Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

So FUCKING sick of printers

135 replies

Medsy · 29/07/2023 15:48

Why the fuck do they never work? I'm so sick of this shit. We can find a covid vaccine but nobody has been able to create a printer that actually, you know, fucking works?

I'm especially really sick to the bloody back teeth of "HP Smart". Why does this app exist and why does it force me to sign in when I just qant to do some basic bitch task like photocopy something. And now my printer isn't working again so clearly not that Smart are you?

Just seriously sick of printers, every time there's some "Issue", companies need to get their shit together. Latest one has WiFi apparently, but does it work? No, it fucking doesn't. That's fine I guess I'll just a cable like its the 80s

🤬

OP posts:
Thread gallery
6
Lanneederniere · 29/07/2023 18:12

Thunderpunt · 29/07/2023 17:05

HP and all who sail in her are cunts of the highest order

Printer offline
Inks not compatible
Open HP smart app - can't find printer.
Can't connect to Wi-Fi
Printer offline
Rinse and repeat

The only thing that stops me lobbing it out of the window is the chance that it will bounce and hit my car

This, 100%.

The latest trick of my HP 'printer' is to insist on saving any image you try to scan to some weird, cloud-based location (I suspect taking ownership of it for HP's own nefarious purposes).

I now try to avoid scanning for this reason, and take a photo of the item instead, sending the attachment as a .jpeg when possible.

These items should come with blood pressure medication.

thaegumathteth · 29/07/2023 19:16

@SmartHome I screenshot the consent forms and then use the edit function in photos to sign them and email them back.

thaegumathteth · 29/07/2023 19:16

PS a the closest dh and I have ever come to a divorce was over a bastarding printer.

Daphnis156 · 29/07/2023 19:17

Printers are such a pain!
However my Canon wifi one has been quite good- BUT when I had to change router, it was so difficult to link it up again- no instructions worked, and when I did manage it, I had no idea what I had done, so would face the same problem again.
I wouldn't use HP again.
And never get in any type of contract with them...

TheYearOfSmallThings · 29/07/2023 19:19

Printers are shit and HP are total bastards.

I was praying the pandemic would end mainly so I could get back out to work where someone else is responsible for sorting out my stupid fucking printer when it plays up.

TellerTuesday · 29/07/2023 19:24

Preach!!

Several times a day I can be found muttering to myself that "there's nothing bloody smart about it"!

C1N1C · 29/07/2023 19:32

Well, you know what they say...

"Need printer ink, need a second job"

PrudenceDictates · 29/07/2023 19:33

Printers are all wankers. I’ve never had a good one. If there even is such a thing.

One we had a few years ago had the model name “Hero” which made me apoplectic with fury every time I even saw it; because it wasn’t a hero, it was a crock of shit.

Oh and they bring up a message that if you use cheap genetic cartridges or refill your old ones rather than the proprietary ones that cost about £100 each then you’ll invalidate your guarantee. Wankers.

HulaHoop2012 · 29/07/2023 21:27

I hate mine with a passion. My kids still remember the day that HP not so fucking smart tipped me over the edge during the nightmare that was home school and I walked out the door and sat in the car!

Mine also refuses to print then prints at some random time, giving me heart attack and using reams of paper that no amount of pressing the ‘x’ button stops 🤬

londonrach · 29/07/2023 21:31

Totally agree. Have hp....ruined by updates...never ever ever will I but another hp item and this doorstep which works but £50 a cartridge will be binned shortly...love to know a printer other than hp

Dippydinosaurus · 29/07/2023 21:50

I wasted an hour of my life last weekend trying to connect it to our new broadband. Why doesn't the app just have a 'wifi' option like every other electrical device. After an hour and then watching the video, figured out there was a minuscule Wi-Fi button at the back of the printer. Why make it as small as a reset button where you can't actually see the Wi-Fi logo on it

ntmdino · 29/07/2023 21:53

Hateful b'stard machines, not helped by the fact that printer manufacturers are actively hostile to consumers.

The pinnacle of insanity is that my 3D printers - a technology still in its infancy and barely out of its DIY roots - are orders of magnitude more reliable than any paper printer I've ever owned.

mrshenny · 29/07/2023 21:57

I hate my printer. Hate it!! It's currently "out of ink" even though it's definitely not.

Clarabe1 · 29/07/2023 22:01

The closest I ever came to wondering if I was seriously mentally unstable was when I had a ‘row’ with my HP printer. I thought I was going to have to check myself into hospital with nervous exhaustion . I felt really unwell. Needless to say the printer won and it still sits there mocking me. The bastard.

CeratopsofthePharoahs · 29/07/2023 22:03

Used to own a mythical beast of a printer. It was a Cannon Bubblejet and.... it just worked. You'd send a print job and it would print! Just like that.

Then bastarding Cannon stopped updating the drivers for it. Then it was no longer compatible and became nothing but an ugly plastic paperweight.
Enter the Epson. The evil thing.
You spend ages just trying to connect to the sodding thing. Then it sulks for a bit.
Then it complains the ink is low. The ink isn't low.
Then it complains it's the wrong sort of ink. Ink is ink!! And when the Epson design team were working on ink cartridges they decided that they needed a hole in the top and a hole in the bottom so no matter how careful you are, you get ink on your hands.
There's still no ink! Wait, yes there is.
The paper tray isn't within one micrometre of it's correct alignment.
Waah, waah complain.
Wait... it's printing!
Wait... it appears to be in stripes and everything yellow has come out blue. Oh, and it's yanked through seventeen pieces of paper in one go and jammed.

There's nothing for it but to sing some Bob Marley.
Jamming, it's jamming, the printer is jamming too.
There's no ink left in this thing, now everything you print gonna come out white.....

Thislittlepiggylikeschocolate · 29/07/2023 22:04

Omg I am so with you on this! I dread having to drag my HP Envy out of it's cupboard!!

julylover · 29/07/2023 22:15

This thread has had me in stitches 😂

The other thing I hate about printers is that they’re so bloody ugly. You’d think someone might have invented a semi aesthetically pleasing one by now - nope!

ArseInTheCoOpWindow · 29/07/2023 23:02

We once had a printer that liked to take itself off the network. It pissed us off so much we bought a new one.

That also liked to take itself off the network. Then we had to carry on swapping because they were both shit.

It then got to the point that if one was on the network the other one would openly sulk and remove itself.

Eventually they would both only comply if they were both on the network. If one stamped its foot and disappeared the other one would immediately follow. WTF?

They were both shite. And yet they had to be soothed and cosseted like naughty toddlers.

We binned them both and bought a laser printer. Some slight problems about sulking off line ocassionally. But comes round pretty quickly like an adult.

Not like the two bastard spawns of Satan that were in cahoots. Dh and l once spent nearly a whole day trying to deal with them. This resulted on one of them being hurled onto the patio. It’s mate went immediately offline forever.🤬

Vitriolinsanity · 30/07/2023 11:33

I even bought mine a fancy table to sit on, so it could feel slightly superior to other devices. Now I have a fancy table with a stupidly expensive sulking plastic useless piece of shit in it.

HP Envy

It is a cunt.

AgentJohnson · 30/07/2023 11:47

(too tight to pay for the software that lets you sign online and theres no free ones as far as I am aware?).

I haven’t signed a physical form since before COVID, I use markup on my IOS devices. Forms are never lost or eaten by a dog we don’t have and the unreliable middle man (teenager) is bypassed.

At work we have a Xerox workhorse and a very stroppy, ‘I’ll do it if I feel like it’ Canon, which unlike my old Lexmark, works wirelessly without fault.

User14287559 · 30/07/2023 11:52

We have an old Epson printer and it's fine, always works and uses the very cheap ink from Amazon, we mainly have it so DH can print off maps and information for his Long distance walking and running events. You can't really solely rely on a phone for these as they are often very long and phone signal and battery are not to be relied on

tallsmallmum · 30/07/2023 11:57

cuckyplunt · 29/07/2023 15:49

Why are you still using a printer, are you MN from the 90s?

what on earth do you mean love? MN in the 90s? just yesterday I needed to print 3 copies of a travel disclaimer for DC they had to be on paper or they can't travel, what would you suggest? we get on the bus to the library and do it there? this is just a recent example but we use it every week and I wasn't on MN in the 90s coz I was a child and it didn't exist 🤣🤣🤣

Dbank · 31/07/2023 10:54

I feel your pain, after many years for fighting blocked jets and wasted ink, I bought a colour HP laser, zero issues.

The toner is a bit expensive, but I really don't care as long as it works.

P.S. I only use it with recent Macs, iPhones and iPads, and good mesh router, which might also help.

GasPanic · 31/07/2023 11:04

Dbank · 31/07/2023 10:54

I feel your pain, after many years for fighting blocked jets and wasted ink, I bought a colour HP laser, zero issues.

The toner is a bit expensive, but I really don't care as long as it works.

P.S. I only use it with recent Macs, iPhones and iPads, and good mesh router, which might also help.

Toner is expensive but maybe not so if you compare it to the ink you end up wasting on an ink jet.

GasPanic · 31/07/2023 11:10

Mrstwiddle · 29/07/2023 17:38

Are laser printers more reliable then? I've always thought they're a lot more expensive, but if they're reliable it would be worth it.

I have a HP too, I bought it 2nd hand for £5 and I overpaid :(

They are more reliable, but the key issue for me is with a laser you can just leave them for two years, start them up again and they work fine (maybe smell a bit at the start because of the dust burning off), whereas with ink jets the cartridge will have long jammed over that timescale.

If you buy a very cheap laser and don't print that often (a few pages a month) you might never have to renew the toner cartridge.

If you print a lot in colour, sure it is going to be expensive. And the photo quality is not so good. But if I want good print quality on photos I invariably send off for prints anyway, because even ink jet ones don't look that great.