HP Instant Ink
 

Questions for users of HP instant Ink. We had a need to sign up for HP instant Ink when our son visited and worked from our home. We signed up for 100 copies per month and were supplied all ink cartridges required for about $7/month. Price went up to $8/mo and required copies diminished.

Long story shortened. Copy requirement reduced and ready to cancel HP Instant Ink but find out that all delivered cartridges will be disabled upon quit date.

Just wondering if others have encountered this situation?

HP will disable your printer when you cancel the subscription. Change your payment info to Paypal (with $0 balance and no linked bank/card.) or to a Debit card that has no money, or to a credit card that's about to expire. This way, when the ink eventually runs out and they want to send you new cartridges, they won't, and will alert you that your payment method is not working. Then you can cancel your subscription and install your own cartridges. (Not sure if I explained that clearly)

Also, if you are really not printing much at all, change your plan to a lower plan. For example, my plan is 10 or 15 pages a month, I can't recall exactly, and I pay less monthly.

Wow! That's a new one! HP bean counters at it again!

I've got a Canon laser printer, got it for around $130 at Best Buy. With the included print cartridge that doesn't dry out (it's toner not ink), I'll get around 1700 pages. Printing what I print, around 5 pages a month, it'll last me over 25 years. No subscriptions.

I did the same thing a few years ago. Bought a Canon laser printer at Costco, and a toner cartridge. I try to avoid the subscription scam for suckers business model.

No, it doesn't disable your printer. It disables your ink cartridges. You can then go to Staples or Walmart or Target or online at Amazon and buy HP ink cartridges that go with your printer and use those instead.

You're paying for pages, not ink. You can stop your subscription effective the next cycle, and just use up all the pages you have available on your subscription until that date.

It's $7.99/month for up to 100 pages per month. If you use less, you can get the 50-page-per-month plan for $5.49, up from $4.99 a couple of years ago.

There IS a printer plan, that comes with a printer AND Instant Ink - and if you choose not to pay for it anymore, THAT will disable your printer. But if you own your printer outright, then no - your printer won't be disabled and will still be 100% usable if you discontinue your Instant Ink subscription.

Call them on the phone, let them know you want to cancel the plan effective the NEXT billing cycle. Make sure to write down when that is on your calendar. And go to the store and buy the appropriate ink, for that day when the cartridges stop working.

If you get it at Staples, you can sign up for their rewards, and turn in those used cartridges for a $2 store credit each. You can use that toward the cost of another ream of paper (or anything else the store sells except for gift cards).

(how I know all this: I used to work at Staples, I was the 9th top HP salesperson nationwide for 6 months and received multiple awards and prizes from HP - including 6 years worth of free Instant Ink, 3 HP printers, 2 HP laptops including a $1500 gaming laptop, and $100 toward my choice of HP desktops. I was also an HP Instant Ink "beta tester" for certain programs they were trying out, and received a thermos, a mini-printer with a couple years worth of Zink paper to use in it, Starbucks gift cards, a bluetooth mini speaker, keychain, dinner and seminar at Dave & Busters with $25 in game credit while there, and a bunch of other odds and ends. If it has to do with HP ink printers and Instant Ink, I'm pretty much the person you want to ask about it.)

Thankfully when I started my business and made 500 or so copies a month bought a copier using toner.

Wife pushed me to buy ink (she worked at staples at the time and the ink salespeople persuaded her ink was better than toner) but heard a few stories of ink drying up and was convinced on what to do

"No, it doesn't disable your printer. It disables your ink cartridges. You can then go to Staples or Walmart or Target or online at Amazon and buy HP ink cartridges that go with your printer and use those instead"

Sorry, that's what I meant. If the ink cartridges are disabled, then the printer is pretty much disabled, until he buys his own cartridges. (I worked for HP for 15 years.)

Sounds like rip off to me. I’ve got two printers I just buy toner when they get low. 100 pages way to low IMO for 8 bucks month, sounds just like car payment. I surprised they don’t have interest charges on top of 8 bucks?

Hp and Microsoft are the model T’s in the computer world IMO. Slow, slow, and slower.

BTW found that toner is a lot cheaper at amazon that staples or even sams

I had a situation where it was cheaper to just buy a ON SALE NEW printer, with its ink, then it was to just buy the replacement cartridges.
Explain that one to me.

However, make sure you buy HP cartridges. I bought an off brand from Amazon at about half the price of the HP brand and they DID disable the printer. I will never own another HP printer again. It seems illegal to me for them to be able to disable the printer like that. Canon printers are my new favorites.

HP could give the printers away, and still make a ton of money. It's all about the ink.

Get rid of the ink... I have a HP B & W laser printer which is the way to go.

That business model of cheap printers / expensive ink is dead. Buy regular HP ink until the printer fails. Then toss it out and get an Epson EcoTank (I have the ET-4800) printer. Fantastic product. The Epson EcoTank ET-4800 can print up to 4,500 pages in black and 7,500 pages in color with a single set of ink bottles. This is equivalent to about 80 individual ink cartridges, according to Epson. And a complete set of bottles (two black and three color) can be purchased for under $30 on Amazon.

Kick HP to the curb.

We have HP Instaink
 

We have this service and the wife keeps track if it's worth it. She claims it's pretty much a wash for us. As you mentioned, if you kick it to the curb, you end up with new cartridges that become useless even though they are paid for. It almost sounds illegal.
Personally , I wouldn't even start a service like this again. Just buy as we go, like the world should be!

That happened to me also. There was a class action suit and though it took a while I did get total reimbursement for my original purchase.

The best way to save on ink and paper is to scan documents to your hard drive or to the cloud. Why do you need a paper copy?

Exactly! Took awhile to get my old fashioned hubby onboard, but now we save everything digitally and rarely “need” to print anything.

Let's do some math.

You're a hobbyist photographer or watercolor artist. You like printing out your work framing them, using them as greeting cards for friends out of state, giving them to people, maybe selling some at craft fairs or submitting them at art shows. You also make brochures and flyers for your volunteer group. Not super-high usage, but definitely around 100 pages a month, and most of them in full color.

You get the HP Envy Inspire 7955e all in one, which is known to print out high quality photos, can also scan documents, and print out brochures and invitations, avery labels for your jam and jelly collection, and whatever else you need for hobby needs and personal home use. The 7955e uses the #64 ink cartridges, black and color. At 100 pages per month of full color printing, you'll want the XL cartridges which have more than twice as much ink than the regular, but cost less than twice the price.

So you get the XL 2-pack, 1 black, 1 tri-color, for $108 at Sam's. That'll get you through around 4 months worth of full color printing. You'll still have a couple months worth of black left. Basically for one full year of use, you'll need two sets of the 2-packs, and one extra tri-color XL (which sells for $64).

That brings you to $280 for a year's worth of ink, at 100-page-per month full-color usage.

OR - you can choose Instant Ink, which is $8/month for 100 pages of full-color use. That comes to $96 for a year.

That means - all else being equal, using 100 pages per month for full-color printing, you will spend almost 300% more on ink without Instant Ink, than you will with Instant Ink.

As for ink drying - not really. Once you peel the tab off the delivery edge, you'll need to USE your printer at least once a month. If you don't use it once in awhile then yes - it will eventually dry out. But that will take MONTHS of not using it for that to happen. If the ink is unused and unopened in its original package, it should be just fine to use, if you open it for the first time a year later. If you don't ever use your printer, there's no point in having one. Much more efficient to just save a file or scan from your phone to a thumb drive and bring it to Staples and have them print it out for you, for around $1.

Because I earn e-gift cards to stores that don't have barcodes you can scan from your phone, and I don't have an app for those stores. So I print them out and the cashier manually inputs the card number and PIN.

Because I print brochures for the group I volunteer for.

Because I like having paper copies of legal documents, since sometimes - the internet is unavailable.

Because I print out business cards for another group I volunteer for.

Because I sometimes take interesting photos and print them out and put them in frames and hang them in my house.

Because I live outside my phone, not inside it.

HP Ink
 

Ik just purchased my second HP OfficeJet Pro, but never again from HP. I did not receive a user's manual with instructions on how to reduce print density, black only and any other achievements I wanted. I tried to secure a user manual from the interenet. I would have to give them my credit card info. Ain't gonna happen. I would also have to pay to have a conversation with one of their techs. HP.....you just lost me and I hope this note will be read by others.:boxing2::boxing2:

I was disappointed with every ink jet printer I ever owned. Always clogged print heads, always running out of ink. My favorite was those 3 color ink tanks when one color ran out you had to replace all 3 colors since it was one tank. And don’t get me started on those massive eco tank printers, I spent the better half of a day trying to unclog one of those for a friend.
So now I scan everything or download it so I rarely have to print, and those companies that require me to mail a document or fax it, I move away from them and go elsewhere.
If I need a photo printed I go to Walgreens or Shutterfly online.
Otherwise I use a Canon laser printer. Toner doesn’t dry out and clog.
The rollers might dry out after a long time, but with Florida humidity I’m sure they’ll outlast me at this point.

Really like Brother and Canon, they seem to be the least evil in the printer space.

I signed up for the minimum pages. It’s working fine, even when I go over the limit. It’s countered by the months I am under. I find it superior over trying to find cartridges, either locally or online.

Reducing print density and printing in grey-scale is done through the print screen that shows up on your computer. It's the same with ALL printers, not just HP. If you've ever printed anything from a computer in the last 15 years, you will have seen this. It's a setting from the program you're using to create your document.

You click on PRINT and it opens a window where you can set the criteria for printing. You make it normal, high quality, or draft, you can set grey-scale (black only), portrait or landscape, fit to page or change the proportion of the margins, and so on and so forth. Two-sided and printed from the long edge or the short edge, and on it goes.

It's all done through that PRINT window, and isn't specific to your printer. It's specific to the program you use to pull up the image or document you want to print.

If you go under the limit, then the balance of pages is transferred to the next month. So if you have the 100PPM deal and only print 80 pages this month, then next month you'll have 100 pages, PLUS 20 pages of balance. It uses the balance first, then it digs into the monthly allotment. If you know you'll need extra pages for a project (like printing 200 brochures for your volunteer group), you can ration the previous months, until you have enough "balance" pages to print them out without having to pay for the overage. I believe they've raised the balance amount to three months worth, it's been awhile since I've checked since I still get 700 pages per month free and don't really have to care about overages until my subscription finally expires in November.

Or you could bump up your plan to the 500ppm plan for just the single month you need for that extra printing, and bump it right back down after you've finished the task. You pay the extra just for that one month.

When I print from my iPad, it doesn’t show any of that.
But on my printer there’s an option for toner saver, have to hit the button, so for me that’s how it works.

This is very impressive. Amazing how you are also an expert on so many other topics here, and possess a very strong opinion and wide open outlook on so many topics outside this narrow realm of expertise of HP printers. Yes, very impressive, thank you for sharing.

Yes, I experienced the same thing. Just bite the bullet and get it over with, which is what I did. Not worth the monthly fee in my opinion, but to each their own.

Not impressive at all. Some people are just - not narrowminded and myopic. Some people don't exist within the confines of their limited understanding of the world. Some people explore other ideas, some people do actual research just because they enjoy the stimulation, rather than simply running a google search and pasting the top results and calling it "facts." Some people have a liberal arts education, which requires them to learn bits and pieces about all kinds of things. Some people have done more than one thing in their lives, rather than finding a career and never venturing beyond it to learn about how other people live their lives. Some people have had a multitude of jobs in different fields and have become knowledgeable about topics pertaining to those fields. Some people had dads who brought their daughters to work with them on Saturdays and taught them how to operate and repair a folding machine so in addition to all the other random stuff they're good at, they also happen to be experts at operating and repairing folding machines.

Some people have more than one hobby and have cultivated their hobbies over the course of 50+ years, and have become experts at those hobbies as a result. Some people grew up with lots of diversity and were exposed to lots of different ideas and information, skills and cultures, even languages.

Perhaps these concepts might be foreign to other people, who would be impressed by all the above because they were never exposed to it all, or who were, but never learned to care about any of it. But in my world, it's pretty common and not particularly impressive at all.

You forgot "And some people are overly full of themselves and overestimate their skills, knowledge, and talent."

I'm pretty sure a liberal arts education is not something to be super proud of these days - usually means you studied something fanciful and near meaningless as to productivity and income earning ability. It could be something as simple as English or philosophy or something as edifying as "The habits of the Trill people of the western mountain tiers." None of which are more educational than a degree in "septum rings and blue hair."

I like instant ink. I make jewelry and need to make copies of patterns. I take the patterns with me to the bead club to make my project. I would say that I make copies of various bead patterns every week. When I need the ink, I always have it on hand in the cabinet and don't have to run out to the store. For me this works.

Yes. Also I received one cartridge that didn’t work and they had me jump through a bunch of unnecessary maintenance and troubleshooting efforts on my printer which was fine and would not send me a replacement cartridge, I had to buy one and then cancelled the service and had to replace the one that was working. Done sign for the service. It is fine as long as everything goes well only.

I think it's $1.75/mo.

I have to disagree. I just looked up a random HP Officejet manual and had no problem with it WITHOUT a credit card. I'm thinking you accidentally ended up at a 3rd party site and not HP.

HP Smart Tank Printer
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp...in-one-printer

Other than the fact that the poster is wrong about the printing process and how things get printed and what options are available.

Some documents are printed, formatted & controlled by the application that created the document. Some, by the application that's reading it ... others, are printed by the native operating system (printer driver) of the computer .... others are printed by your printer's driver. The Options can be different, depending on which "driver" is being used to print.

I was a hardcore HP printer fan from as far back as the late 1990s. Liked the printers but NOT the price of the ink. When a new ink cartridge set costs well over half the cost of the printer, and sets kept getting spendier each time, I figured it was time to look elsewhere. About 2 1/2 years ago I dumped the HP and got myself an Epson Eco-Tank ET-3850 and am VERY glad I did. I print a lot, and am still on the original color tanks (maybe 60% gone). I did have to refill the black tank once but the printer came with two extra black ink bottles. Bottom line: from paying a couple hundred dollars per year for printer ink, I'm down to paying pennies--if this printer ever runs out of color ink before I upgrade to another Epson model, that is.

Print quality is excellent: B&W or color. The Epson is a bit clunkier than the HPs were: no touch screen, for example, and the screen displaying printer info is pretty minuscule. It is also a bit slower than my last HP. But it means more money in my pocket so I'll gladly put up with the minor inconveniences.