Never buy HP. Never put up with any system that requires HP. Never let your daughter date someone that works for HP.
These are among the many things that I have learned.
Like a lot of people, when I need a new computer, I build mine piecemeal. I’ve done this since the Win95 days: It’s usually cheaper, and I get better quality parts. Of all the things I buy, I HATE buying printers the most.
I bought my printer, a Canon TS 9020 back in 2018, and chipped ink carts were a thing back then as well. They’ve been chipping carts for over ten years at least. I knew I wanted to find a printer that didn’t lock my into the OEM ink carts, so every printer I was interested in, I did a search on Ebay for ink. When I found a printer I liked that also had the 3rd party ink carts, I bought it, and so far, so good.
My printer takes 6 ink carts, and they can be had for under $10 for a pack of ALL SIX! Staples sells 4 of the carts together for $55.99, and that leaves out the grey and photo black carts! They might not by archival quality, and maybe less so under heavy UV exposure, but I have some color printouts that are 2 years old that still look great.
I hope when this printer dies, I can still find another that takes 3rd party ink. I know that printers cost more than they often sell for and they hope to make it back via ink sales (the razor and blade business model), but my OEM refills look to be close to $100, and that’s just outrageous. When you have an emotional investment in getting a full-page color printout right the first time, something’s wrong.
As an aside, I was surprised at the printer reviews at PCMAG.com. That’s not a site I’ve much use for, but when I bought my printer, they had a ton of in-depth reviews. Every printer I googled reviews for took me there. Good stuff.
Finally, I’ll back any and all HP hate in this thread and elsewhere. I curses them and hates them forever.
My HP laptop is fine, but buying a printer from them is a mistake, IMO.
I run an ethernet cord any time I’m able to. It’s just simply more reliably. At work, every gadget and gizmo and sensor and RPi and machine that has an ethernet jack has an ethernet cable run to it. It’s a lot of work but it’s also a whole hell of a lot easier to troubleshoot problems when you can rule out a wifi signal issue before you even start.
A while back I remember watching something about why one store did better than another (Cosco vs Sam’s, IIRC). The big reason they point to is that the one store had something like 50,000 different items and the other had 30,000 (making up numbers here). People analyzing what was going on learned that at the store with less items, if you want some peanut butter, you go to the peanut butter aisle, you’re presented with a dozen or so different kinds, grab the one you like and leave. At the other store, you find 60 different kinds, see the one you like but then also see two dozen others that sound interesting, can’t make up your mind, give up and leave without any peanut butter.
In fact, in my own line of work, one of the things we do is catering to offices for people that are coming in to do presentations. We’ve learned over the years (from the people ordering, we just deliver, not attend/serve) if we bring a variety of, for example, all the different sandwiches we offer, people take a long time to get their food. If we bring just two or three options (ie ham, turkey and veggie sandwiches), they just grab the one they like and keep moving.
I’ve typically had really good luck with HP. Most of my laptops (after thinkpads got too expensive) have been very good. All my desktops at work are HPs and they’ve been fine and most of our printers have been HPs (the last handful being LaserJets) have lasted years and we print quite a bit.
To be honest me too. I’ve never not had an Hp printer and I love my DeskJet 8600. Mom has an HP printer and laptop that I take care of and they work fine, and my HP desktop runs my entire web programming business and is 10 years old.
I bought an HP laser jet pro mfp m283fdw.
So far, I’m very happy with it. It talks (over the home network) to every device I’ve tried to connect to it, including a MacBook pro, an HP spectre, and my Pixel phone. I’m not looking for photo quality, but it prints pretty colored graphs, and prints PDFs nicely.
I haven’t tried scanning anything, yet.
It’s good to read the negative reviews to see if there are patterns, but the % of reviews that are negative should probably be discounted for the reason you point out: people who are happy with a product are less likely to post a review than if they are unhappy - and their reviews are less likely to be extremely passionate.
As for printers…I bought a laser all-in-one about 13 years ago and will never buy an inkjet printer again.
WRT amazon reviews only, a helpful tool is
https://reviewmeta.com/
You paste the URL of an amazon product into the box and this site uses a series of algorithms to check their overall validity. It’s only a tool, not foolproof, but it’s helpful. You can also add the link to your browser (at least you can add it to Firefox) and just click on it when you’re on the product page.
Similarly, I always sort the Amazon reviews by newest instead of their default “top reviews”. I’ve found the ones at the top tend to be old, and therefore obsolete, for a variety of reasons. Plus they tend to be exclusively good reviews. I want to see what the people that bought the item in the last few weeks/months are saying about it. Quality changes over time with some things. Hell, sometimes the entire listing changes. It’s funny how often you’ll be looking at, say, a cheap LED light strip but see reviews for sunglasses and phone chargers, because that’s what the listing had been in the past, which means the average star rating is useless.
That site (or one like it), I can’t bring myself to use any more. When I tried it out a few years ago, it was like I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t full of (what it said were) fake reviews. That made buying things even more difficult. I just tell myself that, other than the very clearly BS reviews, they’re all real, otherwise I’d drive myself crazy trying to buy anything. Spending two days trying to decide which 10 dollar shower curtain to buy is already enough work.
Yeah, the site is pretty wonky (the way Paul Krugman uses the word) if you read the whole page on your item. I usually just look at the overall score. If amazon gives it 4.5 stars and ReviewMeta gives it 3.5, that might tell me there are a lot of fake reviews.
I got sick of inkjets because I also only print a few times a year and all of a sudden my ink would be low, or it was clogged.
I bought a laser printer and it just stopped after a year. I bought another and it seems good so far…
I’ve now looked at pretty much every site that does testing of these things and every one of the recommended printers have at least 6-7% “WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT!” reviews; usually setup, connectivity and ink issues. Well of course: why would you want those things to work properly? I’m about at my wit’s end here.
Sigh.
Remember the old pin printers, you shove the wire in the jack, made sure it had a ribbon and you were in business. I found my ancient one and tried it, my laptop wouldn’t even talk to it cries I have yet in the past decade had a printer that lasted more than a year, some not even past replacing the damned ink cartridges! WTF people, can’t you hire a fucking woman to do some designing? I swear, men are generally not thinking with the right head when it comes to decent design [like don’t get me started with my router, why the fuck should I have to unplug the damned thing to power cycle it, how about a fucking on off rocker switch?]
I’ve since moved on to a black and white laserjet, but I was livid with my old Canon inkjet multi-function when it refused to scan a document when one of the ink tanks was empty. Fucking hell.
Keep in mind there’s a large group of people who are stupid, clueless and inept and who can’t be persuaded that anything going wrong is due to user error and are determined to tell the world about it. I discount a lot of those poor reviews unless they can cogently explain what was wrong with it, preferably including pics of something being actually borked.
That being said, I’ve never had a problem with either Brother or Samsung printers and they’re smart enough to make the setup pretty generic and they don’t radically change how the models work much so finding internet guidance on setup and fixing random problems is dead easy.
On the plus side, my printer makes excellent coffee.
If you rule out any product that generates venomous Amazon one-star reviews, you’ll never buy small electronics again. If the vast majority of buyers are happy with it and it generates decent evaluations on respected review sites*, you should be OK.
*not dubious sites that have popped up like toadstools after a rain, like bestnosehairtrimmerreviews.com
But none of the newer computers come with those built in cup holders anymore; the ones where you press the button & the cup holder slides out. 
I have had a black and white laser printer for a while but I wanted a color inkjet last winter, barely pre-pandemic, that could do things that a laser printer can’t, like print on shrink film.
So I got Brother’s version of an ecotank model last February, finally set it up in June (2020) when I finished making a home office and it’s still going strong on the ink cartridges it came with without any warnings or suspiciously timed failure after low use. It’s definitely the least irritating inkjet I’ve ever own.