I fear the day my 2014 hp LaserJet dies. There won’t be a decent printer on the market…
They were the last good guys :(
I guess it’s time to buy the printer I’ve been postponing
try looking for laser jet printers, only use toner cartridge. Ink-based printers are pretty much scams. we spent an untold amount on ink for epson, until the printer failed completely
Sadly i need an ink printer. I already hace a laser one but sometimes i need to printer on papers that don’t work on laser
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I think its time we deprecate most forms of printing. Clearly corporations cannot be trusted to operate these kinds of companies.
if the update doesn’t allow the printer to calibrate with this aftermarket ink the cheaper carts become basically unusable
This isn’t true. It just means you have to do the registration manually.
This is scummy behavior for sure, but it’s also being exaggerated for clicks. You can read the sources linked in the wiki to see exactly what users are reporting.
Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?
I don’t at all feel vindicated, but my Brother printer is the worst printer I ever owned (this was 20 years ago admittedly). Absolute hunk of junk with nothing but problems. I’ve always wondered why they were so well recommended online.
Could have been a Friday afternoon one. The one I have is a workhorse that could print on bark using toner made of charcoal and dust.
ill have to recommend buying old refurbished printers
I’ve got a Lexmark laser printer, and while there are cheaper subscription toners, you can pay the higher price for normal toner, and buy compatibles, for now at least.
you seem to have gotten a smart printer, new ones have that one, we got a canon laser.
Epson inkjets with refillable tanks probably.
Depending on the frequency of your printing, they can suck as well. Chronically clogged nozzles are maddening.
This. My partner’s office is stuck with “it has to be inkjet and not toner", and on January their printer got clogged…
Inkjet is great, for photo printing regularly. For absolutely every other situation a laser printer is better.
ink jet ones are so messy, and it waste a ton of ink.
Yeah, that’s true. That was a pain in the ass when my wife needed good color accuracy.
I don’t print that often but I do have a calendar event to tell me to print something monthly. This could be a nice side project for someone to write a program that sends a print to your printer on a schedule to keep the heads clear. Wastes paper but at least the heads won’t dry out.
I reuse old paper when I do this.
You can run a power clean cycle which should help, then just replace the foam pads they saturate with ink for the cleaning
They’re not perfect but they’re still the most consumer friendly option on the market at this point
After talking to support 15 times, they never suggested replacing anything, and power clean wasn’t enough. I’ve long since destroyed the thing out of malignant rage and turned to libraries and copy shops, but it’s good to know that there might have been a solution.
Aliexpress syringe cleaning kit
Wait until copy shops start raising their prices cause nobody has printers anymore and you have no choice but to use them
Still cost me less than a new printer every two years if they multiplied their prices by 10.
yup and your not using a printer every single day.
a personal printer/ink is far more expensive.
Not for me, 40€ toner cartridge gets me 10k pages, already have over 80k pages printed so the printer paid itself multiple times compared to a copyshop
I have the 2850. Been using it for a couple years now. Print maybe once a month. Nozzles get clogged periodically but you run the automated cleaning process and it’s back to working again.
That printer is a nightmare. But financially makes sense.
Did they ever make the excess ink parts user replaceable?
That they weren’t in some models kept me from getting one when I was in the market a few years ago.
The printer has the same ink problems, clogged, runs out easy, can’t print b&w when missing a color. But I can buy random ink.
Kyocera.
Also Japanese, and plenty of cheap generic toners available online. They even publish Linux drivers.
use a laser printer? preferabally the ones that doesnt use updates or any newer versions.
I don’t know if it matters, but I just bought a Canon laser printer. Didn’t see anywhere about forced subscription options for toner.
we bought laser canon printer to, toner cartridge doesnt use color, so if you want color you would need an ink printer, its better to print a library or a printer shop anyways. we are using an MF class one?
I have a color canon laser printer scanner.
That’s actually what I bought, too.
Nice, Brother was the last one standing in my mind.
I’m glad I have an IoT vlan without internet access. Nothing is allowed to phone home here.
10 years later
Printers now include embedded cellular modems as backup for OTA firmware updates, ink subscriptions and telemetry.Dude!
Printer Faraday cage.
I suggest whoever has old firmware files to upload them to the Internet Archive (if they allow those).
Internet Archive is extremely lax in what it allows
Got this link from reddacted
Buy an Epson EcoTank printer. My family owns three. You pay more for the printer but just dump in bottles of ink when they need refilling.
Just make sure you schedule a test print every couple off weeks to prevent clogs, is a little wasteful but if you get aftermarket ink it’s cheap enough that is worth it, otherwise a new head will run you down around 50 bucks.
TIL EDIT: you can get continuous tank mods for most printers on AliExpress! I might give it a try with mine!
They do require maintenance to keep them running smoothly. I’m fairly mechanically and technically capable so I can disconnect the head and run DA-2A through the mechanism to clean it out.
DA-2A works to a point, but if you let the printer sit for a year it might not unfortunately. Like I said print heads aren’t crazy expensive, but still kind of sucks. But hey inkjets still do have their place sometimes.
DA-2A works to a point
I have a 210 L drum of the stuff.
We do a fair amount of printing and run the print head cleaning routine on our printer every few weeks to keep it happy. We’ve had the ET-4550 for over 8 years and it’s still chugging along. If it ever needs a replacement print head it will not owe me a damned thing.
That’s great but it doesn’t sound like this is relevant for home gamers ;)
I just bought a printer. Everything I saw said that if you print infrequently then you don’t want an inkjet. They’re very prone to clogging if left alone for a while. Went with a laser printer instead.
I just got an old HP inkjet that doesn’t care about reported ink levels and cheap ink bottles from AliExpress.
I print white on black because I have so much damn ink and nobody expects dark mode documents. Kinda funny when I take out a sheet of paper and have to dry it out. 120g/m² is absolutely the minimum when doing such crap though. Regular 80g/m² just wrinkles up and leaks through, although that’s also a property of dye ink vs pigment ink.
But I also lucked out on sales combined with coupons
Currently it’s €18.50, though for 0.5L (~1 pint) that’s still cheap. Honestly I am surprised I actually received that.
Nice. We had one printer or another that required expensive ink cartridges before we got the Epson. I used to refill some cartridges but it was a pain. Now I just open a set of bottles and top up the tanks whenever it’s thirsty.
It’s like every company that wasn’t complete shit just suddenly decided to…go to complete shit.
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The government has mostly turned a blind eye to dark pattern business for years, and now the president is openly saying that he encourages it and wants companies to step up their game. Of course things are going to get worse, especially now where everyone will have forgotten this by the next election, so it’ll get to stay as “the norm”
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
With the current US government, there’s far more roadblocks to running a company ethically than turning it to absolute shit
Brother is a Japanese company.
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If regulators don’t stop them from doing it, the CEO’s of publicly traded companies will get the boot from the board for not doing it. They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
We need laws to stop this, but the politicians are all bribed not to.
They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
They don’t – that’s a cargo-cult misunderstanding of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co – but it’s so widely believed I guess it might as well be true.
Well, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as the way Costco mostly operates. Being the good guys has a lot of brand value. With a little nurturing of the vast propaganda machine known as advertising, that could be improved.
If the people sitting on the Supreme Court believe it, and I believe the majority of those shitbags do, then that is unfortunately the law as it stands.
But when the law is unethical, I don’t see why we should be lawful.
Dude, Brother is not even an US company - like most big printer companies it’s Japanese and traded at the Tokyo stock exchange.
So… You’re arguments are invalid and only show your americentric world view.
It’s like every company that was
n’t completeplaying the social good will game and didn’t appear at a casual glance to be shit just suddenly decided to…goto complete shit.masks off, because they saw it might finally be acceptable to be ghouls again.Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I FTFY. Wish it weren’t so, but that’s definitely what it looks like…
The mask of humanity fall[s] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
- The Deserter, Disco Elysium
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Game is such a fucking gem. I gotta do a replay soon.
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Cuts into profit margins pretending to not be a threat to the continued existence of the species and ecosystem as a whole. Gotta buy that 15th mega-yacht.
Something something, I’ll bring the BBQ sauce.
Oh, Brother.
Nooo, you were the only remaining printer company that wasn’t a customer-hating dumpster fire of a company!
In case anyone was thinking this applies only to inkjet printers: no, it ONLY seems to apply to laser printers – the thing that Brother used to be known for. Where the article says “ink”, they mean “toner”. There is no ink in a laser printer.
Could this be anything related to government printer tracking requirements?
I believe that only applies to ink jet. You can hardly make secret dots in B&W.
There is something similar for B&W laser printing. Text is never 100% black, but rastered. You can digitally hide a whole lot of information in microraster on a page of printed text.
Text is never 100% black, but rastered.
Does “rastered” mean the image is mapped onto a very fine grid and each square is given a 0-100 value for intensity of ink? I looked it up, and it seemed like the squares are given a binary value, but this is nowhere near my wheelhouse and I’m honestly not sure I understood the Wikipedia page, let alone the references
It is actually quite easy: “Black” print does not mean that 100% of all pixels are actually set. Print pixels are never perfect squares, so even if the printer only prints half of the dots, the print is still dark enough. If not, it could print 70% or 80%, but lets stick to 50% for ease of argument.
So instead of
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXit would print
X X X X X X X X X X X XFor you, it would still be a “roughly black” spot (keep in mind these 8x3 pixel are 0.032mm wide and 0.012mm high on good laser printer).
Would you notice if the pattern was slightly different, like
X X X X X XX X X X X XMake a bonanza of those small changes nobody can see, and you can hide thosands of bytes of data in those patterns on any printed page.
Wait, I thought that’s something that only color laser do with yellow toner…
Edit: Possibly
We seriously need a FOSS+FOSH printer
I have even thought of some names:
- Gutenberg
- Aldus
- Manutius
It’s really surprising this doesn’t already exist. It’s such a hated piece of tech, I would have thought someome would have thought they could do better! I don’t know enough to do it myself but I’d sure as hell support a project to do it!
In my experience, people who are aware of open source and the like are also people who only print something when they absolutely HAVE to.
It will cost too much because they can’t get back R&D money back via sales of proprietary ink and spare parts, plus competitors will immediately take advantage of your improvements
Like a prusa (open source 3d printer) costs like 3 bambulab (walled garden closed source 3d printer that uses a fork of prusa slicer)
It’s not, though. Printers are actually fairly expensive to manufacture, and they’re sold heavily subsidized by the companies in order to sell you a decade of printer cartridges where you make up for that loss. It was the first tech subscription model.
If someone made and sold a shitty inkjet printer at cost, the last time I saw something written up on this years ago, it was several times more than the current cost of printers. And consumers are stupid, so they will go for the immediate cheap thing and get locked in to buying proprietary cartridges rather than invest in saving money long term.
What we need is a Graphine OS for existing printers. A repo of firmware updates that anyone can install to jailbreak a handfull of widely sold printers to allow printing every drop of ink, and DIY refills. Let’s be real, we’re not a huge part of their market, so IMO the gains are to exist like wolves preying on the occasional sheep, rather than be wolves that try to evolve thumbs and force everyone to learn how to cook and go shopping in order to eat.
1000x this.
We’ve got all this figured out for 3D printers with all kinds of cool tools to make the job easier, and yet, take away a dimension and there’s crickets?
The hell?
Let’s make a 3D printable 2D printer.
Or a modular printer
Good that we did not buy a Brother printer.
they were the only option tho.
