I hate that everything now is a subscription service instead of buying it and do whatever you want.
Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.
That was because of a misunderstanding. Brother started a subscription service and people assumed that meant you had to pay a monthly fee to use the printers like with HP. Instead, it’s a toner subscription like Dollar Shave Club or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save where they auto-send a new toner at your requested interval.
I use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser
I heard they stopped allowing that recently.
Mine still allows it. There might be a model or two that doesn’t but I’d be surprised.
Up to date firmware?
I treat that thing like a rented uhaul, of course the firmware hasn’t been updated
Saw some people posting recently they sold out also
I also heard a rumor about something somewhere, that maybe something might have happened. But I’m not sure. /S
I just installed a Brother printer for my dad, absolutely zero bullshit.
I just read an article the other day that said LG is about to start charging subscription fees for washing machines 🙄
I will go old school and start washing my clothes against a rock in the river before I’ll pay a fucking subscription to use my own washing machine
That is crazy.
Like a damn laundromat. So is LG gonna supply water and power too? Wtf are the charging for? The right to buy their product? Lmao. Fuck off.
Go analog. Real analog. Sticks and stones baby.
The article said the subscription was for “software updates” which really seems like something they should provide for free anyway so you’re really just paying for the privilege to use their precious machine that you already paid for lol
what is the difference between a subscription and a never ending loan
With a loan you actually receive money at the start.
man the world is so fucked up that I was more surprised that they weren’t already doing this
Ready boys? Say it with me, now.
BROTHER👏LASER👏PRINTER👏
I love the fact that brother basically does no marketing as far as I know. They just end up shining like a diamond because they make a generally good product and everyone else around them makes absolute trash.
I only bought a brother printer because of recommendations from reddit. It’s so much better than my old hp inkjet that randomly started asking me to sign in in order to print or scan.
Why tf would I need to sign in to my HP account online in order to print in my own fucking home.
No joke. I had HP and I knew Brother was painfree experience and when I was buying said HP, I completely forgot about them. Few years forward my old HP avoided destruction by sheer luck and my brother’s will to try and tame it. These days I have Brother laser printer and it takes whatever you throw at it without complaints. It’s so obedient am having issues accepting such behavior.
Sorry to burst your bubble but Brother are also going down the subscription path.
They are but the pricing is ok, £2 a month for 50 pages. The higher end pricing seems to be around 3p per page which is what they price their toners at. They even allow you to rollover a decent amount of print credit. Now, if they had these printers in shops around the country and I could use the credit for those instead of just in my own home, I think it would be a really cool service. The local corner shop charges £2 to print a single sheet of A4 and then 50p per page after that.
Do they force you to use the subscription model, or do they brick your device if you fail to keep up on payments?
If yes to either, fuck them.
Got one of these years ago and it’s still kickin’
I find myself being a printer snob by judging a friend of mine for buying into HPs ink subscription ecosystem.
I’ve moved to Brother from HP. Disappointed by the support for Linux. While the driver exists, a lot of them aren’t packaged. HP does a better job at that.
But people will think something is wrong when it just works and prints for years without needing any replacements
What about Epson? Specifically I’m considering one of the ecotank ones because I need to print stuff for board games like info sheets and so on that need rich colours and designs. Might even look into A3+ printers.
Are those useful? The per-page cost looks crazy low for an inkjet.
Every time I think printers can’t get any worse, they get worse.
What’s next? are they going to have to scan your anus to confirm that it’s actually you printing things? I shouldn’t give them ideas.
By the way, I’m sure there’s a way to get into the firmware of the printer to disconnect it from that centralized service.
What’s next?
Printed ads.
Yes
I can picture it, if you don’t want ads printed at the bottom of every page you have to subscribe.
Oh god, imagine your printer waking you up at 3 am as it spits out an ad for Arby’s. But hey, ink at half price!
Or get the brother printer while they’re still good.
What’s next?
The firmware will ask for a tip every 10 pages.
Please drink a verification can
“PLAYER ATTEMPTING TO STEAL ONLINE PLAY!!!”
mom just walked in the room
I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t. The companies that make printers have always been scamming people with their printers and all the shitty things the printers do.
They’re designed to be shitty and expensive on purpose so that you have to call the guy to fix it and pay an enormous amount of money every time the printer stops working by design.
If they could get away with it, they would have made paper that only works on their printer, and it would be more expensive than normal paper but you have to use it.
Dymo has done that a year ago.
Why not just not allow it to connect to any internet and use wired printing?
Even better!
A whole other brown ring of quality
Please drink verification can to continue
What the fuck is wrong with people? It’s been common knowledge that hp is trash for decades now. The whole idea of capitalism is that the bad products fail when customers go to the competitors who do a better job, but hp is not a monopoly and there are better competitors that exist, but people keep in buying HP because frankly, they are too fucking stupid. Capitalism is a lie because consumers are too stupid to pick the best products.
My hp laptop works fine, but yeah hp printers are terrible. They are very slow to print, and the ink was quite expensive.
I don’t have any experience with their laptops, but they pissed me off so much with their printers that I’ve written off their entire brand. Even if their other stuff is really good, I’m fine with writing them off entirely just out of spite.
Honestly the laptops are pretty good in my opinion. My HP pavillion laptop had space to upgrade RAM, install new hard drives and plenty of ports. But I still agree with you that the printers are complete rubbish.
The simplest proof that the Homo Economicus human model used in the mathematical models that justify Free Market Theory is complete total bollocks is that the Marketing that has no mention of the qualities of the product whatsoever, actually works (perfumes and cars are prime examples but there are tons of examples for consumer tech also).
That and some people from Behavioural Economics (the only part of that domain which is actually scientific) have shown with various experiments that there are lots of ways in which people are not rational in their economic decisions, hence not at all the “pure personal upside maximizer” which is the Homo Economicus model.
People sticking to a well-known name such as HP is probably down to the effect of familiarity (at times known as “name recognition”) - maybe one of the biggest irrationalities in human economic behaviour and one of the pathways most commonly exploited by marketing.
And for example, the products that sell the most on amazon are not the best products, they’re the ones that give amazon the biggest advertising budget.
There was a time when Hewlet Packard products were the best, them it became HP and…
I was there, but that was decades ago.
At least three…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
HP printers are now pure scamming dog shit. The HP printer division must have been taken over by criminals.
The first laser printer I worked with was a HP 4L and it was fantastic. So fantastic, that we implemented it company wide, and they were close to immortal. The last of them got killed off when we got follow-me print.
If you want a decent laser printer today, stay clear of HP and get a Brother instead.
Subscriptions are out of fucking hand.
Printer company are one of the biggest legalized scammer we currently have. Out water and some ink they make huge amount of Profit.
They are the Definition of making Gold out of shit.
Their laptops and desktops are terribly cheap too. Just avoid HP all together is everyone’s best bet.
Snagged an 840 G6 for a little more than 100 and it’s working fine. Had the company send me a new touchpad and there hasn’t been an issue since
I can speak for their terrible cheapness, I work at a repair shop and we got a lot of HP laptops. It’s extremely common for the very stiff hinge just to snap the upper case because they didn’t even try to reinforce it. Just 3 screws to hold down this half an inch long hinge and that’s it, you can see it flexing and twisting when using it.
I swear all those HPs and frankly a lot of dells have the build of wet newspaper, I wouldn’t touch them (minus HP elite books, my 8770w is great).
On another note Lenovos and Thinkpads are always very sturdy and are very good.
My mom’s Amazon Halo that counts steps just shut off because they ended the service. I do not trust anything that requires live service at this point.
I still have a poke walker step counter from like 2005 or whatever. Still works
I hate these things. I took one out to an abandoned reservoir and blew it to pieces with a .12 gauge shotgun. Very therapeutic.
“PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean?”
It was .12 gauge triple ought buckshot Office Space.
I would never buy another HP printer, except for target practice.
Well if your going that route (and I’m ok with it) go with Mossberg 590 Shockwave. I run mine w/ double ought w/ a sidesaddle of more rounds. I don’t have a HP printer but I did take a faulty firewall that would get me called out every other night for hanging to the range. It got a lovely sprinkling of 7.62x39 and x54r, it was from the heart, true love.
Then it went to the E-Recyclers, got to be Earth conscience.
I was using a Mossberg. I eventual stopped doing it because it was blowing glass and toxic circuit board stuff all over the place.
I can see that being an issue, it shatters the PCB and the fiberglass/plastic isn’t something I would want to breath in of contaminate the area
Exactly. I did it a few times and stopped. Good times, though.
I love blasting, I have a legal machine gun (in the US). Lighting something up (not living) is a blast. Until you get back blast and that shit sucks. Also hot brass down the back of your shirt is hell. Happens more when you have FA.
/Love the handle, they banned my 6 accts and all my subs. F reddit we need Aaron back.
I still use the same printer I got in 2004. Hp color laser jet 2600n. Highly recommend. It’s large and loud and toner is pricey. But toner is widely available, you can easily get 2,000+ pages out of a toner cart, I’ve generally found it to have native driver support in macOS and Linux at this point, it has an Ethernet jack so you can print over network, etc. the toner is also much more reasonable if you only print black and white, the $$$ is if you change all the toner carts at once.
It does have a toner tracking chip but you can override that in the firmware. they used to actually allow you to do such a thing!! It’s not even like a secret developer menu thing, it’s just an option you can pick although iirc it warns you print quality may suffer. or you can just buy blank chips for a few bucks, it’s just a little plastic tab that you break off and then you slide the old one out and the new one in. But that’s more for if you plan to refill the toner carts which I do not recommend; it’s a messy process where you have to burn/cut a hole in the cart, refill with powder, then seal it with tape. I tried it a few times and it was a huge mess and lead to leaky carts; not worth saving the $50 bucks or whatever
I’m pretty sure in like 2040 my house will be an anachronism of old tech like this. It’s already mostly there with some notable exceptions. If I have to subscribe I won’t buy it; if I buy it and find out I need to subscribe I’ll return it or sell it. I will pay month by month for items that justify a need for ongoing payment (like I pay once a year for Usenet access). But I don’t think I am in the target demo for basically any company lol
FWIW I’ve an $100 brother laser (2140) the same age. The toner cartridges are $20 on eBay. I’ve bought two or three in the last 20 years.
black toner is cheap, everything else is expensive as hell. But yes, toner printers are probably your best option for cheap printing.
Sure but I mean to accentuate the idea that older printers don’t have these stupid drms. Frankly I would prefer something newer that isn’t the size of a mini fridge and sounds like an industrial copier but I’ll take that over a printer that requires persistent WiFi and my debit card to print.
Pretty sad that in 20 years we went from a printer that had a chip that tracked toner use so that you could see how much was left but still easily gave you the option to say “ignore that and keep printing” to printers that arbitrarily create e waste by bricking cartridges because they’re past the assigned page count or expiry date despite having ink/toner left.
Pretty sure toner is cheaper than what HP charges for ink.
I had an ancient laserjet for years and HP stopped making toner. Wished I had kept it and used 3rd party toner but I heard about others not having great experiences with that.
That said our old OfficeJet 8600 is still going great and no subscriptions.
How it is legal to charge a subscription for a device like that is beyond me. Need to pass state laws to stop that bullshit I think. That’s the only way that might actually be remotely feasible.
Same, except it’s an Officejet 6600 from early 2010. I use third party ink cartridges in it. Fuck those expensive “genuine” ink cartridges!
As this year has progressed I’ve become increasingly disillusioned by technology. Shit just stops working, random upgrades, and adverts invading my search results, the list is endless. I have an LG washer and needed to install an app to diagnose the problem. The Wi-Fi chip took multiple attempts to connect, and then the app required countless permissions to anything and everything. My work is making me travel and the hotel doesn’t have a check in desk, alas I need to install and app and upload my photo ID… ffs!!
There was a recent episode of Always Sunny where Denis takes a mental health day. It can’t be more accurate! I am so over being harassed by technology. To some degree I invited it into my life, I’ll own that. But I think I’m slowly becoming a willful Luddite and I’m absolutely fine with that!
I have a 1320n. When I bought toner about 5 years ago and it was $20 for third party, works fine. Every few months I flip it on, print a few pages (sometimes from my phone), and flip it off again. Ezpz.
Third party toner is usually fine, refilling is where I’ve had issues. Although years ago I did get a super cheap third party toner at micro center that leaked like crazy. I had to return it and clean the whole printer, was a nightmare. But aside from that one incident never had an issue
nobody should support companies that place restrictions on their hardware for RANSOM
++ for brother. Still running my mfc j470 ink jet purchased in 2013. I purchased it because of their support of Linux and Android. I’ve NEVER used official ink cartridges besides what came with it. it’s printed 6900 pages
Nice x 100
Brother it is! I have a laser combo scanner printer MFC thingy, I guess from around 2010 or so, still works like a charm as a network device. I buy a third party toner every three years and that’s it.
I have a brother B&W laser printer but for anyone looking for a new printer, be wary of brother. Their latest firmware stops the allowance of 3rd party toner/ink cartridges. It’s disappointing because I’ve been a big proponent of theirs for years. Haven’t bought toner since 2019 on our printer.
It’s always funny to see content creators you watch appear randomly somewhere else Wendigoon is a great long form content creator for unfiction and conspiracy theories and here he is talking about a printer.
True I followed him because I loved his conspiracy iceberg playlist.
His video about the Waco siege was what really got me into his videos.
Is unfiction like scp stuff where it pretends to be real? Sorry, I can’t make spoilers work for me right now
Also, is there any meaningful difference between that and magical realism?
Yeah, you can count SCP as unfiction they are stories meant to suspend disbelief so in-story they are taken as fact. A good example, if you want to dive into unfiction, I really like the “Monument Mythos” series it is really interesting.
