[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company

That's what we did.

For the few pages we need to print, I can use the machine at the library for $0.10/page.

dude I would pay gold for that

I used to work for canon as a service tech. They are a wildly scummy company that routinely goes out of their way to fuck over their employees and customers.

It's just capitalism. Don't make it more then what it is.

That gives a whole new twist to "you'll own nothing and be happy"

I've decided that just going to a copy shop a few times a year is less hassle.

You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note or counterfeits cash with it, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.

There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. One of the other big criteria is that the printer needs to be able to recognize and refuse to print images of cash, to prevent counterfeiting. If you try to print an image of a dollar bill, the printer’s firmware will refuse to continue the print job. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near duopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.

There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.

Its been doing that for 50+ years. But just like how capitalism expects growth, the trend is exponential.

People that Weasle their way up the corporate ladder have been prefectly groomed to have no shame.

They're actually behind. 3D printers are a much newer industry. Most industries start out super open, competitive and collaborative. This speeds up development to consumer-grade products. Eventually one or two companies gain sufficient marketshare to start enforcing anti-consumer shitfuckery. Look at the recent drama with Bambu printers and you'll find that's exactly what's happening. It's a tale as old as time.

Framework actually trolled us into thinking they were going to release a printer but instead they went into a market segment where everything was already modular, repairable and upgradable and gave us something that was not, at all. But hey, they gotta capitalize on the AI nonsense too, I guess?

2D printers used to be like this.
They all worked with open, universal drivers, no additional software, and any ink cartridge that fit inside the bay.
But then companies figured out that people will just buy the cheapest printer on offer, regardless of everything else.

Over time as 3D printers go from tinkerer's toy to household staple, I'd expect them to become more locked down and anti-consumer.

This is mainly because consumer 3d printer have been developped by 3d printing enthusiast first and not a company, Prusa which was leader for some time used a lot of open sources project to build their printers. As it's getting mainstream as time goes by more and more companies shows up with closed sources project sadly.

Don't worry. Companies like Bambu and others are trying to lock down shift their printer business in the style of 2d printer companies. I hope it at least happens very slowly, but the enshittification is happening...

Has anyone figured out how to 3d print a 2d printer yet?

Edit: actually, scratch that entirely. How difficult do you suppose it would be to create an aftermarket non-malicious logic board to drive the hardware in lieu of the malicious OEM board? After all, it's not the cartridges refusing to print.

Except those who aren't.

You are crazy, but good crazy.

Wake up babe, new copy pasta just dropped.

I have VERY few and I cherish them.

Fairphone feels great to me. I think My coffee stuff is the same (Profitec, Eureka Mignon); no app or wifi or anything, fairly available spare parts.

Always has been like that.

Not one single corporation is your friend or wants to be. All they want is your money. No exceptions.

Brother's been anti-consumer for at least 5 years now. Not sure why people are just learning about it now.

Brother blocking 3rd party toner was the primary reason why I went with Canon back in 2020.

I've had an Epson Ecotank for the last couple years and I have no complaints. I just refilled my black ink and it was $11 for 9 oz., which should last me years (but I don't print that often).

Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous

Just buy an ink tank printer, it fixes 90 percent of your printer grief

Line go up

I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?

Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don't weight ongoing costs as much -- happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.

For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn't have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.

Rossman: What Rossman's saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He made a wiki page listing all the things that they're doing. He says that he doesn't know of a type of printer to recommend now.

He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream. A substantial portion of the video is his cat licking him.

Only if you can keep it working for ten consecutive minutes. I went through three of them under warranty until my warranty expired, then Epson told me to fuck off.

If have a Canon color laser now. If that conks out and everything on the market by then is locked out shit I'll just convert my 3D printer to a plotter, or maybe go back to clay tablets.

Canon has a tank printer line too. Absolutely recommend any tank printer (you'll have to check reviews for specifics obviously).

I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5¢ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I'll be going there.

I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).

If we want to get pedantic, it is possible to get a pen plotter. There are fountain pen compatible pen plotters, and the whole fountain pen world has a healthy and mature third-party ink market.

Now, that's not simply a drop-in replacement for a regular printer, starting with the fact that you need to use monoline fonts so that the plotter traces out what a hand would rather than filling it in, and that a plotter just can't produce all the same stuff. The speed is going to be abysmal compared to a conventional printer for virtually any image. And I don't think know if there's anyone who has built one with a paper feed system (there are large-format pen plotters that can work with a continuous-feed roll of paper, but I don't know if those can handle fountain pens. I don't know of a fountain pen plotter that can just take a ream of A4 or US Letter pages and then handle those correctly).

But you can, strictly-speaking, have a computer create output that uses ink from the fountain pen world.

Honestly, that's not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including -- as Rossman points out -- making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn't mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.

Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the xz attack -- the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up. I understand that it's also been a concern with even browser extensions.

The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value. And there are people who will try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.

Strictly-speaking, in this case, it's not the ability to be network-connected that's at issue, but rather the ability to push updates to firmware.

I don't know what type of computer you have it connected to, but Linux has a system that will automatically update firmware on USB-attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.

$ sudo fwupdtool get-devices

Will show you a list of managed devices.

I'm sure that Windows and MacOS have comparable schemes.

On Linux, I'm sure that you can blacklist a device for updates.

I'd guess that it's possible to get one of those dedicated USB print servers. Those probably don't support updating firmware on an attached printer. I might have some questions as to how much I'd trust a no-name one of those on my network itself, but...

FYI an MBR table with a fat32 partition is probably what it was looking for. If that doesn't work odds are the port is broken

I have a Brother printer at work that's old enough that I don't have a single thumb drive small enough to work with it. Haven't tried in a while, but iirc it tops out at 8gb and the smallest I have is 32gb.

But it works fine over the network, so I'll just carry on ignoring the firmware update it's been begging me to install for two years.

You might have to consider buying used.

Even older HP printers are fine (and I know people love to shit on them, but they too used to be perfectly safe and reasonable choices). More or less the safe/unsafe divide coincides with the switch from printers with 2x16 character displays to ones with full colour screens.

I've got a 2012-designed (but mine is 2017-built) HP Colour Laserjet CP5225dn, it has none of the modern lock-in shenanigans.

Just gotta find one that's new enough that consumables are still readily available (fortunately this usually isn't too difficult), and in good physical condition.