How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps

I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (with built in scanner) for £250 and it was bundled with 6 spare toner cartridges. That was two years ago, we’re still on the first cartridge. The printer before that was also a monochrome laser printer and that lasted nearly a decade (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore). Basically, I think monochrome lasers can last forever, they always work (even if I haven’t printed for 6 months). Most people seem to buy printers with way too many features and they need 7 ink cartridges etc. I rarely print anything, but when I do I want it to just work.

This story tells me I made the right decision: Never ever buy a printer. I can print in the library. Since Covid started I needed to do that twice: The first time they had stopped accepting cash because of the infection risk(!). And I loaded 2 Euros on my library card for 10 pages but obviously did not use all of them. The second time they were surprised that I had money on my library card.<p>To be fair I have printed a couple of times at the office. But I think I have been below 10 pages a year for at least 10 years, office and library combined.<p>The only case seems to be having to send documents to an authority abroad. That happens to me, but infrequently enough.<p>Now people might say, do you trust the library with your personal documents? First I don&#x27;t remember when I had something seriously sensitive. And then I would say do you trust all that closed source software on your own Windows PC? As Linux user I would have probably not even been able to open the secret windows the article described.

I went through a similar problem with an expensive wifi 6 cable modem router (Netgear Nighthawk CAX80). Spent too much money on it ($400 if I remember rightly) for better internet connectivity from xfinity. Worked well until I moved back to the UK, shipping it across in a container, only to discover that it&#x27;s not only region locked but if it cannot detect an American-style cable connection, it gets stuck in a reboot loop. Wanted to switch regions and turn on AP mode to use it just for that, but now it&#x27;s an expensive paper weight.<p>Also had the same problem with a gas pizza oven (Ooni), ironically from a Scottish company, but has only USA gas connections and is impossible to switch regions. I can very much sympathise with the author and am very glad consoles are no longer region locked.

I actually have no idea how printers (things that have been around for ever) are _still_ just so bad. I do get cheap printers tbf... but sometimes they just flat out do not work or can&#x27;t connect or get jobs stuck in the queue, etc. I never experience this when buying other &quot;cheap&quot; peripherals, yet, printers just seem to consistently suck in almost every way.

It has always annoyed me that &quot;region settings&quot; don&#x27;t just take into account the realities of the situation; they&#x27;re OBVIOUSLY designed to prevent people in &quot;rich&quot; countries from buying media designated for &quot;poor&quot; countries in a form of market segmentation; but that should mean the &quot;rich media&quot; should just work in all devices.<p>Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to bypass region encoding on DVDs, for example.<p>I wonder if off-brand ink would have just completely ignored the region thingy.

HP products are now such crappy&#x2F;broken products, it is incredible.<p>Their printers are probably the worst. All the ones I had to touch had problems: scan pages bent, adf adding a blue line on scanned documents, configuration messed up in windows because owning 2 times the same model or one of them being setup both by cable and wifi, huge software bloat on PC or android, thing that should connect but is not detected despite installing all their crappy software and resetting the stuff 10 times, printer refusing to start and scan because a cardridge is missing<p>That makes me totally crazy and I hate them.<p>I&#x27;m quite sure that they would have died a long time ago and not have this market share if they weren&#x27;t so aggressive on prices. They are playing on the fact that they make you buy a lot of them. I think that some people should start to sue them.

A pox on printers with DRM cartridges and all their works. We binned ours a couple of years back in favour of an Epson something-or-other. It&#x27;s not exactly the world&#x27;s greatest printer, but it has two absolutely killer features - one, it has four ink reservoirs that you refill from (non-DRM!) squeezy bottles of ink that are <i>cheap</i>, and two, once in there the ink lasts for absolutely <i>ages</i>.<p>Like OP&#x27;s, that printer took an absolute caning during the pandemic as both kids&#x27; schoolwork was constantly spewing out of the thing, and I marvel at how much money it saved us.

I hope that someday the EU will look into manufacturers of consumables-based devices like printers. Consumers shouldn&#x27;t be limited to use branded, forced-expiring, half-empty consumables, that can&#x27;t work because of DRMs, or other anti-consumer rules like &#x27;oh you need all cartridges even if you want to print in black and white&#x27;

If I may, I’d lite to quote, in their entirety, two older comments of mine:<p>⁂<p>I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is <i>opaque</i>. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and <i>you can’t look inside them and find out why</i>. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. <i>Free software</i>, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system&#x2F;printer has found some new way to confound you.<p>I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software <i>in a printer</i>, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.<p>— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10322408" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10322408</a><p>I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the computer side.<p>— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24787633" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24787633</a>

HP printers are absolutely awful now in terms of their PITA setup, obtuse smart setup exe’s instead of drivers, stupid drm or subscription lock stuff like this. We do not supply or recommend them any more (IT company).

It&#x27;s not even the idiotic DRM that gets me so triggered about this - I&#x27;m sure most of us have been in a situation with corporate support where someone is genuienly trying to help but their own tools don&#x27;t work, their support pages don&#x27;t load, and the tech team is no more knowledgeable than a random wiki article. Like, with the DVD drives you also had a built-in region lock into every drive but changing it could be accomplished in about 30 seconds and yes there was also a global limit on number of changes. Why go through this insane process of giving support dozen different numbers they type into some keygen - it feels crazy.

HP is another of many examples how MBAs in their search for ever growing &quot;value&quot; can gradually destroy a company that owes its success to great engineering.

I think part reason HP had trouble solving this case is the fact that most skilled people have decent ethics, and refuse to work for Vito Corleone [ink edition].

What happened to the simple world of unit price and volume discounts.<p>The screw the consumer for the max they can afford works for monopoly, corruption and stand over tactics

I have the Brother HL-L2305W referenced[0] in the article. After I purchased it, I added it to the Wifi network and it showed up as a printer on my Linux machine. Stays mostly turned-off except when I need to print at which point I turn it on, it connects seamlessly, prints and I again turn it off. My wife can print to it from her iPhone and she is not a tech savvy person. All the high praise about Brother&#x27;s monochrome laser printers are well deserved.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;23642073&#x2F;best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;23642073&#x2F;best-printer-2023-brother-...</a>

Brexit eBay forced me to create a new EU account, effectively nuking 15 years of reputation.

I bought a cheap (£50) hp multifunction at the start of covid with an instant ink subscription. Obviously this involves dystopian DRM and the printer phoning home the number of pages I am printing but it actually works really well. I print over WiFi from Windows, iPhone, android, etc with no issues, cartridges arrive at my door before I need them, and the cost per page is competitive with professional equipment (under 5p for the ink even if full colour photo).<p>The cartridges belong to hp, not me, so they would stop working if I cancelled and I would have to buy my own. That&#x27;s normal with pay per click printing, which is also the standard in high end leased machines. I don&#x27;t want my computer to be an appliance but having the printer be &#x27;just an appliance&#x27; is very convenient.

We bought a new Fuji Xerox recently and we were very happy with it. Everything so far seems very non-hostile.<p>Have also owned Brother printers, which were very good, but they tended to overheat and catastrophically fail if you print a lot on them in one sitting (i.e. 1000 flyers).<p>Owned Epson and always had driver issues.

It’s always HP

Have a separate small travel router with embedded VPN support to connect printer to Wi-fi hotspot with whatever region it wants to see.<p>It&#x27;s not HP&#x27;s or any other vendor&#x27;s business to know where you are. This is an easy solution to this.<p>I have a few routers at home with a separate Wifi hotspot each configured for separate country to avoid exactly this nonsense for different services.<p>Advantage of this approach is you can travel with a small travel router all over the world while feeding each of the service with a consistent country location.<p>Added privacy is a benefit.

HP used to be so good in terms of printers. I still have a 4050DTN that can take overstuffed cartridges that will do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. I think I’m on my third cartridge in 20 years and two degrees. It needs some maintenance such as replacing the pick-up rollers and possibly even the fuser, but it’s an absolute beast that I have no intention of getting rid of any time soon.<p>What I hear about HP printers these days is deeply disappointing. For shame, HP. You have truly lost your way.

Get a used HP LaserJet from their professional line. They lack wifi, are way bigger then your normal printer but they work for years without problems and have cheap replacement parts and cartidges.<p>One general advice is to look for recommended devices in the medical&#x2F;law&#x2F;military area. There is nothing special about those printers but their recommondation for such institutions makes them a safe bet and never failed me or one of my clients (even 10+ years later).

There is no technology I despise more than printers. Inkjet printers, in particular, are the work of El Diabolicolo.

Do you have a recommendation for a laser printer manufacturer with no locking (third party toner, ok...) and no steganography (invisible dots)?

Is this not something you would try to dump on a local computer repair shop? Why waste so much of your time?

Is the an opensource firmware or even an opensource motherboard for hp ….?

this place has been around for decades - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tonerrefillkits.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tonerrefillkits.com&#x2F;</a>

Who has so much free time? Easy solution:<p>- return cartridges since they do not work in &quot;compatible&quot; printer. Consumer laws do not care about small print or region locks<p>- go to unauthorized shop and have original cartridges refiled. I recycled cartridge like that for several years.