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You didn't bought it you rented it! (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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I hate that everything now is a subscription service instead of buying it and do whatever you want.

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[–] 177 points 3 years ago (4 children)

Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.

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  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I’ve had my Brother printer for several years and never had an issue. I don’t have the color one, just black and white. Would buy again.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I have one of the complicated brother ones that scans and prints, including double sides, in colour, and it's a tank. Works fine in Linux too. Connected or through the network.

    It even does fax, which someone, somewhere probably finds useful.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    Doctors offices and health insurance. It’s weird but technically fax machines are still considered “secure” communications for sending PHI. Sending it across the internet requires a lot of expensive hoops to jump through, or they could just buy a fax machine.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Funny thing is those faxes are going through internet anyway most of the time.

    Where I live fax are considered a legal proof contrary to emails.

    So for important contracts it is considered safer than mails.

    And honestly it kinda is since an email can totally end up never being recieved without any kind of error or warning. A fax you should know immediately that it wasn't received on the other end.

    I still wish fax would disappear soon but an email is not a good replacement.

    Emails are now considered the defacto standard for businesses but they suck and are absolutely not reliable.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I heard they stopped allowing that recently.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Mine still allows it. There might be a model or two that doesn't but I'd be surprised.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Saw some people posting recently they sold out also

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Yes, some of their firmware updates started breaking aftermarket toner cartridges and support said "that sucks" like it was very intentional. It seems constrained to a few of the MFC color models more than anything tho I've never had any issues other than bad wifi modules in the b&w home office lasers. Which if you're using wifi on a printer that's your own damn fault lol

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.

    On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).

    I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah I'm not sure whether this is shenanigans or an actual problem Brother is managing here. The post does mention there are problems with incorrect response to temperature management with the unoriginal cartridge, which again could theoretically cause harm.

    I honestly wasn't aware unoriginal cartridges were a thing for Brother printers, since the originals tend to be quite reasonable.

    But to continue using the unoriginal cartridges he can as the answer states, use BRAdmin to downgrade the firmware.

    So it's not like Brother is attempting to take control of your printer like HP likes to do.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm sure HP didn't ramp up their bullshit from 0 to 11 overnight, the question now is how much we can trust Brother not to be walking the same path and mandating more and more restrictive firmwares in the future. I think them opensourcing drivers and firmwares would help mitigate that, and if their business model is really to be that sole good guy and antagonize the likes of HP/Epson/... they don't have anything to lose and a lot to win (or as a minimum, myself as a customer).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    HP has done the ink cartridge shenanigans for more than 30 years now. They just recently found a new trick. Apart from that nothing has really changed.

    I am not aware Brother ever did similar things to basically trick or cheat their customers. Most other vendors are somewhere in between. AFAIK none are as bad as HP.

    My dad is running his Brother HL-1212W printer on the open source Linux driver, works perfectly fine, and I was actually surprised about the high quality of his prints for such a cheap printer.

    AFAIK Brother is among the best regarding opensource drivers too.

    All this printer talk almost makes me want to buy a new printer. My current printer is a 14 year old Samsung color laser, and the print quality is not that stellar anymore. ;) The Samsung open source driver kind of suck for this printer. There isn't even a driver for this specific model CLP-325W, so I have to choose another Samsung printer that is (mostly) compatible.

    The Brother printer was completely plug and play. The system recognized the printer, and installed the correct open source driver, no hassle at all.

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