HP Stole My Ink

My old Epsom printer recently decided that it didn’t want to print with blue ink anymore. It was a few years old, so it went in the bin. Actually it went into the boot of my car, where it remains to this day, to be transported to the dump. And I bought a new printer. Not an Epsom. Theor software was fragmented into a dozen annoying programs and they won’t all necessarily perform all their possible functions over Wi-fi. So I went for an HP Envy 5100.

It’s just a cheap, bog standard, printer. I print off tickets mostly, so I really don’t need anything grand. The HP has a paper tray, so I don’t have sheets of the stuff sticking out of the top of the printer anymore. Which is nice. The software came in a single package which installed easily enough. The mobile app works a treat. I was happy.

Then HP stole my ink cartridges. Two cartridges came with the printer. One with black ink. The other with coloured ink. And HP god dammed stole them. What happened is this. I signed up for their Instant Ink subscription. There’s a range of subscription levels and one is actually free. You get 15 pages a month. Need more? That’ll be charged at £1 per 10 sheets. Sounded fair enough to me, so I signed up.

They’d send ink cartridges thru automatically as I needed them. Or so said the blurb. What actually happened is that they hijacked my cartridges currently installed in the printer. I could now only print 15 pages using my ink before they started charging extra for using further quantities of my ink.

I got in touch with HPs Twitter support to correct this obvious error. They informed me that new printers are equipped to go straight onto Instant Ink. What the Dickens? That, to my ears, sounded like a confession that HP routinely steals their customers ink.

I could sign up for the trial period they told me. I’d get 300 pages a month for two months, free. And then I could downgrade back to the free subscription plan. That sounded reasonable. Except the Ts & Cs explicitly state that you cannot downgrade from a paid plan to the free plan. 

We argued for several days, back and forth. Eventually, they agreed that they would manually downgrade me to the free plan at the end of the trial period as a gesture of goodwill. So kind of them. As a special favour, just to me, they won’t steal all of my ink.

I have things settled. I’m happy, really. Despite their thieving ways. The printer is good. And the subscription plans are good as well, truth be told. But if you buy an HP printer, just beware. They’ll steal your ink.