Submitted 3 days ago by PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat to technology@lemmy.zip
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/
According to Brother and covered list in Arstechnica, it’s not true.
I know we shouldn’t take the manufacturer at their word, but reading the Ars comments, there’s a lot of reasons why third party toner would cause problems on their own and Brother can’t support trying to fix another company’s product in their own.
I don’t know, man. Maybe it is lies. Cory Doctorow and Louis Rossman are not just random idiots on YouTube, but they are just as susceptible as anybody to reading some hearsay and repeating it.
On the other hand, the claims are very specific. “When you install third party toner, on this particular model of Brother printer, it stops respecting the calibration settings meaning that your colors are misaligned and color prints will look weird.” That’s pretty verifiable. It doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s also actually not directly contradicted by anything in the Ars article. The article just says that Brother said you can use third party toner. Which everyone (as far as I saw) was agreeing that you can. Your prints will just look bad, after a particular firmware update, for reasons that are completely separate from any theoretical issue with the toner being third party.
IDK. I will not claim to know the truth here. But I’m not convinced by what I have seen so far that the story is definitely bullshit. And the whole thing of sidestepping the issue of “the printer starts refusing to apply color calibration”, and just talking in generalities, is also a little suspicious. That has nothing to do with third party toner being lower quality or something.
Yeah I definitely have to agree there. I don’t want to side blindly with a manufacturer, but I like how you said it about the YouTubers being just as susceptible as anyone else to falling for hearsay.
I will try a third party toner on my Brother when it finally needs a refill to see. Looks like I’ve been running the newer firmware a long time but haven’t had to refill toner since well before. Might as well be moot with how rarely I print lol
That’s some article 🤣
eRac@lemmings.world 3 days ago
Please note that this is based on a Reddit post from three years ago. It’s a YouTuber that stokes drama for money doing what he does best.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
You can disagree with Rossmann on many things, but trying to dismiss him by calling him “YouTuber that stokes drama for money” just shows your own ignorance. His business revenue is in millions, in comparison what he gets from YouTube is peanuts.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 days ago
I mean it was news to me. I didn’t watch the Youtube video or feel that I needed to. I own a Brother printer, I did exactly the same thing both commentators talked about, recommended to people that they buy from Brother specifically because they didn’t do this bullshit. Now I am bothered.
It doesn’t talk to the internet, but I am wondering if having it connected to a Mac is enough to automatically update my drivers someday and start to commence fuckery, and if I should go ahead and figure out how to hook it up to Linux and have it on a frozen driver version just to be sure. I definitely like the way it works right now.