5 ms·

I've given up on virtually all brands of printers. The last brand standing that doesn't seem like absolute shit is Brother. I have an inkjet laser printer o

by jchw 4y ago

I've given up on virtually all brands of printers. The last brand standing that doesn't seem like absolute shit is Brother. I have an ~~inkjet~~ laser printer of theirs that I have connected to the network, which I use with IPP and AirPrint with no issues. HP printers have been horrible anti-consumer garbage for as long as I can remember at this point.

williamscales 4y ago
Yep, I chucked my HP inkjet and got a single function Brother mono laser printer. I figure if I need to print in color, I am probably better off just paying to use a really good photo printer.
- quijoteuniv 4y ago
  This is the best solution for home use, totally agree. Is a shame that they turned inkjet technology into a scam.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    The printer in question is a laser printer, the M209dwe.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Curious, how often do you find yourself printing these days? At this point I print so infrequently that going to the print shop for $1 is a more sound decision than spending $100 on a printer i use a handful of times a year.
  - williamscales 4y ago
    I often print off papers to read, something about the form factor just works for me. I do this pretty frequently so it's worth it. Oh and return labels for packages.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I use the laser printer a lot for hobbies. Example: printing a pattern that I then lay onto a sheet of balsa so I can then cut out the shape. My wife makes the Christmas cards every year carving a linoleum block, ink-roller, that sort of thing. She also used the laser printer to transfer a design. Papercraft.... Occasionally a recipe though to add to my recipe book, ha ha.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    > Curious, how often do you find yourself printing these days? Main use is that I write music scores which I print (reading them off a tablet won't do). This would be several times a week. Weekly or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) I print tickets (those with bar codes or QR codes) for concerts and the like. I don't want to rely on a phone for that, my normal phone isn't actually online when I'm not in wifi range and it's cumbersome to drag up a PDF on it. Way easier to bring out a piece of paper from my pocket. And reliable. And yes, boarding passes for flights as well. Reliability is even more important there.. EditAdd: And labels for post packages. It's cheaper to prepare that online and print the label myself, then bring the package to the post office where they'll clamp a transparent plastic sheet over it. If they have to do the label at the post office it'll cost more. It's because when I enter the address etc. online then it'll go directly into their database, and that's why it's more expensive if the post office has to enter it. My wife has a small class for which she needs to print learning material she's made for her pupils, each time. She also occasionally need to make color prints, and for that we use an HP bought years ago (and deliberately never given Internet access). For the other mentioned stuff we use a b/w laser printer. None of the above is really feasible for printing at a print shop, would have to drive ten minutes and (these days) go through a toll booth as well. In fact I'm very close to buying another b/w laser printer so that I don't have to go upstairs to get my printouts - I would like to have one real close. Was looking into a low-cost (and small) Brother laser printer for that - now I see they're into shenanigans as well, will have to check carefully before I go further. So, unlike some other commenters here, I find having a printer (or several) at home is still a must for me. I use print shops only for printing photos (at dedicated photo shops).
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Not the original poster but I also have a monochrome laser printer from Brother. I find myself printing anywhere from 500 to about 3000 pages per year. I find it paid for itself in the first year. I also have one of the "professional" network scanners for digitizing. The printer I got is an MFC with duplex automatic scanning and a flatbed. Occasionally Costco will drop the price by $100 and you get a pretty good deal. Starter toner cartridges are good for about 1500 pages.
  - mschild 4y ago
    True, but print shops are harder and harder to find. I live in Berlin and the closest print shop is almost 2km away.
    - HTTP418 4y ago
      is 2km far? that is a very short bike ride, and even shorter drive. As someone who lives in a suburb i regularly drive over 2km just to pickup some takeout food
      - mschild 4y ago
        Generally no. Its about the length of walking that I do to get to work one way. But its a far enough distance to be an inconvenience. I rarely ever print something, but when I do its because there is no other option for me. That usually means its something chore related and adding a 4km round trip walk just to print out a singular page is a pain.
    - okanat 4y ago
      All DMs and Rossmanns have print service. Are you in a suburb?
      - mschild 4y ago
        Mine does, unfortunately, not offer printing services.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Both of the major private delivery services in the USA, UPS and FedEx, offer printing in their retail locations. So does office supply vendor Staples. There is no equivalent in Germany?
      - mschild 4y ago
        Not really. Shipping companies rarely ever have their own locations and are usually located in some form of kiosk. I don't think there is an equivalent to Stapels in Germany. Another commenter mentioned that DM and Rossmann (CVS, Rite Aid kinda store) offer printing, but that's not at all locations.
  - ars 4y ago
    The most common thing I print is return labels for Amazon packages. Also coloring pages for kids.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      At least where I am you can print labels at whatever shipping service they're meant for free of charge (FedEx, UPS etc.) and they also will package the return for you.
      - ars 4y ago
        By me both those companies charge to print labels.
      - sbaiddn 4y ago
        That means that I have to go there to drop it off and wait Im line to get served. If I print the label myself I can just leave it in a box in the store without waiting in line, or better yet, give it to the delivery man next time he comes around. Seems like a small inconsequential, or rare benefit. But with three kids the delivery guy is by our house every other day
      - pxx 4y ago
        This depends on the type of return and the type of location. Sometimes the location doesn't support this. Sometimes Amazon won't support this.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I print when I prep for a meeting so I end up doing it quite a bit.
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    I spent $100 on a Brother B&W laser in 2010. It's paid for itself many times over, and it's still doing great!
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Unfortunately even Brother has resorted to similar means to locking their cartridges. I got Brother because they have been reliable, but was disappointed to see Epson and others with better Linux support when in the past I had thought Brother had good support. You can use IPP Everywhere or whatever they call it but you lose access to a lot of the printer and page options.
deely3 4y ago
I quite like Canon Pixma G-series. To refill ink you have to just open build-in catridges and pour ink inside. Manual includes instruction how to reset ink level sensor (not sure why this needed but nice to know anyway). So far (year and half in use, print 1-2 color pages every day) I have no issues.
repiret 4y ago
I’ve got a Brother HL5040 that I bought in 2004 for $200 that’s still going strong. That said, I find business grade HP laser printers superior to the Brother printers at that price point, and they don’t have any of the shenanigans you find in consumer-grade printers from most brands.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
The last HP printer I bought was from eBay ... an earlier model that there are plenty of cheap Chinese refills for. Still printing with it.
lodovic 4y ago
I found out long ago that it really is cheaper to replace a color laser printer than the toners in it (printer is approx €150, while a toner set is approx €250). A new printer with toners lasts about 5-8 years as I print very little. So I haven't bought printer toner ever.
catiopatio 4y ago
I’m happy with Xerox’s commercial/office color laser printers; I also have one that works fine with IPP and AirPrint.
- Tempest1981 4y ago
  I've had good luck with Brother. Will avoid HP. I returned a cartridge at Staples, a few years ago. I think they offered $1-2, not much, but happy they took it. Also try Office Depot.
jdlshore 4y ago
I abandoned an HP PageWide color inkjet MFP for a Brother color laser MFP and couldn't be happier. Brother's front panel tech and UI isn't as polished, but the printer is rock solid and the company isn't scummy. (There's an easily-found way to reset toner counts, for example, and get anther 25-50% more pages from a cartridge. Although I no longer use it as running out of toner mid-job is a hassle. The toner is cheap enough, and long-lasting enough, that I happily set-and-forget with their auto-order system.) The only thing that's bothered me about them is they're making it harder and harder to figure out how to return toner cartridges for recycling.
- l8rlump 4y ago
  Those Pagewides also have expiration dates programmed into their inks. If you install one that's "out of date," the machine will just tell you that it's incompatible. I haven't come across another brand with use-by dates on their inks. Maybe that's why the error message is so cryptic. The other one (with the bigger Pagewides at least): they had a problem with the formulation of the black ink, where the constituents would separate over time. They changed the formulation and that formulation doesn't dry properly on their own photo paper. I wanted optimal quality photos, so I went through the specific calibration function for the HP Advanced photo paper. Because of the way the machine shuffles the page back and forth in the machine to perform the calibration, all the black was smudged and the calibration would fail every time. When HP support eventually realized I had a point, they told me calibration on HP Advanced photo paper is "not supported." I bet they remove it as an option in later firmware, if they haven't already. I have never dealt with a more user-hostile company than HP.
Oxidation 4y ago
My Brother colour laser is an absolute tank (by weight, if nothing else) and happily uses the cheapest eBay toner going. It can sit idle for months then get plugged in and hammer out 400 pages, double sided. I'll never use an inkjet again, they're always nightmares. We'll see how long it goes before the fuser carks it, but so far it's been pretty cost effective, considering the thing itself was £200.
- manuelflara 4y ago
  what model you got? at that price it sounds great
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    It's a DCP-9020cdw. Sadly I don't think they're still made. Looking it up, I paid about £210 for it in 2018.
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  Another shill for Brother here. It's a good service day when I can trade HP's hostility circus for a Brother laser.
- swayvil 4y ago
  Have a brother laser. HL2070N. prints just black. Like 10 years. Indestructible. Uses the cheap toner. Nice prints. CUPS. Debian.
  - philsnow 4y ago
    I upgraded from my B/W laser to a color laser, both Brother, but I'm keeping the old one in a closet. Someday when if for some reason the new one has problems (or I legit run out of color toner), I know it'll be ready to step in.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  If it is an older one it will most likely outlive you. We used these in production for daily runs of 1000's of pages and the mechanism would eventually wear out but that's not something that any ordinary mortal will ever see. Fun bit: they even offered to replace the ones that eventually did fail under warranty so that they could strip them to see what failed so they could improve them. Very high standards there.
josephcsible 4y ago
Brother recently went as evil as the rest of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  For blocking Brother firmware updates (ports 80 & 443). update[.]brother[.]co[.]jp -> I blocked this domain and my printer is unable to query for updates. I can still download binaries from Brother's website. firmverup[.].brother[.]co[.]jp & update-akamai[.]brother[.]co[.]jp Other domains found by people sniffing their printer firmware updates.
- myself248 4y ago
  Came here to post this. The last of the good ones, squandered their reputation.
- max-ibel 4y ago
  I wonder if it's feasible to 3d-print a decent open source printer. Doesn't have to be perfect quality, the old deskjet 500s quality was fine for me. But I think making a simple inkjet printhead is still beyond a hobbyists effort. Laser printer or dot matrix likewise.
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  To clarify, Brother is deploying toxic firmware to their MFC-3750s. I don't think this is widespread (yet). I did see requests to roll back firmware on a MFC-L3770CDW so other 37xx models may be at immediate risk. I did see posts about HL-L3290CDW and MFC-L8900CDW with the same No Toner symptom but it wasn't clear they ever had firmware updates. From what I can tell from your link, the OP there had a HL3070CN. It doesn't appear that he updated the firmware or ran into any No Toner errors. He was sharing reports about the 3750. My similar HL3040CW takes 3rd party cartridges (orig firmware). My vibe is Brother is test-fouling the water to see how it goes. For my part, I'll research how block firmware updates (not all models have an auto update to disable, IP & url blocking might block driver downloads. We shall see).
  - 4y ago
_tom_ 4y ago
Was reading reviews for Brother recently. "The printers keep track of every page that goes through it whether or not you use any consumables and forces you to replace the toners the belt the drum and the fuser regardless of the actual condition of these parts." And many other reports. Note: I have a Brother monochrome laser that is great, but it seems like there are no printer companies left standing that I would buy a printer from now.
- knaik94 4y ago
  My understanding was that this was more of a stop sign than a brick wall trying to stop you from printing. I have not seen any examples of Brother enforcing replacements of parts in consumer products. Do you remember the model? There is one example of a multi-color laser printer where it complains about not having genuine toner, but there's a few links of firmware downgrades online if you know where to look. My experience is that a, sometimes complicated, series of button presses for a specific amount of times resets the counter and it continues printing like usual. For the model I have the reset procedure is just holding the power button while turning it on for a specific number of seconds.
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    Reviews specifically mentioned that this was not overridable anymore.
- vbernat 4y ago
  I have a HL-4150CDN and that's true it asks for a replacement after a fixed page count but it is easy to workaround this by resetting the page count (https://www.inkowl.com/page/tnreset/ https://www.inkowl.com/page/tnreset/). I am still using it after more than 10 years with the half-capacity toners it was shipped with.
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    As I mentioned in another thread, people were complaining that there were not longer any workarounds for the artificial limits.
nixgeek 4y ago
I moved to Canon from HP and have both their Maxify GX7020 [1] and their imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 [2], both of which have a strong Just Works (tm) factor, at least in my experience. I'm a low workload user, and probably do about 300 pages a month on the GX7020 and perhaps 30-40 photos a month on the PRO-1000, the cost per page on the GX7020 is very low, and while the PRO-1000 is much more expensive it's still "cheaper and faster" (cheaper - requires taking a somewhat long-term view on amortization of initial cost; faster - since I'm doing it myself and not waiting for UPS to bring me prints) than outsourcing the print for anything up to about 11x17", but anything larger I still do need to send out. [1] https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx7020 https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx7020 [2] https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/imageprograf-pro-1000 https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/imageprograf-pro-1000
ptero 4y ago
I have xerox phaser 6510 color laser, which I like. Built like a rock, works great on third party cartridges. It does add watermarking (feels like USSR, where KGB took fingerprints of all typewriters), which is despicable, but I think all modern printers do that.
- Karellen 4y ago
  More info: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
Karellen 4y ago
I only print around once/month (or less), and I've given up on having my own printer. I get stuff printed at the local library now. Yeah, the per-page costs are relatively high, but I'm not amortising the cost of a printer, I don't have to worry about any kind of ink/toner/printhead/other mechanical issues, and any "profit" that's being made goes towards my local library - which I'm totally fine with.
RajT88 4y ago
I have had issues with Brother printers, but I gather those issues were just normal inkjet issues. (Jets clog, hard to unclog)

I've given up on virtually all brands of printers. The last brand standing that doesn't seem like absolute shit is Brother. I have an ~~inkjet~~ laser printer o

by jchw 4y ago

williamscales 4y ago

Yep, I chucked my HP inkjet and got a single function Brother mono laser printer. I figure if I need to print in color, I am probably better off just paying to use a really good photo printer.

quijoteuniv 4y ago
This is the best solution for home use, totally agree. Is a shame that they turned inkjet technology into a scam.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The printer in question is a laser printer, the M209dwe.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Curious, how often do you find yourself printing these days? At this point I print so infrequently that going to the print shop for $1 is a more sound decision than spending $100 on a printer i use a handful of times a year.
- williamscales 4y ago
  I often print off papers to read, something about the form factor just works for me. I do this pretty frequently so it's worth it. Oh and return labels for packages.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I use the laser printer a lot for hobbies. Example: printing a pattern that I then lay onto a sheet of balsa so I can then cut out the shape. My wife makes the Christmas cards every year carving a linoleum block, ink-roller, that sort of thing. She also used the laser printer to transfer a design. Papercraft.... Occasionally a recipe though to add to my recipe book, ha ha.
- Tor3 4y ago
  > Curious, how often do you find yourself printing these days? Main use is that I write music scores which I print (reading them off a tablet won't do). This would be several times a week. Weekly or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) I print tickets (those with bar codes or QR codes) for concerts and the like. I don't want to rely on a phone for that, my normal phone isn't actually online when I'm not in wifi range and it's cumbersome to drag up a PDF on it. Way easier to bring out a piece of paper from my pocket. And reliable. And yes, boarding passes for flights as well. Reliability is even more important there.. EditAdd: And labels for post packages. It's cheaper to prepare that online and print the label myself, then bring the package to the post office where they'll clamp a transparent plastic sheet over it. If they have to do the label at the post office it'll cost more. It's because when I enter the address etc. online then it'll go directly into their database, and that's why it's more expensive if the post office has to enter it. My wife has a small class for which she needs to print learning material she's made for her pupils, each time. She also occasionally need to make color prints, and for that we use an HP bought years ago (and deliberately never given Internet access). For the other mentioned stuff we use a b/w laser printer. None of the above is really feasible for printing at a print shop, would have to drive ten minutes and (these days) go through a toll booth as well. In fact I'm very close to buying another b/w laser printer so that I don't have to go upstairs to get my printouts - I would like to have one real close. Was looking into a low-cost (and small) Brother laser printer for that - now I see they're into shenanigans as well, will have to check carefully before I go further. So, unlike some other commenters here, I find having a printer (or several) at home is still a must for me. I use print shops only for printing photos (at dedicated photo shops).
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Not the original poster but I also have a monochrome laser printer from Brother. I find myself printing anywhere from 500 to about 3000 pages per year. I find it paid for itself in the first year. I also have one of the "professional" network scanners for digitizing. The printer I got is an MFC with duplex automatic scanning and a flatbed. Occasionally Costco will drop the price by $100 and you get a pretty good deal. Starter toner cartridges are good for about 1500 pages.
- mschild 4y ago
  True, but print shops are harder and harder to find. I live in Berlin and the closest print shop is almost 2km away.
  - HTTP418 4y ago
    is 2km far? that is a very short bike ride, and even shorter drive. As someone who lives in a suburb i regularly drive over 2km just to pickup some takeout food
    - mschild 4y ago
      Generally no. Its about the length of walking that I do to get to work one way. But its a far enough distance to be an inconvenience. I rarely ever print something, but when I do its because there is no other option for me. That usually means its something chore related and adding a 4km round trip walk just to print out a singular page is a pain.
  - okanat 4y ago
    All DMs and Rossmanns have print service. Are you in a suburb?
    - mschild 4y ago
      Mine does, unfortunately, not offer printing services.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Both of the major private delivery services in the USA, UPS and FedEx, offer printing in their retail locations. So does office supply vendor Staples. There is no equivalent in Germany?
    - mschild 4y ago
      Not really. Shipping companies rarely ever have their own locations and are usually located in some form of kiosk. I don't think there is an equivalent to Stapels in Germany. Another commenter mentioned that DM and Rossmann (CVS, Rite Aid kinda store) offer printing, but that's not at all locations.
- ars 4y ago
  The most common thing I print is return labels for Amazon packages. Also coloring pages for kids.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    At least where I am you can print labels at whatever shipping service they're meant for free of charge (FedEx, UPS etc.) and they also will package the return for you.
    - ars 4y ago
      By me both those companies charge to print labels.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      That means that I have to go there to drop it off and wait Im line to get served. If I print the label myself I can just leave it in a box in the store without waiting in line, or better yet, give it to the delivery man next time he comes around. Seems like a small inconsequential, or rare benefit. But with three kids the delivery guy is by our house every other day
    - pxx 4y ago
      This depends on the type of return and the type of location. Sometimes the location doesn't support this. Sometimes Amazon won't support this.
- xeromal 4y ago
  I print when I prep for a meeting so I end up doing it quite a bit.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  I spent $100 on a Brother B&W laser in 2010. It's paid for itself many times over, and it's still doing great!
encryptluks2 4y ago
Unfortunately even Brother has resorted to similar means to locking their cartridges. I got Brother because they have been reliable, but was disappointed to see Epson and others with better Linux support when in the past I had thought Brother had good support. You can use IPP Everywhere or whatever they call it but you lose access to a lot of the printer and page options.

deely3 4y ago

I quite like Canon Pixma G-series. To refill ink you have to just open build-in catridges and pour ink inside. Manual includes instruction how to reset ink level sensor (not sure why this needed but nice to know anyway). So far (year and half in use, print 1-2 color pages every day) I have no issues.

repiret 4y ago

I’ve got a Brother HL5040 that I bought in 2004 for $200 that’s still going strong. That said, I find business grade HP laser printers superior to the Brother printers at that price point, and they don’t have any of the shenanigans you find in consumer-grade printers from most brands.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

The last HP printer I bought was from eBay ... an earlier model that there are plenty of cheap Chinese refills for. Still printing with it.

lodovic 4y ago

I found out long ago that it really is cheaper to replace a color laser printer than the toners in it (printer is approx €150, while a toner set is approx €250). A new printer with toners lasts about 5-8 years as I print very little. So I haven't bought printer toner ever.

catiopatio 4y ago

I’m happy with Xerox’s commercial/office color laser printers; I also have one that works fine with IPP and AirPrint.

Tempest1981 4y ago
I've had good luck with Brother. Will avoid HP. I returned a cartridge at Staples, a few years ago. I think they offered $1-2, not much, but happy they took it. Also try Office Depot.

jdlshore 4y ago

I abandoned an HP PageWide color inkjet MFP for a Brother color laser MFP and couldn't be happier. Brother's front panel tech and UI isn't as polished, but the printer is rock solid and the company isn't scummy. (There's an easily-found way to reset toner counts, for example, and get anther 25-50% more pages from a cartridge. Although I no longer use it as running out of toner mid-job is a hassle. The toner is cheap enough, and long-lasting enough, that I happily set-and-forget with their auto-order system.) The only thing that's bothered me about them is they're making it harder and harder to figure out how to return toner cartridges for recycling.

l8rlump 4y ago
Those Pagewides also have expiration dates programmed into their inks. If you install one that's "out of date," the machine will just tell you that it's incompatible. I haven't come across another brand with use-by dates on their inks. Maybe that's why the error message is so cryptic. The other one (with the bigger Pagewides at least): they had a problem with the formulation of the black ink, where the constituents would separate over time. They changed the formulation and that formulation doesn't dry properly on their own photo paper. I wanted optimal quality photos, so I went through the specific calibration function for the HP Advanced photo paper. Because of the way the machine shuffles the page back and forth in the machine to perform the calibration, all the black was smudged and the calibration would fail every time. When HP support eventually realized I had a point, they told me calibration on HP Advanced photo paper is "not supported." I bet they remove it as an option in later firmware, if they haven't already. I have never dealt with a more user-hostile company than HP.

Oxidation 4y ago

My Brother colour laser is an absolute tank (by weight, if nothing else) and happily uses the cheapest eBay toner going. It can sit idle for months then get plugged in and hammer out 400 pages, double sided. I'll never use an inkjet again, they're always nightmares. We'll see how long it goes before the fuser carks it, but so far it's been pretty cost effective, considering the thing itself was £200.

manuelflara 4y ago
what model you got? at that price it sounds great
- Oxidation 4y ago
  It's a DCP-9020cdw. Sadly I don't think they're still made. Looking it up, I paid about £210 for it in 2018.
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
Another shill for Brother here. It's a good service day when I can trade HP's hostility circus for a Brother laser.
swayvil 4y ago
Have a brother laser. HL2070N. prints just black. Like 10 years. Indestructible. Uses the cheap toner. Nice prints. CUPS. Debian.
- philsnow 4y ago
  I upgraded from my B/W laser to a color laser, both Brother, but I'm keeping the old one in a closet. Someday when if for some reason the new one has problems (or I legit run out of color toner), I know it'll be ready to step in.
jacquesm 4y ago
If it is an older one it will most likely outlive you. We used these in production for daily runs of 1000's of pages and the mechanism would eventually wear out but that's not something that any ordinary mortal will ever see. Fun bit: they even offered to replace the ones that eventually did fail under warranty so that they could strip them to see what failed so they could improve them. Very high standards there.

josephcsible 4y ago

Brother recently went as evil as the rest of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
For blocking Brother firmware updates (ports 80 & 443). update[.]brother[.]co[.]jp -> I blocked this domain and my printer is unable to query for updates. I can still download binaries from Brother's website. firmverup[.].brother[.]co[.]jp & update-akamai[.]brother[.]co[.]jp Other domains found by people sniffing their printer firmware updates.
myself248 4y ago
Came here to post this. The last of the good ones, squandered their reputation.
max-ibel 4y ago
I wonder if it's feasible to 3d-print a decent open source printer. Doesn't have to be perfect quality, the old deskjet 500s quality was fine for me. But I think making a simple inkjet printhead is still beyond a hobbyists effort. Laser printer or dot matrix likewise.
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
To clarify, Brother is deploying toxic firmware to their MFC-3750s. I don't think this is widespread (yet). I did see requests to roll back firmware on a MFC-L3770CDW so other 37xx models may be at immediate risk. I did see posts about HL-L3290CDW and MFC-L8900CDW with the same No Toner symptom but it wasn't clear they ever had firmware updates. From what I can tell from your link, the OP there had a HL3070CN. It doesn't appear that he updated the firmware or ran into any No Toner errors. He was sharing reports about the 3750. My similar HL3040CW takes 3rd party cartridges (orig firmware). My vibe is Brother is test-fouling the water to see how it goes. For my part, I'll research how block firmware updates (not all models have an auto update to disable, IP & url blocking might block driver downloads. We shall see).
- 4y ago

_tom_ 4y ago

Was reading reviews for Brother recently. "The printers keep track of every page that goes through it whether or not you use any consumables and forces you to replace the toners the belt the drum and the fuser regardless of the actual condition of these parts." And many other reports. Note: I have a Brother monochrome laser that is great, but it seems like there are no printer companies left standing that I would buy a printer from now.

knaik94 4y ago
My understanding was that this was more of a stop sign than a brick wall trying to stop you from printing. I have not seen any examples of Brother enforcing replacements of parts in consumer products. Do you remember the model? There is one example of a multi-color laser printer where it complains about not having genuine toner, but there's a few links of firmware downgrades online if you know where to look. My experience is that a, sometimes complicated, series of button presses for a specific amount of times resets the counter and it continues printing like usual. For the model I have the reset procedure is just holding the power button while turning it on for a specific number of seconds.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  Reviews specifically mentioned that this was not overridable anymore.
vbernat 4y ago
I have a HL-4150CDN and that's true it asks for a replacement after a fixed page count but it is easy to workaround this by resetting the page count (https://www.inkowl.com/page/tnreset/ https://www.inkowl.com/page/tnreset/). I am still using it after more than 10 years with the half-capacity toners it was shipped with.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  As I mentioned in another thread, people were complaining that there were not longer any workarounds for the artificial limits.

nixgeek 4y ago

I moved to Canon from HP and have both their Maxify GX7020 [1] and their imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 [2], both of which have a strong Just Works (tm) factor, at least in my experience. I'm a low workload user, and probably do about 300 pages a month on the GX7020 and perhaps 30-40 photos a month on the PRO-1000, the cost per page on the GX7020 is very low, and while the PRO-1000 is much more expensive it's still "cheaper and faster" (cheaper - requires taking a somewhat long-term view on amortization of initial cost; faster - since I'm doing it myself and not waiting for UPS to bring me prints) than outsourcing the print for anything up to about 11x17", but anything larger I still do need to send out. [1] https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx7020 https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx7020 [2] https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/imageprograf-pro-1000 https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/imageprograf-pro-1000

ptero 4y ago

I have xerox phaser 6510 color laser, which I like. Built like a rock, works great on third party cartridges. It does add watermarking (feels like USSR, where KGB took fingerprints of all typewriters), which is despicable, but I think all modern printers do that.

Karellen 4y ago
More info: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

Karellen 4y ago

I only print around once/month (or less), and I've given up on having my own printer. I get stuff printed at the local library now. Yeah, the per-page costs are relatively high, but I'm not amortising the cost of a printer, I don't have to worry about any kind of ink/toner/printhead/other mechanical issues, and any "profit" that's being made goes towards my local library - which I'm totally fine with.

RajT88 4y ago

I have had issues with Brother printers, but I gather those issues were just normal inkjet issues. (Jets clog, hard to unclog)