6 ms·

Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well. In the end it somewhat boils down to p

Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well. In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description. There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.

antod 3y ago
I haven't actually had any printer at all for a while, but we had a cheap networked double sided Brother laser that lasted for ages. One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box. I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
- jacobgorm 3y ago
  I never got actual Postscript to we work on Linux and my Brother. It looks like the ripping runs on the host side, and what gets printed is bitmaps. Works fine on Mac and windows though.
waveBidder 3y ago
thanks I hate it. definitely wouldn't bet against you on that.
vidarh 3y ago
"As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner instead: ..."
- layer8 3y ago
  It will just silently "auto-correct" the letter instead.
  - jll29 3y ago
    You don't need deep learning for that... https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
    - vidarh 3y ago
      But that was at least a bug, and a somewhat understandable one (though still stupid). I did my MSc on doing statistical methods to reduce error rates in OCR, and one of the methods that actually worked very well was various nearest neighbour variations over small windows of the pixel data. As part of that I did a literature review, of course, and there has been quite a lot of work on various algorithms for cleaning up images by trying to replace patches of pixels with presumed "clean" samples (sometimes from a known font, but more often by applying various clustering methods to patches from the image itself). Get that wrong and you'd very easily end up with something like this. My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    You're probably right - I'd not make a good printer company executive, I'm not cynical enough.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> Solve one problem only, and solve it well. I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is. It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up. Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  This is going to become a bigger problem over time. A lot of the embedded chips that provide WiFi only supported 2.4GHz. There’s a whole bunch of devices that just aren’t going to work.
- hales 3y ago
  > my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time. Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router. Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
  - octacat 3y ago
    oh, I actually needed to check routers recently. Prices like 5 years ago but specs for cheaper models are "slightly broken". Like 2.4+5 router, but only 100MBit ethernet (and full AC speed for wireless). So, you kinda have "cheap" models, but to get a real usable router you have to pay the full price. Marketing.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    It's an 8 year old SBG6580-2 with radio button selection for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz on the web interface. I bought the cheapest one guaranteed to work with Xfinity to save on the rental costs. I'll upgrade when they force a move from DOCSIS 3.0. Just like I'll upgrade my cheapest smart phone with a replaceable battery when they force a move from 4G (or finally make a workable phone with a physical keyboard again).
ohuf 3y ago
I must have missed the Blockchain/Bitcoin printers
- dubcanada 3y ago
  Oh they exist > https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-deploys-blockchain-technology-for-label-printers-to-help-supply-chains-become-more-secure https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-depl...
  - __loam 3y ago
    I mean, it's blockchain necessary to accomplish this? Probably not, but they're at least not building on top of a crypto currency.
indrora 3y ago
Brother and Canon are both really good examples of long-term thinking in Japanese companies, along with Nintendo. All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products. Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good. These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
- soco 3y ago
  Well let's not overdo it. Right now if you search the Brother knowledge base to troubleshoot something you'll be surprised to see that the questions are there, but each and every answer says "the page you requested was removed". It works as long it works but in the end, it's the same garbage company.
- vGPU 3y ago
  And it’s not just Japanese companies that manage to pull that off. Some others have managed to do the same. See: Lego, for example. They branched out into movies, games, and parks, but their primary and core product remains bricks.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    It's pretty much anything U.S. oligarchs don't control.
  - indrora 3y ago
    Lego has had issues for years, and has faced bankruptcy[1] through to several years ago just going "Whoops we made too many bricks..."[2] Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks. It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed. [1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankrupted-lego-until-it-rebuilt-with-a-better-blueprint/ https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298897 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298897
GCA10 3y ago
Truth. I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system. Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
axus 3y ago
I'm pretty sure mine came with some OCR PDF-generating software. It has Fax functions I never use, Copy functions that come in handy several times a year, and Scan I've used a few times. The web admin interface seems to have a lot of options. But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.

antod 3y ago

I haven't actually had any printer at all for a while, but we had a cheap networked double sided Brother laser that lasted for ages. One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box. I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.

jacobgorm 3y ago
I never got actual Postscript to we work on Linux and my Brother. It looks like the ripping runs on the host side, and what gets printed is bitmaps. Works fine on Mac and windows though.

waveBidder 3y ago

thanks I hate it. definitely wouldn't bet against you on that.

vidarh 3y ago

"As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner instead: ..."

layer8 3y ago
It will just silently "auto-correct" the letter instead.
- jll29 3y ago
  You don't need deep learning for that... https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
  - vidarh 3y ago
    But that was at least a bug, and a somewhat understandable one (though still stupid). I did my MSc on doing statistical methods to reduce error rates in OCR, and one of the methods that actually worked very well was various nearest neighbour variations over small windows of the pixel data. As part of that I did a literature review, of course, and there has been quite a lot of work on various algorithms for cleaning up images by trying to replace patches of pixels with presumed "clean" samples (sometimes from a known font, but more often by applying various clustering methods to patches from the image itself). Get that wrong and you'd very easily end up with something like this. My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
- vidarh 3y ago
  You're probably right - I'd not make a good printer company executive, I'm not cynical enough.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

> Solve one problem only, and solve it well. I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is. It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up. Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.

iamflimflam1 3y ago
This is going to become a bigger problem over time. A lot of the embedded chips that provide WiFi only supported 2.4GHz. There’s a whole bunch of devices that just aren’t going to work.
hales 3y ago
> my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time. Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router. Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
- octacat 3y ago
  oh, I actually needed to check routers recently. Prices like 5 years ago but specs for cheaper models are "slightly broken". Like 2.4+5 router, but only 100MBit ethernet (and full AC speed for wireless). So, you kinda have "cheap" models, but to get a real usable router you have to pay the full price. Marketing.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  It's an 8 year old SBG6580-2 with radio button selection for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz on the web interface. I bought the cheapest one guaranteed to work with Xfinity to save on the rental costs. I'll upgrade when they force a move from DOCSIS 3.0. Just like I'll upgrade my cheapest smart phone with a replaceable battery when they force a move from 4G (or finally make a workable phone with a physical keyboard again).

ohuf 3y ago

I must have missed the Blockchain/Bitcoin printers

dubcanada 3y ago
Oh they exist > https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-deploys-blockchain-technology-for-label-printers-to-help-supply-chains-become-more-secure https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-depl...
- __loam 3y ago
  I mean, it's blockchain necessary to accomplish this? Probably not, but they're at least not building on top of a crypto currency.

indrora 3y ago

Brother and Canon are both really good examples of long-term thinking in Japanese companies, along with Nintendo. All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products. Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good. These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.

soco 3y ago
Well let's not overdo it. Right now if you search the Brother knowledge base to troubleshoot something you'll be surprised to see that the questions are there, but each and every answer says "the page you requested was removed". It works as long it works but in the end, it's the same garbage company.
vGPU 3y ago
And it’s not just Japanese companies that manage to pull that off. Some others have managed to do the same. See: Lego, for example. They branched out into movies, games, and parks, but their primary and core product remains bricks.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  It's pretty much anything U.S. oligarchs don't control.
- indrora 3y ago
  Lego has had issues for years, and has faced bankruptcy[1] through to several years ago just going "Whoops we made too many bricks..."[2] Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks. It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed. [1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankrupted-lego-until-it-rebuilt-with-a-better-blueprint/ https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298897 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298897

GCA10 3y ago

Truth. I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system. Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)

axus 3y ago

I'm pretty sure mine came with some OCR PDF-generating software. It has Fax functions I never use, Copy functions that come in handy several times a year, and Scan I've used a few times. The web admin interface seems to have a lot of options. But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.