[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company

[catloaf@lemm.ee]

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.

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

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.

[harsh3466@lemmy.ml]

Glad I've got an Brother laser that has no network connectivity.

[kickmeelmo@sopuli.xyz]

Canon has a tank printer line too. Absolutely recommend any tank printer (you'll have to check reviews for specifics obviously).

[tal@lemmy.today]

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.

[tal@lemmy.today]

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).

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.

[tal@lemmy.today]

Ehhh. I rarely print anything, but I really don't want to give up the ability to print things at any time I want.

[tal@lemmy.today]

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 xz attack -- 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.

[cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de]

How recent does the printer have to be for them to do this?
The two that I have are old and the toner cartridges don't even have a chip in them, so I doubt they could tell if the toner is 3rd party.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

We need an open source RepRap printer. Like, I wonder if this thing could be reverse engineered, given they still make the ink cartridge/head units for it.

[tal@lemmy.today]

Strictly-speaking, in this case, it's not the ability to be network-connected that's at issue, but rather the ability to push updates to firmware.

I don't know what type of computer you have it connected to, but Linux has a system that will automatically update firmware on attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.

$ sudo fwupdtool get-devices

Will show you a list of managed devices.

I'm sure that Windows and MacOS have comparable schemes.

On Linux, I'm sure that you can blacklist a device for updates.

I'd guess that it's possible to get one of those dedicated USB print servers. Those probably don't support updating firmware on an attached printer. I might have some questions as to how much I'd trust a no-name one of those on my network itself, but...

[alexstarfire@lemmy.world]

Funny you mention apps. I turned auto-update off for all of them on my phone because I got tired of functionality being removed. A couple force updates after you get too far behind. Been alright so far, but it's been less than half a year ago we'll see how it goes in the long run. Security is obviously taking a hit by doing this.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

I actually bought a little tablet PC so that I could carry a working copy of FreeCAD into my workshop rather than print out plans and such. My little Epson printer does very little.

[plasticexistence@lemmy.world]

Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous

[gofsckyourself@lemmy.world]

Summary for those who can't watch at the moment?

[tal@lemmy.today]

Yeah, that can cover some cases (also, throwing data on a smartphone, which most people have and keep with them most of the time) but I think that for most people, electronic devices still aren't a complete replacement for paper.

• Power. Paper just needs some kind of light in the environment.

• Shareability. Okay, there are schemes to let one transfer data from phone to phone, but it's hard to compete with how intuitive and universal handing some paper to someone is.

• Battery. Just keeping the display on a phone or laptop, even if you aren't far away from power, on to keep the page visible tends to consume power, and many devices can't keep something visible all day. I'll concede that eInk displays can cover some of that.

• Disposability. Paper is pretty cheap, and if a piece of paper gets soaked in water or whatever, it's no big loss.

• Use of paper in the physical world. I can do things like create stencils on a sheet of paper and cut them out. It's a device that lets a digital computer interact with the outside world beyond purely showing information.

We're a lot closer to the paperless world than we were when I first started hearing the phrase "paperless office", and a lot of documents never leave electronic form, but I still do occasionally want to use paper.

[tal@lemmy.today]

Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don't weight ongoing costs as much -- happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.

For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn't have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.

What Rossman's saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected laser printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He says that he doesn't know of a type of printer to recommend now.

He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream.

[harsh3466@lemmy.ml]

Shit. I didn't even think of that. I'm using fedora. Tomorrow I'll be blocking firmware updates for the printer. Thank you for pointing that out.

[f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz]

I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don't buy Brother if you want that feature, either.

[f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz]

My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter.