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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s like every company that wasn’t complete shit just suddenly decided to…go to complete shit.
With the current US government, there’s far more roadblocks to running a company ethically than turning it to absolute shit
Brother is a Japanese company.
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If regulators don’t stop them from doing it, the CEO’s of publicly traded companies will get the boot from the board for not doing it. They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
We need laws to stop this, but the politicians are all bribed not to.
They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
They don’t – that’s a cargo-cult misunderstanding of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co – but it’s so widely believed I guess it might as well be true.
If the people sitting on the Supreme Court believe it, and I believe the majority of those shitbags do, then that is unfortunately the law as it stands.
But when the law is unethical, I don’t see why we should be lawful.
It’s like every company that was
n’t completeplaying the social good will game and didn’t appear at a casual glance to be shit just suddenly decided to…goto complete shit.masks off, because they saw it might finally be acceptable to be ghouls again.Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I FTFY. Wish it weren’t so, but that’s definitely what it looks like…
The mask of humanity fall[s] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
- The Deserter, Disco Elysium
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Game is such a fucking gem. I gotta do a replay soon.
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Cuts into profit margins pretending to not be a threat to the continued existence of the species and ecosystem as a whole. Gotta buy that 15th mega-yacht.
Something something, I’ll bring the BBQ sauce.
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
That’s what happens when the government allows it openly.
I’m actually looking for a good multifunctional printer. Our Samsung is dying. It was an LED printer and we only changed toner 1 time in 15 years.
