281–290 of 297 posts
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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
Would be really nice if someone reverse-engineered the maintenance program and allowed a reset of this idiot-light.
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Reliable physical paper handling, e.g. supporting different paper weights, sizes. and thickness, duplex printing, avoiding paper jams, is nontrivial.
Well given that there are literally thousands of printers on the market that make it work, I'm guessing that can be replicated.
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I agree and recommend them to everyone. That said, their monochrome lasers also prevent non-OEM toners from working without an opaque sequence of key presses. Maybe this is normal for printers but it was non-obvious for me.
Huh? What's this sequence of key presses? I have a B&W MFC Brother device and my toner is at 40% so I might need the info in the next year or so.
" If your Brother HL-2130 does not reset properly after putting in a new cartridge, and is still showing a 'toner low' or 'toner empty' message, it is possible to manually reset the printer:
Ensure the printer is turned off.
Open the printer front cover.
Hold the Go button while turning the printer on.
When the Toner, Drum, and Error LEDs are on and the Ready LED is off, release the GO button. All of the LEDs will turn off.
Press the Go button two (2) times. The Toner, Drum, and Error LEDs will turn on.
Press the Go button six (6) times.
The Error LED should now be flashing, close the front cover. "
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> There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage. What? A hackable, OSS printer whose manufacturer puts time and effort into reducing waste and creating the best, longest lasting ink on the planet would crush it. Well, maybe not. But anytime anyone has said: “That’s it. There’s nothing more to do here.” It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.
> A hackable, OSS printer Outside of our bubble nobody cares about that There is always something you can do, we see it with phones, just add more gimmicks on top, the thing is smartphones are aimed at the general population and became a fashion/class/status symbol. Printers are just printers, they work just fine and most of them are used in pro environment (aka most people don't pay, maintain or replace printers). >…
I kind of want to spend some time on this printer thing, now!
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.
I thought that was well known. In EU printers cannot be sold "inked locked". They do lock themselves as soon as they have an opportunity to update their firmware. My Brother never had Internet access. I configured it with the Internet gateway unplugged and assigned it a static address to which I forbid Internet access. It is now running on compatible color cartridges. For black I stay on OEM ink. It is funny that my…
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 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…
Then HP bought Samsung and killed that model.
Now I see they go for £130+ second hand on ebay.
I think that says something about how the market's going to hell as it were.
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> 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…
Funny thing with my printer - I bought a "SAMSUNG Xpress M2026W Mono Laser Printer" for £60 about 4 years ago. Thought this is pretty good - Samsung's the way. Then HP bought Samsung and killed that model. Now I see they go for £130+ second hand on ebay. I think that says something about how the market's going to hell as it were.
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If you print something once a month, then shouldn't the starter cartridge last for about the life of the printer (maybe a decade or so)? That's been my experience with the B&W Brother laser printer I bought about 2010. I've never changed anything on it. And really I don't find much need to print anything these days anyway.
Because you have a laser printer. A lot of people try to be cheap and buy inkjets, and those things will fail if they sit without use for a month. And if the ink won't dry, the machine will claim it has, and force you to buy new ink -- which will cost more than the sale on the printer was originally.
How well does it work in practice? Well on my Epson ET4500 I get a few clogged jets every two or three months, but running a cleaning cycle has always cleared them. A bottle full of black Epson ink costs about £7.50 and seems to last about 1000-1500 pages. Colour has the same price, but I don't use enough colour to estimate low long it lasts. There seem to be several alternative ink suppliers.
This isn't a universal recommendation, just a response to your specific points. There is a premium for the tank models, so whether they are worth it depends on the amount that you print.
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Well, Brother had never done this to date. That is the real shocker.
Exactly. I looked at eco-tanks, and aside from the fact that the tanks would dry out given how little I need to print, it was avoiding the evil printing companies selling those printers. That left Brother: Linux-friendly, inexpensive open printers. Kinda took them at their name.