BTW, I’ve had my Brother laser MFP for 11 years and still on the original toner.
If any representative from Brother is reading this, hear me.
DON’T ENSHITTIFY! You see this? You can own the market if you just LEAVE IT ALONE.
Exactly. You can join the club of “Do Nothing and Win” club along with Gabe Newell
They have started chipping their toners, or so I’ve read. They’re still the least shitty printer manufacturer, AFAIK, though.
Let’s hope it’s just for quality of life and not to bully their customers…
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is. I used to use knock-off toner, but after a firmware update, the printer would no longer recognize those cartridges. Luckily, I had bought them on Amazon, so I just explained the problem to customer service and got a full refund. I still love the printer though.
I’m sure even internally their message is that they want to ensure the best customer experience while also protecting their revenue.
Now if ensuring the best customer experience HURT revenue, things get interesting. And by interesting I mean enshittified.
DON’T ENSHITTIFY!
They kind of already did, at least they did in the past.
They fought pretty hard to make you only use their toners, and they would warn you to change your toner cartridges way earlier than it was necessary to do so, disabling the printer if you didn’t. I remember having to put tape over the optical device in the printer that looks at the toner cartridge, just so I can keep using my toner cartridge.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my brother mfc7840w printer, but it’s so weird to hear so much praise for Brother, it’s like there is group amnesia about how they used to be on some of this stuff themselves.
They already started. I think it’s too late
Too late
I honestly don’t remember my printer brand. And that’s a good sign. I bought it years ago, and it now lives under my basement stairs on a static IP via wifi, accepting the on average bimonthly print job that I need from it. Then I walk down, fetch the print, and close the door on it again. I should name it Harry Potter.
Harry Printer
Harry Plotter ?
You’re a printer Harry.
I’m a what???
Give a lightning scar across the top
You may not remember the brand, but sounds to me like you got yourself a Brother laser printer.
I might not know the brand of my Brother laser printer either, if it weren’t for all the other printers sucking so badly.
“Dude, you’re getting a
DellBrother!”
It runs arch btw
And Doom
Harry Plotter
deleted by creator
I’ve used tons of dot matrix, inkjets and lasers since the 80s. I’ve used them in MSDOS, ProDOS, Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS, OSX, and BeOS. I don’t know how many I’ve owned or how many different OS versions but I know I’ve had exactly 1 printer that wasn’t constantly a problem and its a Brother laser printer.
Okidata Microline dot matrix printer has entered the chat
They’re fine until they get off track with the page perforations. And the ribbons last quite a while, but are technically a security risk
Wow, I think I had an Okidata modem at one point. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.
can you recommend a good printer ?
Get a brother laser. 👨
can you tell me how to kill a High Ganzonian ?
Get a laser, brother. 👽
I would take any laser printer with a scanner/copier that doesn’t have a subscription model that has Linux drivers for all features .
Brother is the only one I’ve found to check all the boxes
My only gripe with it was the scan drivers were not easy to configure to enable network scanning.
Once I figured that out, I made a SANE scan server that has the drivers, and I just point all my devices to that (SANE to SANE) and don’t even need to install the actual scanner drivers. It’s damn amazing.
Oh, the software is actually called SANE. I thought you were just making clear how bad Brother’s drivers were.
Oh, yeah. lol. It’s the Linux scanner framework. It has a network protocol that will talk to other SANE services and allow scanners to be shared.
My scan programs all go through SANE, so you don’t need the Brother drivers on each PC you want to scan from (just the machine that is interfacing with the scanner; in my case, it’s a Docker container on my server).
Learning I could do that was pretty life changing. lol
Maybe it depends on the model? I just set it up on one a laptop a couple weeks ago and it only took like 10 minutes.
I guess it was easy, just not well documented (at the time, anyway).
Once I figured that out, I made a SANE scan server that has the drivers, and I just point all my devices to that (SANE to SANE) and don’t even need to install the actual scanner drivers. It’s damn amazing.
Could you point me towards instructions on how to do that?
Pretty sure I just followed this:
Thank you!
Did the same thing for mine. I’ve got one with ADF scanning, but it’s only one-sided. So I simply wrote some script on my scan server that merges the current scan with the last scan if they have the same amount of pages and now I can easily scan stacks of paper with both sides. After that it goes through some compression and off to my NAS. Ah, love my pipeline, so glad how simple the printer’s Linux drivers made it.
That’s awesome! I’d love to expand mine to do more like that, but the model I have doesn’t have the ADF so it’s kind of pointless.
Interestingly a Lemmy user in another thread has a very negative view of Brother because he only uses Brother cutting machines (for craft projects) and it’s filled with DRM and HP style lock in.
its why i dont like buying by brand, but rather specific product.
buying by brand gives companies a pass when they push out a shit product.
A “printer”? Oh right, those things we used to spray ink on dead trees back in the 20th century.
You’d think, lol. I still find myself randomly needing to print randomly (and more often than I’d like).
When I read a very long RFC, I’d rather read it as an ink sprayed dead tree than a PDF.
Have you thought about e-ink readers? There are ones you can write/draw with, and since I got mine I completely skip paper!
I keep a lot of binders of them for reference. I just prefer having it in a binder with all my notes and bookmarks in it. But yeah, eink is so much more comfortable to read than an LCD.
I’m with you, but unfortunately our world is still filled with old fucks who still see paper (and by extension, wet signatures) as some sort of ultimate authoritative source
Source: I’ve worked in the financial industry before (and never again)
Greatest article ever: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine
Legit solid printer. Would highly recommend
Just don’t update the printer’s firmware! Mine’s being going great for years now, but I’m scared that I might accidentally update it and the toner will be labeled unauthorised
In fairness you should do this on Windows as well.
95% of home printing needs can be handled by a mono laser. If you need a photo, usually cheaper to print it online or at a supermarket. Only for larger prints might it be cheaper to do it at home, and you’d better be sure to use it often because most inkjets clog like a motherfucker when not in use.
Yep. That’s exactly what I do. I thought about a color laser, but even the Brother ones will not print if one of the colors is empty (or, at least at the time I was researching).
So I got a good mono one that covers 99% of my needs. For the few times I need to print in color, I just have that done somewhere for next to nothing. Typically those are photos, and what I get back are better than I’d have printed at home.
most inkjets clog like a motherfucker when not in use.
If you have an inkjet printer, even an expensive one, you have to leave it plugged in and in standby mode so it can do it’s regular cleaning cycle.
A good middle-range inkjet printer (like a Canon MB2700) can be economical and durable; unfortunately most people’s experience of inkjet are the ultra-cheap ones sold in big-box stores, sold at a loss, to sell over-priced cartridges, and not left plugged in/don’t have cleaning cycles.
I have a 10 year old Canon MP280 still going strong. It’s one of the ultra cheap ones, I believe originally sold for something like 20$ at a sale. The only problem it has nowadays is that it occasionally makes some ink blotches in a corner of the page.
Brother gets recommended a lot by virtue of being the least shitty option in the hellish wasteland of consumer/office printers. They aren’t perfect, but Brother printers have been the only option in the entire office to reliably print from a Linux computer over the network. Honestly, any day I don’t have to interact with a printer is a good day.
Brother has already started to enshitify, Kyocera is an alternative company that does simple laser printers, with easy and cheap to source generic toners
The only reason I ever got rid of my original brother laser printer is because computers stopped coming with parallel ports, and the adapters I tried all sucked.
2nd Brother laser printer is still going strong after 15yrs.
Heyyy, mine just turned 16. Cheers.
I think mine is at least over 15 (hl2150n released in 2007). It had 4 toner replacements so far. It gets used less and less. It could be that I still did not print a single page in 2024, don’t remember.
I’m a big proponent of buying government surplus office printers. I have this huge print center collater thing that came with more toner than I’ll ever use in my life. $55
Oh gods yes. Government surplus equipment is amazing when you can find it.
My state used to send all their decommissioned IT equipment to a warehouse where the public could buy it. It was a wonderland. My first few laptops all came from there (was poor and that was the only way I could afford one).
About 5 years ago, though, they stopped that and only send old furniture there. Anything electronic now goes to some 3rd party e-waste service where it probably ends up in a landfill in some poor country.
Tbh, get a Brother printer for any OS. At least they don’t buy into the shitfuckery that HP and others do with ink and firmware updates.
They are starting to now.
