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Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

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Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#141

Post by julianlam »

gandalfian wrote: post #72

Yeah I'm struggling. Last 15 years I bought £50 multifunction brother or canon printers with separate ink cartridges and fake ink for a £1 a cartridge. Wore the heads out in about five years, repeat. Now they seem to have disappeared, all the cheap canons have combined colour ink cartridges not separate. A colour laser multifunction is expensive and may have pricey toner too. People here seem to like the Epson Ecotan…

> You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the complexity of printers (actually, almost certainly I am), but isn't OSX support on printers just "let the manufacturer handle it"?

I'd imagine the least amount of effort they could do is support postscript via USB and leave it at that...

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#142

Post by [deleted] »

choward wrote: post #129
booleandilemma wrote: post #111

Why hasn’t the printer industry not been disrupted by a company that isn’t hell-bent on fucking over their customers?

Because if a company like that starts to emerge they'll be bought out by a larger company. At which point everyone around here will congratulate them on their "exit".

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#143

Post by post_break »

baxuz wrote: post #127
colechristensen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epson EcoTank, pretty hard to lock out other vendors when your supply is delivered as a liquid.

Problem is that the heads clog up quite often. I had to replace mine recently. Oh, and they spew so much ink in the cleaning cycle that the pad got soaked up in 2 years. The service would cost 1/3 the price of a new printer so I visited some shady sites to find a one-time service mode reset code. As soon as the ink starts spilling out I'm tossing it in the garbage and never buying another printer again.

How often do you print? I have read those things need to be run very often to keep them from clogging or breaking down.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#144

Post by oldandboring »

arcade79 wrote: post #66

This is why I've never voluntarily owned a printer. Well, never actually owned one at all. My father got a bit frustrated that I didn't have a home printer and gifted one to my wife. It was used a couple of times. If I have something I need to print, I print it at work or at the library. Happens less than once a year. I don't need my own printer.

How on earth is this relevant to the post?

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#145

Post by meragrin_ »

alias_neo wrote: post #19
CrazedGeek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the laser side, but for inkjets, the Epson EcoTank line is the best at not fucking you - it uses ink bottle refills, no cartridges in sight.

I bought one a few months ago, about £200, because of exactly this sort of crap going on here. I didn't want to go the compatibles route, and the cartridges are so small in capacity anyway. It's been good so far, and I've been printing roughly once a week so it has been ok. I have kids so I've been photocopying pages from their colouring books etc for them to colour in and keep the books themselves clean, which means…

I take it you have not heard about the waste ink pad counter? Once that is up, you either have to buy a new printer or take it to a service center.

https://epson.com/Support/wa00369

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#146

Post by julianlam »

arcade79 wrote: post #66

This is why I've never voluntarily owned a printer. Well, never actually owned one at all. My father got a bit frustrated that I didn't have a home printer and gifted one to my wife. It was used a couple of times. If I have something I need to print, I print it at work or at the library. Happens less than once a year. I don't need my own printer.

I agree mostly — most days the most action my printer gets is printing out amazon return labels.

However we have an MFC and we scan items fairly often.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#147

Post by guerrilla »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #20
carpenecopinum wrote: post #13

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. 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 would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device For printing something like once a month, it is even harder to justify wasting space by putting a printer. Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs.

Pro-tip: Libraries.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#148

Post by projektfu »

pid-1 wrote: post #80
danpalmer wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

I do. I had a number of great printers before they adopted the DRM to enforce their razor+blades model.

1. HP Deskwriter. Built-in localtalk networking, connected to two Macs over phonenet. Bulletproof, paper handling was great.

2. HP Laserjet 4N. Built-in Ethernet print server, fast, bulletproof. Worked with 3rd party toner just fine. It was priced to pay HP enough for the printer even if you never bought toner.

3. HP Deskjet 6000-series. 6210? Worked great, beautiful color, obsoleted by USB replacing parallel ports.

4. Lexmark laser, bought used, worked with 3rd party toner, fast, networked, postscript. Was the workhorse for a political campaign.

Since about 2007 I haven't been happy with a printer. The toner is very expensive and the products are poorly made and not easily repaired.

Epson Workforce Pro: needs to print every week or its jets dry out.

HP OfficeJet X page at once, a great idea, but the jets jam if you don't use enough color, and the paper path breaks.

Brother printers: always yelling at me for some reason, and they wear out.

Lexmark color laser: great physical printer but the controller board hangs. Too unreliable for business. Toner is expensive.

Before the Deskwriter I had printers I was less happy with. An Epson dot matrix, I mean, nobody liked their dot matrix printers, and an Apple Stylewriter that was finicky, not crisp, and didn't hold much ink.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#150

Post by [deleted] »

gjvc wrote: post #70
reaperducer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the consumer printers are anything like the office printers, no thanks. The one at my office has to be serviced in-person but a tech almost every week.

i'm talking about a previous-generation one from ebay, been solid as a rock for me. sad to hear you have had such luck. Printers... YMMV.

[deleted]
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