Can’t watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
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Same but I thought Louis had a brother who became evil for some reason 😭
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I’ve been saying that for a couple of years now. They started fucking with third party ink at least a year ago
Oh, this one stings.
Are there no good guys left?
I’ve had an Epson Ecotank for the last couple years and I have no complaints. I just refilled my black ink and it was $11 for 9 oz., which should last me years (but I don’t print that often).
Ink dries out, probably better to fill it part way and refill more often.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I would assume dried ink could clog up your cartridge or the printer
Good tip, thanks.
Just buy an ink tank printer, it fixes 90 percent of your printer grief
Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous
The last bid I reviewed for a new office recommended Brother printers (woot) but the color laser had toner lock-in. I recommended an alternative and the owner agreed.
Too bad these companies won’t know about the products they don’t sell because of this crap.
O, damnit. Not the last bastion of hope!
Edit: 100% serious. Like Rossmann, Brother was the go-to brand.
Well, whatever that update was, I probably installed it (assuming it’s the same here in Japan).
Use pen & paper – Do you really need a printer?
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5¢ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I’ll be going there.
Ehhh. I rarely print anything, but I really don’t want to give up the ability to print things at any time I want and have them promptly available.
I actually bought a little tablet PC so that I could carry a working copy of FreeCAD into my workshop rather than print out plans and such. My little Epson printer does very little.
Yeah, that can cover some cases (also, throwing data on a smartphone, which most people have and keep with them most of the time) but I think that for most people, electronic devices still aren’t a complete replacement for paper.
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Power. Paper just needs some kind of light in the environment.
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Shareability. Okay, there are schemes to let one transfer data from phone to phone, but it’s hard to compete with how intuitive and universal handing some paper to someone is.
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Battery. Just keeping the display on a phone or laptop, even if you aren’t far away from power, on to keep the page visible tends to consume power, and many devices can’t keep something visible all day. I’ll concede that eInk displays can cover some of that.
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Disposability. Paper is pretty cheap, and if a piece of paper gets soaked in water or whatever, it’s no big loss.
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Use of paper in the physical world. I can do things like create stencils on a sheet of paper and cut them out. It’s a device that lets a digital computer interact with the outside world beyond purely showing information.
We’re a lot closer to the paperless world than we were when I first started hearing the phrase “paperless office”, and a lot of documents never leave electronic form, but I still do occasionally want to use paper.
I would say “power” and “battery” are the same thing.
Yeah sharing digital documents between devices is still a complete urethra sanding, isn’t it? If it can’t go by email you probably shouldn’t even try. Having an x86 tablet running desktop GNU/Linux and Syncthing…Syncthing works very well, Linux works well, Linux UIs on touch screen are more unpleasant than dental surgery, and FreeCAD is less touch screen friendly than the average CLI utility. I can just barely use FreeCAD to look at the spreadsheet on that thing, especially when it’s got its keyboard snapped off.
It would be maybe more ideal to have an e-ink device that goes with me to the shop, something that will run for a month on a cell phone battery, that can display things like technical drawings made from CAD, a spreadsheet exported from CAD, along with things like tool manuals and similar reference materials, and with some utility apps like a calculator and maybe a little notepad…
Everything I want we have the technology to do right now, but no one does it the way I’d want it done because interoperability be damned.
As for making stencils and templates, it’s something I really miss now that I don’t have ready access to a laser engraver.
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I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
If we want to get pedantic, it is possible to get a pen plotter. There are fountain pen compatible pen plotters, and the whole fountain pen world has a healthy and mature third-party ink market.
Now, that’s not simply a drop-in replacement for a regular printer, starting with the fact that you need to use monoline fonts so that the plotter traces out what a hand would rather than filling it in, and that a plotter just can’t produce all the same stuff. The speed is going to be abysmal compared to a conventional printer for virtually any image. And I don’t know if there’s anyone who has built one with a paper feed system (there are large-format pen plotters that can work with a continuous-feed roll of paper, but I don’t know if those can handle fountain pens. I don’t know of a fountain pen plotter that can just take a ream of A4 or US Letter pages and then handle those correctly).
But you can, strictly-speaking, have a computer create output that uses ink from the fountain pen world.
…I remember Brother intnetionally making their stuff VERY user servicable.
Wha happen
Line go up
Shit come down
LINE GO UP
Damn, Brother was the only company left I was happy to blind purchase from by name alone.
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.
Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There’s nothing to lock out.
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.
Oh, color laser is the way to go, for sure. Refills are expensive, but rare; the biggest problem is if you have to move them, they’re a nightmare. And far heavier than inkjet. But, all things being equal, I’d take a color, duplex laser any day.
You’re not the first person I’ve heard who’s had trouble with Ecotanks. I’ve been very fortunate and have not had any issues. I did learn that you need to print at least once a week or the heads tend to clog; the downside of never replacing the heads with the cartridges, I guess. But now I just have a cron job that prints a test page once a week and it’s fine.
Both Ecotanks and laser eliminate that “print anxiety”, where you’re afraid to use the device because each page costs $2 because of the cartridges costs.
To paraphrase Quint: “I’ll never replace a cartridge again.”
We need an open source RepRap printer. Like, I wonder if this thing could be reverse engineered, given they still make the ink cartridge/head units for it.
What we actually need is to stop fucking printing.
We need a foldable A3 size e-ink reader that you can use like a folder.I’d be more interested in something more iPad sized with an e-ink display that is more generally usable.
The ReMarkable tablets for example have interesting hardware but the software fits such a narrow use case and I don’t think you could slap like, Linux on it or something.
Canon has a tank printer line too. Absolutely recommend any tank printer (you’ll have to check reviews for specifics obviously).
My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter. 😂
Are there actually any good printers? I would pay more for the printer itself if you just don’t try and scam me afterwards. It feels like a hopeless space.
You might have to consider buying used.
Even older HP printers are fine (and I know people love to shit on them, but they too used to be perfectly safe and reasonable choices). More or less the safe/unsafe divide coincides with the switch from printers with 2x16 character displays to ones with full colour screens.
I’ve got a 2012-designed (but mine is 2017-built) HP Colour Laserjet CP5225dn, it has none of the modern lock-in shenanigans.
Just gotta find one that’s new enough that consumables are still readily available (fortunately this usually isn’t too difficult), and in good physical condition.
Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays 🫤 to prevent things like this happening.
Honestly, that’s not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including – as Rossman points out – making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn’t mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.
Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the
xzattack – the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up. I understand that it’s also been a concern with even browser extensions.The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value. And there are people who will try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.
Funny you mention apps. I turned auto-update off for all of them on my phone because I got tired of functionality being removed. A couple force updates after you get too far behind. Been alright so far, but it’s been less than half a year ago we’ll see how it goes in the long run. Security is obviously taking a hit by doing this.
