Yeh I dunno what's up with mine.. It does work if I faf with it for ages, that's via USB or WiFi, Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Printers probably 2 years old so fairly modern.
Also I worked in desktop support for years before moving into service management and I just can't fathom it.
Can’t get my head round paying £x/month for printer ink. Not everything needs a subscription.
I totally agree that 'not everything needs a subscription'. Software is a good example here, there's plenty of things I'd buy as a one-off but I cannot justify a subscription for. Lightroom for example, I'd quite like it but I'd only ever use it once in a blue moon and there seems to be no recognition from Adobe that not everyone who buys this stuff will use it in a professional capacity. If they offered it as a one-off purchase for a sensible lump sum I'd probably buy it.
I picked up a "lifetime subscription offer" (or as it used to be called way back in the 20th Century, "buying things") for both Plex and a VPN provider, the former because I felt it was worth contributing towards and the latter because it's a handy thing to have in your back pocket; neither of which would've seen a red cent from me on a subscription model because it's just not worth that much to me.
HP Instant Ink though, it's worth the price of a pint IMHO. It's two pounds a month for a 50-page sub and £3.50 for (IIRC) 150 pages. Whereas a pair of cartridges is £32 and over the years I've probably thrown away more ink in sodded inkjet cartridges than I've managed to squeeze out onto bits of paper.
We've got two Canon Pixma G5050 (one at work, one at home). Huge tank of black ink, slightly less huge tanks of each coloured ink. It replaced a B&W laser at work and costs far less to run.
https://www.zdnet.com/product/canon-pixma-g5050/
First printer I've liked in over 30 years! (I remember finding my first Apple inkjet quite exciting in the late '80s, was quite a step up from dot matrix).
... the drivers are dogshit though. No arguments here.
Still happy with Instant Ink, though tbf it's got worse since I signed up. Getting a replacement for a duff cartridge is now bloody nearly impossible, and HP's app obsession is maddening- I wanted to attach my old wireless printer to a new network, literally all of the HP guides available now say use the app, and the app needs bluetooth. Eventually managed to find an archived manual which told me how to do WPS pairing like I did the first time using the printer's button. But HP have just erased that from all their references.
Not sure if this is helpful, as this won't necessarily work for everyone, but I was in the same position: WFH for an extended period means no access to work printer. Rarely need to print stuff but it's occasionally really inconvenient not to be able to.
I just found a slightly beat up, but working, printer on Freecycle, bought a refill kit, which came with empty cartridges that trick the printer into thinking they're genuine, and enough of each ink to last me a lifetime, for about £23. So far it's worked pretty well. If it gives up the ghost I'll only have lost twenty quid while getting a bit more life out of a printer before it goes to be "recycled" on a pile in south east Asia.
Have to buy a new printer/scanner every sort of 5-10 years as that seems to be how long they last for low usage (couple pages a day)
I've always: Looked up cheap a-i-o printers (80 quid ish iirc) got them open in a load of tabs, then looked at which has the most availability of 3rd party ink on amazon. And bought that. Has worked so far for me and also my mum. It's something like £10 for 2x sets of full colour/blacks, couple times a year.
It's usually Canon, because the heads are on the cartridges so if there is ever a 'clog' (there isn't - but nightmares from an old HP) you just dump it and put another one in.
