I didn’t even know he had a brother.
[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
Submitted 3 months ago by hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
echodot@feddit.uk 3 months ago
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’ve always promoted commercial inktank printers for people who do a lot of printing, and people always mentioned Brother as a response, but tbh I’ve never really hopped on the bandwagon to shill for any particular company.
Just a good commercial inktank printer. A regular printer with all the bells and whistles is going to cost you like $100 and $45 for each ink pack you buy, you might as well just spend $450 on a printer, write it off as home office expense, and call it good.
Dirk@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Can’t watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
Cocopanda@futurology.today 3 months ago
When I saw this title. I thought another YouTube hardware advocate turned their back on Louis and started an anti-consumer group to fight off policy debate that Louis does. My brain is wild.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Same but I thought Louis had a brother who became evil for some reason 😭
Cocopanda@futurology.today 3 months ago
Me too! I was like. Who is this brother? How have we not met him!
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I have a Canon color laser printer which works pretty well and doesn’t pull any of this shit. They’re probably the last one standing now.
CMonster@discuss.online 3 months ago
I used to work for canon as a service tech. They are a wildly scummy company that routinely out of their way to fuck over their employees and customers.
GeneralVincent@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hey, I work for canon in tech support right now. Trying to find a better job though haha
f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don’t buy Brother if you want that feature, either.
alphapuggle@programming.dev 3 months ago
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
f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
That goes without saying… another user here says the drive can’t be larger than 8GB but I’m fairly certain I tried that, too.
DJDarren@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
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.
tal@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Ugh.
$100 mono laser printer
Well, you probably aren’t getting a $100 laser printer unless they’ve got a razor-and-blades model. I definitely paid more than $100 for the mono laser I had. I don’t know what printers out there are gonna be fine with third-party ink (or toner), but any that do are going to cost more, because they aren’t relying on ink sales to make the printer business viable.
He says that he doesn’t know what to recommend any more, now that Brother has started doing this too.
I understand that Epson has some inkjet printers that don’t use ink cartridges. You just pour more from a bottle into the tank. Like, they can’t implement a lockout, and there are other manufacturers that sell ink for them.
kagis
“Ecotank”.
But if you want those, they’re gonna cost more than printers that are using the razor-and-blades model and expecting to make their money on the ink.
epson.com/For-Home/Printers/Inkjet/c/h110
There’s a list of their home inkjet printers. Notice how the “EcoTank” ones cost more than the non-EcoTank ones.
Like, one way or another, the printer manufacturer is gonna make their money. Either it’s not razor-and-blades model, in which case the printer is gonna cost more but the ink is cheaper, or it’s razor-and-blades and you get a cheap printer but pay more in ink and the printer manufacturer will do everything they can to lock out anyone else from selling ink for the thing.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Go with a bottle printer, or at least a laser. Cartridges suck, literally.
not_amm@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
I’m glad there’s a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There’s also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer) scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
eric5949@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Great, brother are the only ones I’ll still buy.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
How recent does the printer have to be for them to do this?
The two that I have are old and the toner cartridges don’t even have a chip in them, so I doubt they could tell if the toner is 3rd party.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
I have a Brother MFC-9340CDW that I salvaged from work last year, we replaced it because it kept getting a ghost “paper jam” every time you tried to print something. Turns out the cause is an $18 board that’s known to fail.
Now to figure out how to disable automatic firmware updates 🤔