I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (with built in scanner) for £250 and it was bundled with 6 spare toner cartridges. That was two years ago, we’re still on the first cartridge. The printer before that was also a monochrome laser printer and that lasted nearly a decade (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore). Basically, I think monochrome lasers can last forever, they always work (even if I haven’t printed for 6 months). Most people seem to buy printers with way too many features and they need 7 ink cartridges etc. I rarely print anything, but when I do I want it to just work.
> Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine
> The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.
I read that article. After a few paragraphs it goes:
“ And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again…”
The Verge is honestly pretty great. Usually. It's the only mainstream tech news publication that feels like it's not bought out by every company (re: CNET)
The first sign I should probably stop visiting The Verge was Nilay Patel's fashion meltdown[1] Then a few years later they DMCA'd a bunch of YouTubers making fun of a Verge-produced PC building video[2].
I realize Kotaku and Gawker aren't much better reputation-wise, but a journalism outfit (The Verge) issuing DMCAs against people reporting on them rankled me much worse than the former two. Absolute hypocrisy.
I don't think those things are good at all (especially 2., that was a mess), but the Verge has hundreds of people working for them, and I think overall their content is amazing.
Nilay Patel is... uh, a mood, he's probably my least favourite part of the Verge.
Even though Arstechnica is owned by Conde Nast, it's still my go-to for most tech news, albeit normally more specialized in certain fields. But at least once per week they have a really excellent and in-depth article about a variety of topics.
Ars has always been consistently in-depth and technically insightful, somewhere in-between TechCrunch/The Verge and Phoronix/XDA Devs.
My only minor complaint is that Ron Amadeo is so transparently bitter about every little bit of Google news, to the point these days he only reports the bad and very rarely the good.
Like, the last news article on RCS was about 3 years ago... Right before all four US carriers standardized on Google Messages + Universal Profile (and three of them on Jibe). There's been a mountain of RCS developments happening lately but it doesn't fit the narrative of "Google is bad at messaging" so no articles are written. You can bet if RCS has even a minor gaffe, it'll get an article. (See this play out with Ars' reporting on Google's payments efforts.)
Other than that, Ars is my go-to as well. I just have to mentally apply the Amadeo Bias Filter before I read any article about Google.
For the record, I am also incredibly bitter about Google[1]. But I'm not a reporter.
The endless-summer of the net dilutes the relevancy of information exponentially every year, while also exponentially increasing the amount of non-trivially discovered good information every year.
The good becomes burried by the bad, in ever increasing volume. The tasty nuggets of information being eaten by ever-larger sewer-slimes.
If you have an always-on machine at home, their older network printers can have AirPrint added with CUPS, avahi and (optionally) and avahi service file.
I know somebody who works at Brother and they were upset at how little innovation happens at Brother. So they asked the CEO about working on some of them or newer items, like 3-D printers, and the CEO said we work on products after everybody stops working on them.
Their entire business model is to make great basic products.
A friend of mine also bought a monochrome laser Brother. It was about half of what you paid; but it came with one toner, and it was only half-capacity. Already a bad start.
The stock toner only lasted for a year or about 200 pages. A replacement toner costs 50€, more than a single black ink cartridge would cost, and the toner is rated for 1k pages only while the 44€ ink cartridge is rated for 2.2k. (!)
In fact, for even one of the most expensive inkjet printers I can find, replacing all _4_ color cartridges costs in the vicinity of 100€. There are single color toners that are more expensive than that.
It is true that for an inkjet cartridge you will never be able to print the rated 2.2k pages, specially if you don't print frequently or in long-spaced batches. A single nozzle cleanup probably wastes around 200 pages equivalent of ink, and you definitely need one after about one week of not using the printer.
The math in these cases favors the lasers, albeit not by several orders of magnitude as is often claimed. Also, the same amount of ink is wasted if you don't use the printer for a week than whenever you don't use it for half a year.
Page count ratings aside, the issue I've always had with Inkjet printers is that I print rarely - so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months.
My laser printer will sit there quietly out of the way indefinitely. Then I surprise it with a print job and it just does what I asked before getting out of the way again. Repeat in 3 months, same story.
> so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months.
Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.
In my experience, an installed cartridge does not become unusably dry even after 1 year of total lack of use. That's because I've had all 4 colors installed for almost a year and they're still printing, and they were open & already close to the expiration date by the time I bought them (amazon warehouse stuff)...
I’ve never once had that cleaning process work. I’ve even tried a number of convoluted multi-step processes involving iso alcohol and a freezer to fix the cartridges. Always left with streaky prints.
But I’ve only tried it with 2 inkjet models before throwing those pieces of junk away and getting a laser. Printing bliss ever since.
> Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.
That sometimes works. The last HP I bought, cartridges would easily start choking after a few months of non-use, and no amount of cleaning would stop prints from having soft lines/etc. Unfortunately my printing was so infrequent that I'd be lucky to get 50 pages out of a cartridge.
The only environment where I've seen Inkjet cartridges actually 'get fully used' in the last 15 years or so has been in CAD. [0]
Compare and contrast to my Father, who goes through ebbs and flows of printing. Since switching to Brother, his overall 'ink/toner' costs have gone down since there's less waste, also Brother drivers are a bit less offensive than HP.
[0] - I'll add that while the quality of HP Plotters went down substantially between the era of the OG DesignJet 750C and the DesignJet 4000. Sure, the latter was faster, had a way nicer spittoon setup[1] and separate nozzle/ink cartridges, but had a number of design issues that prevented any real use of batch plotting. Any time we did a large series of prints unsupervised it would wind up feeding output back in and jamming the whole thing. [2]
[1] - Tl;dr- where excess ink went between jobs. Part of me wonders if the lack of such bits in consumer printers leads to more clogged nozzles.
[2] - Nothing like telling your boss your print job broke a 2 week old printer that cost almost as much as the compact sedan you bought a couple years prior...
Owner of a color Samsung C430W laser printer here. Have changed the black and yellow toner once in 3-4 years. Both still at > 80%. Never worried about 'dry cartridges'. Works seamlessly on Mac, Windows and mobile phones, no driver installs (should be totally possible on inkjets too, but never is).
There is absolutely zero chance you'll ever get 2k+ prints from an inkjet cartridge unless you're printing a small emoji on the center of the page. The most I think I've seen is ~500 pages of text.
So with infrequent use you use about 1% of the cartridge just cleaning. I typically print 1-3 pages when I print something. So your ink cartridge would give me about 200 pages.
Sounds about right. Which would make this corner case about 5-10x more expensive than a laser, which is close but below one order of magnitude difference. At these points and with such infrequently printing, the cost of the printer itself becomes more relevant than the cost of ink, and that favors inkjets and inkjet multifunctions (e.g. dual-sided ADFs can be had for around 50€ inkjet, since they obviously under-price them; much harder to see these prices for lasers or even non-cartridge inkjets).
I’m not sure it’s a corner case. I print a handful of times a year. I’ve had my $80 Dell laser about 10 years and just had to replace the toner and buy a second ream of paper. This seems about average for people I know.
If I’d bought an inkjet I suspect I’d have had to buy a new cartridge at least once a year wiping out any savings on the printer itself even if I had gone for the more expensive Brother (which would have been less of a pain on a Mac now that the old Dell drivers barely work on current macOS.)
I own a HP M15w, bought 2 years ago for ~£100. They're still available for ~£100.
I'm still on whatever toner came with the printer. It uses the 44a toner, which is ~£45 on Amazon (or third part ones are available for £12), and it's rated for 1000 pages.
I had a look at the HP and brother range of cartridges, and every single one of them was rated less than 200 pages. I found _one_ brother cartridge that does 500 pages but on a £500 printer.
What inkjet cartridges are you looking at that do 2200 pages?
I have a Brother monochrome printer too and it's been a great machine. I just want to caution people that while they are much more reliable than an inkjet, they still require _some_ maintenance every so often.
In my case, I had to buy a new (aftermarket) drum unit, and have to go in and clean the rollers, and dust it out every one in a while. I suspect most owners don't do these things and decide to just buy a new one every 5 years or so.
Our shipping department runs on brother machines, the 6200 something. I don't recall the model number offhand, but these printers are intended for a office, they really aren't true commercial spec machines. That being said, the oldest one has a page count of 1.5m last I had looked and the only real maintenance they have needed is occasional disassembly to dust them from paper fibers.
The off brand toner cartridges work OK, but they have much lower than advertised capacity. I had run the numbers 6 months ago, and the most economical option is the high capacity OEM brother units. However, my one real annoyance is the printer reports low toner well before it is actually low, we get ~500-1k pages after the low toner warning before the prints start getting faint.
> (only got rid of it because it didn’t support wireless and I couldn’t be bothered running cables anymore)
I picked such a machine (a DCP-7065dn) out of the hackerspace's scrap pile. It's complaining that the drum is at the end of its service life, but still makes great prints. It supports wired but not wireless Ethernet.
So I got a $20 gl.inet router, glued it to the side of the printer, and tapped the internal 5v power point (the schematics are easy to find) to power the router. It comes on when I turn on the printer, and their bootup times seem agreeable enough; the router is configured with WDS so the printer gets DHCP off my main WLAN and Just Works™. It took a few hours to find the power trace and perform the surgery, but I love not having an extra power brick.
Mine's a B&W samsung laser. I print a decent amount but sporadically, No issues, fast and reliable and generic replacement toner cartridges are cheap on Amazon (which was where I bought the printer for about 50 quid).
Similar with my Samsung M2026 laser with WiFi which still works well and cost £60. I would recommend it but HPs CEO of Hostage Situations Incorporated and Monopoly Maintenance bought Samsung printers and got rid of it.
Depends. I had an 8-year-old Samsung fail because a foam pad on a solenoid in the paper feed mechanism degraded past the point where the mechanism could work. I got a good life out of it, but to have it fail for such a stupid reason really annoyed me.
I was issued a Brother by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and it burned through ink cartridges, I took a semester off and the ones in the printer went bad without me printing anything; when the yellow ink ran out it refused to print in black and white even though I had plenty of black ink. Eventually it stopped working because of something to do with the drivers even though I never changed anything.
I'm glad your experience, and the experiences of others here, seem to be better but I can't help but reflect on the variance every time I read an HN poster relating about their positive Brother experience since my own experience was so different.
If your print dialog was set for color then it requires working color cartridges. Even if the document is only black and white. I've been buying Brother printers for over 20 years and I've run into that a few times.
This story tells me I made the right decision: Never ever buy a printer. I can print in the library. Since Covid started I needed to do that twice: The first time they had stopped accepting cash because of the infection risk(!). And I loaded 2 Euros on my library card for 10 pages but obviously did not use all of them. The second time they were surprised that I had money on my library card.
To be fair I have printed a couple of times at the office. But I think I have been below 10 pages a year for at least 10 years, office and library combined.
The only case seems to be having to send documents to an authority abroad. That happens to me, but infrequently enough.
Now people might say, do you trust the library with your personal documents? First I don't remember when I had something seriously sensitive. And then I would say do you trust all that closed source software on your own Windows PC? As Linux user I would have probably not even been able to open the secret windows the article described.
The article opens with a hint at another possible course of action: buy a cheap Brother laser printer, which currently go for about $129 in the US. Read the beginning of the article for the testimony, which many people have found for themselves.
What you actually need to avoid are manufacturers like HP, unless the idea of an “ink subscription” appeals to you. It’s also best to avoid ink jets both because of ink costs but also because they’re much less reliable especially if you don’t use them often - the ink dries up and the autoclean option never quite works right.
I happen to have an HP inkjet printer which I use every three or so months, and never had the dried ink problem. Always works reliably, including the display ink level function.
I think this "the ink dries up!" mantra is either outdated, doesn't affect HP anymore, or I got extremely lucky with my HP printers since 2014
The reason I posted is that I'm about to throw out an HP OfficeJet Pro with that issue. It's a few years old but it hasn't worked properly for a while now, and given the costs of ink it's not worth repairing. I used to have a laser and I'm planning to switch back.
>This story tells me I made the right decision: Never ever buy a printer.
If it's that easy for you, great.
Fact is that desktop printers offer a service that is so valuable to some people/professions that manufacturers can be as outwardly customer-hostile as they please and still ship plenty of product.
I have a home office, and life without my printer would be terribly inconvenient. Driving to the library or copy center every time I need to print something is a nonstarter.
What're you printing? At some point I realised it was extremely rare that I printed anything other than a return label (and was doing so at the office while largely working from home, not that convenient), so I just got a label printer.
Most places (government included) accept e-signature now, don't they? You might need to upload the PDF to docusign to make it a "legit" e-signature, but that sounds better than the absurdity of printing and rescanning an originally digital document.
Nope. Many places will still require a physical signature on a scanned document. Why?
Because on their end, they print it back out and keep a physical copy. That is their workflow. Many offices are still paper based.
Even at my work, we use docusign for some stuff, but will require physical signatures for others.
Printing and rescanning is absurd, but also very easy for anyone. Especially now, it’s less “print and rescan” and more “print and send me a photo with your phone”.
Tried this with a couple of forms in Alaska and they were rejected because the signature looked like a digital one. (Even though my digital signature is a scan of an actual signature)
I had this with the IRS. Someone hand reviewed the form and used a highlighter to highlight the two digital signatures that were identical (they were, but not placed exactly the same, so im surprised they noticed) and said “this is not a legal signature, please sign again in ink and return”.
The E-SIGN act says that e-signatures are valid, with the main caveat being both parties need to opt into doing business electronically. Unfortunately that doesn't mean that every agency must accept e-signatures.
I don't think I do any less (or more) of that than normal/average. I managed to buy a house without one (by which I mean it never came up, not that I could work around it).
Change that to "Only buy a laser printer" or "Never ever buy an inkjet printer" and you're closer to the truth. Better still, "Only buy an older - but no too old - office-type laser printer at the thrift store" or something along those lines and you're golden. Cheap toner which lasts for years, the machine has a network connection so you can just wire it to a switch or router somewhere where it is convenient. The "not too old" is mostly because really old laser printers are power hogs, get one with a power-saving mode. It might take a few more seconds before the first page comes out when it as to heat the fuser first but who cares?
I have a HP Laserjet 2200dtn and a Canon MF9220Cdn in different locations, both of them switched off but ready for use after being switched on. Toner does not dry out like ink does, nozzles do not get clogged, the things tend to just work when needed. With enough toner for at least 3 years (and more to be had for cheap on eBay et al) we're set and we do not need to go to any library - which would be a long cycle ride seeing how as we're living on a farm in the Swedish countryside - to print out those stupid forms, schematic diagrams and presentations.
For those of us who need to print a bit more often, my advice is to buy a black and white laser printer for ~$40 on Craigslist and you'll get years of cheap, reliable occasional printing in your own home while you use up the rest of the toner cartridge that came with it. When it breaks you can probably find another one in the same price range.
I'm going to advise against this. Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense. I have gotten 2 used printers out of not wanting to generate e-waste, only to have constant printer jams and other frustrations leading to me having to just print at the grocery store instead.
"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.
I got a Brother laser printer (HL-3170CDW) and in terms of economy it's hard to beat. (Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.)
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.
> Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.
With traditional ink printers, yes.
With the new tank-based printers? No. That advice no longer holds.
Tank-based printers separate out the tank that holds the ink from the nozzle that sprays the ink. This allows the printer to fully seal off the tank when the printer is not in use, preventing the ink from drying up. The traditional ink cartridges are not able to do that, which is what causes so much frustration and wastage.
I have a few clients with the tank-based printers, and these products seem to have solved the last major objections against inkjet printers. FWIHS, they tend to work quite well.
How do they keep the ink from drying up in the nozzles? That, in my experience, is the problem. There's always leftover ink in the nozzles from the last print operation.
I did buy a (Brother DCP-J4120DW) colour inkjet printer all-in-one device. And (surprisingly to me) it actually doesn't suck. The Linux drivers work. Sure, the ink is pricey, but it has generally been trouble-free. I left it for a couple of years without printing anything and it clogged up, but when the pandemic hit and I started having to print at home again, it cleared up with a couple of head-cleaning operations. I'm not printing much - maybe a double-sided sheet a week.
So yeah, the advice to never buy an inkjet - it's true but not disastrously true all the time.
I second the trouble-free experience with the dcp-j4120. Printing from Android works fine as well.
It does seem there are Linux problems ahead though, as the drivers seem to support only some deprecated CUPS driver version...
Perfectly. At least from the cable onwards. This seems to be a fairly common problem for Brother printers, oddly enough. I eventually figured out the issue from one of several Youtube videos addressing it.
I wonder if Brother knows of its growing positive reputation over the past ~15 years, and whether there are internal pressures within Brother's C-execs to capitalize on this through 'successful' tactics that others are employing.
Its just the lasers though. I had a brother inkjet and it was a short lived disaster. I don't print much and the heads dried up a bit and then in 'cleaning mode' it blasts out most of the ink of the cartridges, but doesn't fix the problem. Other inkjets have the print heads on the catridges so you get new ones when they are replaced. Brother inkjet heads are part of the printer which means they can be a better quality head, but if there is a problem then its much harder to fix. In the end the printer didn't last a year because it heads got fouled and couldn't easily be cleaned/replaced.
Maybe they know, and it's a better business model for them. I don't know how the costs break down. Anti-consumer shenanigans cost money -- first they have to be engineered, then it probably generates a certain amount of after market support issues even when it works perfectly. A shenanigan-free product could be cheaper to design and quicker to market in the first place.
> Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense.
Consumer printers? Sure. Highly likely. That stuff was designed to be disposable.
Business-class or Enterprise-class printers that had been used in larger offices or have low page counts? A much lower probability.
The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
Yes, it is still possible to get a lemon. But if you live somewhere with any sort of a significant metro region, you only need a little patience to find older pre-DRM hardware that is still performing well.
I have had a second-hand 4050DTN for about two decades now (liquidation sale, IIRC), and while it’s hurting for a maintenance kit (already have one, albeit in storage somewhere), it’s still running very well in all other aspects.
> The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
On the large format side, OG DesignJet 750Cs were pretty dang serviceable for the longest time. The first one I had to repair took a good day or so to disassemble/reassemble, but the next 2 I was able to handle in the second half of a workday.
I do think that used enterprise things will be likely to work well.
I do not live in a place that can fit an “enterprise” printer though, and I think for many people living in apartments it’s a bit of an ask. But it’s also pretty dependent on both the value of the surface area required to you and your printing needs.
I've done it four times. One printer had an issue but was still usable, the other three didn't. It's very common for students and other folks to sell perfectly fine printers when they move.
My latest one is a brother printer that I bought on Craigslist.
My laserjet 1020 is messed up and gets jammed up if put more than one sheet into the tray. So I need to print the pages one by one by waiting until the status led flashes orange, then load the next sheet and click next / briefly opening the top lid. But I rather keep just doing this than dealing with any of that modern drm crap.
Sounds like you need to purchase the laserjet 1020 maintenance kit. It has these replacement pickup rollers that are supposed to be replaced after x number of years/x number of prints.
Another thing I've been told by a manufacturer: paper quality is apparently the biggest factor in longevity of a printer. To the point they custom order "the worst paper" for testing purposes (which apparently a speciality paper mill agreed to do, but absolutely refused to put their name on).
I don't know the specifics of this, beyond if you buy the cheapest paper you can probably expect your printer to jam up sooner.
Used to work for a BigCo printer maker. This is true. You wouldn’t believe the things people print on, there are racks and racks of weird papers from around the world. Tested at different temps/humidities (matters for the electrostatic process in laser printers).
I spent a "happy" 20 minutes peeling semi-molten polyester labels off a fuser belt a few months back. (Lesson learned, I duly told the machine it was printing on a thinner paper stock, and ran the rest of the job without issue...)
I’m a stupid consumer with printers. I have a HP office jet and pay like $5/month for their ink subscription. I print 30-80 pages a month. The economics work. I have a cheap capable inkjet MFP in the same cost envelope of a bigger, lower toner cost laser.
The printer talks PCL and works with anything I’ve tried including Linux.
There’s a $1/month subscription. You get 10 pages a month.
The author would pay $12/year for 10 pages per year, without the cost of the cartridge. You need 20 years before you reach the cost of a $240 cartridge. The cartridge would’ve dried out before then.
This entire article is an exercise in “I can’t do math”
Are you talking about something else? The article is about region locking which means, by definition, that the ink available in North America won’t work.
Money isn’t the only consideration in these situations anyways. For some people it’s the principle.
More directly to your point - the author plainly acknowledges the sunk cost fallacy at play here. I’m pretty sure he can do the math.
I’m talking about the snide remarks towards InstankInk throughout the article. The GP says that because the author prints 10 pages a year it’s a bad deal. I’m arguing that InstantInk is a great deal for someone that prints 10 pages a year. The author should’ve said “yea, I followed principles here, but honestly I should’ve gotten InstankInk from the very beginning” instead of crapping on it
Same here, except I print way less, so I’m on a dollar per month sub, and just pay for overages sometimes.
I think instant ink is a better product in terms of money saved, especially when you account for the risk of cartridges drying out.
Now, to be clear, when it first came out, I thought “evil capitalists” just like everyone else in this thread. But I think it’s wrong, there’s just a yuckiness factor associated with paying monthly for something you theoretically own.
I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.
> I think instant ink is a better product in terms of money saved, especially when you account for the risk of cartridges drying out.
They created a problem for which the solution was a subscription. Laser toner doesn't have this issue.
> I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.
You do own it. If you want to pay someone a monthly fee to help you manage it, that's your choice. But to say that everyone else should "move on as a society" because of your personal choices is very arrogant.
I went through a similar problem with an expensive wifi 6 cable modem router (Netgear Nighthawk CAX80). Spent too much money on it ($400 if I remember rightly) for better internet connectivity from xfinity. Worked well until I moved back to the UK, shipping it across in a container, only to discover that it's not only region locked but if it cannot detect an American-style cable connection, it gets stuck in a reboot loop. Wanted to switch regions and turn on AP mode to use it just for that, but now it's an expensive paper weight.
Also had the same problem with a gas pizza oven (Ooni), ironically from a Scottish company, but has only USA gas connections and is impossible to switch regions. I can very much sympathise with the author and am very glad consoles are no longer region locked.
With Wifi, there's different laws about strength of broadcasts etc. in various countries, so I can understand there being some kind of region control, but having it locked is very anti-consumer. Usually you can easily change the legislative region to bring you in line with local laws.
Gas equipment tends to be extremely controlled, so I can understand no-one wanting to connect to a different region's connector with possibly different regulatory standards.
Yeah I've heard about the regional wifi laws to do with strengths etc. Annoyingly there is a disabled region dropdown in the web UI of the router, which has Europe listed as an option, I just cant change it. Ive tried undisabling in the inspector as well as crafting an http request to modify the region but it doesn't work. Then it reboots itself due to the lack of cable connection.
I understand more with the gas due to the difference in gas canister supplies. They do actually sell replacement regional hoses, so I assumed I'd be able to just switch it out.
Oh and don't even get me started on trying to change regions on online accounts and the inconsistencies involved in doing so. Airbnb and Etsy, easy to change. PayPal and PlayStation online account, had to create a new account.
This is so true. We moved to another country and changing everything from my location in the google play store (requires a form of payment from the new country) to opening a second PayPal account with another email was painful. I still think the change of cell phone numbers was the worst. It seems the assumption with all applications is that we will be born and die with the same number now. I will have to memorialize my cell number on my tombstone.
How would you expect global number portability to work when each country more or less has their own country code and unique numbering plan?
A US to Canada or vice versa move would work since they’re on the same system, but a UK number, for instance, doesn’t even have the same digits of numbers necessarily, and even if they’re both 10, they’re completely different formats.
Yes.. It is near impossible to change a phone number for most accounts. My US banks would not allow for the same amount of digits as my European phone number had. Wiring money from my own accounts wanted to send a 4 digit pin to my US number which would not work in France. You seem to imply that in 2023, we are not capable of making a banking application accept more than one format of phone number. And the fact that google cannot figure out I live in another country (and I have to enter a bank card with address in an app store or else I am blocked from certain apps) is laughable.
I mean, why would a bank care about phone numbers outside of the country it serves? Do you expect a US bank to recognize the number systems of every single one of the 195 countries out there when 99.9% of their customers live in one? Do you expect a French one? An Ethiopian one? Banks are explicitly not global businesses, they are generally national at the largest. It's not like they lose a whole lot of business if they don't support it; it's an edge case at best.
And Google certainly knows you are currently in a new country, but you could be there temporarily visiting, on a temporary residence, or have moved. How would you expect Google to know that? You likely also have to accept new Terms based on the country you move to, and there are more than likely fraud policies in place specifically to prevent people abusing a system like that to get lower pricing. The required step is there as policy, not a technical necessity.
Not OP, but I think they mean changing their mobile number setting inside of their online accounts is impossible. When they moved, they got a new number format but their existing account won’t let them change the format.
The reason for this often is that the service works differently for different regions and depending on how it was implemented (as in launched quickly not thinking of multiple scenarios) you may have an account with US activity (transactions, kyc details, reporting, etc) that would be messed up if they simply switched the country flag on your account. So often customer support doesn’t even have the capability to do that, and the request has to go all the way to product managers and sent down to devs to handle just this one account. And a dev might suggest making this process easier and letting the customer do that themselves (requires streamlining reporting, transaction processing, etc), and this will be shot down because the estimated cost is much higher that processing this “one off” request. And this will repeat for all such one offs.
It might be that it's just the regulator that's different (the bit that connects to the cylinder). If you haven't already then it could be worth getting in touch with their support. I had a broken glass window on my oven, the replacement was never in stock, so they sent me a whole new door with glass for free.
I actually have no idea how printers (things that have been around for ever) are _still_ just so bad. I do get cheap printers tbf... but sometimes they just flat out do not work or can't connect or get jobs stuck in the queue, etc. I never experience this when buying other "cheap" peripherals, yet, printers just seem to consistently suck in almost every way.
I thought this too! Then I saw the light. Get the cheap Brother laser printer "that everybody has" in the article that is linked from the linked article (the linked linked article?)
Seriously. It's so stupid simple. It rules. It juuuuuust prints. No DRM, no nothing. No apps to install. (I think it has apps, but you don't need them. I certainly didn't install any) It costs like $120. I actually bought one model up for $150 that also does duplex printing.
This is the printer that you are wishing for. It certainly is the one I was wishing for. Can't believe it existed. Wasted so much time and frustration on inkjets.
I have the wired version of this - the HL-L2300D - and it has been fine too. The one issue with the wired version is that there are no good Linux drivers, brlaser [0] kind of works - but fails with certain documents.
But honestly, I don't understand it in the context of capitalism.
Why does just this one good printer exist? Why doesn't it have competitors? Or if competitors aren't economical to exist, why does this one still exist?
I'm thankful it's here. But I can't think of any other product category at all where there's only one really good one and then everything else is overpriced crap.
Wait, I'm not sure that's true at all but I do think there's an interesting question there.
Brother has a whole bunch of monochrome laser printers from $120 up to $250ish depending on if you want duplex printing, wireless, document scanning, multiple paper trays, etc. From what I can gather they're all well-regarded? HP, Canon seem to also have decent offerings in that price range though based on a totally unscientific review of scanning Amazon ratings it seems like people like the Brothers best.
I think it's just an issue of inkjets versus lasers.
Inkjets are just horrible. Every single freaking one. Why are they so bad? The ink cartridges always dry out and stop working unless you print on a regular basis, and they all have some weird predatory business model based on selling you a bunch of ink that you don't need. It feels like they lose money on the printer and bank on you buying a bunch of ink later on.
So how did monochrome laser printers in the same price range avoid that weirdo predatory business model? That's my question. I can't really imagine that a laser printer is any cheaper to manufacture than an inkjet printer.
They are required by law to do certain things. You can't print black if yellow is out because the tracking microdots won't print. The region is extremely important not to be changed because different regions have different requirements.
You can't even create a printer startup and fix the issues because it's all basically regulatory.
I do not believe that a colour laser printed can't switch to whatever tracking dots mono laser printers use when out of yellow ink. I'd believe laziness over compliance issues.
Citation needed about tracking dots on B&W lasers. I don't see why they're necessary: the main reason is for anti-counterfeiting. B&W lasers can't be used for printing counterfeit money, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I don't know if they have them - but the same argument still applies. If you're printing in mono then no tracking dots are necessary, therefore stop complaining about missing yellow ink.
Printers are mechanical devices. Putting ink on the page in a way that actually looks good requires quite a lot of precision. It may take a lot of resources to get a marketable product, so it’s not something startups tend to do.
You can read more about how the eff has determined that 'all major printer manufacturers have a secret agreement with governments to implement tracking'. There's no link to the specific agreements though since they are secret. It's just known that printers add colored docs to track documents and it's also known that this is required by various governments throughout the world.
At the university helpdesk, I worked next to a grizzled Unix veteran who had worked on their network since the 70’s. He said basically what you said: printers were always the worst component of the school’s network.
From the typewriter-like things with all their their mechanical moving parts up the the Canon color laser printers we had just deployed, they all took inordinate amounts of time to keep running.
It really blows my mind and will frustrate me like no other device. Usually because its last minute and I have to print something out quickly. I could plug in a 10 year old USB camera, monitor, mouse, etc. and have no problems. Plugging in a 1 year old printer is really rolling the dice.
It has always annoyed me that "region settings" don't just take into account the realities of the situation; they're OBVIOUSLY designed to prevent people in "rich" countries from buying media designated for "poor" countries in a form of market segmentation; but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices.
Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to bypass region encoding on DVDs, for example.
I wonder if off-brand ink would have just completely ignored the region thingy.
Tangential: after moving to a “cheaper” region I can no longer gift American friends Steam titles. I’d pay the full American price but there’s simply no such option. Sad. (Of course I can send cash instead, but cash gifts IMO are kinda gross.)
On a side note, I've come around on cash gifts. I used to think they were gross, as they seemed to put a number on a relationship.
However, life is short and I would much rather give my kids 20-40 bucks to gift to a friend than go shopping for a toy. Moreover, I'd rather get something I wanted instead of 10 things I didn't really want; cash presents make that possible.
As a kid I preferred cash gifts because it meant I could buy the things I actually want. As an adult I have enough disposable income that 20-40 bucks does not make a meaningful difference to what I can buy - I much prefer getting an item that I didn't think about buying, something that the giver has invested time into creating/slecting or that has some other personal meaning.
Of course that doesn't work out for situations where people just buy a random item as a token gift because they (feel they) are expected to provide one. In that situation the best solution is to remove that expectation - if nothing else works by forbidding gifts.
Or to sum it up: I think cash gifts only make sense if the amount is menaingful for the receiver and they are not expected to just gift the same amount back (i.e. the relationship is asymmetric in terms of gift transfer).
> but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices.
There's no simple business reason to do that. The most basic approach is to have the customer pay multiple times: they can afford to move regions or have the goods imported, blocking that route and have them pay for a whole new set is a simple strategy.
Arguing against that simpleness requires fuzzy touchy/feely brand image, consumer satisfaction, lifetime customer value calculations that most printer brands probably care very little about outside of the enterprise market.
No-one in their right mind would pay a scumbag company with that strategy having moved, so they in fact lose revenue as the ongoing media cost goes to their competitor.
This is an issue only if your direct competitors have different strategies. And in my experience, they don't.
I think the general wisdom for anyone caring enough, is to go for a Brother laser printer (I personally went for Xerox but it's the same deal), and I'd posit they're not in direct competition with HP or EPSON:
- it requires ample prior research. You don't stumble upon a laser printer when going to a shopping mall and ask the staff for a printer for your kids homework.
- it requires having given up on many dreams in general and recognizing the bullshit of the whole industry. They are big and bulky, expensive, under marketed, your friends won't have them (or you're lucky), they're never on discount, and you're not a lawyer so you shouldn't be buying something named "WorkCenter 6515" instead of "ENVY Inspire all-in-one" to print school assignments. When I bought mine online I was asked my VAT number for the corporate tax paperwork and had to explain we're just some random family needing a reliable printer.
It's only after having seen the other side for so many years that you give up and buy a professional grade color laser printer if you expect to have to print more than 3 times a year at home.
I’m pretty sure off-brand ink would not have worked at all. That’s the whole purpose of the DRM — HP cannot tolerate that someone buys non-original cartridges, or refills them.
Depends of your country, there's a lot of countries with interoperability exceptions to copyright, a lot of EU countries will fall in this category and it's totally legal in those countries to publish DRM hacks and publish software which circumvent such protections automatically.
The DMCA specifically acknowledges that it cannot limit free speech, and it specifically defines what is prohibited:
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part"
HP products are now such crappy/broken products, it is incredible.
Their printers are probably the worst. All the ones I had to touch had problems: scan pages bent, adf adding a blue line on scanned documents, configuration messed up in windows because owning 2 times the same model or one of them being setup both by cable and wifi, huge software bloat on PC or android, thing that should connect but is not detected despite installing all their crappy software and resetting the stuff 10 times, printer refusing to start and scan because a cardridge is missing
That makes me totally crazy and I hate them.
I'm quite sure that they would have died a long time ago and not have this market share if they weren't so aggressive on prices. They are playing on the fact that they make you buy a lot of them. I think that some people should start to sue them.
The took over support for the Samsung printer I have, and guess what: that support is also practically non-existent. The software they offer is out of date, incomplete, whatever. There are messages on the forum from hp staff that it's easy: install something else, then pick model M2020. Well, not only could I never ever have guessed that from their documentation, it also doesn't work. HP is a total embarrassment.
>I'm quite sure that they would have died a long time ago and not have this market share
They are riding on their legendary reputation during the 20th century.
Once upon a time, Hewlett-Packard was the industry leader in precision electronics and their printers in particular were built to withstand World War 3.
A pox on printers with DRM cartridges and all their works. We binned ours a couple of years back in favour of an Epson something-or-other. It's not exactly the world's greatest printer, but it has two absolutely killer features - one, it has four ink reservoirs that you refill from (non-DRM!) squeezy bottles of ink that are cheap, and two, once in there the ink lasts for absolutely ages.
Like OP's, that printer took an absolute caning during the pandemic as both kids' schoolwork was constantly spewing out of the thing, and I marvel at how much money it saved us.
I hope that someday the EU will look into manufacturers of consumables-based devices like printers. Consumers shouldn't be limited to use branded, forced-expiring, half-empty consumables, that can't work because of DRMs, or other anti-consumer rules like 'oh you need all cartridges even if you want to print in black and white'
The EU makes a lot of noise and has a reputation for pro-consumer regulation, but that reputation is mostly historical. When it comes to new (last decade) pro-consumer regulations, they are flawed and/or not enforced enough to make a difference. Case in point, the GDPR. Lots of noise and fear-mongering, yet the (very little!) enforcement we've seen still isn't enough to actually be a deterrent. I suspect the upcoming DMA will play out in the same way.
If I may, I’d lite to quote, in their entirety, two older comments of mine:
⁂
I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is opaque. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and you can’t look inside them and find out why. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. Free software, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system/printer has found some new way to confound you.
I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.
I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the computer side.
HP printers are absolutely awful now in terms of their PITA setup, obtuse smart setup exe’s instead of drivers, stupid drm or subscription lock stuff like this. We do not supply or recommend them any more (IT company).
I've had good experiences with Canon's business-grade laser multifunction units (scanner/copier/printer). Everything is configurable via a web UI (no client-side software needed) and worked fine with Linux/CUPS. Since it's a laser, toner doesn't dry out and lasts a significant amount of time.
I actually have worked for HP (well one of their spinoffs) for 25 years and ditched them in favour of Brother laser printers. I and 2 of my children have the B&W MFC-L2750DW and I bought the L3750CDW color one for my Mother-in-law. They have all been great and work fine with 3rd party cartridges.
My brother dcp-1512 laser printer/scanner is a tank and was cheaper than buying the ink for the hp inkjet it replaced. Toner costs $15 and I’ve only gone through two cartridges during the printers lifetime (6 years and counting). It works well with Linux although it has no wireless - I hooked it up to an old laptop to share the printer.
I went with a brother black&white laser printer a couple years ago, and never had any issue while using aftermarket toners etc. Also, the setup under Linux using CUPS was pretty straightforward.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers which is pretty nice. Because it doesn't have (much of) a razors and blades ink model, you have to pay a significant amount of money up front however.
It's not even the idiotic DRM that gets me so triggered about this - I'm sure most of us have been in a situation with corporate support where someone is genuienly trying to help but their own tools don't work, their support pages don't load, and the tech team is no more knowledgeable than a random wiki article. Like, with the DVD drives you also had a built-in region lock into every drive but changing it could be accomplished in about 30 seconds and yes there was also a global limit on number of changes. Why go through this insane process of giving support dozen different numbers they type into some keygen - it feels crazy.
HP is another of many examples how MBAs in their search for ever growing "value" can gradually destroy a company that owes its success to great engineering.
I think part reason HP had trouble solving this case is the fact that most skilled people have decent ethics, and refuse to work for Vito Corleone [ink edition].
Nobody skilled is going to voluntarily do consumer-level tech support where 99% of support tickets involve the user being an absolute idiot (and you're not even allowed to swear at them).
You do tech support out of necessity when you don't have any other options, and you look to get out as fast as possible.
My guess is that the issue for support is that it's very much an edge-case, and not something most in support would encounter. The feature is most likely only available do to refurb or transfer inventory across regions.
That being said, the reason it works so poorly might be because there's a lack of continuity within HPs printer line up. For obvious reason I haven't used an HP products in years, but even going back, there seemed to be little lineage within their InkJet printers. The fact that a tools was still available is amazing.
I have the Brother HL-L2305W referenced[0] in the article. After I purchased it, I added it to the Wifi network and it showed up as a printer on my Linux machine. Stays mostly turned-off except when I need to print at which point I turn it on, it connects seamlessly, prints and I again turn it off. My wife can print to it from her iPhone and she is not a tech savvy person. All the high praise about Brother's monochrome laser printers are well deserved.
Their customer support agent started the conversation with something like "you've been our valued customer for 18 years, how can I help?" and two minutes later said there was no alternative but to open a new account.
I bought a cheap (£50) hp multifunction at the start of covid with an instant ink subscription. Obviously this involves dystopian DRM and the printer phoning home the number of pages I am printing but it actually works really well. I print over WiFi from Windows, iPhone, android, etc with no issues, cartridges arrive at my door before I need them, and the cost per page is competitive with professional equipment (under 5p for the ink even if full colour photo).
The cartridges belong to hp, not me, so they would stop working if I cancelled and I would have to buy my own. That's normal with pay per click printing, which is also the standard in high end leased machines. I don't want my computer to be an appliance but having the printer be 'just an appliance' is very convenient.
We bought a new Fuji Xerox recently and we were very happy with it. Everything so far seems very non-hostile.
Have also owned Brother printers, which were very good, but they tended to overheat and catastrophically fail if you print a lot on them in one sitting (i.e. 1000 flyers).
Have a separate small travel router with embedded VPN support to connect printer to Wi-fi hotspot with whatever region it wants to see.
It's not HP's or any other vendor's business to know where you are. This is an easy solution to this.
I have a few routers at home with a separate Wifi hotspot each configured for separate country to avoid exactly this nonsense for different services.
Advantage of this approach is you can travel with a small travel router all over the world while feeding each of the service with a consistent country location.
Doesn't sound like it has to be online if they're blocking it using a VPN. But probably it phones home opportunistically, similar to modern TVs and most other "smart" stuff.
I have about 5 of these at home, each configured at different subnet and VPN for different country. One i always take with me while traveling to securely connect via shady hotel Wi-Fi's.
You can even go crazy with it - install ZeroTier directly in the router by typing few commands and access low-level config of the router from anywhere.
HP used to be so good in terms of printers. I still have a 4050DTN that can take overstuffed cartridges that will do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. I think I’m on my third cartridge in 20 years and two degrees. It needs some maintenance such as replacing the pick-up rollers and possibly even the fuser, but it’s an absolute beast that I have no intention of getting rid of any time soon.
What I hear about HP printers these days is deeply disappointing. For shame, HP. You have truly lost your way.
Get a used HP LaserJet from their professional line. They lack wifi, are way bigger then your normal printer but they work for years without problems and have cheap replacement parts and cartidges.
One general advice is to look for recommended devices in the medical/law/military area. There is nothing special about those printers but their recommondation for such institutions makes them a safe bet and never failed me or one of my clients (even 10+ years later).
Not sure refilling works with HP’s DRM-equipped cartridges. I think they will refuse to print once their counter shows 0, no matter if there’s ink inside.
My dad used to be in the refill business selling parts, inks and all needed to get it done. Im not sure about this particular model but the DRM can be worked around in a couple of ways: swapping for a 3rd party drm chip, using a reset device or some older models just click “print anyway”.
Edit: typo
I’d imagine things could be worse nowadays.
He used to buy products from an American company so it should be available in the US too.
