[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
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Oh, this one stings.
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I've been saying that for a couple of years now. They started fucking with third party ink at least a year ago
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Are there no good guys left?
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Well, whatever that update was, I probably installed it (assuming it's the same here in Japan).
Use pen & paper β Do you really need a printer?
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it's printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
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O, damnit. Not the last bastion of hope!
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...I remember Brother intnetionally making their stuff VERY user servicable.
Wha happen
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Well, whatever that update was, I probably installed it (assuming it's the same here in Japan).
Use pen & paper β Do you really need a printer?
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it's printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5Β’ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I'll be going there.
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Damn, Brother was the only company left I was happy to blind purchase from by name alone.
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Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There's nothing to lock out.
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...I remember Brother intnetionally making their stuff VERY user servicable.
Wha happen
Line go up
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Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays π«€ to prevent things like this happening.
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Okay, so after reading this, they're not specifically degrading print quality, they're just making you do the alignment manually. This is probably legal, but still scummy.
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Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There's nothing to lock out.
Only if you can keep it working for ten consecutive minutes. I went through three of them under warranty until my warranty expired, then Epson told me to fuck off.
If have a Canon color laser now. If that conks out and everything on the market by then is locked out shit I'll just convert my 3D printer to a plotter, or maybe go back to clay tablets.
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Glad I've got an Brother laser that has no network connectivity.
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Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There's nothing to lock out.
Canon has a tank printer line too. Absolutely recommend any tank printer (you'll have to check reviews for specifics obviously).
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Ugh.
$100 mono laser printer
Well, you probably aren't getting a $100 laser printer unless they've got a razor-and-blades model. I definitely paid more than $100 for the mono laser I had. I don't know what printers out there are gonna be fine with third-party ink (or toner), but any that do are going to cost more, because they aren't relying on ink sales to make the printer business viable.
He says that he doesn't know what to recommend any more, now that Brother has started doing this too.
I understand that Epson has some inkjet printers that don't use ink cartridges. You just pour more from a bottle into the tank. Like, they can't implement a lockout, and there are other manufacturers that sell ink for them.
kagis
"Ecotank".
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ecotank
But if you want those, they're gonna cost more than printers that are using the razor-and-blades model and expecting to make their money on the ink.
https://epson.com/For-Home/Printers/Inkjet/c/h110
There's a list of their home inkjet printers. Notice how the "EcoTank" ones cost more than the non-EcoTank ones.
Like, one way or another, the printer manufacturer is gonna make their money. Either it's not razor-and-blades model, in which case the printer is gonna cost more but the ink is cheaper, or it's razor-and-blades and you get a cheap printer but pay more in ink and the printer manufacturer will do everything they can to lock out anyone else from selling ink for the thing.
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I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, itβs printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
If we want to get pedantic, it is possible to get a pen plotter. There are fountain pen compatible pen plotters, and the whole fountain pen world has a healthy and mature third-party ink market.
Now, that's not simply a drop-in replacement for a regular printer, starting with the fact that you need to use monoline fonts so that the plotter traces out what a hand would rather than filling it in, and that a plotter just can't produce all the same stuff. The speed is going to be abysmal compared to a conventional printer for virtually any image. And I don't think know if there's anyone who has built one with a paper feed system (there are large-format pen plotters that can work with a continuous-feed roll of paper, but I don't know if those can handle fountain pens. I don't know of a fountain pen plotter that can just take a ream of A4 or US Letter pages and then handle those correctly.
But you can, strictly-speaking, have a computer create output that uses ink from the fountain pen world.
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I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5Β’ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I'll be going there.
Ehhh. I rarely print anything, but I really don't want to give up the ability to print things at any time I want.
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Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays π«€ to prevent things like this happening.
Honestly, that's not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including -- as Rossman points out -- making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn't mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.
Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the
xzattack -- the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up.The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value.
