Technology

Brother's been anti-consumer for at least 5 years now. Not sure why people are just learning about it now.

Brother blocking 3rd party toner was the primary reason why I went with Canon back in 2020.

dude I would pay gold for that

Not saying they couldn't/shouldn't but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it's a miracle, mostly of HP's marketing department, that they're a household object.

Over time as 3D printers go from tinkerer's toy to household staple, I'd expect them to become more locked down and anti-consumer.

This is mainly because consumer 3d printer have been developped by 3d printing enthusiast first and not a company, Prusa which was leader for some time used a lot of open sources project to build their printers. As it's getting mainstream as time goes by more and more companies shows up with closed sources project sadly.

They're actually behind. 3D printers are a much newer industry. Most industries start out super open, competitive and collaborative. This speeds up development to consumer-grade products. Eventually one or two companies gain sufficient marketshare to start enforcing anti-consumer shitfuckery. Look at the recent drama with Bambu printers and you'll find that's exactly what's happening. It's a tale as old as time.

Framework actually trolled us into thinking they were going to release a printer but instead they went into a market segment where everything was already modular, repairable and upgradable and gave us something that was not, at all. But hey, they gotta capitalize on the AI nonsense too, I guess?

Don't worry. Companies like Bambu and others are trying to lock down shift their printer business in the style of 2d printer companies. I hope it at least happens very slowly, but the enshittification is happening...

2D printers used to be like this.
They all worked with open, universal drivers, no additional software, and any ink cartridge that fit inside the bay.
But then companies figured out that people will just buy the cheapest printer on offer, regardless of everything else.

Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous

Line go up

Always has been like that.

Not one single corporation is your friend or wants to be. All they want is your money. No exceptions.

You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note or counterfeits cash with it, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.

There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. One of the other big criteria is that the printer needs to be able to recognize and refuse to print images of cash, to prevent counterfeiting. If you try to print an image of a dollar bill, the printer’s firmware will refuse to continue the print job. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near duopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.

There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.

That's what we did.

For the few pages we need to print, I can use the machine at the library for $0.10/page.

That gives a whole new twist to "you'll own nothing and be happy"

Only if you can keep it working for ten consecutive minutes. I went through three of them under warranty until my warranty expired, then Epson told me to fuck off.

If have a Canon color laser now. If that conks out and everything on the market by then is locked out shit I'll just convert my 3D printer to a plotter, or maybe go back to clay tablets.

Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don't weight ongoing costs as much -- happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.

For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn't have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.

Rossman: What Rossman's saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He made a wiki page listing all the things that they're doing. He says that he doesn't know of a type of printer to recommend now.

He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream. A substantial portion of the video is his cat licking him.