To fucking hate printers? (A rant about HP Instant Ink)

[QuestionableMouse]

Trying to print a returns label with my shit goblin of a printer. It's black and white and the black cartridge is full. The colour one has an issue apparently and so I can't print anything.

I also can't get a replacement cartridge from Instant Ink until I resolve the problem yet I've ran through all of the steps at least three times without them fixing anything and the problem only started with the cartridge they sent me. I've given in and ordered a new colour cartridge because I'm so frustrated.

Why are printers so fucking frustrating?! It's one black and white page ffs!

Printers are teenagers’

Lol. Was just thinking this

They are the bastard of society

Shit goblin 😂😂

HP printer drives me to distraction. I have instant ink and it does seem more cost effective than buying the £££££ cartridges.

I didn't receive my last colour cartridge so tried to contact their help desk. A personal appearance with the Queen would have been easier to arrange. "It" kept telling my that my printer was offline... no it wasn't... After 3 weeks I somehow managed to get them to send me a replacement - I had to wait 2 more weeks to receive it.

I hate it.

I tried taking the colour cartridge out but then it threw a strop because it didn't have both cartridges.

It is a shit goblin. 😁😂😂😂

My bastard printer did this. Three new colour cartridges and some interminably long and tedious WhatsApp conversations later and the printer is being replaced under warranty. And they can fuck off with their "too much dust on the printer carriage" line.

When it works, great. Otherwise it's shit. And their customer service is beyond shit

It’s weird, with all our tech advances I still feel like home printers are as good as they were 15-20 years ago (horrible flashbacks of trying to print out my school work at the time and the printer just not playing ball).

The only ones that seem to work well are the big industrial ones you get at businesses/offices, but even those can be temperamental. They’re a bloody nightmare.

+353 1 582 2932 WhatsApp support. It'll take a week for them to answer, mind you.

@winechateauxjoy

Laser printer. It's a game changer - I would not go back to ink jet if you paid me.

Why is that? Sell it to me!

Printers hate me too. I recently resurrected an ancient HP inkjet and bought new ink for it because my Epson had a tantrum and told me ink levels were low when they'd literally just been filled up. Nothing worked. We currently have two dead printers on our hall floor waiting to go to the tip to join the other thousands of dead printers.

A week into setting up this old one I start getting these messages telling me that all its drivers are corrupting my computer. Nothing I do works, I can't stop these crazy warning messages and it will. Not. print. A. Thing. After googling it became evident that HP and Apple had had some falling out and HP had failed to update their drivers in the latest iOS update. Or something. And millions of others were having the same issue with now obsolete great big printers sat on our desks.
After much hair tearing we found a workaround after a few weeks. But seriously. It is 2020. Why are printers, and printer companies, so crap?

I remember having a replacement card so my instant ink account couldnt take payment. Decided not to bother changing it as I never used my daily usage anyway. Went to print one day and it printed a note to tell me I had to sort my account out before it would print for me again. I just assumed it was a normal ink cartridge and I wouldnt recieve replacements. Sorted my payment out and it printed off immediately!

@Ozgirl75 the hairdryer story has made
Me howl

Mine always decides to recalibrate and then decide it can’t connect to the WiFi. It is a lazy piece of shit. I so miss the big printer in the office.

@Bimbleboo on a positive note, it meant that I always completed my assignments a day early to allow my absolute bastard of a printer at least a day to be coddled into printing it out for me.

@AmICrazyorWhat2

I’m looking for a new small office printer at the mo and have had all the issues mentioned above.🤣. Does anyone have a recommendation? I can’t get over how expensive ink is, it’s putting me off the them all.

I am a Canon devotee. I've literally just this month replaced my PIXMA mp600 which is 15 years old and still going strong - I just need an A3 printer now.

I'm running both until it gives up the ghost! All the canon printers with individual cartridges will do you nicely, means you're not constantly having to replace to print in black.

I also leave my printer on pretty much constantly as I'm certain that costs less than the cleaning every time it switches on

The new one is a ts9551 I think - white one. But while I resisted the £600 photo printers, all the others looked pretty good and along same lines as my workhorse :)

And maybe I'm tired and need a break but this thread has made me laugh a lot which was much needed today - thanks OP!

I work with large format inkjet printers and they're cunts too.

My favourite is when they suddenly stop halfway through a print to do a nozzle clean for 10 minutes, like a cat ostentatiosly stopping for a wash.

Nearly 40 years ago I had to write a university thesis. In those days we did not have - & am not sure many people did then - a computer for word processing and a printer. I wrote the essay out longhand and lovely mother drove into the nearest town where a woman offered typing services - brought it back - I proof read and sent a couple of pages back for corrections where she could not read my writing. I am pretty sure that was as quick as some of the document printing I have done recently.

My delicate little flower is an Epson which claims to work over wi-fi. Well occasionally it does , but really it doesn't like working unless it has its umbilical cord actually plugged into the back of the computer ,so I have had to bring the poppet downstairs to clutter up my little sitting room. I think it felt lonely upstairs. And even then it can be precious in many of the ways mentioned above. Honestly I do think sometimes I could get a monk to transcribe things with decorated initial letters in the style of the Lindisfarne gospels quicker than I can get a document out of this plastic twat.

@QuestionableMouse

This is one of the funniest and threads I most agree with in the history of mumsnet.

“Plastic twat”
“Cat ostentatiously stopping for a wash”

I use HP instant ink. Love it. £2 a month and I have as much printing as I need. Cartridge always seem to arrive on time and never had any problems with it.

another one saying get a laser printer. Inkjet cartridges dry up unless you use them regularly. I got a brother one about a year ago and never have a problem.

Well I say that, it still has moments of disappearing off the WiFi network then reappearing 10 minutes later after no intervention

@AmICrazyorWhat2

I’m looking for a new small office printer at the mo and have had all the issues mentioned above.🤣. Does anyone have a recommendation? I can’t get over how expensive ink is, it’s putting me off the them all.

Laser not inkjet, and B&W unless you need colour, and if you only need colour for printing photographs, if anyone even does that these days, forget about printing those yourself and get them done online or at supermarket printers.

I've done OK with Samsung lasers because they were cheap and did the job. We've had two that have lasted nearly a decade each and I've only had to buy one or two cartridges in all that time because they come with a starter cartridge that's good for around a thousand pages.

Our second one broke about a week into lockdown and of course then you couldn't get a printer for love nor money from Amazon, eBay, Currys, John Lewis etc, so the ultimate final 'fuck you' that would make all the other printers on this thread proud.

I finally tracked one down from printerland.co.uk, I got a Xerox for £95, which was more than I wanted to pay, but it's wireless and does double sided and apart from it failing to find the wifi every once in a while (easy enough to reconnect with an ethernet cable) it's probably as good as you can get from the 'not hugely expensive home printer' market. But it seems that I got a bit of a bargain because it's now £142, but there's plenty of other cheaper ones in stock now.

www.printerland.co.uk/product/xerox-b210/146516

I had a succession of ink jet printers that were the work of the devil. Unless you use them pretty much every day the ink dries up and they become useless, dust hoarding paperweights.
About five years ago I bought a black and white samsung laser printer on and Amazon lightening deal. It came with a half full cartridge so I thought I would buy a spare full one at the same time, expecting it not too last long. Well - that half cartridge lasted for about a year! I print a fair amount of stuff, mainly airtickets, insurance info etc for holidays, but I used to use it a lot for work too.

The replacement cartridge is still going strong - so the one I bought to replace that with has been sat there in it's box for a couple of years waiting to be used. the software is easy to install - it has survived three changes of laptop now.

The only thing I have had to replace is the usb cable because my dh sat on it and squashed the end so it no longer fits into the laptop.

It's not a perfect printer. Some days it randomly does not print anything, but usually switching it on and off - whilst getting increasingly demented because I NEED those bloody tickets printed because easyjet will take my first born in return for printing them for me in the airport - works.

I just love the diva printer that needs a scarf to get going😂