Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?
Epson inkjets with refillable tanks probably.
Depending on the frequency of your printing, they can suck as well. Chronically clogged nozzles are maddening.
You can run a power clean cycle which should help, then just replace the foam pads they saturate with ink for the cleaning
They’re not perfect but they’re still the most consumer friendly option on the market at this point
After talking to support 15 times, they never suggested replacing anything, and power clean wasn’t enough. I’ve long since destroyed the thing out of malignant rage and turned to libraries and copy shops, but it’s good to know that there might have been a solution.
Wait until copy shops start raising their prices cause nobody has printers anymore and you have no choice but to use them
Still cost me less than a new printer every two years if they multiplied their prices by 10.
yup and your not using a printer every single day.
a personal printer/ink is far more expensive.
Not for me, 40€ toner cartridge gets me 10k pages, already have over 80k pages printed so the printer paid itself multiple times compared to a copyshop
Aliexpress syringe cleaning kit
Yeah, that’s true. That was a pain in the ass when my wife needed good color accuracy.
This. My partner’s office is stuck with “it has to be inkjet and not toner", and on January their printer got clogged…
Inkjet is great, for photo printing regularly. For absolutely every other situation a laser printer is better.
ink jet ones are so messy, and it waste a ton of ink.
I have the 2850. Been using it for a couple years now. Print maybe once a month. Nozzles get clogged periodically but you run the automated cleaning process and it’s back to working again.
I don’t print that often but I do have a calendar event to tell me to print something monthly. This could be a nice side project for someone to write a program that sends a print to your printer on a schedule to keep the heads clear. Wastes paper but at least the heads won’t dry out.
I reuse old paper when I do this.
Did they ever make the excess ink parts user replaceable?
That they weren’t in some models kept me from getting one when I was in the market a few years ago.
That printer is a nightmare. But financially makes sense.
The printer has the same ink problems, clogged, runs out easy, can’t print b&w when missing a color. But I can buy random ink.
I don’t know if it matters, but I just bought a Canon laser printer. Didn’t see anywhere about forced subscription options for toner.
we bought laser canon printer to, toner cartridge doesnt use color, so if you want color you would need an ink printer, its better to print a library or a printer shop anyways. we are using an MF class one?
I have a color canon laser printer scanner.
That’s actually what I bought, too.
I’ve got a Lexmark laser printer, and while there are cheaper subscription toners, you can pay the higher price for normal toner, and buy compatibles, for now at least.
you seem to have gotten a smart printer, new ones have that one, we got a canon laser.
I don’t at all feel vindicated, but my Brother printer is the worst printer I ever owned (this was 20 years ago admittedly). Absolute hunk of junk with nothing but problems. I’ve always wondered why they were so well recommended online.
Could have been a Friday afternoon one. The one I have is a workhorse that could print on bark using toner made of charcoal and dust.
use a laser printer? preferabally the ones that doesnt use updates or any newer versions.
Kyocera.
Also Japanese, and plenty of cheap generic toners available online. They even publish Linux drivers.
ill have to recommend buying old refurbished printers
In case anyone was thinking this applies only to inkjet printers: no, it ONLY seems to apply to laser printers – the thing that Brother used to be known for. Where the article says “ink”, they mean “toner”. There is no ink in a laser printer.
Could this be anything related to government printer tracking requirements?
I believe that only applies to ink jet. You can hardly make secret dots in B&W.
There is something similar for B&W laser printing. Text is never 100% black, but rastered. You can digitally hide a whole lot of information in microraster on a page of printed text.
Text is never 100% black, but rastered.
Does “rastered” mean the image is mapped onto a very fine grid and each square is given a 0-100 value for intensity of ink? I looked it up, and it seemed like the squares are given a binary value, but this is nowhere near my wheelhouse and I’m honestly not sure I understood the Wikipedia page, let alone the references
It is actually quite easy: “Black” print does not mean that 100% of all pixels are actually set. Print pixels are never perfect squares, so even if the printer only prints half of the dots, the print is still dark enough. If not, it could print 70% or 80%, but lets stick to 50% for ease of argument.
So instead of
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXit would print
X X X X X X X X X X X XFor you, it would still be a “roughly black” spot (keep in mind these 8x3 pixel are 0.032mm wide and 0.012mm high on good laser printer).
Would you notice if the pattern was slightly different, like
X X X X X XX X X X X XMake a bonanza of those small changes nobody can see, and you can hide thosands of bytes of data in those patterns on any printed page.
Wait, I thought that’s something that only color laser do with yellow toner…
Edit: Possibly
It’s like every company that wasn’t complete shit just suddenly decided to…go to complete shit.
If regulators don’t stop them from doing it, the CEO’s of publicly traded companies will get the boot from the board for not doing it. They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
We need laws to stop this, but the politicians are all bribed not to.
They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
They don’t – that’s a cargo-cult misunderstanding of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co – but it’s so widely believed I guess it might as well be true.
If the people sitting on the Supreme Court believe it, and I believe the majority of those shitbags do, then that is unfortunately the law as it stands.
But when the law is unethical, I don’t see why we should be lawful.
Dude, Brother is not even an US company - like most big printer companies it’s Japanese and traded at the Tokyo stock exchange.
So… You’re arguments are invalid and only show your americentric world view.
Well, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as the way Costco mostly operates. Being the good guys has a lot of brand value. With a little nurturing of the vast propaganda machine known as advertising, that could be improved.
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
That’s what happens when the government allows it openly.
It’s like every company that was
n’t completeplaying the social good will game and didn’t appear at a casual glance to be shit just suddenly decided to…goto complete shit.masks off, because they saw it might finally be acceptable to be ghouls again.Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I FTFY. Wish it weren’t so, but that’s definitely what it looks like…
The mask of humanity fall[s] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
- The Deserter, Disco Elysium
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Game is such a fucking gem. I gotta do a replay soon.
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Cuts into profit margins pretending to not be a threat to the continued existence of the species and ecosystem as a whole. Gotta buy that 15th mega-yacht.
Something something, I’ll bring the BBQ sauce.
With the current US government, there’s far more roadblocks to running a company ethically than turning it to absolute shit
Brother is a Japanese company.
deleted by creator
The government has mostly turned a blind eye to dark pattern business for years, and now the president is openly saying that he encourages it and wants companies to step up their game. Of course things are going to get worse, especially now where everyone will have forgotten this by the next election, so it’ll get to stay as “the norm”
You were the chosen one! 😭
They had two things going for them… Decent linux support and non-shitty DRM ink/toner
I have a Ricoh that doesn’t give me any problems, works out of the box with Linux pcl6 drivers. Bought a third party toner cartridge like 8 years ago, still using it today. It’s an old model, but worth checking newer ones.
I Remeber something about that being buyitforlife on reddit, would you consider posting it to !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
I suggest whoever has old firmware files to upload them to the Internet Archive (if they allow those).
Internet Archive is extremely lax in what it allows
Got this link from reddacted
Brother used to be the good guys… Damn.
Right? I used to recommend friends and family invest in a brother laser printer instead of inkjet, especially if they didn’t need color
Et tu Brother?
These motherfuckers are actively making tech as a whole less secure by destroying any trust the public may have had in firmware updates.
Urgent security fixes are gonna go unpatched on a lot of shit because consumers are seeing more and more firmware or software updates actively making things WORSE.
Definitely true. I’ve been putting off an upgrade of my NAS because they have randomly decided to completely remove the video streaming software that came with it when I bought it. So infuriating.
Tell me you are using synology without telling me you are using synology
Time to DIY.
I use a regular Linux system and set stuff up manually, but there are options that do more out of the box if you don’t know how (and don’t want to learn) to DIY the software.
I’m working on that. I have little previous experience with Linux and self hosting but I’m slowly making progress. I now have switched my gaming PC over to Linux almost full time. I know I can switch to Jellyfin for video streaming but it’s been a lower priority to figure out compared with other services I’m trying to understand how to self host.
Rock on, you’re killing it! Please don’t hesitate to ask questions either here or a place like !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
Id recommend Proxmox on a cheap n100 nuc.
Makes it easy to spin up VMs, take snapshots of them, tinker and break them, then roll back to the snapshot
That sucks.
Urgent security fixes are gonna go unpatched
I don’t understand why a printer would ever need an “urgent security fix”. Or a software update for that matter.
… Because products can contain security exploits, and if not patched could leave homes and businesses vulnerable.
This shouldn’t need to be explained, but here we are.
The fun part is the security exploits often come from things like DRM ink cartridges that allows an attack to come from the goddamn cartridge!
Wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t include a serial connection to the cartridge in the first place!
Oh hey I can think of a solution to improve security here!
Depends on whether you absolutely need your printers connected to the internet or not.
Printer manufacturers: Of course your printers need to be connected to the Internet… For… Reasons…
Any networked device can be used to gain access to the rest of the network (kind of).
And once again the only available good tech is old 2nd hand.
Yep. Just getting ready to replace the color laser printer I bought almost 10 years ago. I had been considering a new Brother before this but looks like I’m going the 2nd hand route again (last one was an open box HP from microcenter for $200 lol)
I got a tiny HP laser from an old job. Must be 15+ years old, runs perfectly and toner is $20 for god knows how many pages.
Looks like nobody can or is willing to do decent printers anymore. I’ll run my Laserjet 1100 till it dies, then I’m done with printing.
If Brother starts playing that game, they will lose. Why bother buying their considerably more expensive printers over those of HP if they are going to be just as bad in the third party ink department?
Brother losing all competitive advantage they had via reputation. Doing a very big 180 and reversing the changes and commiting to no do t his BS is the only way to undo this
They must’ve hired some new analysts that said “hey, people are willing to accept less! Why are we doing more?”
It’s up to the people to prove them wrong, but that usually doesn’t happen :\
Losing*
Nice, Brother was the last one standing in my mind.
I’m glad I have an IoT vlan without internet access. Nothing is allowed to phone home here.
10 years later
Printers now include embedded cellular modems as backup for OTA firmware updates, ink subscriptions and telemetry.Printer Faraday cage.
Dude!
Thats’s a shame, I always considered brother one of the better makers of paper manglers.
“You were supposed to be the one”
“IT WAS SAID YOU WOULD DESTROY THE COMPETITION, NOT JOIN THEM”
Proton, Mozilla, Brother
Its not gonna stop there
😓
Every single company.
All it takes is your favorite company to suddenly be run by a CEO who wants to maximize profits or increase shareholder value, or worse, think they’re God’s Gift to the World. Or in the flip side, they’re fighting for survival so they have to make scummy decisions to keep afloat.
Pro tip: don’t have favorite companies, have favorite products. And don’t assume the next gen of your favorite product will be good.
The issues with each are very different:
- Proton - CEO sucks and for some reason is sucking up to Trump; products are still good
- Mozilla - PR team sucks, though AFAIK the product is still fine, and you can use a fork to avoid the PR/legal team
- Brother - actively screwing you
