needs to improve its adaptive behavior.
Remember, the driving forces in corporate software development (which are usually not defined by knowledgeable, experienced software engineers) are:
1 - Having someone/something to blame when there are failures.
2 - Keeping those bonuses coming in increasing amounts.
3 - Short term thinking.
4 - Just get a minimum viable product (MVP) out the door and don’t worry about future SDLC costs for support and extension.
5 - Use #1 above when projects fail or customer revenue streams are lost. It is much easier than getting it right the first time.
So, you may agree or disagree, in whole or in part, but I hope you have a lively and respectful discussion.
I do know, from reason and experience (the benefit of “been there, done that”), it does not have to be this way and such situations are correctable. I’ll bet a lot of you know that, also.
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Not sure this is a cynical view at all, more like a pragmatic view.
For grins, I asked Bing for an authentication script. Now I understand that Sydney, or whatever it calls itself, isn't a programming AI but, hey, it was fun. It returned a working solution. Would an inexperienced programmer have just copied/pasted it in, changing out vars? I don't know. It certainly wouldn't accomplish what we'd want it to if they did.
How carefully does one need to architect or pseudo out what you want written and, at that point, is it any more efficient than working with a human?
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