341–350 of 485 posts
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It’s kind of a pain to go to the drug store at 9pm to Print your kids solar system project. Just saying
Sounds like something that would be pretty trivial to solve by a ever so slight application of advance planning?
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I do not understand how the other printer brands are even in business when Brother is an option. I feel like their reputation for being the best in the consumer space would have spread far and wide by now. I have been able to scan all of my documents with their MFC line directly to my Dropbox (or box or drive or onedrive) account for over 6 years now, AND Brother Web Connect automatically OCR’s them.
I have a Brother inkjet all-in-one, and it works great, BUT... Problem is that it needs to "clean" the print heads frequently. It uses up ink every time it cleans. So if you're not printing frequently, 95% of your ink will be used up by letting the printer do its thing. I tried just leaving it unplugged for a long time once, and sure enough the print head clogged. It took a lot of printing and cleaning (and wasted in…
As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer. And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers. Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Exam…
I was fortunate enough to buy a 1990s laser printer. Back then companies were still short sighted enough¹ to build them to last. It's an Apple Laserwiter 12/640PS. It's still chugging along today, with 64Mb of memory no less! [1]: Recurring revenue wise that is.
I’m tempted to track down an old LaserWriter myself, those things don’t quit. Are you able to find toner for yours reliably?
For some reason I enabled the ‘auto refill’ on my new canon printer because that is what our office did (somehow). Don’t do that: it kept making purchases because it didn’t receive the ink as fast as it expected due to supply chain issues. It took a long time for Canon to cancel the orders that had never left the factory and give our hundreds of dollars back. It’s a fun story at least!
There's an onion article in there somewhere. Honestly, giving a money grubbing printer a credit card and ordering powers might make a decent analogy to parts of the supply chain issues at large.
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There's an onion article in there somewhere. Honestly, giving a money grubbing printer a credit card and ordering powers might make a decent analogy to parts of the supply chain issues at large.
Yup. I mean, I've heard HP has some silly "ink as a service" program, but honestly, giving credit card details to a printer? That sounds extremely unwise (and the fact it's even possible says something about the world we live in, and not nice things).
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Canon was actually on my short list of printer vendors I would have recommended people to use. Now it's just down to Brother and Kyocera I guess.
Even Brother is dodgy, depending on the model. I have a low-midrange Brother B&W laser printer that worked great until one day it decided to stop accepting print jobs, both via network and USB… it just stalls at “processing” and never proceeds. Googling around it seems like people with various Brother models have seen this behavior.
It could also have to do with the detail/complexity of your document. Intricate PDFs or high-dpi graphics can overwhelm low-midrange printers. (I once had a print job that took the printer half an hour to process.) On some printers you can even install additional RAM.
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Accidental failures are one thing, deliberately user hostile design is another.
Parent is insinuating this may be deliberate sabotage on Brother’s end, to convince users to buy a new model after a while
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The exception is if you print photos. There’s not really a good alternative to inkjet, except RA-4, which is out of reach for consumers.
Every Walmart can print photos in a hour for cheap, and if that’s not an option Shutterfly and friends are always doing sales (or free with shipping prints).
As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer. And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers. Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Exam…
cat myfile.pdf |nc printername 9100