Brother printer gang printing with their tears of joy.
I got a Brother with the big chonker carts, I usually only print once every 5-6 months and I’m still g2g like 5-6 years in.
I gotta run a cleaning cycle each time usually but that’s perfectly understandable haha.
Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
What !! Really? That’s sad
If you still own a HP printer, it’s your own fault. Sorry. Got an Canon with liquid refill, loved it, equipped my company with it & recommended it to everyone I know. It’s not even expensive & the quality is impeccable. Plus: no problems whatsoever over Linux.
EDIT: CANON, not Epson. I’m distracted sometimes. Canon PIXMA G4511, sub 300 Eur.
Wait till you find out it purges the lines every print, and while you can replace the purge sponge, the system doesn’t always have a “reset the purge sponge” option. And the ones that do use a rather unknown button combination that may or may not work.
I have an ecotank, no linux support.
Sorry, that happens when I do too many things at the same time. Canon. I’m talking of the Canon G4511 liquid refill.
My epson ecotank l6490 works like charm with Linux…
For me too with wifi, and the standarised network printing 🤣 but not when directly connected to pc with usb.
My FIL owns an HP with a subscription. I’ve given up on the things he wastes money on; most of them he’s not really technically savvy enough to implement anyway. (And, yes, buying a printer and getting it installed may exceed his technical abilities)
I have one of those, it won’t work with my Linux though :/
Now I fucked it up, my finger wrote "Epson x while my brain thought “Canon”… I was talking the Canon G4511.
I only use it for scanning now. I was mad when my parents bought a new one.
Education is the key.
Breaking news: Printer company behaves like printer companies always have. User hostile.
This just in: Capitalism works
If like me you don’t print much but still need a printer occasionally, get a laser printer (possibly a scanner multifunction, since it can be handy to scan your receipts), and just buy your cartridges normally. Laser toner won’t dry up like ink does, so you end up paying less for your infrequent prints in the long run.
Go to your local goodwill/thrift store and check for laser printers.
Get a laser printer, with toner cart, for less than 20, often less than 10, bucks.
Yeah but, how big are they?
Old ones can be big, yeah.
Depends.
Though I suspect what you can find used for a good price will generally be larger.
You have a scanner in your pocket, just a reminder.
It doesn’t do as good a job, unless there’s something I could be doing better.
Adobe Scan works as good as a scanner if you use their cropping system to square up the page afterwards.
It’s probably down to the scanner app. I’m using CamScanner.
Tiny Scanner for Android
Ink subscription is a bad descriptor
You pay per page, if you have extra ink leftover then you don’t have access to it
Isn’t that worse? It’s hard to say at these levels of corporate nastiness but I was surprised they could go lower
Yes, the ink subscription is their corporate speak
Seriously, fuck HP.
HP actually has a brilliant business strategy.
-
First get a huge customer base via cheap ass product
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Remove the customers who care about quality
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Remove the customers who care about reliability
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Remove the customers who care about price
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Remove the customers who pay attention to their monthly bills
voila, you have like 3 people left who you can charge infinite money for a lump of shit. Infinite profit margins
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The only thing that still might save printers is competition.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit? They even have label printers which allow third party labels.
There are inkjet printers now from multiple other brands which are great too and allow full refills.
Just don’t buy HP it’s that easy.
Dude. Brother was founded in 1908.
1908 was … like 20 years ago.
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit?
You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates outright blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Now, that even Brother has turned to the dark side, I really don’t know what printer to recommend other than older/used Brothers with firmware updates disabled.
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Also, laser printers don’t dry out. Don’t need a subscription.
“They cost money because they save money”
My 1996 Lexmark laser just died this summer. Fortunately I inherited an HP laser (older one) with wifi. Works like a champ.
Picked up a used color laser for $50 a couple years ago.
With all the Big Brains at HP making up all this atrocious bullshit you’d think one of them would say “why don’t we buy all the competition like the large media companies are doing? It’s not like the US will stop us, hell they’ll give us subsidies or something.”
I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for Brother, I want to add one for Ricoh.
I bought a B/W laser printer from Ricoh (213w IIRC) a decade ago for under 40 bucks and a new generic, no-name Amazon toner refill for 25 like 5 years ago. Printed thousands of pages, just sitting in a corner under the stairs.
Bonus: it uses Wi-Fi (so anyone in the house can print) and is compatible with generic PCL drivers in Linux.
Any laser printer is better for occasional printing. Ink doesn’t dry up, no nozzles to get clogged. It just sits there waiting to be used and prints beautifully when you do. I’m so done with ink jets.
“Ink doesn’t dry up” maybe you meant toner.
Well, ink can’t dry up if it doesn’t have any ink to dry up.
I think they don’t make the home printers anymore.
That sucks, but maybe second-hand can be found, even cheaper.
I am guessing people aren’t printing as much as they used to and the prices will just go up eventually.
Also, fuck printers, and HP specifically.
My brother laser jet still happily prints.
the way you phrase it I thought your brother is a laser jet lol
Don’t be silly. The laser jet ain’t my brother. That’s reserved for Brother P-Touch ❤️❤️
Do not update its firmware and disable auto-updates:
The cheapest plan is .10 euro a month per page if you only print 10 pages. (.99 euro, max 10 pages). Just pay a library or kinkos at that point!
they charge you PER PAGE??!
No, you get billed X euro per month, which gives you the “right” to print up to X pages each month. Even worse.
Laughs in Epson Ecotank
laughs in off-brand toner sitting in my Brother
Laughs in BizHub color laser copier that fell off a truck
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God, the amount of times I’ve had to explain the EcoTank vs HP math to customers in my store, and then STILL have them pick an HP is fucking baffling.
My deepest condolences - the absolutely dire mathematical skills of the purchasing public never cease to horrify me.
They are both terrible. HP for obvious reasons, Epson for its self destruct timers.
If they want a third option, I usually recommend Brother, and even more I tend to recommend used/refurbished. We just don’t carry those in my store.
Brother used to be the best choice, until ~2020 when they, too, went over to the dark side and secretly blocked third party toners via firmware auto-updates.
Not sure if any non-shitty printer makers are left, there’s only so long that you can recommend “try to find an old Brother printer and disable firmware updates” is an effective choice.
Until the software counter decides that the waste ink pad is full and the thing blows a software fuse.
Epson’s official solution to a full pad is to throw out your printer and buy a new one - literally a printer with a self destruct timer. Not very “eco”.
Cursory research about this seems you can replace it yourself for $10. Are you sure about this?
Yes, the hardware (a cheap sponge, essentially) that the counter “protects” is easily replaced for little money - but you still can’t just reset the counter.
https://epson.com/support/epson-ink-pads-reset-utility-faqs
For “North American users” Epson now offers a tool to reset the self destruct counter one, single, time.
There are third parties now, that offer a reset of the software destruct counter, for a fee.
The fact that a printer sold as “Eco” has a software self destruct that the user requires an unlock key to reset - an occurrence frequent enough to make it a profitable business for third parties to sell such keys - should tell you all you need to know about these printers.
I couldn’t confirm, but there supposedly are more premium models with user serviceable waste ink tanks that don’t have a self destruct, but most consumer models very much have this limitation.
Thanks for the info, that’s absurd. I don’t know why more people are talking about this then.
dell
brother
I pity the fool that doesn’t listen to the Hulkster.
Anything corporations think you can’t do without will be raised until enough people have no choice but to stop buying them, then they’ll hold it there.
