Why hasn’t the printer industry not been disrupted by a company that isn’t hell-bent on fucking over their customers?
Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
111–120 of 297 posts
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#112Hmm, I have a new Brother color laser printer standing here with two batches of non-brother (I refuse to say non-genuine) toner. Kind of wonder how that will go when my printer included toner runs out…
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#113I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers". I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spendin…
I agree. It's so hard to recommend printers to family and friends now. It seems they all suck in their own very special way.
The only reason I even have a printer is that I happened to find an old LaserJet for 10$ at my local thrift store. It was "broken" but all i had to do was oil the laser scanner motor. Right era of printer, toner cartridges are only around 20$, and I put in a JetDirect card. Only thing is the memory is a bit lacking, even being fully upgraded, so for complex documents it sometimes will pause between pages.
I definitely wouldn't have bought a printer new today.
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#114We need laws to prevent such malicious practices. Currently most if not all printer vendors sell printers at loss hoping to claw it back by sell consumables at extremely high prices. Given such background, vendors have more than enough motivation to undermine 3rd party consumables if not totally lock them out.
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#115Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#116Time for an open hardware printer manufacturer? Or more lobbying for right-to-third-party-ink protection (including not making the quality worse) ?
Printer hardware is very specific, so you don't have generic versions of everything, defacto standards and official/unofficial documentation like you do in other DIY-able fields like 3D printers and CNC. The best you can do is buy replacements or salvaged parts for existing {HP,Canon,Epson} printers and spend months reverse engineering them. This will not only cost you more than buying a very nice new printer, but will suffer from the same availability issues every project depending on parts that aren't regularly for sale.
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. This is the dying gasps of an industry that is mostly irrelevant in the modern age. When I was growing up we always had a printer, and while ink wasn't cheap, it wasn't too bad, so we used it a lot and printed everything we needed. The industry grew to expect this, most households with…
IDK, I'm in my mid 30s and I really can't remember printers being alright.
Printers became garbage when we switched from dot-matrix to inkjet.
Then they were horrible for 20 years until I decided to buy a Brother laser printer, and suddenly everything was right in the world.
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#118I've got a HL series color laser that I'm otherwise happy with. The firmware version is reported as 1.34. I guess I just have to take care to never upgrade that, and make a mental note never to buy another Brother product again?
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Epson EcoTank, pretty hard to lock out other vendors when your supply is delivered as a liquid.
you can have some sensors that test whatever physical property of the liquid (spectrum, electrical and thermal conductivity, viscosity,...) and turn off if it's not in the range of the genuine product.
It's possible to design print heads that are warped over time by ink that's not exactly like the official ink. At least, that's what I suspect killed my last (literally) Canon inkjet. There are a lot of rumours online about that practice.
Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. Credit to Epson for taking this track. I wouldn't consider a cartridge printer again.
Sadly only applies to these high end ones; I got a cheap Epson one and found out after moving it to another country, that the cartridges are indeed vendor+region locked.
Region locked ink?! That's a special kind of stupid.