7 ms·

Brother refutes "false claims" that it bricked printers using third-party ink

86 points by AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261933
nickthegreek 2y ago
This seems like a reasonable reply from Brother. I have not seen verification (screenshots, videos) of what is being alleged. I wonder if it is poppin up scary messages or refusing to do some of the troubleshooting steps without a chipped ink cart. Removing old firmware versions from their download site is bullshit though.
legitster 2y ago
I have a brand new color laser printer on the latest firmware and have no such problems running aftermarket toner. > Rossman created a Wiki page breaking down the reported issues, including “printers continue to function with third-party toner but print at degraded quality unless OEM toner is installed.” People are probably overreacting when their knockoff Chinese toner fails in the machine and the Brother rep's official response is "Use genuine toner". Especially when there is an equal number of complaints that are essentially "I bought the cheapest knockoff toner I could and the print quality went down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi... The irony is here is that the mass paranoia created by inferior knockoffs is exactly why the evil printer companies justify their ink/toner restrictions.
- ivell 2y ago
  In my experience, once I replaced the 3rd party toner chip with brother's, it started working fine. Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks...
  - topspin 2y ago
    > Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks... There is nothing "definitely" about that; you could have just replaced a defective, knockoff or recycled chip that doesn't work: the grey market for ICs is absolutely rampant and full of trash. Replacing the chip doesn't prove some firmware check. All of the popular, disposable ICs used in mass market products like toner cartridges are cloned and/or recycled and are widely available at low cost, and problems with these are common.
  - legitster 2y ago
    Again, I've never had problems. It's just as likely a defective or missing chip for that specific manufacturer.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I don't know Brother, but Xerox and HP do their own toner/ink R&D and both have in-house labs. Inks are not "simple science". I don't object people using 3rd party replacements, but if/when quality goes down with 3rd party refills, blaming the manufacturer is the easy way out. I prefer to use original cartridges because even if my printer's color inks are dye based, they do not fade and change colors after 5+ years under normal conditions (I print photos with it sometimes), and I don't know the dye/pigment quality of the 3rd party cartridges yet alone their color rendering. Heck, even something relatively simple like fountain pen inks have thousand different properties, and they all behave slightly differently. Some inks do not work well with some pens, even. Everybody has their favorite pen, without even noticing, too. Thinking that a much more complex assembly to work as equal to its first part counterpart is a bit optimistic. Esp. if you're going for the cheapest.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    I agree with you wholeheartedly and definitely have my favourite (refillable, only refilled with genuine ink) pen. My bias with respect to the headline is that it seems, to me, highly improbable that Brother specifically would pull a stunt like this because their laser printers seem to be bulletproof. Plus their genuine toner cartridges aren’t ridiculously overpriced. HP? Lexmark? I wouldn’t be surprised even a little bit. These two definitely seem like they’re in the razors and blades market. They sell you the printer and then pull all sorts of stunts to get recurring revenue out of you. Epson? They’ve historically been pretty good about not disrupting inkjet refills and recently have started selling inkjets where you just refill them with a relatively cheap bottle of ink. Brother? As far as my own experiences go they seem to be in the business of selling you a printer that’s going to last a decade and then hope you come back for another one down the road. My current HL-2270dw was purchased in 2012. I can still get toner for it at Staples. It still works amazingly well. I might replace it soon but only because I’m starting to need to be able to print 11x17 mechanical drawings. Or maybe I get an Epson inkjet with the refillable ink wells and keep the brother for day to day use.
Aurornis 2y ago
The original source was Louis Rossmann, a YouTuber known both for advocating for Right to Repair and for producing a lot of videos in the rant/complaint genre. I know a lot of people are fans of his content, but this is hardly the first time he's rushed out a video with unverified claims that later turned out to be false/exaggerated. He also has a habit of moving the goalposts when manufacturers actually try to do something good, like when he continued to complain about Apple after they introduced their hardware repair program with loaner equipment. He's very confident in his videos and presents a calm and collected demeanor, but his claims and content feel like they're scraped from the angry parts of social media. Take with a grain of salt.
- dingdingdang 2y ago
  Rossmann also wholesale recommends LibreWolf as a replacement for Firefox with full calm assurance despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity. A prior time he did this was with GrapheneOS which ended in tears when he had epic fallout with the primary maintainer and withdrew all support because.. no surprise.. all the security of that fork is in the pocket of a single individual who may or may not, as according to Rossmann, be stable any given day of the week. We all make mistakes and I hope he will retract if needed but the attention economy is clearly an -attention- economy, not a truthful-content economy..
  - drpossum 2y ago
    I don't see how the anonymity of the maintainers of Librewolf are at all relevant to this discussion. You're just doing a gish gallop argument and undermining your credibility.
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
    > despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity. Librewolf is judged by its track record of being open source, rapidly fixing security issues, and strict stance on user privacy. Why do people always attack these projects on "Hacker" News?
topspin 2y ago
Pleasing. Brother has been one of the few -- or possibly only, I don't know printers well enough to know -- that don't appear to be governed entirely by rent seekers. I've bought exactly one printer in the last 20 years; six month ago: a Brother laser printer. So far, it's great.
- bentcorner 2y ago
  I realize these are just anecdotes but: I have a Canon color laser and while it's quality is to be desired, it functions just fine with 3rd party toner cartridges. I also recently bought an Epson Inkjet mostly because it didn't use cartridges - ink comes in a bottle you fill the tanks with. You can get 3rd party ink bottles but the Epson branded ink bottles are very affordable. Just to contrast the $/mL for ink for the Epson tanks, the Epson costs 25 cents/mL ($16 for 65mL of black ink), while a random HP printer I found costs $9/mL ($18 for 2mL of black ink).
- emorning3 2y ago
  Same here, I've had my Brother HL-L234 for 15 years I think. Bestest cheapest printer I've ever owned except for my first dot matrix. The laser is way quieter though.
mrandish 2y ago
Hopefully, Brother has not in fact succumbed to the dark side. This was a significant story because Brother is known for generally not already doing this shit. Either way, this is yet another reminder to do everything within reason to block your printer from updating it's firmware automatically. If it's working, there's no reason to let it update itself.
criddell 2y ago
It should be easy enough for Ars to buy one of the exact models being complained about and test it. I know reporters try not to be part of the story, but a reliable first hand account would be useful here.
- drpossum 2y ago
  I'd prefer that a credible journal do that as that would be even better. Also the idea of "journalists try not to be part of the story" should preclude product testing on verifiable claims is a really bizarre stance to take.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Louis surely also has enough money to test this. Buy a $100 Brother laser, update to latest firmware. Buy 10 different el cheapo toner carts and test them all.
layer8 2y ago
Some worthwhile comments from the site: “Ive run into this issue before with brother printers when we would bulk buy cheaper toner and drums from third parties at the large school i worked at. It was pretty much always something wrong with the thrid party toner or drum. it especially could get weird when with a toner from one company and a drum from a different one. a toner that was exactly the same from the same company would work with one drum but not with another even if they were from the same place as well so you sometime had to mix and match to see which would work at a decent enough quality” “Brother technician here. Who produces stuff for giving away? Who is working for free? Nobody. Manufacturers want and must earn money. Also they want to make sure their reputation wont get bad. I know companies which only sell dealers the stuff when technicians are trained. I was certified lately for Kyocera. Their toner contains a lubricant for the fuser unit, and some ceramic particles for refreshing the drum unit. Using third party crap from backshops in third world countries contains everything but not the material Kyo has the patent for and spent much research. Same with Brother. They redesingned the fuser unit to last up to 25% longer, to reduce waste. Their toner is refilled in their own factories and every cartridge will return in the refill-cycle as long as the user is sending it back(for free) or hand it to the dealer like my company. I dont find that very bad. Many units end up on my workbench that got destroyed by above crap or wont produce good results. Some machines get destroyed beyond repair. All that for saving a little money and end up with a huge estimate of costs. I can force the color registration in the technician menu(I am not allowed to answer how to get there), but the result wont be really good, just saying. Sooner or later, the cartridges fail, the drum unit is damaged or wont last the designed lifetime. Think of the camera perspective of the user calling the printer crap because the results are bad, this is what Brother and other manufacturers want to avoid. People think and are fucking stupid sometimes. Thats why they took that step.” I don’t think that last comment’s argument supports that Brother is lying, but it does support that using third-party supplies can cause decreasing quality.
gblargg 2y ago
This response is good because it means Brother has basically committed to not doing this, so if it's found they are they'll have to reverse that with an update to save face.
MostlyStable 2y ago
I have a brother printer. I swapped out OEM toner for 3rd party. The printer stopped working with a mysterious error message. Support told me to replace with geniune toner. Taking the DRM chip off my empty (OEM) cartridge and installing into the 3rd part cartridge fixed the issue (and it has remained fixed for many months at this point). Brother is lying. It might be that not all of their printers have this restriction. But I do not see another explanation for my experience other than DRM locking of the printer. -edit- I experienced this with both a HL-L2350DW and an MFC-L2690DW
- DHPersonal 2y ago
  Your third-party toner chip could've been defective.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    Given the number of reports (and the fact that this is common enough that I found a youtube video explaining how to swap the DRM chip), that seems possible, but less likely. These chips are not complicated or hard to make. The prior on failure rates should be extremely low. But the next time I need a toner cartridge, I will make sure to test it before I swap the chip, just to double check.
    - qiqitori 2y ago
      If the chip isn't defective, why did it work with a known good one? If it isn't complicated to make them, why does your chip not work? To answer these questions, we need to know: what do the chips do? Where did the replica cartridge companies get them from? Etc. You said you would test the chip before swapping, how do you do that? Is it just a flash chip? If it is, why are the replica manufacturers not putting the correct information on it?
- legitster 2y ago
  Pulling from a few Reddit threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_aftermarket_toner_still_work_for_the_brother/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_afte... > No firmware blocks them out. Major issues have to do with the chip holder and brothers intellectual property on their floating chip technology. Additionally, when power cycling the chips on aftermarket tend to blow the little battery capacitor in them. 2 main aftermarket chip suppliers and awhile back they made some progress in the chip design. I sell ink and toner for a living and for the past year, have had 1 defective only pertaining to the chips...and considering how often they had trouble before..a solid result. Trouble is most consumers have no idea of the technicals, and just order whatever. Not great for this model. https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarket_brother_toner_no_toner_bad_chip/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarke... > Tbh, if u want an actual fix, it's to get some better toners...for a few years now we have no longer had this issue. It goes back to the chip assembly, and quality of the chip. There is so much variation on these depending on what factory in China they are pumped out of. > If you utilize a remanufactured tn227 with oem floating chip technology, with the current chips that don't seem to short, you'll have no issues. >There really is no suggestion or work around in my book besides better supplies. I am glad this issue is behind us based on the workmanship of the supplies. The issue seems to be that aftermarket manufacturers had problems manufacturing the chips, not that Brother was enforcing DRM on them.
samlinnfer 2y ago
Not surprised. If you looked at the sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262650) for Louis’ claims they seem to be poorly sourced. There could be a variety of reasons why aftermarket toners/inks weren’t recognised apart from intentional bricking.
motohagiography 2y ago
I actually buy a new printer every 18 months because the ink "dries out" and whatever crappy box store I get it from surprisingly doesn't carry the ink cartriges for the printers they sell when I need it, and for another $60 I can print whatever I need. i look at the telemetry their shitty spyware drivers collect and think I should do some vuln research on them just as a matter of principle and to regain some sense of screwing them back, but don't want to make my life about it anymore than I have to. printers are just a scam. consumer electronics companies just produce landfill, and don't get me started on their products.
- Someone1234 2y ago
  Sounds like inkjet problems; laser printers never dry out and print 3-10K pages. You can also buy and store multiple backup toner cartridges because they never dry out, just shake them before install.
OutOfHere 2y ago
This is hilarious because Brother can do it selectively to people it targets, never allowing a tester like Rossman to verify the bricking. The ultimate determinant here is verified user reviews.
threesevenths 2y ago
I read this article overwhelmingly thinking: do a test Ars. The subtext read like “Oh woe is us well just have to wait and see what happens there’s nothing we could do to move this along. We have an editor that has one but theirs isn’t internet connected. Oh if only there was something we could do to give more substantive reporting.” Buy a printer, buy third party toner, and try and confirm or refute the claims.

86 points by AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261933

This seems like a reasonable reply from Brother. I have not seen verification (screenshots, videos) of what is being alleged. I wonder if it is poppin up scary messages or refusing to do some of the troubleshooting steps without a chipped ink cart. Removing old firmware versions from their download site is bullshit though.

legitster 2y ago

I have a brand new color laser printer on the latest firmware and have no such problems running aftermarket toner. > Rossman created a Wiki page breaking down the reported issues, including “printers continue to function with third-party toner but print at degraded quality unless OEM toner is installed.” People are probably overreacting when their knockoff Chinese toner fails in the machine and the Brother rep's official response is "Use genuine toner". Especially when there is an equal number of complaints that are essentially "I bought the cheapest knockoff toner I could and the print quality went down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi... The irony is here is that the mass paranoia created by inferior knockoffs is exactly why the evil printer companies justify their ink/toner restrictions.

ivell 2y ago
In my experience, once I replaced the 3rd party toner chip with brother's, it started working fine. Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks...
- topspin 2y ago
  > Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks... There is nothing "definitely" about that; you could have just replaced a defective, knockoff or recycled chip that doesn't work: the grey market for ICs is absolutely rampant and full of trash. Replacing the chip doesn't prove some firmware check. All of the popular, disposable ICs used in mass market products like toner cartridges are cloned and/or recycled and are widely available at low cost, and problems with these are common.
- legitster 2y ago
  Again, I've never had problems. It's just as likely a defective or missing chip for that specific manufacturer.
bayindirh 2y ago
I don't know Brother, but Xerox and HP do their own toner/ink R&D and both have in-house labs. Inks are not "simple science". I don't object people using 3rd party replacements, but if/when quality goes down with 3rd party refills, blaming the manufacturer is the easy way out. I prefer to use original cartridges because even if my printer's color inks are dye based, they do not fade and change colors after 5+ years under normal conditions (I print photos with it sometimes), and I don't know the dye/pigment quality of the 3rd party cartridges yet alone their color rendering. Heck, even something relatively simple like fountain pen inks have thousand different properties, and they all behave slightly differently. Some inks do not work well with some pens, even. Everybody has their favorite pen, without even noticing, too. Thinking that a much more complex assembly to work as equal to its first part counterpart is a bit optimistic. Esp. if you're going for the cheapest.
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  I agree with you wholeheartedly and definitely have my favourite (refillable, only refilled with genuine ink) pen. My bias with respect to the headline is that it seems, to me, highly improbable that Brother specifically would pull a stunt like this because their laser printers seem to be bulletproof. Plus their genuine toner cartridges aren’t ridiculously overpriced. HP? Lexmark? I wouldn’t be surprised even a little bit. These two definitely seem like they’re in the razors and blades market. They sell you the printer and then pull all sorts of stunts to get recurring revenue out of you. Epson? They’ve historically been pretty good about not disrupting inkjet refills and recently have started selling inkjets where you just refill them with a relatively cheap bottle of ink. Brother? As far as my own experiences go they seem to be in the business of selling you a printer that’s going to last a decade and then hope you come back for another one down the road. My current HL-2270dw was purchased in 2012. I can still get toner for it at Staples. It still works amazingly well. I might replace it soon but only because I’m starting to need to be able to print 11x17 mechanical drawings. Or maybe I get an Epson inkjet with the refillable ink wells and keep the brother for day to day use.

Aurornis 2y ago

The original source was Louis Rossmann, a YouTuber known both for advocating for Right to Repair and for producing a lot of videos in the rant/complaint genre. I know a lot of people are fans of his content, but this is hardly the first time he's rushed out a video with unverified claims that later turned out to be false/exaggerated. He also has a habit of moving the goalposts when manufacturers actually try to do something good, like when he continued to complain about Apple after they introduced their hardware repair program with loaner equipment. He's very confident in his videos and presents a calm and collected demeanor, but his claims and content feel like they're scraped from the angry parts of social media. Take with a grain of salt.

dingdingdang 2y ago
Rossmann also wholesale recommends LibreWolf as a replacement for Firefox with full calm assurance despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity. A prior time he did this was with GrapheneOS which ended in tears when he had epic fallout with the primary maintainer and withdrew all support because.. no surprise.. all the security of that fork is in the pocket of a single individual who may or may not, as according to Rossmann, be stable any given day of the week. We all make mistakes and I hope he will retract if needed but the attention economy is clearly an -attention- economy, not a truthful-content economy..
- drpossum 2y ago
  I don't see how the anonymity of the maintainers of Librewolf are at all relevant to this discussion. You're just doing a gish gallop argument and undermining your credibility.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  > despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity. Librewolf is judged by its track record of being open source, rapidly fixing security issues, and strict stance on user privacy. Why do people always attack these projects on "Hacker" News?

topspin 2y ago

Pleasing. Brother has been one of the few -- or possibly only, I don't know printers well enough to know -- that don't appear to be governed entirely by rent seekers. I've bought exactly one printer in the last 20 years; six month ago: a Brother laser printer. So far, it's great.

bentcorner 2y ago
I realize these are just anecdotes but: I have a Canon color laser and while it's quality is to be desired, it functions just fine with 3rd party toner cartridges. I also recently bought an Epson Inkjet mostly because it didn't use cartridges - ink comes in a bottle you fill the tanks with. You can get 3rd party ink bottles but the Epson branded ink bottles are very affordable. Just to contrast the $/mL for ink for the Epson tanks, the Epson costs 25 cents/mL ($16 for 65mL of black ink), while a random HP printer I found costs $9/mL ($18 for 2mL of black ink).
emorning3 2y ago
Same here, I've had my Brother HL-L234 for 15 years I think. Bestest cheapest printer I've ever owned except for my first dot matrix. The laser is way quieter though.

mrandish 2y ago

Hopefully, Brother has not in fact succumbed to the dark side. This was a significant story because Brother is known for generally not already doing this shit. Either way, this is yet another reminder to do everything within reason to block your printer from updating it's firmware automatically. If it's working, there's no reason to let it update itself.

criddell 2y ago

It should be easy enough for Ars to buy one of the exact models being complained about and test it. I know reporters try not to be part of the story, but a reliable first hand account would be useful here.

drpossum 2y ago
I'd prefer that a credible journal do that as that would be even better. Also the idea of "journalists try not to be part of the story" should preclude product testing on verifiable claims is a really bizarre stance to take.
qingcharles 2y ago
Louis surely also has enough money to test this. Buy a $100 Brother laser, update to latest firmware. Buy 10 different el cheapo toner carts and test them all.

layer8 2y ago

Some worthwhile comments from the site: “Ive run into this issue before with brother printers when we would bulk buy cheaper toner and drums from third parties at the large school i worked at. It was pretty much always something wrong with the thrid party toner or drum. it especially could get weird when with a toner from one company and a drum from a different one. a toner that was exactly the same from the same company would work with one drum but not with another even if they were from the same place as well so you sometime had to mix and match to see which would work at a decent enough quality” “Brother technician here. Who produces stuff for giving away? Who is working for free? Nobody. Manufacturers want and must earn money. Also they want to make sure their reputation wont get bad. I know companies which only sell dealers the stuff when technicians are trained. I was certified lately for Kyocera. Their toner contains a lubricant for the fuser unit, and some ceramic particles for refreshing the drum unit. Using third party crap from backshops in third world countries contains everything but not the material Kyo has the patent for and spent much research. Same with Brother. They redesingned the fuser unit to last up to 25% longer, to reduce waste. Their toner is refilled in their own factories and every cartridge will return in the refill-cycle as long as the user is sending it back(for free) or hand it to the dealer like my company. I dont find that very bad. Many units end up on my workbench that got destroyed by above crap or wont produce good results. Some machines get destroyed beyond repair. All that for saving a little money and end up with a huge estimate of costs. I can force the color registration in the technician menu(I am not allowed to answer how to get there), but the result wont be really good, just saying. Sooner or later, the cartridges fail, the drum unit is damaged or wont last the designed lifetime. Think of the camera perspective of the user calling the printer crap because the results are bad, this is what Brother and other manufacturers want to avoid. People think and are fucking stupid sometimes. Thats why they took that step.” I don’t think that last comment’s argument supports that Brother is lying, but it does support that using third-party supplies can cause decreasing quality.

gblargg 2y ago

This response is good because it means Brother has basically committed to not doing this, so if it's found they are they'll have to reverse that with an update to save face.

MostlyStable 2y ago

I have a brother printer. I swapped out OEM toner for 3rd party. The printer stopped working with a mysterious error message. Support told me to replace with geniune toner. Taking the DRM chip off my empty (OEM) cartridge and installing into the 3rd part cartridge fixed the issue (and it has remained fixed for many months at this point). Brother is lying. It might be that not all of their printers have this restriction. But I do not see another explanation for my experience other than DRM locking of the printer. -edit- I experienced this with both a HL-L2350DW and an MFC-L2690DW

DHPersonal 2y ago
Your third-party toner chip could've been defective.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  Given the number of reports (and the fact that this is common enough that I found a youtube video explaining how to swap the DRM chip), that seems possible, but less likely. These chips are not complicated or hard to make. The prior on failure rates should be extremely low. But the next time I need a toner cartridge, I will make sure to test it before I swap the chip, just to double check.
  - qiqitori 2y ago
    If the chip isn't defective, why did it work with a known good one? If it isn't complicated to make them, why does your chip not work? To answer these questions, we need to know: what do the chips do? Where did the replica cartridge companies get them from? Etc. You said you would test the chip before swapping, how do you do that? Is it just a flash chip? If it is, why are the replica manufacturers not putting the correct information on it?
legitster 2y ago
Pulling from a few Reddit threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_aftermarket_toner_still_work_for_the_brother/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_afte... > No firmware blocks them out. Major issues have to do with the chip holder and brothers intellectual property on their floating chip technology. Additionally, when power cycling the chips on aftermarket tend to blow the little battery capacitor in them. 2 main aftermarket chip suppliers and awhile back they made some progress in the chip design. I sell ink and toner for a living and for the past year, have had 1 defective only pertaining to the chips...and considering how often they had trouble before..a solid result. Trouble is most consumers have no idea of the technicals, and just order whatever. Not great for this model. https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarket_brother_toner_no_toner_bad_chip/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarke... > Tbh, if u want an actual fix, it's to get some better toners...for a few years now we have no longer had this issue. It goes back to the chip assembly, and quality of the chip. There is so much variation on these depending on what factory in China they are pumped out of. > If you utilize a remanufactured tn227 with oem floating chip technology, with the current chips that don't seem to short, you'll have no issues. >There really is no suggestion or work around in my book besides better supplies. I am glad this issue is behind us based on the workmanship of the supplies. The issue seems to be that aftermarket manufacturers had problems manufacturing the chips, not that Brother was enforcing DRM on them.

samlinnfer 2y ago

Not surprised. If you looked at the sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262650) for Louis’ claims they seem to be poorly sourced. There could be a variety of reasons why aftermarket toners/inks weren’t recognised apart from intentional bricking.

motohagiography 2y ago

I actually buy a new printer every 18 months because the ink "dries out" and whatever crappy box store I get it from surprisingly doesn't carry the ink cartriges for the printers they sell when I need it, and for another $60 I can print whatever I need. i look at the telemetry their shitty spyware drivers collect and think I should do some vuln research on them just as a matter of principle and to regain some sense of screwing them back, but don't want to make my life about it anymore than I have to. printers are just a scam. consumer electronics companies just produce landfill, and don't get me started on their products.

Someone1234 2y ago
Sounds like inkjet problems; laser printers never dry out and print 3-10K pages. You can also buy and store multiple backup toner cartridges because they never dry out, just shake them before install.

OutOfHere 2y ago

This is hilarious because Brother can do it selectively to people it targets, never allowing a tester like Rossman to verify the bricking. The ultimate determinant here is verified user reviews.

threesevenths 2y ago

I read this article overwhelmingly thinking: do a test Ars. The subtext read like “Oh woe is us well just have to wait and see what happens there’s nothing we could do to move this along. We have an editor that has one but theirs isn’t internet connected. Oh if only there was something we could do to give more substantive reporting.” Buy a printer, buy third party toner, and try and confirm or refute the claims.