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HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

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Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#261

Post by rookderby »

lchengify wrote: post #23

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

I have a brother printer/scanner as well (model HL-L2395DW). I've been using at home since 2020 to supplement at-home office and school work once the pandemic started. It takes third-party black toner cartridges that you can buy from amazon/office stores. It's never jammed, I've replaced the starter toner cartridge, and have fed it several reams of paper. Scanning works well with a USB cable to PC and wireless printing works well from Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. I expect it to last 10-20 years, overall a good product. I would not worry about getting this exact model, I'd expect any brother toner printer to work well.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#262

Post by squarefoot »

RajT88 wrote: post #127
lchengify wrote: post #23

For those of you who haven't already, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and switching from HP to Brother for your home printing needs. I was a HP customer for decades . I had models going back to perforated paper dot-matrix printers. Finally last year I had a down-and-out fight to get my HP to do a basic task, and I bit the bullet and ordered a Brother at the recommendation of my friend. My mfc-l3750cdw Broth…

I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist. The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine. The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

I have a Ethernet only Epson WP4515 that I plan to keep until it dies since it works perfectly with 3rd party cartridges. In order to add WiFi, years ago I took a TP-Link TL-MR3020 mini router I got for €5 at a flea market, put OpenWRT into it and set it up as a wireless bridge. Worked perfectly for years until I could finally put the printer in a place to connect it through Ethernet. Any piece of hardware with the necessary features (compatible with OpenWRT or any other Linux, Ethernet, WiFi) can be used, therefore many *Pi-like boards will also work, but repurposing an old router/AP will be the cheapest solution since they're often literally thrown away.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#263

Post by RobotToaster »

kube-system wrote: post #88
freakynit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this open up the space for a "framework laptop" like company to open up? For "open" printers? If yes, what other product categories is this applicable?

Printers are pretty difficult to manufacture compared to a laptop. They have specialized high precision parts and a lot of mechanical parts that have to work together for a particular design. A laptop can be pretty much made from off the shelf parts aside from the chassis and PCB, which you can easily have made by any number of contractors. And I’m sure printers are probably a minefield of patents.

There are dirt cheap printer heads on aliexpress for inkjets, isn't the rest just stepper motors and belts?

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#264

Post by RajT88 »

ashton314 wrote: post #152
RajT88 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist. The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine. The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

Have you looked at things like power line adapters? I’ve got one and it works brilliantly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

Powerline does not work in my home for reasons I can only speculate. It would take hundreds of dollars of tooling to figure it out.

To the gent suggesting Moca - an option generally, but no coax in the office.

I think a pi or small wireless bridge will probably be the way to go. Or I will talk my wife into letting me drill another hole in the floor.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#265

Post by javajosh »

passwordoops wrote: post #217
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many people willing working jobs that explicitly make the world a worse place to live and we wonder why everything is going to shit.

For the record I disagreed with the decision, and eventually left them shortly after (not just over this) but you're putting a very unfair statement out there. First, it's basically every company that's doing this, and it's the logical next step when growth is the target. Even at the time, they used Apple as an example to be emulated with their anti-consumer practices. Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimate…

>it's basically every company that's doing this

It's useful to distinguish between ideas, decisions, and actions. Every idea, no matter how good/bad, far-fetched, that would make your company money has been considered. It doesn't matter which company. When a company decides what to do, they reject most ideas for a variety of context dependent reasons. Reputation is one of those reasons. Unfortunately the meaning and importance of reputation itself has been undermined by enormous reflowing of attention by screens and the remarkable credulity of people.

>Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights.

Greed is unbounded, restrained first by character, then by law. This basic assumption is part of the fabric of the US, itself based in part on the analysis Adam Smith. There has always been tension between greed and character+law, and modern fashion has weakened the meaning and importance of character to almost 0, so greed feels ascendant. But I propose that greed is the same, only the countervailing forces are weaker.

This might seem like splitting hairs. The value in the distinction is that you can let go of worrying about intrinsic human qualities like greed getting worse. If that were true, it would be unsolvable. You can instead worry about a fixable problem, like how "character" itself can rise back to prominence, and how the public's BS meters can be improved.

(Getting a big population to a reasonable standard is a lot of work, so any help appreciated.)

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#266

Post by gooob »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #206
passwordoops wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an experience in another industry similar to what printers are doing. We used to use standard, easy-to-source-from-3rd-party 6-port valves on one of our instruments. Customers loved it, since the valve would need servicing now and then with replacement parts but the company president only saw lost recurring service and support revenue. To complement that perception, the VP Engineering decided "our systems shoul…

So many people willing working jobs that explicitly make the world a worse place to live and we wonder why everything is going to shit.

prisoner's dilemma

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#268

Post by kappuchino »

m463 wrote: post #53
coda_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like my brother, but it will attempt to detect and reject non-authentic ink. I don't update mine anymore because the last time I did, it rejected my cartridges.

I have a brother HL-2360DW circa 2017, with a new brother large-size authentic toner cartridge. I never hooked it to the internet, never updated the firmware. And it started saying low toner even though I've put (far?) less than 250 sheets through it. There was a way to turn off the low toner warnings, I did it, and seem to be ok, but it makes me wonder. EDIT: wow, it sells for $449 on amazon. I paid $115 in 2017.

OT: Quick question - does this model (HL-2360...) have a physical on/off switch? I run two Brother HL-2130 series which I turn on and off with a relais to save energy for standby.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#269

Post by alentred »

gigel82 wrote: post #116
Algemarin wrote: post #29

What I find notable whenever something like this is in the news, is that these user-hostile features don't just manifest through abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation. User-hostile features are created by people. Just once, I would like to see an AMA by someone who was directly involved in creating a user-hostile feature - whether it's locking down printers or any of the countless other examples that come up on a we…

I saw a PM during a large company meeting Q&A eagerly talking about how we're not leveraging our existing customers enough to sell more products and how we should have advertisements in product A for (largely unrelated) product B because we have a large enough user base. The VP's face lit up and our product has ads now :( The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked them…

> The PM got a promotion - I bet some metrics moved enough to "show impact", but no one asked themselves what the long term effect will be

Yep, that's the worst part: people not staying long enough to evaluate the consequences. To some extent it doesn't even matter if these ideas were good or bad in the end - the person is just not there anymore to even learn from the experience.

Re: HP have updated their printers to ban ‘non-HP’ cartridges

#270

Post by otherme123 »

zdragnar wrote: post #259
otherme123 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shouldn't make sense. It's like buying a car, and then you cannot refill unbranded gas at 1.5€/L, but at 5€/L at the official dealership. Same gas, car works exactly the same, but the car refuses to start it you put unbranded gas. No wonder the money is in the gas, tagging it at 500% the price it would get in a competitive market. The mistery is why the printers market get away with it.

> It's like buying a car Printers are basically sold at a loss. A more apt analogy would be selling you a laundry washer/dryer for $100 but only accepting name brand detergent pods. Or, what Keurig tried to do to coffee, though even they sell the machines above the printers margins. Printers get away with it because unlike your car, laundry, or coffee maker, most people don't actually use the printer very often and c…

I get what you say, but never bought the cheapest-product part. Brother printers compete in price with any HP equivalent, is not like HP is selling laser printers for $20. Maybe a 15% less than a equivalent Brother, if that.
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