Proton, Mozilla, Brother
Its not gonna stop there
😓
This shit happened to me recently. Installed firmware update and immediately my 3rd party toner stops working. Try to find old firmware to roll back to and couldn’t locate it anywhere. Found some for other models via Google drive links in Reddit posts, but nothing for my printer.
I replaced the toner with new 3rd party toner which worked. And now I’ll never install another firmware update on the printer and should probably block it from the internet.
Drag thought Brother were supposed to be the makers of user friendly printers. Are they enshittifying?
I fear the day my 2014 hp LaserJet dies. There won’t be a decent printer on the market…
anyone know about jailbreaking printers
It absolutely baffles me that there isn’t a huge custom printer firmware movement.
I’ve have had this thought too and the only reason I can think of is that the inkjet printers are sold at such a rediculous loss, that anything that could be sold next to them without the offset price from ink would seem like a bad joke.
I think they meant - movement to release custom firmware for existing printers.
You were the chosen one! 😭
They had two things going for them… Decent linux support and non-shitty DRM ink/toner
Et tu Brute! :(
nononononononpnNONONONONONO WHYYYYY I JUST GOT A BROTHER BECAUSE OF HP DOING THE SAME THING WTF
Keep it off the Internet and don’t update the firmware
Haha, my crappy ass old HP printer still takes refills. No printer company shall ever see another cent of mine 😈
Et tu Brother?
This is a total shit move but I have tried many printers and I’m still choosing Brother everytime. Especially on some older generations with copy scan and print. None of the other big brands are worth a shit. They all fail or jam in some form or fashion.
Give them time and they’ll suck too. Nothing is safe from enshitification, as they’ve just shown us.
It’s going to get to the point where you might be better off going back to dot matrix if tank-based inkjet printers are somehow locked down via chemical DRM too.
Brother used to be the good guys… Damn.
Right? I used to recommend friends and family invest in a brother laser printer instead of inkjet, especially if they didn’t need color
In case anyone was thinking this applies only to inkjet printers: no, it ONLY seems to apply to laser printers – the thing that Brother used to be known for. Where the article says “ink”, they mean “toner”. There is no ink in a laser printer.
Could this be anything related to government printer tracking requirements?
I believe that only applies to ink jet. You can hardly make secret dots in B&W.
There is something similar for B&W laser printing. Text is never 100% black, but rastered. You can digitally hide a whole lot of information in microraster on a page of printed text.
Text is never 100% black, but rastered.
Does “rastered” mean the image is mapped onto a very fine grid and each square is given a 0-100 value for intensity of ink? I looked it up, and it seemed like the squares are given a binary value, but this is nowhere near my wheelhouse and I’m honestly not sure I understood the Wikipedia page, let alone the references
It is actually quite easy: “Black” print does not mean that 100% of all pixels are actually set. Print pixels are never perfect squares, so even if the printer only prints half of the dots, the print is still dark enough. If not, it could print 70% or 80%, but lets stick to 50% for ease of argument.
So instead of
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXit would print
X X X X X X X X X X X XFor you, it would still be a “roughly black” spot (keep in mind these 8x3 pixel are 0.032mm wide and 0.012mm high on good laser printer).
Would you notice if the pattern was slightly different, like
X X X X X XX X X X X XMake a bonanza of those small changes nobody can see, and you can hide thosands of bytes of data in those patterns on any printed page.
Wait, I thought that’s something that only color laser do with yellow toner…
Edit: Possibly
Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?
I don’t at all feel vindicated, but my Brother printer is the worst printer I ever owned (this was 20 years ago admittedly). Absolute hunk of junk with nothing but problems. I’ve always wondered why they were so well recommended online.
Epson inkjets with refillable tanks probably.
Depending on the frequency of your printing, they can suck as well. Chronically clogged nozzles are maddening.
I have the 2850. Been using it for a couple years now. Print maybe once a month. Nozzles get clogged periodically but you run the automated cleaning process and it’s back to working again.
You can run a power clean cycle which should help, then just replace the foam pads they saturate with ink for the cleaning
They’re not perfect but they’re still the most consumer friendly option on the market at this point
After talking to support 15 times, they never suggested replacing anything, and power clean wasn’t enough. I’ve long since destroyed the thing out of malignant rage and turned to libraries and copy shops, but it’s good to know that there might have been a solution.
Wait until copy shops start raising their prices cause nobody has printers anymore and you have no choice but to use them
Still cost me less than a new printer every two years if they multiplied their prices by 10.
This. My partner’s office is stuck with “it has to be inkjet” and not toner, and on January their printer got clogged…
Inkjet is great, for photo printing regularly. For absolutely every other situation a laser printer is better.
Yeah, that’s true. That was a pain in the ass when my wife needed good color accuracy.
I don’t print that often but I do have a calendar event to tell me to print something monthly. This could be a nice side project for someone to write a program that sends a print to your printer on a schedule to keep the heads clear. Wastes paper but at least the heads won’t dry out.
I reuse old paper when I do this.
Did they ever make the excess ink parts user replaceable?
That they weren’t in some models kept me from getting one when I was in the market a few years ago.
I’ve got a Lexmark laser printer, and while there are cheaper subscription toners, you can pay the higher price for normal toner, and buy compatibles, for now at least.
I don’t know if it matters, but I just bought a Canon laser printer. Didn’t see anywhere about forced subscription options for toner.
