29 ms·

Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

500 points by b112 4y ago

I recently bought a Brother colour laser printer, with the understanding that OEM toner was not chip-locked. Wanting to update the firmware, and being on Linux, I started to look at ways to do it manually. After finding a few guides to do so manually: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Printer-specific_problems#Updating_the_firmware https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Printer-specific_probl... https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2015/11/updating-hl3040cn-firmware.html https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2015/11/updating-hl3040cn... I decided to poll my printer. I then noticed an OSS/python project to just handle it via a package. However, I noticed this issue: https://github.com/sedrubal/brother_printer_fwupd/issues/9 https://github.com/sedrubal/brother_printer_fwupd/issues/9 Startled, I Googled... and the printer listed is an inkjet. For a second I was relieved, but then started to search for other issues, and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mfc_firmware_update_nongenuine_toner_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf... Not only is the above, post-sale firwmware update a change of what I understood to be Brother's historical policy, the method is beyond evil. Brother seems to be apparently accepting the ink, but then purposefully making the print quality poorer. I literally cannot think of something, product wise, more evil. It's one thing to say "We refuse to use 3rd party toner", and another to accept the toner, and then just purposefully print like garbage. I was a happy HP customer for years, and only switched to Brother (which, by all accounts, is a much smaller / less renowned company) for the sole reason to not be vendor locked. I will likely return this printer, but thought HN should know what Brother seems to be up to.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
Well that's just awful. I own 2 Brother printers because I thought their management wasn't garbage like HP. I don't know what I'll do when one breaks.
gjvc 4y ago
Buy a Kyocera
- reaperducer 4y ago
  If the consumer printers are anything like the office printers, no thanks. The one at my office has to be serviced in-person but a tech almost every week.
  - gjvc 4y ago
    i'm talking about a previous-generation one from ebay, been solid as a rock for me. sad to hear you have had such luck. Printers... YMMV.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
causi 4y ago
You may want to add "Tell HN" to your title.
- 0des 4y ago
  It doesnt matter
  - causi 4y ago
    It increases visibility and engagement.
leetrout 4y ago
I have nothing but bad things to say about Brother. I will never buy another one. Last purchase was a $350 multifunction color laser printer that stopped turning on. I was just over the one year warranty and no support from Brother and their authorized service centers want to put me on a commercial support plan. I bought it for my wife, a teacher, because the school copiers were always broken or unavailable. HP makes shitty printers but they will actually help you get something replaced in my experience.
- xattt 4y ago
  I have an HL2270DW monochrome laser that’s been a workhorse for the last decade for my family. It’s got network support and duplexing. Brother must have jumped the shark lately. It had no problems printing on random toner (or I have been lucky), and I have extended its useful lifespan by running CUPS for AirPrint support on a home server. It seemed like one of those legendary products at the time I bought it. I think companies will bring on star engineers from time-to-time to build brand goodwill, and then let the bean-counters loose that will tie up loose ends.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  Until they stop making the fusers for your model in 3 years... Ask me how I know.
  - leetrout 4y ago
    Kyocera was recommended below... I will either buy epson or kyocera I think. Do you have a recommendation?
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Ok... so if I need a printer, that won't fuck me with stuff like this, what should I buy now? Except HP of course, and now Brother
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  Printers in general suck, but... Canon? Haven't had any headaches since I switched to them from HP. Then again, since it has been a few years, it's possible that they too went downhill since.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Canon isn't as bad, but it's headed that way. Driver and firmware quality have declined in recent years. I'm a tech person, and it took about three hours to set up the wireless Canon I bought a couple of months ago. When the thing has an error, it displays a QR code that just links to a PDF of the printed installation manual that it came with. Not helpful. It also won't connect to eero routers because of a bug in the printer firmware, combined with eero removing the ability to have different SSIDs for 2 and 5Ghz networks.
- CrazedGeek 4y ago
  Not sure about the laser side, but for inkjets, the Epson EcoTank line is the best at not fucking you - it uses ink bottle refills, no cartridges in sight.
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    I had one, looks good at first, but a few months on, the inkjet is just stuck with ink
    - serf 4y ago
      I have an ecotank monochrome epson, it's been fine for a few years now. that said, they don't seem to like to sit. if I go for awhile without printing I need to do a cleaning more so than conventional inkjets, but i'm okay with that tradeoff, it's nice just refilling with ink. also the software/driver package on Windows sucks, but unless you're doing firmware upgrades then why bother installing it, anyway.
aurizon 4y ago
I wonder if this is an actual crime = vandalising your printer. It is not the inferiority of the ink = make prints bad consequentially, they are taking command and making it act against your best interest. Gotta be class action in there...
radiojasper 4y ago
Buy an EPSON. Apart from the fact they have separate ink cartridges for each colour, they also don't act like satan.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  If any onevof the colors runs out, does it still print in b/w? Or, even worse- there is a printer i lnow that won't scan to usb if there's a color missing.
- pxx 4y ago
  Except the nature of inkjet printing makes it just look inferior to the crispness of laser.
- auxym 4y ago
  I had an Epson printer in college, it screwed me over one night where I had to print a paper to turn in the next day by refusing to print some black text because the cyan cartridge was running low. I understand this is standard practice from all printer makers now, but it really turned me off the brand.
- gpvos 4y ago
  Don't. You need to have all colour ink cartridges even if you only print B&W, and if you don't print often, you will need to replace the cartridges after some time anyway. I don't know if that's because the ink dries out or if they have some artificial time limit, but I had to replace all cartridges every half year or so while I think I printed only a few dozen pages in that time, almost all black & white. I replaced it with a €140 Brother B&W laser printer/scanner a year or two ago and have been happy with it ever since. Sad to hear they turned evil too.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  > they also don't act like satan Give them time. Market forces will compel them.
- meragrin_ 4y ago
  They don't let you change the waste ink pads. Once that counter is up, either into the trash or to a service center. https://epson.com/Support/wa00369 https://epson.com/Support/wa00369
rob74 4y ago
Another data point: I have been using a Brother inkjet multifunctional printer with high-capacity ink cartridges for ~five years now, it has no problems with third party ink, and it has worked perfectly from day one. My home office is apparently quite challenging for an inkjet printer, because it's located directly under the roof, so temperatures can get quite high in the summer, which the Epson printer I had before couldn't handle - it constantly had white lines in the printouts. No problem with the Brother.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Did you read the post? > I have an MFC-3750 that’s been running perfectly with Non-OE ink for more than a year now. The W1.56 firmware update, however, disabled the automatic color registration feature.
jlturner 4y ago
Bummer, I’ve been a fan of Brother in the past. Owned two monochrome laser printers that have been great over 10 years of service with not a single paper jam.
- otherme123 4y ago
  That's also for me. I've advocated for Brother before here in HN, as they just seem to sell printers that works, and avoid toner shenanigans.
  - noir_lord 4y ago
    Same but based on this post and since I don’t buy printers anymore I simply can’t recommend anyone anymore. I’ve probably accounted for the sale of dozens of brother printers over the years.
  - lelag 4y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I was a big fan after many years happily using a monochrome HL-5250DN networked laser printer. It was just great: the printer was cheap, it printed well and fast, the cartridges were dirt cheap and lasted forever (1 cartridge was like 7000 pages). Now I have one of their color laser printer which is OK but it's slow, you can't print that much with it before having to change one or the other cartridge and the OEM ink is terribly expensive. If they now prevent from using third party ink like this, I'm officially out.
- anjc 4y ago
  I agree and recommend them to everyone. That said, their monochrome lasers also prevent non-OEM toners from working without an opaque sequence of key presses. Maybe this is normal for printers but it was non-obvious for me.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Huh? What's this sequence of key presses? I have a B&W MFC Brother device and my toner is at 40% so I might need the info in the next year or so.
carpenecopinum 4y ago
I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers". I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  > I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device For printing something like once a month, it is even harder to justify wasting space by putting a printer. Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs.
  - Kankuro 4y ago
    In France, some post offices have such self-service printers. I chose to go to the a self-service printer shop when I need it every few months. It minimizes resources, it limits feeding this toxic industry and it saves space on my desk.
  - grishka 4y ago
    We had a machine exactly like that at my university.
  - zeusk 4y ago
    > Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs. Every Fedex Print/Office center has this service. Most city libraries do as well.
kmbfjr 4y ago
That is unfortunate, I have had good luck with the 2 I have owned over the last fifteen years. They had a toner window that I’d have to cover with tape to avoid toner low messages, but that is the extent of their games.
theplumber 4y ago
Perhaps it's time to ban printers and printing. Let's make it all digital!
ztrlp 4y ago
Soon they'll have a hidden 5G Internet connection that sends all printed material to the manufacturer, who will then sell the data to advertisers and the state. Are there still any new printers (postscript, laser) that are reasonable? Black and white printing is sufficient.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  There's an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/ Also, actual example of a smart TV connecting to an unprotected WiFI: https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-connect-your-samsung-smart-tv-to-wifi-it-will-secretly-connect-to-your-neighbours-passwordless-wifi/7926 https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    I wish ours connected to any wifi? I have a strong feeling this is somehow related to our local office network, but... any wifi printers we have never 'wake on lan'. If I reboot the printer, it's connected. 30-60 minutes later, it will not respond to any network commands. It's on, and you can go insert USB stick to print, or make a copy on it, and it says it has an IP address, but it's essentially 'dead'. Although it has 'wake on LAN' set (or whatever the setting is). Brother, but same issue with HP before that (and... someone else reports similar with their printer in their office too). But we have a dozen people plus more devices on the wifi every day without incident. Just something about the printers we've had over the last few years. Have changed wifi routers at least once during this period as well to no avail.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Wake on LAN means that you can wake the device from sleep mode by sending it a special WoL packet; I'm not quite following how that's related to your problem?
      - mgkimsal 4y ago
GiorgioG 4y ago
I have an epson eco-tank printer. I buy 3rd party bottles of ink once every 2-3 years. The upfront cost of the printer (multifunction model ET-4550) was high in 2015 ($500) but I've spent maybe $60-70 in ink to print (as of this morning) 19,536 pages (13,954 in color, 5,582 in B/W). I can't see a good reason to keep buying printers that are locked into proprietary cartridges or toners.
- rustyf 4y ago
  Me too. Credit to Epson for taking this track. I wouldn't consider a cartridge printer again.
  - dgl 4y ago
    Sadly only applies to these high end ones; I got a cheap Epson one and found out after moving it to another country, that the cartridges are indeed vendor+region locked.
    - GiorgioG 4y ago
      EcoTank printers don't use cartridges. You fill the ink tanks with ink bottles. They've come down in price, you can buy an EcoTank printer for ~$229. A couple of other companies have followed Epson in offering these kinds of printers. Sadly Brothers' version requires a proprietary cartridge tank.
    - hyperdimension 4y ago
      Region locked ink?! That's a special kind of stupid.
      - NoSorryCannot 4y ago
        They do it for the same reason as anything else: to charge different prices in different parts of the world and still stymie the gray market.
        4y ago
joshuajill 4y ago
Is there a printer that isn't a proprietary ink dispensing jail? I'm with current knowledge and tech it should be possible to print your own printer?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Epson EcoTank, pretty hard to lock out other vendors when your supply is delivered as a liquid.
  - julienfr112 4y ago
    you can have some sensors that test whatever physical property of the liquid (spectrum, electrical and thermal conductivity, viscosity,...) and turn off if it's not in the range of the genuine product.
    - jbotz 4y ago
      And that would be entirely acceptable, perhaps even desirable, since it would be only be verifying the quality of the Ink rather than locking out competition even when the competition has a product of sufficient (or even superior) quality.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Not impossible, but pretty hard. Not so hard to defeat such sensors by making a matching product (which should be the goal anyway for printer ink). It would then be an arms race with third party vendors and your own internal ink and sensors to make a more consistent product yourself with better and better sensors.
    - bzzzt 4y ago
      It's possible to design print heads that are warped over time by ink that's not exactly like the official ink. At least, that's what I suspect killed my last (literally) Canon inkjet. There are a lot of rumours online about that practice.
  - baxuz 4y ago
hoistbypetard 4y ago
Ugh. This is bad news. I've used Brother B&W lasers at home for the past 20 years, and they've been great. (I'm 5 years into my second one, because when the rollers wore out on my first one, 15 years in, I decided I'd rather have the iOS printing features they offered on their newer models instead of sourcing new rollers and taking it apart to change them.) Between their BrScript and their no-BS networking, they were the last I know of to work with no fuss with all the machines I own. On everything other than the iDevices, it's nothing more than a PPD install. I hope this isn't accurate.
throwaway787544 4y ago
Time for an open hardware printer manufacturer? Or more lobbying for right-to-third-party-ink protection (including not making the quality worse) ?
- kuon 4y ago
  It is surprinsigly hard to move paper the way a printer does it. The easiest way for DIY would be to use a continuous roll of paper and a very thin pen on a 3d printer like stepper motor, like older dot matrix printers.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    If it fits the quality you need, I think a plotter is actually the best option; the FOSS ones seem to just take arbitrary pens for ink and there's a fair few projects implementing open source plotters that seem to get decent results.
- franga2000 4y ago
  Printer hardware is very specific, so you don't have generic versions of everything, defacto standards and official/unofficial documentation like you do in other DIY-able fields like 3D printers and CNC. The best you can do is buy replacements or salvaged parts for existing {HP,Canon,Epson} printers and spend months reverse engineering them. This will not only cost you more than buying a very nice new printer, but will suffer from the same availability issues every project depending on parts that aren't regularly for sale.
anticristi 4y ago
My Canon MFC742cdw has been complaining about me using the original toner far beyond its "useful lifetime". I lost count, but it must have been at least 200 pages ago and it's still printing just fine. Kind of sad that we need to learn to put up with this kind of dark patterns.
kmfrk 4y ago
I've got a Brother laser printer that's probably old enough to vote now. It's impressive that it's lasted this long, but the whole business model of printing is so rotten I still wonder how much I want it around when the toners have run completely dry. On top of the installation being a mess. I've seen that companies like Brother make dedicated shipping label printers, and I guess that's what I realistically would use my printer for the most. Brother's clearly doing horrible stuff, but printers also seem like a terrible business model when you ship products that live forever without maintenance beyond refilling the paper tray and toner. If only the e-ink display technology weren't encumbered by so many patents, maybe that's what we'd be reading most things on now instead.
- julianlam 4y ago
  Same for me. I think I was introduced to Brother printers in 2006, and bought my first then. That HL-2140 is still kicking, although it doesn't do much nowadays (a digital office, as it turns out, needs paper hard copies quite infrequently!) A MFC I bought a couple years later is still going strong.
infogulch 4y ago
Aw and I thought brother was one of the good ones. The FTC seems to have got off their ass recently, so maybe it'd be worth it to file consumer protection complaints about shitty printer company behavior. I'm sure HN alone could fill their mailbox to bursting.
arcade79 4y ago
This is why I've never voluntarily owned a printer. Well, never actually owned one at all. My father got a bit frustrated that I didn't have a home printer and gifted one to my wife. It was used a couple of times. If I have something I need to print, I print it at work or at the library. Happens less than once a year. I don't need my own printer.
- oldandboring 4y ago
  How on earth is this relevant to the post?
- julianlam 4y ago
  I agree mostly — most days the most action my printer gets is printing out amazon return labels. However we have an MFC and we scan items fairly often.
Beltiras 4y ago
Last time I had to print something it was so I could turn it in as an attachment to an application with a government agency. I flatly refuse to work with dead trees wherever possible.
floor_ 4y ago
I've been fighting brother printers for decades at this point. From taping over the clear hole plug to rewinding the spring cog. I feel like the only thing they can defeat me is probably NFC but I'm not sure if that would be worth it cost wise for them.
gandalfian 4y ago
Yeah I'm struggling. Last 15 years I bought £50 multifunction brother or canon printers with separate ink cartridges and fake ink for a £1 a cartridge. Wore the heads out in about five years, repeat. Now they seem to have disappeared, all the cheap canons have combined colour ink cartridges not separate. A colour laser multifunction is expensive and may have pricey toner too. People here seem to like the Epson Ecotanks but the reviews say they struggle on anything but thin paper. The canons megatank look a bit better but still £200 for a fairly basically built printer. You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future. Which leaves you paying £250 for something like a G650 megatank Canon. I partly blame the home printer market shrinking due to everyone going paperless but suddenly being faced with paying more for a printer than I did for my desktop PC is irritating. (I did suggest a basic laser but everyone said nooo we need colour and copying).
- PascLeRasc 4y ago
  Why do you think OS X will remove USB printer support in the future? I can't find any articles about that or anything hinting at that on the CUPS release notes.
  - gandalfian 4y ago
    I may be wrong, and its poorly phrased, but when a new version of OSX has required updated printer drivers I've had the impression that manufacturers have been less inclined to provide updated drivers. Generally the answer given is use airprint. But if you saved 30 bucks buying the non wifi printer that doesn't do you much good... So if I buy the non wifi model will it still be usable in a few OSX versions/years? I think it may be a lottery but I may be wrong. Airprint looks like a more generic standard that won't require you do get updated software from the manufacturer.
- julianlam 4y ago
  > You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the complexity of printers (actually, almost certainly I am), but isn't OSX support on printers just "let the manufacturer handle it"? I'd imagine the least amount of effort they could do is support postscript via USB and leave it at that...
hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
Disappointing. I am on my second Brother HL series laser printer. They've been great for me. Fast cheap printing and readily available 3rd party toner and drums. The first one I got it in 2010 and I purchased a 2nd in 2018 when the first stopped working. I would have kept using the original if it were possible to repair it. I would have also paid more than the $80 sticker price
booleandilemma 4y ago
Why hasn’t the printer industry not been disrupted by a company that isn’t hell-bent on fucking over their customers?
- choward 4y ago
  Because if a company like that starts to emerge they'll be bought out by a larger company. At which point everyone around here will congratulate them on their "exit".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - julianlam 4y ago
    I often feel like this is a wonderful business plan, then! Find an industry monopolized, disrupt it just enough to catch the attention of the incumbent, and exit. I often think I should start an infant formula company and sell to Abbott.
- toast0 4y ago
  Who's going to look at a distorted market that's also shrinking and try to compete by offering printers at realistic costs and no lock in. Home users aren't going to buy that when they could get an inkjet for $50 (damn the costs later), and office users aren't going to buy it unless there's a service network and the lineup scales up to the 4 foot high office monstrosity multi function machines with collating and all that jazz. If they have printers at all.
Aeolun 4y ago
Hmm, I have a new Brother color laser printer standing here with two batches of non-brother (I refuse to say non-genuine) toner. Kind of wonder how that will go when my printer included toner runs out…
mrjin 4y ago
We need laws to prevent such malicious practices. Currently most if not all printer vendors sell printers at loss hoping to claw it back by sell consumables at extremely high prices. Given such background, vendors have more than enough motivation to undermine 3rd party consumables if not totally lock them out.
- upofadown 4y ago
  Pretty sure that most countries have laws to prevent such practices...
ohuhu 4y ago
https://www.mimeo.com/blog/destroying-office-printer/ https://www.mimeo.com/blog/destroying-office-printer/
jl6 4y ago
I've got a HL series color laser that I'm otherwise happy with. The firmware version is reported as 1.34. I guess I just have to take care to never upgrade that, and make a mental note never to buy another Brother product again?
kumivasara 4y ago
Thanks for heads up I was considering of upgrading to a Brother model that scans to PDF. Now I won’t.
_abox 4y ago
At the same time many other brands are improving. I've seen ink tank based printers from HP and Epson lately, probably more brands. It's a shame Brother is going this way though because they were so great for a long time
egberts1 4y ago
Aw man, my trustworthy Brothers HL-5470DW Brothers laser jet is taking a licking and still printing after 10 years. Here is to another 10 years … before I buy another used laser jet that hasn’t been stupidly John Deere’d.
thedougd 4y ago
My pretty old DCP-L2540DW has a new firmware update: 06/16/2022 Main: V / Sub: 1.06 Improvement to help with the performance of the machine. I think I'll pass.
- DrudgeCorporate 4y ago
  Wouldn't they have had to put the chip in the printers years ago prepping for this? A firmware update isn't going to necessarily enable this 'feature'.
  - HelloNurse 4y ago
    The printer is probably programmable enough to implement any behaviour with a handful of code in the firmware; the maker doesn't need a specific "chip in the printers", just the capability to read data from ink cartridges (some wires and ports) and the trivial capability to not print or degrade quality.
  - thedougd 4y ago
    I thought about that after posting. I once had a week where I fiddled with the printer constantly after changing the toner, trying to get it to stop reporting it as empty. So who knows, maybe there's something to it. However, looking at the toner cartridge, I don't really see how they could do this. It's also possible they have a unified firmware and this 'feature' doesn't impact my model.
- jacknews 4y ago
  lol, yes, perhaps they mean 'revenue performance'.
pnemonic 4y ago
It's like if Catbert moved to Evil Printing Solutions from Evil Human Resources.
citiguy 4y ago
Would you be interested in getting a laser printer? I have a Brother and it works very well. It doesn't come with a huge toner cartridge but I'm still on the starter and it's been more than 5 years. Honestly I don't print super often, but it's a nice to have thing. The build quality is also good. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but once done it "just works".
- cpcallen 4y ago
  If you follow the links in the original post you will see that OP is talking about a Brother colour laser printer.
userbinator 4y ago
Wanting to update the firmware If you weren't ever wary of updates, this should be a strong lesson. The updates are not for your benefit anymore; the companies just want to have you on a leash where they hold the other end. "Don't fix it if it ain't broke." and then just purposefully print like garbage In other words, they're maliciously spreading FUD that 3rd-party consumables will result in lower print quality, and then making that a self-fulfilling prophecy. That should be illegal if it isn't already.
birktj 4y ago
I would recommend people who are looking for not only printers, but most kinds of equipment (except for cases where new stuff is unambiguously better than old stuff, but this is rare) to buy used professional/industrial hardware instead of new consumer equipment. And if this is difficult try to look for old consumer hardware still in good shape. These are often of much better quality and also it is much less wasteful to something used than new. Professional equipment is usually in another league than consumer stuff when it comes to quality and reliability and also usually has very low resale value so you can get it for quite cheap. Personally I just picked up an old Sharp color laser printer for about 90$. This is a great machine that prints 2 sided A3 (very hard to find for laser printers) and with toners that should last about 10000 pages which is way better than anything you can buy as a consumer. The only backside is that it is quite big and heavy. Old consumer equipment that is in good shape is often a good deal with the main reasoning being that something that has lasted for a long time has a higher probability of continuing to last a long time compared to something new where it is hard to say how long it will last.
jasonjayr 4y ago
This is disappointing. I had been recommending Brother printers exactly because they did not pull shenanigans like this, their windows drivers were pretty light weight, and their Linux support is very good. Is anyone working on a OSS printer, like 3D printers? Buy an existing printer and then rip out + re-wire it's controller?
yrro 4y ago
Oh no
intsunny 4y ago
Wow, if this comment is to be believed, the quality of Brother printers has seriously gone downhill: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mfc_firmware_update_nongenuine_toner_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf... Incredible.
akagusu 4y ago
Almost 40 years ago RMS, the guy people love to hate, created the Free/Libre software movement and a proprietary printer firmware was one of his motivations. For 40 years this guy has been talking about the perils of proprietary software and people gave a shit to him. Today people not only strongly defend proprietary software, but they think he is a moron, and even free/libre software activists think proprietary firmwares are okay as long their hardware works as expected. Of course this is okay until their hardware stops to work as intended and you are locked out because the proprietary firmware, which usually is what happens.
- smsm42 4y ago
  I think current proper title for RMS - at least among Properly Thinking People - is "misogynist, ableist, and transphobic" [1]. I haven't heard many people calling him a "moron" though. Extreme idealist with some weird ideas - maybe, but a "moron" - I don't think so, especially as his predictions keep coming true. I'm not sure whether his recipes are the solution, but at least it can be obvious he can see the problem. [1] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/
myself248 4y ago
Oh, this is bad. Brother has always, like for DECADES, been the non-shitty option. Had ipv6 before anyone else. Good Linux support, even for the scanners on their MFCs. Agnostic about third-party toner. This new firmware demolishes twenty years of goodwill. I was just looking at a new printer, and likely to replace my old Brother B&W MFC and Samsung color laser, with a new Brother color laser MFC, but it looks like I'll see how long I can string the old ones along.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > I was just looking at a new printer There's a discussion upthread about some epson models being mostly alright (with caveats; read the whole thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860555
Lio 4y ago
This is very disappointing to hear. Brother were the one bright spot in the printer industry and I'm so much happier since I switched my business to using a Brother colour laser. They've probably recruited one of the bright spark MBA execs that "revolutionised"[1] the other manufactures with this kind of rent seeking crap. You know that deal, trade a firm's reputation for quality for a short term boost in profits, bank the bonus and move to another job before the chickens come home to roost. :( 1. By revolutionised I of course mean ruined.
mdavis6890 4y ago
An alternative viewpoint is that this business model is good for consumers, or a least differently neutral. If printer companies try to make their money on the printer sale, then it's very difficult for folks who only need to print a little now and again, and they might not be able to afford a very good printer. By moving to a consumption-based revenue model, now they can let everyone have a super-cheap printer (they are MUCH cheaper than decades ago, despite inflation), and then the people who use the printer more (get more value from it) pay more, and those who don't pay less. This seems reasonable, even though I also don't like hardware that bricks itself if I don't use as directed.
- delecti 4y ago
  It doesn't really work out that way though. People who don't need to print very often end up churning through absolutely garbage printers that are more trouble than they're worth and don't last very long before the ink dries up and leaves it a pile of junk. People who print a ton can instead invest a tiny bit more in a printer with notably cheaper per-print costs. It's really better viewed as almost an instance of the Sam Vimes "Boots" theory.
2143 4y ago
I predict the next device to go all bonkers with subscriptions and pay-per-use etc is cars. There would be a day when you have to spend $$$ to use air conditioning even though the entire hardware for that is in there.
pdimitar 4y ago
Gods I hope this is just a fluke but reading OP and some comments it seems that it is not. :( In any case, first thing I always do when I install a printer is to give it one exact static local IP because I made a firewall rule that blocks all outgoing WAN traffic from that IP. I lost faith in all my periphery to not sing behind my back and took things in my own hands. My Brother MFC works amazingly well and I will not think as a programmer in this case; I'll be a normal human who says "no need to update it if it works" and leave it at that. So far zero complains and I am happy with my device. And with these news I am even happier that I am paranoid and make sure my device doesn't get a firmware update.
billpg 4y ago
I'm old enough to remember buying a mouse and having to install the driver that came with the mouse on a floppy disk. Once the mouse market agreed to a single interface standard (and again when USB mice appeared) the world got simpler. Any computer you could buy would just work with whatever mouse you happened to plug into it. You only needed a custom driver if your mouse had lots of extra buttons that no-one really needed. I'm a little surprised that the same thing didn't happen to printers. I could imagine around 2005, Microsoft including a generic printer driver with Windows XP. This way, you could plug in any printer and it would just work, as long as the printer implemented that generic printing protocol, even if it were alongside their own printer interface. Plug in printer. Windows detects device with generic printer interface. User prints document. Document comes out. User happy. Oh sure, the printer would come with a CD that includes software that enables the "special features" of the printer. Digital cameras did this too. (Rule #1 of buying a digital camera: Throw away the CD that comes in the box. Break the CD just in case you're tempted that something on CD might fix some trivial issue you're having.) At the same time, I'm not surprised that never happened. Those "special features", like shouting at you for buying the wrong ink, are just way too important to not have installed on people's computers.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  PCL and PostScript are standards. If you have a printer that supports it, some supported both, a generic driver is all you need, except for special features. Entry-level printers didn't support these standards as it required what at the time was significant computing power on the printer side.
jerome-jh 4y ago
I thought that was well known. In EU printers cannot be sold "inked locked". They do lock themselves as soon as they have an opportunity to update their firmware. My Brother never had Internet access. I configured it with the Internet gateway unplugged and assigned it a static address to which I forbid Internet access. It is now running on compatible color cartridges. For black I stay on OEM ink. It is funny that my venerable HP I had previously stopped working soon after I started using compatible ink. Since it was several years old, I was wanted to spare on ink. A gear broke soon after. Repaired the gear and something else broke. I did not do the second repair. Of course that could be a simple coïncidence, I'll never know. BTW I would not recommend Brother either. It is very picky about paper. Have to use good quality 90g or more exclusively.
- thunkshift1 4y ago
  Can you share steps on how you configured it
- chopin 4y ago
  My HP printer is configured the same way. If only to prevent it from phoning home.
midislack 4y ago
You have to get an antique laser like an Apple IInt. New stuff is garbage.
pvaldes 4y ago
Remember that for some printers there are two parts, you need to change the ink and after some changes also the "cylinder". In any case I had seen a similar poor quality results in the brand. Can't recommend it.
jgerrish 4y ago
Yes, we all rage about this. K-cups, razors. Wait for the next decade: e-vehicle chargers, rocket booster packs (must be approved mixtures!). It never ends, not for this generation, or the next. So, just picking an open publishing article: Playing Super Mario 64 increases hippocampal grey matter in older adults https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187779 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Unfortunately, I don't have the strength, and I just want a different way.

500 points by b112 4y ago

ProjectArcturis 4y ago

Well that's just awful. I own 2 Brother printers because I thought their management wasn't garbage like HP. I don't know what I'll do when one breaks.

gjvc 4y ago

Buy a Kyocera

reaperducer 4y ago
If the consumer printers are anything like the office printers, no thanks. The one at my office has to be serviced in-person but a tech almost every week.
- gjvc 4y ago
  i'm talking about a previous-generation one from ebay, been solid as a rock for me. sad to hear you have had such luck. Printers... YMMV.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

causi 4y ago

You may want to add "Tell HN" to your title.

0des 4y ago
It doesnt matter
- causi 4y ago
  It increases visibility and engagement.

leetrout 4y ago

I have nothing but bad things to say about Brother. I will never buy another one. Last purchase was a $350 multifunction color laser printer that stopped turning on. I was just over the one year warranty and no support from Brother and their authorized service centers want to put me on a commercial support plan. I bought it for my wife, a teacher, because the school copiers were always broken or unavailable. HP makes shitty printers but they will actually help you get something replaced in my experience.

xattt 4y ago
I have an HL2270DW monochrome laser that’s been a workhorse for the last decade for my family. It’s got network support and duplexing. Brother must have jumped the shark lately. It had no problems printing on random toner (or I have been lucky), and I have extended its useful lifespan by running CUPS for AirPrint support on a home server. It seemed like one of those legendary products at the time I bought it. I think companies will bring on star engineers from time-to-time to build brand goodwill, and then let the bean-counters loose that will tie up loose ends.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
Until they stop making the fusers for your model in 3 years... Ask me how I know.
- leetrout 4y ago
  Kyocera was recommended below... I will either buy epson or kyocera I think. Do you have a recommendation?

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Ok... so if I need a printer, that won't fuck me with stuff like this, what should I buy now? Except HP of course, and now Brother

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
Printers in general suck, but... Canon? Haven't had any headaches since I switched to them from HP. Then again, since it has been a few years, it's possible that they too went downhill since.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Canon isn't as bad, but it's headed that way. Driver and firmware quality have declined in recent years. I'm a tech person, and it took about three hours to set up the wireless Canon I bought a couple of months ago. When the thing has an error, it displays a QR code that just links to a PDF of the printed installation manual that it came with. Not helpful. It also won't connect to eero routers because of a bug in the printer firmware, combined with eero removing the ability to have different SSIDs for 2 and 5Ghz networks.
CrazedGeek 4y ago
Not sure about the laser side, but for inkjets, the Epson EcoTank line is the best at not fucking you - it uses ink bottle refills, no cartridges in sight.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  I had one, looks good at first, but a few months on, the inkjet is just stuck with ink
  - serf 4y ago
    I have an ecotank monochrome epson, it's been fine for a few years now. that said, they don't seem to like to sit. if I go for awhile without printing I need to do a cleaning more so than conventional inkjets, but i'm okay with that tradeoff, it's nice just refilling with ink. also the software/driver package on Windows sucks, but unless you're doing firmware upgrades then why bother installing it, anyway.

aurizon 4y ago

I wonder if this is an actual crime = vandalising your printer. It is not the inferiority of the ink = make prints bad consequentially, they are taking command and making it act against your best interest. Gotta be class action in there...

radiojasper 4y ago

Buy an EPSON. Apart from the fact they have separate ink cartridges for each colour, they also don't act like satan.

InCityDreams 4y ago
If any onevof the colors runs out, does it still print in b/w? Or, even worse- there is a printer i lnow that won't scan to usb if there's a color missing.
pxx 4y ago
Except the nature of inkjet printing makes it just look inferior to the crispness of laser.
auxym 4y ago
I had an Epson printer in college, it screwed me over one night where I had to print a paper to turn in the next day by refusing to print some black text because the cyan cartridge was running low. I understand this is standard practice from all printer makers now, but it really turned me off the brand.
gpvos 4y ago
Don't. You need to have all colour ink cartridges even if you only print B&W, and if you don't print often, you will need to replace the cartridges after some time anyway. I don't know if that's because the ink dries out or if they have some artificial time limit, but I had to replace all cartridges every half year or so while I think I printed only a few dozen pages in that time, almost all black & white. I replaced it with a €140 Brother B&W laser printer/scanner a year or two ago and have been happy with it ever since. Sad to hear they turned evil too.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> they also don't act like satan Give them time. Market forces will compel them.
meragrin_ 4y ago
They don't let you change the waste ink pads. Once that counter is up, either into the trash or to a service center. https://epson.com/Support/wa00369 https://epson.com/Support/wa00369

rob74 4y ago

Another data point: I have been using a Brother inkjet multifunctional printer with high-capacity ink cartridges for ~five years now, it has no problems with third party ink, and it has worked perfectly from day one. My home office is apparently quite challenging for an inkjet printer, because it's located directly under the roof, so temperatures can get quite high in the summer, which the Epson printer I had before couldn't handle - it constantly had white lines in the printouts. No problem with the Brother.

BoorishBears 4y ago
Did you read the post? > I have an MFC-3750 that’s been running perfectly with Non-OE ink for more than a year now. The W1.56 firmware update, however, disabled the automatic color registration feature.

jlturner 4y ago

Bummer, I’ve been a fan of Brother in the past. Owned two monochrome laser printers that have been great over 10 years of service with not a single paper jam.

otherme123 4y ago
That's also for me. I've advocated for Brother before here in HN, as they just seem to sell printers that works, and avoid toner shenanigans.
- noir_lord 4y ago
  Same but based on this post and since I don’t buy printers anymore I simply can’t recommend anyone anymore. I’ve probably accounted for the sale of dozens of brother printers over the years.
- lelag 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I was a big fan after many years happily using a monochrome HL-5250DN networked laser printer. It was just great: the printer was cheap, it printed well and fast, the cartridges were dirt cheap and lasted forever (1 cartridge was like 7000 pages). Now I have one of their color laser printer which is OK but it's slow, you can't print that much with it before having to change one or the other cartridge and the OEM ink is terribly expensive. If they now prevent from using third party ink like this, I'm officially out.
anjc 4y ago
I agree and recommend them to everyone. That said, their monochrome lasers also prevent non-OEM toners from working without an opaque sequence of key presses. Maybe this is normal for printers but it was non-obvious for me.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Huh? What's this sequence of key presses? I have a B&W MFC Brother device and my toner is at 40% so I might need the info in the next year or so.

carpenecopinum 4y ago

I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers". I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.

qwerty456127 4y ago
> I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device For printing something like once a month, it is even harder to justify wasting space by putting a printer. Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs.
- Kankuro 4y ago
  In France, some post offices have such self-service printers. I chose to go to the a self-service printer shop when I need it every few months. It minimizes resources, it limits feeding this toxic industry and it saves space on my desk.
- grishka 4y ago
  We had a machine exactly like that at my university.
- zeusk 4y ago
  > Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs. Every Fedex Print/Office center has this service. Most city libraries do as well.

kmbfjr 4y ago

That is unfortunate, I have had good luck with the 2 I have owned over the last fifteen years. They had a toner window that I’d have to cover with tape to avoid toner low messages, but that is the extent of their games.

theplumber 4y ago

Perhaps it's time to ban printers and printing. Let's make it all digital!

ztrlp 4y ago

Soon they'll have a hidden 5G Internet connection that sends all printed material to the manufacturer, who will then sell the data to advertisers and the state. Are there still any new printers (postscript, laser) that are reasonable? Black and white printing is sufficient.

lelandfe 4y ago
There's an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/ Also, actual example of a smart TV connecting to an unprotected WiFI: https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-connect-your-samsung-smart-tv-to-wifi-it-will-secretly-connect-to-your-neighbours-passwordless-wifi/7926 https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  I wish ours connected to any wifi? I have a strong feeling this is somehow related to our local office network, but... any wifi printers we have never 'wake on lan'. If I reboot the printer, it's connected. 30-60 minutes later, it will not respond to any network commands. It's on, and you can go insert USB stick to print, or make a copy on it, and it says it has an IP address, but it's essentially 'dead'. Although it has 'wake on LAN' set (or whatever the setting is). Brother, but same issue with HP before that (and... someone else reports similar with their printer in their office too). But we have a dozen people plus more devices on the wifi every day without incident. Just something about the printers we've had over the last few years. Have changed wifi routers at least once during this period as well to no avail.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Wake on LAN means that you can wake the device from sleep mode by sending it a special WoL packet; I'm not quite following how that's related to your problem?
    - mgkimsal 4y ago

GiorgioG 4y ago

I have an epson eco-tank printer. I buy 3rd party bottles of ink once every 2-3 years. The upfront cost of the printer (multifunction model ET-4550) was high in 2015 ($500) but I've spent maybe $60-70 in ink to print (as of this morning) 19,536 pages (13,954 in color, 5,582 in B/W). I can't see a good reason to keep buying printers that are locked into proprietary cartridges or toners.

rustyf 4y ago
Me too. Credit to Epson for taking this track. I wouldn't consider a cartridge printer again.
- dgl 4y ago
  Sadly only applies to these high end ones; I got a cheap Epson one and found out after moving it to another country, that the cartridges are indeed vendor+region locked.
  - GiorgioG 4y ago
    EcoTank printers don't use cartridges. You fill the ink tanks with ink bottles. They've come down in price, you can buy an EcoTank printer for ~$229. A couple of other companies have followed Epson in offering these kinds of printers. Sadly Brothers' version requires a proprietary cartridge tank.
  - hyperdimension 4y ago
    Region locked ink?! That's a special kind of stupid.
    - NoSorryCannot 4y ago
      They do it for the same reason as anything else: to charge different prices in different parts of the world and still stymie the gray market.
      - 4y ago

joshuajill 4y ago

Is there a printer that isn't a proprietary ink dispensing jail? I'm with current knowledge and tech it should be possible to print your own printer?

colechristensen 4y ago
Epson EcoTank, pretty hard to lock out other vendors when your supply is delivered as a liquid.
- julienfr112 4y ago
  you can have some sensors that test whatever physical property of the liquid (spectrum, electrical and thermal conductivity, viscosity,...) and turn off if it's not in the range of the genuine product.
  - jbotz 4y ago
    And that would be entirely acceptable, perhaps even desirable, since it would be only be verifying the quality of the Ink rather than locking out competition even when the competition has a product of sufficient (or even superior) quality.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Not impossible, but pretty hard. Not so hard to defeat such sensors by making a matching product (which should be the goal anyway for printer ink). It would then be an arms race with third party vendors and your own internal ink and sensors to make a more consistent product yourself with better and better sensors.
  - bzzzt 4y ago
    It's possible to design print heads that are warped over time by ink that's not exactly like the official ink. At least, that's what I suspect killed my last (literally) Canon inkjet. There are a lot of rumours online about that practice.
- baxuz 4y ago

hoistbypetard 4y ago

Ugh. This is bad news. I've used Brother B&W lasers at home for the past 20 years, and they've been great. (I'm 5 years into my second one, because when the rollers wore out on my first one, 15 years in, I decided I'd rather have the iOS printing features they offered on their newer models instead of sourcing new rollers and taking it apart to change them.) Between their BrScript and their no-BS networking, they were the last I know of to work with no fuss with all the machines I own. On everything other than the iDevices, it's nothing more than a PPD install. I hope this isn't accurate.

throwaway787544 4y ago

Time for an open hardware printer manufacturer? Or more lobbying for right-to-third-party-ink protection (including not making the quality worse) ?

kuon 4y ago
It is surprinsigly hard to move paper the way a printer does it. The easiest way for DIY would be to use a continuous roll of paper and a very thin pen on a 3d printer like stepper motor, like older dot matrix printers.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  If it fits the quality you need, I think a plotter is actually the best option; the FOSS ones seem to just take arbitrary pens for ink and there's a fair few projects implementing open source plotters that seem to get decent results.
franga2000 4y ago
Printer hardware is very specific, so you don't have generic versions of everything, defacto standards and official/unofficial documentation like you do in other DIY-able fields like 3D printers and CNC. The best you can do is buy replacements or salvaged parts for existing {HP,Canon,Epson} printers and spend months reverse engineering them. This will not only cost you more than buying a very nice new printer, but will suffer from the same availability issues every project depending on parts that aren't regularly for sale.

anticristi 4y ago

My Canon MFC742cdw has been complaining about me using the original toner far beyond its "useful lifetime". I lost count, but it must have been at least 200 pages ago and it's still printing just fine. Kind of sad that we need to learn to put up with this kind of dark patterns.

kmfrk 4y ago

I've got a Brother laser printer that's probably old enough to vote now. It's impressive that it's lasted this long, but the whole business model of printing is so rotten I still wonder how much I want it around when the toners have run completely dry. On top of the installation being a mess. I've seen that companies like Brother make dedicated shipping label printers, and I guess that's what I realistically would use my printer for the most. Brother's clearly doing horrible stuff, but printers also seem like a terrible business model when you ship products that live forever without maintenance beyond refilling the paper tray and toner. If only the e-ink display technology weren't encumbered by so many patents, maybe that's what we'd be reading most things on now instead.

julianlam 4y ago
Same for me. I think I was introduced to Brother printers in 2006, and bought my first then. That HL-2140 is still kicking, although it doesn't do much nowadays (a digital office, as it turns out, needs paper hard copies quite infrequently!) A MFC I bought a couple years later is still going strong.

infogulch 4y ago

Aw and I thought brother was one of the good ones. The FTC seems to have got off their ass recently, so maybe it'd be worth it to file consumer protection complaints about shitty printer company behavior. I'm sure HN alone could fill their mailbox to bursting.

arcade79 4y ago

This is why I've never voluntarily owned a printer. Well, never actually owned one at all. My father got a bit frustrated that I didn't have a home printer and gifted one to my wife. It was used a couple of times. If I have something I need to print, I print it at work or at the library. Happens less than once a year. I don't need my own printer.

oldandboring 4y ago
How on earth is this relevant to the post?
julianlam 4y ago
I agree mostly — most days the most action my printer gets is printing out amazon return labels. However we have an MFC and we scan items fairly often.

Beltiras 4y ago

Last time I had to print something it was so I could turn it in as an attachment to an application with a government agency. I flatly refuse to work with dead trees wherever possible.

floor_ 4y ago

I've been fighting brother printers for decades at this point. From taping over the clear hole plug to rewinding the spring cog. I feel like the only thing they can defeat me is probably NFC but I'm not sure if that would be worth it cost wise for them.

gandalfian 4y ago

Yeah I'm struggling. Last 15 years I bought £50 multifunction brother or canon printers with separate ink cartridges and fake ink for a £1 a cartridge. Wore the heads out in about five years, repeat. Now they seem to have disappeared, all the cheap canons have combined colour ink cartridges not separate. A colour laser multifunction is expensive and may have pricey toner too. People here seem to like the Epson Ecotanks but the reviews say they struggle on anything but thin paper. The canons megatank look a bit better but still £200 for a fairly basically built printer. You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future. Which leaves you paying £250 for something like a G650 megatank Canon. I partly blame the home printer market shrinking due to everyone going paperless but suddenly being faced with paying more for a printer than I did for my desktop PC is irritating. (I did suggest a basic laser but everyone said nooo we need colour and copying).

PascLeRasc 4y ago
Why do you think OS X will remove USB printer support in the future? I can't find any articles about that or anything hinting at that on the CUPS release notes.
- gandalfian 4y ago
  I may be wrong, and its poorly phrased, but when a new version of OSX has required updated printer drivers I've had the impression that manufacturers have been less inclined to provide updated drivers. Generally the answer given is use airprint. But if you saved 30 bucks buying the non wifi printer that doesn't do you much good... So if I buy the non wifi model will it still be usable in a few OSX versions/years? I think it may be a lottery but I may be wrong. Airprint looks like a more generic standard that won't require you do get updated software from the manufacturer.
julianlam 4y ago
> You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the complexity of printers (actually, almost certainly I am), but isn't OSX support on printers just "let the manufacturer handle it"? I'd imagine the least amount of effort they could do is support postscript via USB and leave it at that...

hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago

Disappointing. I am on my second Brother HL series laser printer. They've been great for me. Fast cheap printing and readily available 3rd party toner and drums. The first one I got it in 2010 and I purchased a 2nd in 2018 when the first stopped working. I would have kept using the original if it were possible to repair it. I would have also paid more than the $80 sticker price

booleandilemma 4y ago

Why hasn’t the printer industry not been disrupted by a company that isn’t hell-bent on fucking over their customers?

choward 4y ago
Because if a company like that starts to emerge they'll be bought out by a larger company. At which point everyone around here will congratulate them on their "exit".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- julianlam 4y ago
  I often feel like this is a wonderful business plan, then! Find an industry monopolized, disrupt it just enough to catch the attention of the incumbent, and exit. I often think I should start an infant formula company and sell to Abbott.
toast0 4y ago
Who's going to look at a distorted market that's also shrinking and try to compete by offering printers at realistic costs and no lock in. Home users aren't going to buy that when they could get an inkjet for $50 (damn the costs later), and office users aren't going to buy it unless there's a service network and the lineup scales up to the 4 foot high office monstrosity multi function machines with collating and all that jazz. If they have printers at all.

Aeolun 4y ago

Hmm, I have a new Brother color laser printer standing here with two batches of non-brother (I refuse to say non-genuine) toner. Kind of wonder how that will go when my printer included toner runs out…

mrjin 4y ago

We need laws to prevent such malicious practices. Currently most if not all printer vendors sell printers at loss hoping to claw it back by sell consumables at extremely high prices. Given such background, vendors have more than enough motivation to undermine 3rd party consumables if not totally lock them out.

upofadown 4y ago
Pretty sure that most countries have laws to prevent such practices...

ohuhu 4y ago

https://www.mimeo.com/blog/destroying-office-printer/ https://www.mimeo.com/blog/destroying-office-printer/

jl6 4y ago

I've got a HL series color laser that I'm otherwise happy with. The firmware version is reported as 1.34. I guess I just have to take care to never upgrade that, and make a mental note never to buy another Brother product again?

kumivasara 4y ago

Thanks for heads up I was considering of upgrading to a Brother model that scans to PDF. Now I won’t.

_abox 4y ago

At the same time many other brands are improving. I've seen ink tank based printers from HP and Epson lately, probably more brands. It's a shame Brother is going this way though because they were so great for a long time

egberts1 4y ago

Aw man, my trustworthy Brothers HL-5470DW Brothers laser jet is taking a licking and still printing after 10 years. Here is to another 10 years … before I buy another used laser jet that hasn’t been stupidly John Deere’d.

thedougd 4y ago

My pretty old DCP-L2540DW has a new firmware update: 06/16/2022 Main: V / Sub: 1.06 Improvement to help with the performance of the machine. I think I'll pass.

DrudgeCorporate 4y ago
Wouldn't they have had to put the chip in the printers years ago prepping for this? A firmware update isn't going to necessarily enable this 'feature'.
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  The printer is probably programmable enough to implement any behaviour with a handful of code in the firmware; the maker doesn't need a specific "chip in the printers", just the capability to read data from ink cartridges (some wires and ports) and the trivial capability to not print or degrade quality.
- thedougd 4y ago
  I thought about that after posting. I once had a week where I fiddled with the printer constantly after changing the toner, trying to get it to stop reporting it as empty. So who knows, maybe there's something to it. However, looking at the toner cartridge, I don't really see how they could do this. It's also possible they have a unified firmware and this 'feature' doesn't impact my model.
jacknews 4y ago
lol, yes, perhaps they mean 'revenue performance'.

pnemonic 4y ago

It's like if Catbert moved to Evil Printing Solutions from Evil Human Resources.

citiguy 4y ago

Would you be interested in getting a laser printer? I have a Brother and it works very well. It doesn't come with a huge toner cartridge but I'm still on the starter and it's been more than 5 years. Honestly I don't print super often, but it's a nice to have thing. The build quality is also good. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but once done it "just works".

cpcallen 4y ago
If you follow the links in the original post you will see that OP is talking about a Brother colour laser printer.

userbinator 4y ago

Wanting to update the firmware If you weren't ever wary of updates, this should be a strong lesson. The updates are not for your benefit anymore; the companies just want to have you on a leash where they hold the other end. "Don't fix it if it ain't broke." and then just purposefully print like garbage In other words, they're maliciously spreading FUD that 3rd-party consumables will result in lower print quality, and then making that a self-fulfilling prophecy. That should be illegal if it isn't already.

birktj 4y ago

I would recommend people who are looking for not only printers, but most kinds of equipment (except for cases where new stuff is unambiguously better than old stuff, but this is rare) to buy used professional/industrial hardware instead of new consumer equipment. And if this is difficult try to look for old consumer hardware still in good shape. These are often of much better quality and also it is much less wasteful to something used than new. Professional equipment is usually in another league than consumer stuff when it comes to quality and reliability and also usually has very low resale value so you can get it for quite cheap. Personally I just picked up an old Sharp color laser printer for about 90$. This is a great machine that prints 2 sided A3 (very hard to find for laser printers) and with toners that should last about 10000 pages which is way better than anything you can buy as a consumer. The only backside is that it is quite big and heavy. Old consumer equipment that is in good shape is often a good deal with the main reasoning being that something that has lasted for a long time has a higher probability of continuing to last a long time compared to something new where it is hard to say how long it will last.

jasonjayr 4y ago

This is disappointing. I had been recommending Brother printers exactly because they did not pull shenanigans like this, their windows drivers were pretty light weight, and their Linux support is very good. Is anyone working on a OSS printer, like 3D printers? Buy an existing printer and then rip out + re-wire it's controller?

yrro 4y ago

Oh no

intsunny 4y ago

Wow, if this comment is to be believed, the quality of Brother printers has seriously gone downhill: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mfc_firmware_update_nongenuine_toner_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf... Incredible.

akagusu 4y ago

Almost 40 years ago RMS, the guy people love to hate, created the Free/Libre software movement and a proprietary printer firmware was one of his motivations. For 40 years this guy has been talking about the perils of proprietary software and people gave a shit to him. Today people not only strongly defend proprietary software, but they think he is a moron, and even free/libre software activists think proprietary firmwares are okay as long their hardware works as expected. Of course this is okay until their hardware stops to work as intended and you are locked out because the proprietary firmware, which usually is what happens.

smsm42 4y ago
I think current proper title for RMS - at least among Properly Thinking People - is "misogynist, ableist, and transphobic" [1]. I haven't heard many people calling him a "moron" though. Extreme idealist with some weird ideas - maybe, but a "moron" - I don't think so, especially as his predictions keep coming true. I'm not sure whether his recipes are the solution, but at least it can be obvious he can see the problem. [1] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

myself248 4y ago

Oh, this is bad. Brother has always, like for DECADES, been the non-shitty option. Had ipv6 before anyone else. Good Linux support, even for the scanners on their MFCs. Agnostic about third-party toner. This new firmware demolishes twenty years of goodwill. I was just looking at a new printer, and likely to replace my old Brother B&W MFC and Samsung color laser, with a new Brother color laser MFC, but it looks like I'll see how long I can string the old ones along.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> I was just looking at a new printer There's a discussion upthread about some epson models being mostly alright (with caveats; read the whole thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860555

Lio 4y ago

This is very disappointing to hear. Brother were the one bright spot in the printer industry and I'm so much happier since I switched my business to using a Brother colour laser. They've probably recruited one of the bright spark MBA execs that "revolutionised"[1] the other manufactures with this kind of rent seeking crap. You know that deal, trade a firm's reputation for quality for a short term boost in profits, bank the bonus and move to another job before the chickens come home to roost. :( 1. By revolutionised I of course mean ruined.

mdavis6890 4y ago

An alternative viewpoint is that this business model is good for consumers, or a least differently neutral. If printer companies try to make their money on the printer sale, then it's very difficult for folks who only need to print a little now and again, and they might not be able to afford a very good printer. By moving to a consumption-based revenue model, now they can let everyone have a super-cheap printer (they are MUCH cheaper than decades ago, despite inflation), and then the people who use the printer more (get more value from it) pay more, and those who don't pay less. This seems reasonable, even though I also don't like hardware that bricks itself if I don't use as directed.

delecti 4y ago
It doesn't really work out that way though. People who don't need to print very often end up churning through absolutely garbage printers that are more trouble than they're worth and don't last very long before the ink dries up and leaves it a pile of junk. People who print a ton can instead invest a tiny bit more in a printer with notably cheaper per-print costs. It's really better viewed as almost an instance of the Sam Vimes "Boots" theory.

2143 4y ago

I predict the next device to go all bonkers with subscriptions and pay-per-use etc is cars. There would be a day when you have to spend $$$ to use air conditioning even though the entire hardware for that is in there.

pdimitar 4y ago

Gods I hope this is just a fluke but reading OP and some comments it seems that it is not. :( In any case, first thing I always do when I install a printer is to give it one exact static local IP because I made a firewall rule that blocks all outgoing WAN traffic from that IP. I lost faith in all my periphery to not sing behind my back and took things in my own hands. My Brother MFC works amazingly well and I will not think as a programmer in this case; I'll be a normal human who says "no need to update it if it works" and leave it at that. So far zero complains and I am happy with my device. And with these news I am even happier that I am paranoid and make sure my device doesn't get a firmware update.

billpg 4y ago

I'm old enough to remember buying a mouse and having to install the driver that came with the mouse on a floppy disk. Once the mouse market agreed to a single interface standard (and again when USB mice appeared) the world got simpler. Any computer you could buy would just work with whatever mouse you happened to plug into it. You only needed a custom driver if your mouse had lots of extra buttons that no-one really needed. I'm a little surprised that the same thing didn't happen to printers. I could imagine around 2005, Microsoft including a generic printer driver with Windows XP. This way, you could plug in any printer and it would just work, as long as the printer implemented that generic printing protocol, even if it were alongside their own printer interface. Plug in printer. Windows detects device with generic printer interface. User prints document. Document comes out. User happy. Oh sure, the printer would come with a CD that includes software that enables the "special features" of the printer. Digital cameras did this too. (Rule #1 of buying a digital camera: Throw away the CD that comes in the box. Break the CD just in case you're tempted that something on CD might fix some trivial issue you're having.) At the same time, I'm not surprised that never happened. Those "special features", like shouting at you for buying the wrong ink, are just way too important to not have installed on people's computers.

GuB-42 4y ago
PCL and PostScript are standards. If you have a printer that supports it, some supported both, a generic driver is all you need, except for special features. Entry-level printers didn't support these standards as it required what at the time was significant computing power on the printer side.

jerome-jh 4y ago

I thought that was well known. In EU printers cannot be sold "inked locked". They do lock themselves as soon as they have an opportunity to update their firmware. My Brother never had Internet access. I configured it with the Internet gateway unplugged and assigned it a static address to which I forbid Internet access. It is now running on compatible color cartridges. For black I stay on OEM ink. It is funny that my venerable HP I had previously stopped working soon after I started using compatible ink. Since it was several years old, I was wanted to spare on ink. A gear broke soon after. Repaired the gear and something else broke. I did not do the second repair. Of course that could be a simple coïncidence, I'll never know. BTW I would not recommend Brother either. It is very picky about paper. Have to use good quality 90g or more exclusively.

thunkshift1 4y ago
Can you share steps on how you configured it
chopin 4y ago
My HP printer is configured the same way. If only to prevent it from phoning home.

midislack 4y ago

You have to get an antique laser like an Apple IInt. New stuff is garbage.

pvaldes 4y ago

Remember that for some printers there are two parts, you need to change the ink and after some changes also the "cylinder". In any case I had seen a similar poor quality results in the brand. Can't recommend it.

jgerrish 4y ago

Yes, we all rage about this. K-cups, razors. Wait for the next decade: e-vehicle chargers, rocket booster packs (must be approved mixtures!). It never ends, not for this generation, or the next. So, just picking an open publishing article: Playing Super Mario 64 increases hippocampal grey matter in older adults https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187779 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Unfortunately, I don't have the strength, and I just want a different way.