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.
Aliexpress syringe cleaning kit
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.
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.
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.
That printer is a nightmare. But financially makes sense.
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.
use a laser printer? preferabally the ones that doesnt use updates or any newer versions.
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.
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.
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 [email protected]
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.
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…
With the current US government, there’s far more roadblocks to running a company ethically than turning it to absolute shit
That’s what happens when the government allows it openly.
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
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.
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
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?
“You were supposed to be the one”
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.
Et tu Brother?
I think its time we deprecate most forms of printing. Clearly corporations cannot be trusted to operate these kinds of companies.
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
I’m curious how this will go down in Australia. Seems like a pretty solid slam dunk refund, oh the product doesn’t work as advertised anymore?
Cool, I’ve had this for 5 years and now I’d also like a full refund under Australian Consumer Law.
Motherfuckers.
(I don’t actually own a printer)
if the update doesn’t allow the printer to calibrate with this aftermarket ink the cheaper carts become basically unusable
This isn’t true. It just means you have to do the registration manually.
This is scummy behavior for sure, but it’s also being exaggerated for clicks. You can read the sources linked in the wiki to see exactly what users are reporting.
Brother loosing all competitive advantage they had via reputation. Doing a very big 180 and reversing the changes and commiting to not 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*
Foss printer when?
i came across this explanation of it, haven’t verified it directly but he seems to make good content:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZX8OaZZDlM8
he says theres identification each time you print using the yellow ink, and basically is a counterfeit currency countermeasure
id kill to have a foss print setup though
I know about the yellow dot thingy. Literally metadata on paper for no reason imo. I highly doubt a person could make a realistic fake through the use of a conventional printer.
In the UK, we don’t even have paper money anymore, it’s plastic… Maybe it’s more of a USA skill issue, too?
