The suit, filed earlier this year, argues that HP all-in-one printers stop all functions when ink levels reach some arbitrary point.
If you don’t need an all-in-one printer, then the Brother HL-L2350DW is great. The best thing about it is that it prints. These accolades are really the bare minimum you’d expect from a device called a “printer”, but that’s where we are in the world of consumer electronics.
I made the mistake of recommending Brother printers without identifying the exact version. The Brother printer my coworker bought took a page from HP’d bullshit. He returned it after a week.
Imo - Look for ones that don’t need internet or just perform 1 extremely specific thing. Or in my case, I printing a lot of b&w docs as cheap as possible.
My recommendation would be the brother laser printer HL-L2300D from 2014. The 2350DW looks similar and is more recent from 2021 and might be okay too.
It bugs me to hear that. My mantra for years has been “Buy a Brother printer, they just work”. Do you know what model of Brother had a HP style limitation, and what the limitation was? I’d like to educate myself before I recommend them again.
I had a Brother MFC something that had page counts on the toner cartridges: they would only print so many pages before saying they were out of ink, regardless of how much ink was left. You could access a secret menu and reset the counts using a special button sequence, but it was a gigantic pain at the time.
L3210CW owner here. Awesome printer. Maybe in retrospect I would have bought the one that did duplex but it’s not a concern really
It’s crazy how as soon as printers became reliable to function, companies purposely made them shit again.
You’re certainly not wrong. I have two Okidata 320 Turbos in my basement that were manufactured some time in the late '80’s that still work just fine, if I ever have occasion to fire one up (which is almost never). They don’t need a single damn thing, ever, except some tractor feed paper and a ribbon. They’ll probably outlive me.
I remember when printing something meant using this paper.
I had a dot matrix in the newsroom I worked in mid-90s. We had to cut the printout down and tape it to 8x11 paper to fit in the document stand in the broadcast booth …
Nothing like being 45 seconds to air and hoping “BRRRRT BRRRRT BRRRRRRRRT” finished up real soon
Never jammed, never went offline, never ran out of Cyan …
I bought a Brother 2270DW laser printer over a decade ago, and it is still going strong.
I have a 2700DW and have been happy with it for years. I recommend Brother to everyone, but I’m curious what Potatos_are_not_friends has to say about their experience below.
We’ve got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.
Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don’t come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users’ only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn’t do this, but it’s in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.
We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC’s for the “scan from console” feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there’s evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.
The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.
that’s quite exactly the opposite of my experience. I’ve had two different Canon inkies that went to shit real quick.
My Brother laser has printed far beyond both of those, and with no issues
My Canon ImageClass is also a laser printer, FWIW. I would not use any inkjet in this application.
That doesn’t seem to be an all in one though? It looks like just a BW laser printer. I ended up with a really cheap epson that meets my limited needs but those can be hit or miss and the ink sure isn’t cheap if you use a lot, which I do not. It doesn’t have the problems of the HP units at least.
This is great news… if HP loses we might all be rewarded $1.89 for years of extortion-level ink prices! Problem solved!1!!
founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard were so customer trusting and had such probity that it revolutionized corporate america and empowered startups to bootstrap from nothing. if they saw what became of their reputation they would’ve forced a name change. thanks Carly Fiorina for destroying an amazing institution. I hope your resume refuses to scan.
Finally! This is was a fucking nightmare for any printer user.
I escaped the nigjtmare by buying any other brand.
“Hey, can you scan this document for me?”
I’m sorry, your magenta ink is low.
“But … I’m not printing anything? None of what I need uses ink.”
MAGENTA. I REQUIRE MAGENTA.
This is great news, but at the same time, I plan on enjoying my Brother printer for the foreseeable future.
This is great, but you really want to go back? I am done using them, they made this decision and mine is to never use them again. I hope everyone else that sees what they did will do the same because they will try something else at some point.
I have a Brother printer, they haven’t been accused of things like HP has and ecotanks for my printer are very affordable. Not saying Brother won’t do this in the future but I’m confused by your reply
It just seemed from your statement that you would go back to HP once the Brother printer breaks.
deleted by creator
Yes. Canon did this shit to me a decade+ ago. Had to go to the store late at night to buy yellow ink so I could scan a goddamned document I needed to send out. Haven’t given them another dollar since.
Happened to me in Summer 2020 after printing maybe 100 total pages on a printer I’d owned for two months.
I kept getting emails about the HP subscription program and then my basically new printer inexplicably stopped working. I assumed HP bricked it and, as much as I hated to, tossed it out and told myself I was never buying their product again. Luckily the KC public library has free black and white printing anyway.
Oh, I can’t wait to get a $10 check while the lawyers get $30,000,000.
I don’t care who wins.
I just want HP to lose.
They’ll charge you to print that check
even if you want to print it grayscale it will still require MAGENTA!
Hp is a piece of shit
Louder
HE SAID “HP IS A PIECE OF SHIT”
Relevant/important watch for everyone who’s not already familiar: https://youtu.be/AHX6tHdQGiQ “Ink Cartridges Are A Scam”
He talks about basically the computer coding “bricking” the system if you try to do anything other than spend more money on their racketeering; their “razor and blade cartridges” profit model of selling the one item for cheap then price-gouging the fuck out of a required component to keep it working
I need more.
This whole “buy the whole product but block features from working without paying a fee” bullshit needs to stop. No questions.
Cars need to be next.
Whats fucked up is this type of bullshit has been a damned meme for over a fucking decade and they’re just now allowing a class action to go to trial. At this point lots of other printer makers have followed suit in some form or another.
Previous judges have thrown out cases like this. Especially in places like CA. And I thought CA was anticorporate! /s
I noped out of printers a long time ago. Staples prints whatever I need on the cheap, compared to ink cartridges.
The most amazing and surprising achievement they have made is to convince customers they are to be trusted. HP has been shit for decades now.
Us nerds called it back when they merged with Compaq. Great, we said, two once decent but now shitty companies can combine their stupidity into one new mega-stupid mega-corporation. They’ve barely done a single thing right since. It sure as shit didn’t take long for us to get proven right, but somehow they’re still shambling along. This just goes to show that no matter what nerds think, what’s “best” for a product or industry and what actually turns out to be profitable are rarely actually the same thing.
about time
