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 spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.

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 a computer also owning a printer and regularly buying ink for it.

This isn't the case anymore. So much of our lives happens "digital-only" that printers aren't needed by most people, and those who do need them don't need as much ink. I have never owned a printer myself, and my parents still own one but buy ink on a yearly basis now.

The market should be shrinking naturally, and so every printer company is trying everything they possibly can to grow or at least keep from shrinking as much. In the panic they are in, it's understandable that this will lead to crappy business practices.

Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.

This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.

The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.

I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers:

https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...

Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

And pay is not catching up, further aggravated by inflation:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-v...

In the UK we also have a 54% increase in the residential cost of energy (within the context of extreme profiteering from energy manufacturers):

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/business/energy-prices-uk...

And 9.1% inflation:

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/uk-inflation-rate-hits-...

This is true across the world. I'm not sure what your life is like, but it sure as hell doesn't match the lived experience of many.

The average person is impacted by capitalist market economy shenanigans on a continuous basis on nearly everything required to stay alive.

Will home printer usage decline? Probably yes, but just like I have a home phone that I barely use, people will probably keep a printer around just in case.

There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”.

We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.

My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.

If you don't know the argument against your point of view, that is a good time to do some reading, not more writing.

The printer market is a commodity market - the very opposite of a monopoly.

I was making a general argument about the pattern one can see across the economy. The printer market is another example of the same pattern that we see all over the place.

I don't claim that the printer market is a single entity that towers over all - my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.

> my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.

This is a very strange argument, the fact that laws exist to prevent/punish something doesn't mean that everyone agrees that society is optimized to cause such eventualities. Laws are on the books in case something "bad" happens, it doesn't mean that society or the economy is structured to hurtle us towards those "bad" situations. It just means, they could happen and we need to deal with them. There are numerous laws against murder, but I doubt anyone would argue that everyone agrees that our society is inexorably optimized towards common and widespread homicidal tendencies.

But which technology market is a legally defined “monopoly”? Before you mention the phone market, that was already adjudicated during the Epic trial and found not to be the case.

As far as “everyone agreeing that capitalism optimizes for monopolies”. The car market has been around for over a century, is it a monopoly? The computer market? Exactly which market around technology is a legally defined “monopoly”?

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.

Now the printers, mechanically, seem pretty good. Some still feel cheap but not necessarily low quality. But all the firmware and software around them seems to be geared at whatever it takes to get you to spend a little more money. Stories like this one are exactly why I don't update my Brother TN-730 firmware.

https://youtu.be/BIltpheSZPs

In the modern era, I've just bought a cheap Brother black and white laser printer and called it a day. The toner lasts F-O-R-E-V-E-R.

Now you know why the manufacturer wants to change things.

Then they were horrible for 20 years until I decided to buy a Brother laser printer, and suddenly everything was right in the world.

I was concerned my instructors might question wether I typed it, or used a dot matrix printer. None had a clue.

I was one of the first people to have a computer and printer, and I was embarrassed. It felt like cheating.

I will never understand why we as a society go from a device that works and is built well; to overpriced gadgets that are constantly trying to trick us to giving them more money.

I would like to see a ratings system, like that one we had here from I believe the EU that rated items on repair, but include any other shinaggigans after sale.

It's too bad Brother's caved in to greed. I was one of their unpaid promotional guys up until today.

I like to give credit where credit is due. I throw this in.

If you need a plumbing fixture buy Moen. I have two faucets that I have gotten free parts with for 15 years plus. I fill out a simple form, and send my receipt to them via email, and the parts arrive in the mail. In all honesty, I need to change my pipes to copper, or pex, but have procrastinating for years. Hence, I always buy Moen, and tell people just how good the company is. Moen recently changed up their lifetime warranty, but most products are still lifetime. If I was CEO at that they would go back to a simple lifetime guarantee on every product. It's free word of mouth advertising, and it's honest customer advertising. Once a company has word of mouth fairness on their side; they will actively have to make stupid decisions to not attract new customers. They should teach this in MBA day school. Just be fair, and honest.

Captain Pedantic checking in: the 1020 was the printer. Your computer was likely an Atari 800 or summat. The 1020 was also a plotter, and not an inkjet.

What does the material your pipes are made from have to do with what company's faucets, showerheads, handles, etc. you buy? Also couldn't you replace your pipes but keep your existing Moen parts?

it's a basic dichotomy of long versus short-term thinking. markets in general and their people tend to be on the short-term side.

It’s nice that they give lifetime warranty though.

The cheap printer market has always been an abusive, anti-user shitshow. Arguably bad for the sellers, too - I've heard an argument that making cheap printers was the catalyst that ruined HP.

Cool anecdote. Here in Brazil, some small shops and cybercaffes will offer copy/printing services to you for a small change. That's usually where people go if they have to print/scan something. BTW this service is also know as Xerox.

I saw some shops running on retail printers, but most use those printers you can just fill with cheap ink.

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.

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.

We're already shifting towards a society where things that offer a traditional offline, anonymous way of transacting information or currency is being construed as a threat because "terrorism", aka it cannot be monitored and controlled. Easily justifiable to still have one.

My dad still uses a Laserjet 4L daily to print ebay stuff and refuses to replace it because it works, and my 14 year old brother mfc, with an ipv6 stack(!) still works as good as the day I bought it. These things last generations.

I also like to print out A3 posters for my kids and these printers can do that, whereas I'd never buy a huge A3 printer to have at home.

At my local library, prints are $0.05/page, vs. $0.15/page at my local commercial print shop.

US 7-11's absolutely do not have this service, and you're lucky if you find a grocery store that has a photo copier these days (was somewhat common in the 90s).

There's also reprographics places and most shipping stores do printing as well.

None of that is as convenient as a home printer, though. If you can get a decent color laser and lightly use it, it should treat you well for quite some time. Inkjets don't really like light use though, although I have fond memories of first page time on the ancient Deskjet 660C and 720C.

Until my kids were a little older, I had an old HP laser printer and then one of those cheap Brother devices. Now I use a little HP mfp with instant ink… it’s essentially a worry free existence.

However, I'd not want to be the device manufacturer, making it secure against all kinds of USB attacks

Every Fedex Print/Office center has this service. Most city libraries do as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC38D5am7go

There's been a sea change. In 2000 if you wasted time on a website for a pitch, it was a gimmick. People wanted a nicely printed, bound pitch book that they'd have in front of them at the meeting. They'd probably throw them away but one would float around for a while if you were lucky.

Now people expect you to have it digitally, and don't have a place for paper.

Definitely more expensive than ink+paper if you print a lot, but for my uses (couple of times a year) it's a no-brainer.

There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage. Its a commoditized market where they only make money when you buy their supplies so naturally they will engineer the product to work well with their supplies only.

This might be an opportunity for open source printer components. Maybe someone can create replacement parts to take out the "brain" of a small printer and replace that with a connected Raspberry Pi that doesn't change the print quality or reject 3rd party cartridges. I know there's likely a lot of settings in the software for head movement, ink usage, etc. so that might take some (possibly illegal?) reverse engineering. I'm a web software person so that idea may sound stupid to someone more knowledgeable.

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.

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).

> It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.

Then let's disrupt coffee mugs, or the wheel... some techs are good enough that further """progress""" isn't required.

Most people who have issues with printers buy cheap ones and/or use them once every 6 months, they then proceed to complain that they don't work anymore and that all printers are bad. It's like buying a car and never doing any maintenance until it dies and then complain about reliability.

There's still room to improve insulation on mugs, and I dare you to go tell any car manufacturer that wheels are a totally solved problem with no room to improve (personally I'm hoping one of the airless variants gets to mass market so I never have another flat).

Some techs are good enough that people get complacent; that's not the same as running out of room to improve.

I kind of want to spend some time on this printer thing, now!

It SEEMS like you could make printer "kits" for people to assemble themselves, which would take bulk ink, and escape all of this nonsense. But then you'd have to sell it in stores, where HP, Epson, and Brother would act like any other large corporation to block chains like Best Buy and OfficeMax from carrying it.

From what I understand, once you get far enough above the SOHO market, even current printers are still that way. I suspect in the past, the small laser printer market was getting trickle-down benefits from technology innovations to service the commercial market, but now it's become its own free-standing market which no longer responds to the same signals.

It also makes me wonder if that's the road to an affordable, if overkill, printer-- a module that bypasses the scanning side of a used copier, and renders your PostScript data to it.

https://www.keypointintelligence.com/news/editors-desk/2018/....

Rent. You are effectively renting your printer, supplies are the payments. The hardware is expensive, sold cheaply, and supplies have high margins to make up for it.

It is often investors forcing this model.

People lease cars, which is also a bad deal. Same motivation.

Alternative (game console model) printer company license right to make ink for printer. Printer company does not go bust.

Cost of printer is printer + driver + server over life time of printer... what the public pay; a single one time purchase price.... model doesn't work.

It's a shame there aren't any open standards like lpd, jetdirect, postscript, and pcl for printers. /s

The printer business model has been abused for a long time in an effort to squeeze every last dime out of the market.

<insert XKCD reference here>

I've had to dig into this a fair bit at work, and it's rather amazing. Certainly not perfect, but basically printers which are certified for IPP Everywhere (Mopria for Android, Airprint for Apple) are required to have built-in format support for a set of given formats. For example, Mopria certification requires PCLm (a backwards-compatible subset of PDF, designed for streaming), PWG Raster and PDF. IPP Everywhere mandates PWG Raster, JPEG and PDF. Of course Apple being Apple, they have their own Raster format (urf). The printers can support more (and typically do), but they have to include the base. Also the formats (and capabilities) the printers support can be queried via standard IPP. (*)

That sounds complex, but it means that as long as the printer supports any of those standards, you have a good chance of printing to it). I've printed to some pretty strange, limited printers via IPP, and had surprisingly good luck doing so (mostly via raster-urf).

Apparently in Linux CUPS is going this way completely, and has recently added built-in on-the-fly conversion. So CUPS will query the printer, and then send documents in whatever format the printer supports. If it's an AirPrint certified printer, then it'll send raster-urf; if it's IPP Everywhere it might send PWG-Raster or PDF.

Certainly not perfect (as my testing has shown), but it's a heck of a lot better than what we had before. And I've heard that they now have a standard for 3D printing (3MF*) aiming to replace STL. Apparently developed with the Linux Foundation. I have no personal experience with it, but with the complexity of 3D printing, I'd not be surprised if it's still immature.

(*) https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/01-standards-and-t... (**) https://www.pwg.org/3d/

Setting aside the general decline of the printer industry, and simplifying slightly, those two interests compliment each other into:

1. Producing the cheapest possible product, and then selling it for a loss while concocting subscription schemes to make-up for the lost profits at the point of sale of the product.

2. Paying employees in general less and less money proportional to inflation to "reduce costs", thus forcing the average person to demand cheaper and cheaper products. Completing the cycle.

Anyway, I don't have a printer. I always just take my pdf and take a walk to a local printing service.

We finally realized the problem was that excess ink was drying up on the (outlet/spout/I'm not sure of the right term) where it's fed out of the cartridge and onto the paper. In short, *we weren't printing _enough_.* Sure enough, as long as we print a page or two a week, it keeps working properly. Also, for some reason, the "Clean print heads" function or whatever it's called doesn't resolve the issue.

This is why I use and recommend a black and white laser printers - total cost of ownership is easiest and cheapest in my experience. I suppose they're more expensive than an ink jet to start off with, but it's not that big a difference and a decade of near trouble free printing is worth something for sure.

I don't see the need for color printing documents, but if so there's office stores. For photo prints I'd be looking at places with high end inkjets most likely these days, but there are other color processes that should still work well - I did RA-4 chemical photo printing way back when and it was excellent at the time and should hold up well, but I don't know that anyone bothers with that today.

Ink jet? Nope, those starter packs are only enough to get you hooked on expensive replacements.

Laser is more expensive, but is the only way to go for rare printing.

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.

For real world prints I just go to walgreens or now more likely to use a digital frame. My mom with memory issues LOVES her digital frame even more than photo albums as she can sit there watching it rotate through her memories. She has boxes of albums in her room but forgets they're there.

Just as a thought experiment, what about the other way round, where you could only rent a printer, fully serviced, as an appliance? Surely, this kind of business wouldn't be sustainable with this kind of tech with consumables running out every now and then, things breaking at any possible instance, non-replaceable consumables, etc. Follows, in addition to all this vendors are off-loading considerable hassles onto the "customer" (or rather, those who have no way around these offerings) to enable this scheme.

Suggested title for a fictitious article on the matter, "If the IBM 1401 had been built like a modern printer".

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.

Amd a very good case for anti e-waste laws and right to repair.

Never throw out a serviceable laser printer.

All my printing is via a 15 year old desktop mini laser printer rescued from a dump. It's been worth locating a printer engineering company to service it. Most of the time it sits idle in a clean, dry cupboard. When I print it's usually a whole document for marking, so it's worth the bother of getting it out, plugging it in and running one print job. Ink-jets, and that whole market is a failed technology in my book, not for technical reasons, but because the vendors have turned every product into toxic crap.

I have an iPad and downloaded PDF Expert and got an Apple Pencil to sign digital documents and I've only occasionally had issues I can't get around - Amazon return labels are the biggest pain in the ass.

If you're from Amazon, sort out a way we can ship returns without needing a printer!

I don't think you get to pick that service anywhere as such, so it might be regional or limited in some other way. When you initiate a return, you don't know whether you'll need a printer or not.

I purchased it in August 2021 and the demo toner it came with ran out this week.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079Z44VZ7

Toner is like £40 which works out at like £3.30 a month

It's why industries need to be regulated. A company run for shareholder value is going to maximize profits and externalize costs. This class of behavior is not at all unique to this product segment or this industry. You think this is annoying? Gonna be somewhere between interesting to horrifying to see what big tech does if the profit growth flags.

I've seen a clip on the Internet where printer rolls a customer satisfaction survey during printing on a little screen panel locking its features away.

I'm afraid that once my Samsung laser printer will be broken beyond any repair I won't have any other choice than to get the one of the newest anti-customer devices that will maneuver me into "supplies as a service" scenario.

Buying cheap third party consumables is a hack. It is people taking advantage of the low prices (entry level printers are often sold at a loss), without paying for the overpriced consumables that is where the real profits are. Back then, manufacturers could absorb the loss, but now, with the printer market tanking, it is becoming harder and harder.

A company that decides to tolerate third party consumables is likely to attract customers who want to do exactly that, a significant loss. If they want to stay profitable, their printers will be more expensive, more than what casual users are ready to pay.

I don't know about laser printers but traditional manufacturers sometimes offer an alternative to expensive ink cartridges: ink tank printers. They are way more expensive than their equivalent cartridge-based printers, but ink is sold in bulk with no DRM (cheap). These, however, are only worthwhile if you print a lot.

For 40 years this guy has been talking about the perils of proprietary software and people gave a shit to him.

Today people not only strongly defend proprietary software, but they think he is a moron, and even free/libre software activists think proprietary firmwares are okay as long their hardware works as expected.

Of course this is okay until their hardware stops to work as intended and you are locked out because the proprietary firmware, which usually is what happens.

[1] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

I can't see a good reason to keep buying printers that are locked into proprietary cartridges or toners.

sigh.

I am happy with the quality of the output with two caveats: (1) the ink is by no means lightfast. In the room I am sitting in now (bright sun, high humidity) I can perceive fading in prints after just six months. (2) it lacks a rear tray that feeds straight-through so I am at the mercy of the pick roller when it comes to printing on particularly thick, thin or slick papers. Since I always print both sides of the paper, paper that is slick on on the "good" side is often a problem.

Epson has two higher lines in the Ecotank range, one aimed at "creatives" that has 6 inks (still dye-based) and another "pro" line that uses pigment based inks (which typically last 70 years or so.)

Even though my material costs are super-low and I can afford to replace faded prints, I don't like spending my time to make ephemeral objects so I've had ET Pro printers on order from two different vendors for six months. It seems they've all been eaten by the supply chain monster.

I'm not a big believer that I need six inks to get good quality output, but I am thinking seriously about getting an ET Photo if I can since the ink used for that should be more lightfast, although these things are unfortunately terribly documented.

Oh and it's not user serviceable.

https://epson.ca/Support/wa00369

We have tiny facilities where a prosumer HP 9000 series MFP is appropriate. Other places with have big $10k copy machines that print for like $0.02-0.04/page

Sun used to sell different (large) CRT monitors to northern hemisphere vs southern hemisphere.

Apparently the magnetic field was reversed and the CRT guns would be pre-aligned for the correct part of the world.

(insert northern vs southern hemisphere toilet joke)

Between their BrScript and their no-BS networking, they were the last I know of to work with no fuss with all the machines I own. On everything other than the iDevices, it's nothing more than a PPD install.

I hope this isn't accurate.

Professional equipment is usually in another league than consumer stuff when it comes to quality and reliability and also usually has very low resale value so you can get it for quite cheap. Personally I just picked up an old Sharp color laser printer for about 90$. This is a great machine that prints 2 sided A3 (very hard to find for laser printers) and with toners that should last about 10000 pages which is way better than anything you can buy as a consumer. The only backside is that it is quite big and heavy.

Old consumer equipment that is in good shape is often a good deal with the main reasoning being that something that has lasted for a long time has a higher probability of continuing to last a long time compared to something new where it is hard to say how long it will last.

Had ipv6 before anyone else.

Good Linux support, even for the scanners on their MFCs.

Agnostic about third-party toner.

This new firmware demolishes twenty years of goodwill.

I was just looking at a new printer, and likely to replace my old Brother B&W MFC and Samsung color laser, with a new Brother color laser MFC, but it looks like I'll see how long I can string the old ones along.

There's a discussion upthread about some epson models being mostly alright (with caveats; read the whole thread): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860555

Is there any reasonable alternative out there if you want:

* Laser printing

* Duplex printing

* Do not necessarily need colour

* Printing from USB storage devices

* Scanning to USB storage devices

Now I have one of their color laser printer which is OK but it's slow, you can't print that much with it before having to change one or the other cartridge and the OEM ink is terribly expensive.

If they now prevent from using third party ink like this, I'm officially out.

I’ve probably accounted for the sale of dozens of brother printers over the years.

" 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. "

They've probably recruited one of the bright spark MBA execs that "revolutionised"[1] the other manufactures with this kind of rent seeking crap.

You know that deal, trade a firm's reputation for quality for a short term boost in profits, bank the bonus and move to another job before the chickens come home to roost. :(

1. By revolutionised I of course mean ruined.

If you weren't ever wary of updates, this should be a strong lesson. The updates are not for your benefit anymore; the companies just want to have you on a leash where they hold the other end.

"Don't fix it if it ain't broke."

and then just purposefully print like garbage

In other words, they're maliciously spreading FUD that 3rd-party consumables will result in lower print quality, and then making that a self-fulfilling prophecy. That should be illegal if it isn't already.

In any case, first thing I always do when I install a printer is to give it one exact static local IP because I made a firewall rule that blocks all outgoing WAN traffic from that IP. I lost faith in all my periphery to not sing behind my back and took things in my own hands.

My Brother MFC works amazingly well and I will not think as a programmer in this case; I'll be a normal human who says "no need to update it if it works" and leave it at that.

So far zero complains and I am happy with my device. And with these news I am even happier that I am paranoid and make sure my device doesn't get a firmware update.

I had been recommending Brother printers exactly because they did not pull shenanigans like this, their windows drivers were pretty light weight, and their Linux support is very good.

Is anyone working on a OSS printer, like 3D printers? Buy an existing printer and then rip out + re-wire it's controller?

The first one I got it in 2010 and I purchased a 2nd in 2018 when the first stopped working. I would have kept using the original if it were possible to repair it. I would have also paid more than the $80 sticker price

It is funny that my venerable HP I had previously stopped working soon after I started using compatible ink. Since it was several years old, I was wanted to spare on ink. A gear broke soon after. Repaired the gear and something else broke. I did not do the second repair. Of course that could be a simple coïncidence, I'll never know.

BTW I would not recommend Brother either. It is very picky about paper. Have to use good quality 90g or more exclusively.

I'm a little surprised that the same thing didn't happen to printers. I could imagine around 2005, Microsoft including a generic printer driver with Windows XP. This way, you could plug in any printer and it would just work, as long as the printer implemented that generic printing protocol, even if it were alongside their own printer interface.

Plug in printer. Windows detects device with generic printer interface. User prints document. Document comes out. User happy.

Oh sure, the printer would come with a CD that includes software that enables the "special features" of the printer. Digital cameras did this too. (Rule #1 of buying a digital camera: Throw away the CD that comes in the box. Break the CD just in case you're tempted that something on CD might fix some trivial issue you're having.)

At the same time, I'm not surprised that never happened. Those "special features", like shouting at you for buying the wrong ink, are just way too important to not have installed on people's computers.

Entry-level printers didn't support these standards as it required what at the time was significant computing power on the printer side.

Are there still any new printers (postscript, laser) that are reasonable? Black and white printing is sufficient.

Also, actual example of a smart TV connecting to an unprotected WiFI: https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...

I have a strong feeling this is somehow related to our local office network, but... any wifi printers we have never 'wake on lan'. If I reboot the printer, it's connected. 30-60 minutes later, it will not respond to any network commands. It's on, and you can go insert USB stick to print, or make a copy on it, and it says it has an IP address, but it's essentially 'dead'. Although it has 'wake on LAN' set (or whatever the setting is).

Brother, but same issue with HP before that (and... someone else reports similar with their printer in their office too). But we have a dozen people plus more devices on the wifi every day without incident. Just something about the printers we've had over the last few years.

Have changed wifi routers at least once during this period as well to no avail.

I don't know how this is legal without informing the user. But that's the case with a lot of censorship/surveillance technology - they not only want to keep surveil/censor, they want to do so while keeping users in the dark about it.

Not too far out of the question the more i think about it. Remember when we used to print directions and they were often littered with ads intermingled with the steps.

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.

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

Last purchase was a $350 multifunction color laser printer that stopped turning on. I was just over the one year warranty and no support from Brother and their authorized service centers want to put me on a commercial support plan. I bought it for my wife, a teacher, because the school copiers were always broken or unavailable.

HP makes shitty printers but they will actually help you get something replaced in my experience.

Brother must have jumped the shark lately.

It had no problems printing on random toner (or I have been lucky), and I have extended its useful lifespan by running CUPS for AirPrint support on a home server. It seemed like one of those legendary products at the time I bought it.

I think companies will bring on star engineers from time-to-time to build brand goodwill, and then let the bean-counters loose that will tie up loose ends.

I will either buy epson or kyocera I think. Do you have a recommendation?

I've seen that companies like Brother make dedicated shipping label printers, and I guess that's what I realistically would use my printer for the most.

Brother's clearly doing horrible stuff, but printers also seem like a terrible business model when you ship products that live forever without maintenance beyond refilling the paper tray and toner.

If only the e-ink display technology weren't encumbered by so many patents, maybe that's what we'd be reading most things on now instead.

A MFC I bought a couple years later is still going strong.

https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf...

Incredible.

> I have an MFC-3750 that’s been running perfectly with Non-OE ink for more than a year now. The W1.56 firmware update, however, disabled the automatic color registration feature.

If only there was some body that could pass laws that would prevent companies from doing such things. You know, like how phones have to use common charger cables.

I would be happy to have to throw out ink cartridges I currently use due to a law change if it meant that forever onwards I knew I could buy third party ink and use it without issues. This would also have the effect of lowering OEM ink prices because they would have to compete. Free markets only work when there is competition.

Indeed, if the situation were different, it would be the same as this one, but it’s not.

I'm tempted to set up something in my home automation to print a "test" page every week or two, just to make sure it doesn't get clogged. Given the couple of feet of tubing between the tanks and the head, I suspect once that gets dried/gunked/blocked, it's game over.

https://epson.com/Support/wa00369

This reads like actual gaslighting. Most users will never reach parts end of life? How is that even possible? Do most users buy a new ecotank printer and throw away their old one every year?

I'm soooo glad consumer 3d printing has avoided it this far and hopefully the momentum keeps up even as the technology advances.

Does the EcoTank do this too?

that said, they don't seem to like to sit. if I go for awhile without printing I need to do a cleaning more so than conventional inkjets, but i'm okay with that tradeoff, it's nice just refilling with ink.

also the software/driver package on Windows sucks, but unless you're doing firmware upgrades then why bother installing it, anyway.

Far cheaper, and better for the environment, than using ink for cleaning.

Well, just as another data point... I've been using a HP LaserJet Pro M402dne for the last two years, and it's solid. I should point out it's not colour, and Ethernet (not wifi). Also prints fine from Apple and Android devices in the family through the network.

Before that, I struggled along with inkjets before finally giving up. I remember having an urgent document to print in mono, had a new black XL cartridge installed, and it refused to print until I went out and got some yellow too. So for a while, I've been telling anyone prepared to listen that inkjets are a scam.

Anyhow, the LaserJet came with a starter toner cartridge. I also got a 9000 page XL toner cartridge around the same time. Two years later, I'm still on the starter toner cartridge. For an intermittent user, it's really great. Inkjets have often dried up on me if there's significant time between prints.

Looking at sites such as this, the model that I use also works with compatible toner cartridges : https://www.tonergiant.co.uk/model/HP-LaserJet-Pro-M402dne-t...

Driver and firmware quality have declined in recent years.

I'm a tech person, and it took about three hours to set up the wireless Canon I bought a couple of months ago. When the thing has an error, it displays a QR code that just links to a PDF of the printed installation manual that it came with. Not helpful.

It also won't connect to eero routers because of a bug in the printer firmware, combined with eero removing the ability to have different SSIDs for 2 and 5Ghz networks.

I'm with current knowledge and tech it should be possible to print your own printer?

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.

Was thinking of getting a color laser printer.

Not so hard to defeat such sensors by making a matching product (which should be the goal anyway for printer ink). It would then be an arms race with third party vendors and your own internal ink and sensors to make a more consistent product yourself with better and better sensors.

Or you just connect a raspberry pi to the printer.

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...

https://epson.com/Support/wa00369

> Why not just make the Ink Pads a user-replaceable item?

> Implementing this type of a design would result in more expensive printers. Most users would not benefit from such higher costs because their printers will never reach the Parts End of Life message.

In other words, if the pads are done, then chances are the rest of your printer is worn out.

Thanks for posting that link. It makes me feel better about Epson.

I understand this is standard practice from all printer makers now, but it really turned me off the brand.

I replaced it with a €140 Brother B&W laser printer/scanner a year or two ago and have been happy with it ever since. Sad to hear they turned evil too.