Slashdot Mirror
HP To Buy Samsung's Printer Business For $1.05 Billion (usatoday.com)
HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP's history. USA Today reports: "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6,500 printing patents as well as 1,300 researchers and engineers "with advanced expertise in laser printer technology." While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung's mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it "suddenly burst into flames."
The way things are going, they could have gotten Lexmark for less.
What do batteries catching fire have to do with printers?
NOTHING!
Please stop with the stories that are off topic with themselves.
I doubt there is much more connection between Samsung's printer and cell phone divisions than there is between their printer and guided missile destroyer units.
sPh
Note to Hp: You guys could have got the business for 250 million, if you hadn't bought the ink cartridge department, too...
Of all people who should know better, it would be you. *sigh*
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Terrible printers, last I checked. I went around at a trade show a few years ago to look at laser printers, and the Samsung impressed me by being the only one whose output was actually worse than not having output at all. The printed photograph that they used for a demo was a dark, blotchy mess, with nonexistent gradients.... It was so bad that I almost wondered if it was somebody's idea of abstract art.
Then again, I can pretty reliably recognize HP-printed photos from several feet away by the banding, so maybe it kind of does make sense....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As if millennials are working on or with printers...
samsung's printers were one of the few remaining product lines you could reliably use third party or remanufactured toner cartridges in. first thing HP will do, no doubt, is nix that, either by "redesigning" samsung's models with DRM, issuing a 'critical' firmware fix that does the same thing, or flat out killing-off the samsung models completely.
captcha: frugally
i guess that leaves brother as the best choice for lower-end lasers (and inkets for that matter) that happily use cheap non-OEM consumables.
Samsung laser printers are cheap and just work. The ones at work (and the ones I have at home) just WORK, the only time they don't work is when they're out of paper. You can always print to them, and it's reliable.
On the other hand, the HP printers on the same work network are pieces of crap that get 'lost' all the time ('Printer is not online'), probably because of how terrible the HP drivers are. And those HP drivers nag you all the f@$ing time to install the rest of the HP bloatware.
So now they're going to slap their shitty drivers on the Samsungs and they'll be completely terrible too, and cartridge prices will skyrocket. There's no upside on this for consumers.
This looks like a transaction that should not be approved.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Still running HP LaserJets made in the '90s in production. These things still work like champs, AND still have drive support up through Windows 10.
The thing is, the Samsung laser printer wasn't *that* much cheaper than the bottom tier of Brother or Konica Minolta laser printers, both of which were miles better.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Look, I just want the machine to put ink on paper. I don't want any innovation here, and certainly not from HP's driver team.
As if millennials are working on or with printers...
Indeed. My daughter is a millennial, and the only time she ever printed anything was for school assignments. Then her school figured out web submission of homework, and even that stopped. Now we only use our printer for printing crap to mail to the government, so some bureaucrat can read the form and manually type it into their computer.
On the other hand my experience with Samsung printers are that they are worlds better than HP.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I really liked Samsung printers.
Seagate bought their hard drive business, and apparently shut it down, rather than use Samsung's superior tech and facilities, to keep churning out crappy drives based on Maxtor tech and dirt floor factories. I have yet to have a Samsung drive fail, some of my drives have over 40000 hours.
As for the memory... WTF happened there? For a while, the best, cheapest 4GB DDR3 modules on the planet, and then.... poof.... they ended production and have never made that sort of impact on the market since.
FTA: "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers," said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement.
Huh? Can a Professor of English please parse that gobbeldey-gook sentence for me? Is it even a sentence?
Will these printers have a headphone jack?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The most hilarious part is that, while this is happening, Apple removes the headphone jack and suddenly everyone is freaking our like it is the fucking end of the world.
Sense of proportion. Get some.
Hopefully the headphone jacks are fireproof. The headphone jack outrage has quieted down a little bit now. since there's a good comeback.
And it's all Apple's fault that that little boy burnt himself on that exploding Galaxy phone. He was listening to music, and his parent's gaddamned iPhone 7 didn't have an earphone jack to plug his Dora the Explorer headphones into. Fscking hipsters anyhow!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Because Congress Cut their Budget and will not spend any money on computer upgrades that would save money in the long run?
No, because Congress gave them $8B to upgrade their software, they hired Oracle as a contractor to implement the upgrade, now all the money is gone, and nobody knows why.
Two points I'd like to make;
1) the reliable early HP laserjets were actually built around a Canon engine. Anyone who used to bag on Canon LBP then rave the virtues of HP Laserjet were promptly despatched red faced back to the mail room.
2) Fuck printers, watch 'em burn.
pc load letter what the fuck does that mean
Most of HP Ink (pun intended, remember that the HP of Yore split into HP Enterprise for Big Iron and Services, and HP Inc for desktops and Printers, tickers: HPE and HPI) Laser printers, even from the begining of "Laser Time" time, use laser printing Engines from other manufacturers (In the begining, mostly Canon, nowadays, they use Samsumg Engines too). So HP gets the Laser engine from a 3rd party, slaps a Microcontroller, some plastic, writes a bloated driver, and of you go.
Samsung and Canon, on the other hand, do all that, but also make the laser engines...
Also, HP Ink is not Strong in Multifunctional Lasers for SOHO/Prosumer/Office/BigCorporates. And has no presence Whatsoever in the Copier business.
For HP this deal means: ... even Dell
1.) Get rid of a competitor, actually, they probably got Samsung because it was the weaker of the lot, or for the other reasons detailed here. No worries, we still have Brother, Lexmark, Canon, Xerox,
2.) Verticaly integrate the Laser Engine into the production, with the associate cost savings. Sorry for Canon, no more HP bussiness for them in the medium term... (contracts will not be renewed, or renewed in shorter terms than without this deal, new products will be based mostly on Samsung Laser tech).
3.) In the medium term, deny other competitors (Dell, for example) of Said engines (Dell uses Samsung laser engines on many of their house brand lasers printers) or, having competitors using their engines to actually put money on HP's Pocket. Again, most likely contracts will not be renewed, or will be renewed on shorter and/or more expensive terms. If I were Dell, I'd rush to Canon's HQ and invite them some niguiri and Sake to, you know, discuss things.
4.) While the product overlap is Huuuuuge, the Market overlap is not, both Geographicaly (think, for example APAC, not only US) and client wise (enterprise vs consumer vs prosumer/soho). That means that HP Ink printers can reach places were samsung is strong, and Samsung printers can reach places where HP Ink is strong.
5.) Cross selling (Mr 500 employee office, here are your printers, can I interest you in some workstations/desktops/laptops? Mr. 800 employee office, here are your Workstations/desktops/Laptops, can I interest you in some printers to go with them?)
6.) "Cost saving synergies" (i.e Layoffs/Pinkslips/Redundancies).
7.) A nice throve of patents with which to defend from (don't even think on suing me, I have my patent's and Samsung's), or harass (hey, Sign this cross-pattent agreement with me, or we'll sue), or even get royalties money from competitors.
8.) Get a presence in the copier business.
Now, is that worth $1.05*109?
Only time will tell.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
So HP's solution to their poor sales is to buy the guys that make the worst printers in the market.
Samsung's printers are outperform in everything by even generic crapware printers. They aren't even good for storing the paper since the tray is usually the first part to break due to the use of ridiculously cheap plastic.
This is like comparing a Pinto to a Corvair.... :-)
My favorite HP experience involved a set of... IIRC three different HP printers (multiple models in the same series) at my former employer with duplexers. If you loaded them up with 11x17 paper and told them to print double-sided, you had to send them exactly two pages (one physical sheet) at a time. Otherwise, the stupid printers would start feeding the next page before it finished printing the previous one, resulting in a paper jam every single time. I wasted a good couple of hours before I figured out what was causing the constant paper jams, because I never in a million years would have thought that a shipping printer could possibly have such a serious firmware bug in its final firmware revision (which was many years old at the time).
Eventually, they scrapped those printers because they couldn't get toner cartridges for them, and replaced them with smaller HP printers that jammed when I looked at them funny. Don't get me started on HP.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It does. And they are great for what they are. Cheap like heck, decent priced consumables, support for Samsung Print Language widely available in Linux. Some even have PostScript Support. I'll still using the cheap Samsung Laser printer I bought a decade ago just fine. For inkjet, if you still care about that, the best brand IMO is the Canon bubble jet line.
HP is good at office departmental printers. They're fine at this but its way outside my small office budget.
The average 3 year old with a box of crayons produces a better result than the average HP printer. And faster, too. Not to mention that the crayons will last longer than the ink. Yes, even if the crayons and edible and made of sugar.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What the hell is the connection between Samsung printers and smartphone batteries that overheat? Is this new style of non-sequiturs an attempt at looking clever without actually making a serious effort at understanding the subject? Are we going to see things like "Gravity waves have been found, as predicted by Einstein, who famously never wore socks"?
In this case there is an excellent opportunity to comment on a variety subjects:
1) HP's and Samsung's financial trouble and the future direction their products will take. ...
2) Compare the quality of the printer offereing from the two.
2) etc etc
In stead we get this idle chit-chat.
The 8150 laser printer was a really good printer, built to withstand a nuclear blast in its vicinity. Ours got too long in the tooth. We replaced it with a P4515. It works okay, but it is built to withstand a low velocity wind storm, anything greater than 15 mph wind will probably cause it to lose plastic parts. I expect the next printer we get from HP (if we get one from them) will probably drop its parts on the floor every 10 pages.
TRIGGERS!!! TRIGGERS!!!
One of the things I've noticed lately is the tendency for people to get so swept up in trends that they forget about the overall market. PC and printer manufacturers need to come to terms with contraction of a mature market, and I think HP is doing that in this case. Yes, of course, fewer people are buying PCs and even fewer are buying printers for home, but that does not mean the market is totally dead. All it means is that you're selling fewer of them, to people who actually need them for "real work." Paper documents are certainly less prevalent than they were before, but it's not at zero -- look at law firms, government agencies, banks, etc. as examples of the heaviest users. Same thing for PCs -- you're not going to have some call center guy bopping into work, placing his iPad on a dock and using that for his job. Thin clients and PCs are the norm for this environment, as it is for most lower-level bit pushers.
What the manufacturers need to do is get margin back up. Stop making 600 slightly different garbage consumer model PCs for Best Buy and Staples, and focus on the real business PCs with good construction and a warranty that you can still sell for $800+. Stop making $49 home printers that won't last through the first set of ink cartridges, and focus on building tanks like the LaserJet 4Si or 4000/8000 series of yesteryear. A really good example of this in action is the workstation market. Not everyone needs dual Xeon processors, 192GB of RAM and 4 video cards on their desktop, but for those who do, they pay a pretty penny for it. I'm old school and pay the premium for quality home equipment. There are fewer buyers like me, but we readily open our wallets when a compelling product is offered...for as often as I use it, I want to buy an expensive printer every 10 years, not a throwaway one every year.
I've been working big corporate for the last 15 years. I've seen more HP printers and plotters used in a corporate environment that probably any other, so I am not sure how they are weak. I would say their corporate business is much lager than even their personal business. When I first started we still had an old Tektronic thermal printer I used (which was fun and used colour wax).
As to if they are any good or not, well we've had our share of issues but probably no more than anything else. Largest share of issues seem to revolve around drivers. Particularly around OS changes, when we went with some Win7 64bit machines it caused a bit of chaos with incompatible drivers, but that could easily just be IT not configuring things properly in anticipation. Going to Win10 with all 64bit I foresee likely similar issues. Other than that, it is typically network issues making printers vanish inexplicably, but again this is more likely due to network hardware failure, or IT making changes to networks without making the required changes to the printer configurations.
As for Plotters, I'm not sure if there is a bigger company, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a near monopoly on that sector. Plotters I have found to have far more quirks when trying to use them with various types of more modern software, adobe for one. I recall there being an issue with "auto rotate", where it was a shell game of sorts because of three separate independent auto rotate functions (software, driver, plotter) either infinitely rotating, or seemingly randomly deciding amongst themselves what to end on...
I've been in the photocopier (now called MFP) business, from the service side for 37 years. Other than Xerox or Canon, I've pretty much worked on them all. Been with Toshiba & Konica/Minolta for the last 19 years. Samsung made us a push when they got into the desktop & console market a few years back. They had a rock bottom price to get into the market, 3 year part warranty on ANYTHING. Of course the sales department JUMPED on it. They brought in a couple machines, SCX-8030 b&w, and CLX-9230 color, for us to look at. "oh these have been tested and tested, they are perfect". As techs, we popped off the covers to take a look, pulled out the image units, fuser etc. The wiring, boards, very well laid out. Image & fusers looked ok. I put a bad omen on our relationship by saying to the sales guys...from a hardware point, they look good, the only variable is going to be the software/firmware. Boy, did I speak the truth! From day 1, we had nothing but trouble from these machines...software wise. Scan wouldn't work fax wouldn't work, this glitch, that glitch...update after update after patch after patch. Then we had trouble with the imaging units puking out all over the place requiring replacement. Then the fuser belt for the upper roller would shread itself. None of the consumable items would make it anywhere near their expected life. Then about 7 months later, they came out with a new model...."tested in the lab, it's perfect". LOL. Same issues, control panel UI lock ups, scan to this or that lock ups, print driver problems....imaging unit & fuser unit issues. They came out with a new series this spring, the SL-X7400/7500. It has issues with the large capacity tray skewing, and there are NO mechanical adjustments to get rid of it. Even more, they came out with these translucent rollers which did not allow the paper to even come out of the tray. I took it upon myself to replace them with the OLD STYLE soft rubber rollers which worked in the older model machines, but Samsung said that should not work. Well, I don't care if it does or not, it works, that's what I'm using. They sent a hardware engineer over from S. Korea to look at what I have done to make them work in the field (18 machines at one location). He took the rollers out, installed a new set of factory rollers...the "new" style, and it wouldn't feed. He played around with it for over an hour not getting it to work, then put my "fix" in, the old rollers and it works like a champ. He took a bunch of photos, downloaded some data files, called someone in Korea, spoke with them for 20 minutes then got back on the airplane to Korea. Still haven't heard but I'm leaving it the way it is. Their technical support hotline is a JOKE. They will even say "I don't know what to tell you, but, if you figure it out, call us back so we can add it to our database". If HP goes through with this, I think they are asking for it. Unless they BEEF UP the software to where it works, fix the issues with the imaging units/fuser units not working, they are going to piss off a lot of HP loyal I.T. people.
I thought that to make CUPS work with a printer it must have support for it, so you just can't "add PostScript" support to a printer that won't understand it?
We have an old ibm iseries server that needs PCL support on a printer in order to be able to print anything besides text.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Same old formula at HP, massive layoffs followed by seemingly random acquisitions (they picked up SGI not too long ago) , followed by BONUS!!!, then by more layoffs.