Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink • Hacker News Board

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#481

Post by coldtea » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 12:17 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #471

coldtea wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A photo service is just somebody else who owns printers and charges you a markup. It's somebody else who owns much hiqher quality printers that you would buy, and who charges everybody for a markup (so it gets spread). It's usually cheaper to print in such a service than to buy printer+ink+paper and print - and with better results.

> It's somebody else who owns much hiqher quality printers that you would buy,… This is just completely untrue. What kind of machines do you think they have back there? Photo labs typically have two types of machines: something like a Noritsu which prints onto standard RA-4 paper with lasers, and ordinary inkjet printers, like the ones from Epson or Canon (like what I’ve purchased for myself—I’ve occasionally seen th…

Not sure what kind of photo labs you work with. I'm not talking about the corner store who does photocopies and prints.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#482

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #477

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways we bring it on ourselves by being such cheapskates. People post reviews in the app stores because they think $2 is expensive for an app then wonder why they end up with free software that sells their private data to the highest bidder.

I never had a problem paying for good software. The issue is that the paid software very often isn't better, that's why many people started gravitating towards the free apps, me included. Nobody likes being scammed even if it's just for $2.

Take a look at any high quality non-free product and you will see reviews complaining about the price.

This isn't about not wanting to be scammed, this is about people wanting something for nothing.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#483

Post by rstuart4133 » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

egberts1 wrote: post #47

Brothers LaserJet. No malware, no adware, no funky drivers; just colored, WiFi, LP-protocol, multi-tray PCL and PS support. Best thing since sliced bread.

> Brothers LaserJet. No malware, no adware, no funky drivers; just colored, WiFi, LP-protocol, multi-tray PCL and PS support.

This is all true, but it seems lasers have had their day for the occasional use printer. We have an Epson EcoTank, and all manufacturers have equivalents. The hardware has been absolutely flawless - 12k pages of ink in the box, not a single jam after 10k pages, ink is something like $20 for 10k pages and child could refill the think without making a mess. They make you pay for the privilege of not nickel and diming you after buying it by charging at least $200 more upfront, but I'd take that any day.

But, for Epson at least, the simplicity of pcl6 / ps isn't there. You have to use their drivers, which often only exist for Windows. That shouldn't happen because they support "driverless printing", which is really just another printing format that supplants pcl6 / ps. They all support "driverless printing" because they need to check the "print from mobile" tick box, and they can only get it by supporting this new format.

In theory, this should be great for open source because this new format started life as the internal format used by CUPS called "CUPS Raster" [0]. It was then taken up by some mob called the "Printer Working Group", made more device independent, and renamed "PWG Raster", which CUPS supports. In practice, so far, I've never had the joy of seeing a driverless printer to work with CUPS - despite the fact that phones do work with the printers. It needs more time in the oven, I guess.

Mindboggling. Here we are, after 30 years of trying to come up with standard way of doing the apparently simple job of telling a printer how to put ink on paper, and we still need more time in the oven. Unbelievable.

[0] https://www.cups.org/doc/api-raster.html

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#484

Post by yawaramin » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 4:29 AM UTC

teakettle42 wrote: post #476

yawaramin wrote: post #475

The era of printers is over. Use PDF viewers to display and annotate documents. MacOS Preview app lets you add arbitrary text, drawings, shapes, and pretty passable signatures. For scanning, download the Microsoft Lens app for your phone, it works well. Stop buying personal printers. They're bad for the environment. We should make them a dead technology.

No. I’ll just keep printing documents for both reading and archival. I even have a comb binding machine so that I can assemble booklets of related published papers, which I rely on — in combination with the digital form — for my work. Sometimes it’s just more efficient to page through and find what you’re looking for in a physical document, and reserve my screens for other information. Furthermore, “bad for the envir…

It's a matter of tradeoffs. I may be bad for the environment, but I'm a human being and have the right to exist. A printer is an inanimate object and doesn't have the inherent right to exist. You don't compare humans and inanimate objects.

Re: Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink

#485

Post by burnished » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 12:26 PM UTC

reayn wrote: post #455

burnished wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you replied to asked a question for specific details on what alternative to Apple products are being used. I think tis telling that each reply fails to answer.

It's not that I failed to answer, I simply asked the parent to be more specific. Unless you wanted me to write an exhaustive list of alternatives for everything Apple makes.

Yes, actually. I recognize that its a burden but thats part of the point I'm getting at - it is easy to tell people to switch, it is hard to give them good solid advice on how to go about doing so. And it isn't just you, its a trend I've noticed around these topics. People want others to make the jump but they don't want to hold anyone's hand while they do it.