Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul Brother is the latest printer manufacturer to come under fire over alleged sharp practices around the use of third-party consumables versus its own ink supplies. Right-to-repair activist and electronics technician Louis Rossmann posted a video blasting the Japanese company, claiming it has updated printer firmware to block or …
I really enjoyed the Toner Games films. Especially the one where the children were all killed by having printers thrown at them by trebuchets - then their corpses ground down into paste to make new printer inks.
Or did I just dream it after eating all that cheese I found underneath the fridge?
I have an old HP CP1525nw color laserjet. If I put 3rd party toner cartridges in it, no MS Office product will print in color. Only black & white. From any of the 3 PC's in the house. (Running Windows 10 and 11.) One has to have Office print to a pdf, then print the pdf from Acrobat to get the Office document printed in color. If I put official HP toner cartidges in, Office prints in color directly.
I've had third-party ink cartridges randomly rejected by Brother printers as "unrecognised" either on first installation or after they've been working and are still almost full. The best hypothesis I can come up with is that some (re-) manufacturers are reusing date-coded chips from official cartridges whose lifetime is expiring.
I've just bought a very solidly-built Canon printer, despite the almost unbelievable cost of the miniscule-capacity official ink cartridges (which include a print head), on the basis that a UK supplier offers an ink-replenishment solution. I'm not updating the firmware and if the source of cheap ink dries up the printer is heading for landfill. Weird way to run an industry.
I found that digging up the old CD which came with the printer and reinstalling this helps in all sorts of way to get back the use of an A3 and A2 printers. Sometimes MS does not like this, so I installed an OLD copy of Office circa 2003 and suddenly could print the A2 paper drawings again.
Oh for the days of printers such as Oki's where a toner cartridge is literally just a plastic box (or tube) with toner in it - and nothing else. No chips, no nothing.
As far as I can still, most Oki page printers are still like that.
> As far as I can still, most Oki page printers are still like that.
"OKI Data Americas has discontinued the sales of all OKI-branded printer hardware in the United States, Canada, and Latin America." https://www.oki.com/us/printing/
Seems to be mostly true. One offered as used/good. Oddly the Oki Microline 320 Turbo/N Dot Matrix Printer (not really a page printer) seems to be a stock thing. This is the old OKI ML120(?) with more pins. They were used far into the 2000s in automobile alignment shops because they were truly filth-proof and could print diagrams to mystify the customers.
Oki has other problems tho.
I own a C3300N. Printer clogged so frequently in the two years I owned it I gave up. Apparently the Magenta toner turns into rocks in the hot and humid Malaysian weather for mysterious reasons and clog the thing.
I was going to ask about humidity before I spotted "hot and humid Malaysian weather".
You are likely to have other problems even with other manufacturers printers such as print quality (damp paper) issues.
Funny thing is tho, it doesn't happen to toners of other laser printers sold in the country, only Oki ones, and only specifically Oki Magenta toners- the printer always only reports Magenta Toner error, never Cyan, Yellow or Black. And indeed, the magenta cartridge was the only one with colored rocks formed from toner powder in it.
And getting to get their printer to work in Linux... Let's just say I actually made a donation to the Foo2ZJS project and hooked Oki up with the developer, just so I can get the printer working. The driver is slow because compression is not supported, and color management still isn't a thing.
Quickfit (tyres/brakes/exhausts) used them here in the UK. In blue, to match the corporate branding. They looked like someone had taken them apart (or masked them off) and spray painted them because the were the standard 80's beige inside.
"Oh for the days of printers such as Oki's where a toner cartridge is literally just a plastic box (or tube) with toner in it - and nothing else. No chips, no nothing."
The Panasonic KXP-$something I used many, many years ago had a hopper with a screw/worm drive agitator at the bottom and you "fed" it toner from a bottle when it ran out.
Maybe it wasn't a KX-Pnnnn model. I can't find anything that looks close the ones we had on a Google image search. It was the early days of readily available laser printers, the other one we had was a Canon LBP-8 A1, which at least gives the time frame. HP LaserJet II might have been around then too.
I see no reason why a printer needs to have connection to the internet to get firmware updates. My 2005 Epson inkjet has been working for almost 20 years without one.
I do have a Canon colour laser but its blocked from Internet access as If there was some bug that requires a firmware update I will do it manually, once i am sure its not gonna cause other issues.
Yep. Same thing with my Brother DCP-L8410.
I have many times recommended Brother printers as this one has been an excellent performer and works well in my (Linux-based) environment.
As it happens, I do use Brother toner (my usage is low and so the cost is small - and my local IT shop provides it on 24 hours notice, so the convenience is worth the price). However, if they really start doing these tricks I will certainly not be recommending them again!
Firmware and other automatic were never about improving features or security for end users. They were always about improving profits for vendors. And I'm not just talking about printers. I'm talking about literally everything that receives automatic updates.
Does your device seem to be a little slower after the latest major update? Well, it is starting to get a bit old. Have you thought about getting an upgrade?
Mostly, a USB-connected private printer is just not useful to me. At home and at work, the printers are on the local network.
I could give them fixed IP, block IPV6, identify and block the connection to the internet, identify and block connections to well-known update points,etc but that is a lot of work.
It isn't that hard. Put them on a subnet that is routable only to your local network. So if your local network is 192.168.1.x put your printer (and other stuff you don't want connecting to the web like smart TVs) on 192.168.2.x. Set a manual route for 192.168.2.x to reach 192.168.1.x and no default route.
No need to worry about IPv6 (just don't enable it at all for devices on that subnet) or "identify" connections. If the printer can't talk to anything outside your house, then you don't need to identify shit.
If what I describe is "too much" then you should turn in your Register reader card.
I did that with our Chinese sourced printers (3d, fabric, plastic laminate etc), but then I found the next generations of devices had the official NIC you could configure, and block, but the firewall logs were showing that the devices were also requesting IP addresses from any DHCP server that would respond, and start nattering away from the new IP address instead. I started to put our China sourced printers into it's own LAN with strict limitations on traffic going to and from the PCs in the main LAN, and nothing in the printers LAN could get to the internet.
"My Epson inkjet lasted less than 6 months. Ink clog. Annoying.
For the records, I rarely print,"
The latter is the most likely cause of the former, especially if you power the printer off when not in use rather than leave it stand-by mode. In stand-by mode, some makes/models will do a short cleaning cycle often enough to stop the nozzles becoming clogged with dried out ink residue. The printer will last longer, but will cost you more in ink and possibly just happen to run out at that crucial moment you need to print something. Inkjet can provide some very nice colour prints and photos if properly looked after, using decent ink and the correct paper, but have obvious downsides if only used occasionally.
When I last needed to replace my home printer, had some "must have" specs such as Ethernet, postscript and duplex. I looked at all the "nice to have" specs and decided none of them, such as colour, were used often enough to justify and went with a black and white laser printer. For the very rare occasion I need colour or photo-quality, I just create a PDF document and take it somewhere that has what I need. I think that was once in the last two years. It's a great option if you have somewhere nearby that can do those "one offs" for you, but a pain the wallet if you don't.
I've blocked my Epson from direct contact with the web with the router's firewall, blocked all of the dozens of packages it installs using a software firewall and deleted the Epson updater app just in case. I still suspect the printer of shenanigans because it seems to need head cleaning more than it used to do but that could also be due to age and the fact that I no longer print very often.
All true, but the printer still works and it has a good resolution scanner and prints A3, both of which are useful to me. When I find I'm using it more than normal I run a cron job to print a test page every morning which keeps the heads clear and probably uses less ink than running the cleaning routing every few days. When it eventually gives up the ghost or they stop supporting drivers I'll look at a laserjet.
3. When going to purchase a printer, there will be 94 varieties of inkjet on display, 5 varieties of expensive colour laser on display and one variety of cheap black and white laser that is never displayed, and is the modernized HP LJ4. Just 1200 DPI, USB and more polymer than metal.
Completely agree - particularly now that I've been seeing a fairly large number of cheap colour laser printers on places like Facebonk Marketfarce.
The one thing my HP Colour LaserJet doesn't do, though, is print to photo paper.
If there was a way to print like that with a laser printer, I think the (consumer) inkjet printer market would struggle.
"The one thing my HP Colour LaserJet doesn't do, though, is print to photo paper."
While true you really can't the quality of an inkjet usingg a good quality glossy photo paper, some colour lasers can do a passable job if you pick the correct paper. Most people rarely, if ever, look at the printer settings for paper type and actually try out some of those different paper types. Most people will just buy whatever "copier paper" they see at the lowest price :-)
(And especially check supermarket "offers". I saw some in Morrisons the other week and I happened to need some. Luckily I deal with printers quite a bit in my job and the pack of paper felt wrong. I eventually found in very small print on the back of the pack that it was only 4/5ths of a ream, ie 400, not 500 pages. It wasn't cheap after all.)
The current firmware in our HP printer suggests we update it. I suggested "no", because it's not MY security that's being updated, and an insecure printer isn't really much of a malware vector on a home network. Either it prints the document, or doesn't, the only "communication" it really needs is "is print job done?" So far 3rd party cartridges still work great.
The printer could well have quite some compute power and can execute code from badly written postscript/pdf/jpg interpreters/decoders so in theory malware could get in to the printer from a nasty document and then do naughty stuff on your network. I suspect that's not all that likely and if possible, likely to be from you more hardened hackers going after bigger fish than a home user. The bug multi-user MDF type stuff you find in offices usually as a full on GUI interface and web server on board, sometime with custom apps installed to manage users and the printer such as Papercut and it's ilk, making then juicy targets if a vuln. is found. Having said that, my little monochrome Brother laser at home has a web interface too. But as others suggested up-thread, it thinks the DNS server and Gateway are at 0.0.0.0 and I don't worry too much about being a target anyway. I think that would be, at least for now, a bit of a theoretical hack.
I've put my printers on a segment of my local network which is non-routable, so any attempts to "phone home" are blocked.
Same thing for any other devices such as NAS boxes, scanners, routers, repeaters, etc.
As long as it's working to my satisfaction, it doesn't need to talk to anyone but me.
Unfortunate, most end users don't have the skill or the inclination to erect a firewall or even the knowledge that the device is chattering away behind their back to some server somewhere reporting who knows what.
If there wasn't such a huge difference between the prices of OEM and third-party consumables, more people would be OK buying OEM.
For my printer I can buy two full packs of third-party ink for the price of a single Epson cartridge, and I'm running a Workforce printer, not one of the printers that costs less than the ink...
That's good to hear. I was wondering if the Xerox brand still bore any relation to Xerox, of it if had been bought up by someone to use and abuse as has happened to Kodak and Polaroid.
I'm on the look out for a cheapish laser printer for Mum - as her inkjet is dead, and I don't want to replace it with a new one - given how little she prints nowadays. But she refuses to be without a printer - even though I suspect it's only getting used once every 2-3 months. Hoping to pursuade her that black and white is fine for what she needs.
Got rid of mine years ago, but can steal the odd printout from the office, if needs be. But that seems to only be once a year.
I snagged a Xerox Phaser 6125N for a nicker, yes £1 ! on a no reserve ebay Auction. Had to drive 20 miles to collect & got a hernia loading it into the car.
Month later spotted someone selling a box of 45 assorted toners - OEM & 3rd party. (office clearance)
Won at £5. Non OEM just display "non Xerox toner" but otherwise work perfectly fine.
Printer Works wonderfully, OK it's old but in excellent condition. It's fast, quiet, sits on my LAN (no outside access) Does the job and everyone uses it.
So I've now got a cracking Colour laser printer (from when they were made properly) & enough supplies to see me out. Stuff HP, Canon & Brother.
"I snagged a Xerox Phaser 6125N for a nicker, yes £1 ! on a no reserve ebay Auction. Had to drive 20 miles to collect & got a hernia loading it into the car."
The power of time and keeping things on a watch list. I picked up an iMac 27" Retina for $25. It cost $75 in petrol to go fetch it. Still, $100 for the computer was dirt cheap. I need to fit a new suspension part on my car and I'll be driving 150 miles each way to pick up some 170W solar panels for less than $20ea in a few days. I'm also planning a few other stops along the way so it isn't all just for the panels, but the price is so good that it's worth the drive just for the panels.
"I'm on the look out for a cheapish laser printer for Mum "
Look for estate sales. Especially ones near senior communities and you will often find a low-mileage printer, spare ink/toner, cables, etc for pence on the pound. I have a collection of all-in-one units that I picked up for free. The trick is being to be there at the close of the sale when the main goal is to get the property emptied so it can be tidied up and sold. Those are the sales I look for. If the sale is just to clear out stuff that isn't being used anymore, they often want too high a price for things and won't dicker.
"All a bit ghoulish just to score a cheaper printer?"
The sales I often visit to empty a home keep things from going to landfill. Is that ghoulish? The Monday after the Saturday sale, a roll-off dumpster will be delivered and whatever remains will get tossed in. People get older and need to move into managed care. We will all die at some point, it's a fact of life. I certainly hope when I go that my things will go to somebody that wants them and not to the local dump.
My kitchen is mainly stocked with things I find at estate sales. Ever shop for a stand mixer? $400ish new, $20 at an estate sale with loads of attachments. Not many people in my area can their own food so I often find loads of jars and supplies from people that would have grown up doing that sort of thing. Think of all of the energy that would have gone into making those glass jars.
The printers I have would have gone in the skip. There are just too damn many of them and once they're a few years old, finding ink/toner is a chore so nobody wants them. An HP laser printer I got for free turns out to have a cartridge that's $80-$100. No having to guess why it was being given away. With patience, I found a new OEM cart on eBay for ~$35. That printer is a backup for my 4100TN which has been a workhorse for ages now. Many of the other printers, usually all-in-one units, will be checked and given away to people that need them in town. I think I've saturated that market but I'm sure there's going to be a family that needs one for their kid(s) soon enough. I may have somebody to help me set up a stand at the monthly food bank to find people that need a computer/printer.
Occasionally, yes. Not a high demand for it, but some MDs we use are a bit dated in their operations, and prefer it over email attachments for signed documents. Works just fine, and you manage the Fax phonebook from the PC app. FYI, I can print to it just fine from my android phone via WiFi.
I bought a colour one for the office and it's great... except when it decides the new non-OEM cartridge is empty. I suspect it's the chips on the cartridges sometimes, not necessarily the printer. But it has made me question buying Kyocera in the future. It has also got to the stage where it eats paper occasionally. I miss my (very) old HP lasers.
My quite recent Brother laser has a service menu where you can override the "toner empty" status. It's still on the original toner cart., which it reported as "very low" last November. I ordered a 3rd party cart and have yet to install it as it seems quite happy running on "empty" after I lied to it :-) I'll swap the cart out what the black starts to look a bit grey.
I have a Kyocera P2235dn on my home network, black and white. I don't do a lot of printing so haven't had to replace the toner cartridge. It's given me no trouble, so can recommend it.
Many years ago, I remember reading a study that a university in Europe had done, to test the ceramic laser drum. They had printed 250,000 sheets at normal page coverage, and the drum was still going strong. My printer has a ceramic drum, so am not expecting it to ever wear out, unlike some of the metal drum in other brands.
PS they didn't waste all that the paper, just inverted it and re-used it.
I remember the first call out I got to "fix" a broken, brand new Kyocera laser printer when the ceramic drums first came out. It was a large office type one that could do A3. Someone had put a label sheet through, used a few labels than decided to be "economic" and used the same label sheet again to print some more labels. A couple peeled off and stuck themselves to the very expensive long life ceramic drum. That was a costly mistake! They wanted if repaired under warranty too!
I have an opinion on Kyocera printers.
I have have looked after a fleet of a few dozen Kyocera FS2020's for ~15 years, quite a few of which racked up print counts literally in the millions; I think the highest got to ~2.5 million sheets. Fantastic printers, hugely rugged and the maintenance was a dream. They don't have any problems using compatible toners assuming that it's the right grade. Even if it's the wrong grade then it'll still print it in my experience, although this will have adverse effects on the drum cleaning blades and thus the drum service life if not adequately maintained. They'll also accept crap quality paper quite happily. (notably if somebody puts paper in at a 15 degree angle then it'll pull it in sideways, flatten it out and spit the sheet out of the top instead of jamming and crying for an engineer)
Kyocera has a "maintenance kit" which contains basically every moving part, all of which could be replaced on the 2020 with nothing more than opening a panel and replacing a unit, with the most difficult one being the fuser; which you had to poke two clips with a random key/screwdriver to detach the clips and remove it from the printer (a nice bit of userproofing; stopping the end user from accidentally damaging the fuser rollers)
The time taken to replace a dev unit, fuser or drum was less than the time taken to remove the part from the packaging materials. (They were very, very well packed against impact damage or contamination in transit)
On the basis of this rather positive experience and with the obvious age of the printers getting to the point of absurdity, combined with spare parts availability starting to become a problem (still available from Kyocera OEM, but they were obviously being made specially for us and then shipped from Asia...) I decided to pay that little bit more and upgrade to the Kyocera p3145, basically a straight upgrade to a more modern printer in the range.
All was well for a bit. The dev unit and drum are relatively painless to replace at about a hundred thousand sheets, but my god the fuser unit at about a quarter million sheets. You've got to basically totally disassemble the printer shell, then unscrew the fuser and pull it out and then disconnect some tiny delicate wires seemingly specifically designed to be easily damageable, thus writing off either the fuser unit or the entire printer and then reassemble the dammed thing again.
Suffice to say that the useful lifetime of these printers is effectively until the first fuser unit change. I'm going to be replacing the printers rather than repairing them at that point and after that experience it's not going to be with Kyocera kit.
But if your expecting to be printing less than a quarter million sheets over the printer lifetime then they are great.
Pro tip when choosing new, heavy duty office type printers. Make sure you can access the service manuals before choosing (via whatever source you can find, although I find many OEMs tend to make them available these days) And beware of HPs if you've not used had them for a few years. The laser printers are made by Samsung now. The entire mechanical design philosophy is not what you'd expect from an HP printer so it's a whole new learning curve comparable with going to an brand you've not dealt with before.
Perhaps because the HP CEO believes that HP has not coded the printer's interface used to communicate with the print cartridge with sufficient input sanitisation.
"
A researcher found a vulnerability over the serial interface between the cartridge and the printer. Essentially they found a buffer overflow. That's where you have got an interface that you may not have tested or validated well enough..."
"
https://www.action-intell.com/2022/10/05/hp-bug-bounty-program-finds-reprogrammable-chips-open-printers-to-malware.
An ink cartridge is just a little plastic container with some ink.
Actually, Canon and HP cartridges usually have an integral (thermal) printhead whereas Brother and Epson printheads (piezoelectric) are usually integral to the printer.
The security issue comes, ironically, from the choice to include chips on the cartridges. There has (allegedly) been a case of third-party cartridges exploiting a bug in a printer's firmware (by carefully crafting a response) resulting in the printer subsequently rejecting cartridges from other sources. That of course is not an argument against third-party supplies, but a condemnation of the poor design choices and implementation of the printer manufacturer, but it appears to have been spun as a positive for aspiring monopolists.
The security issue comes, ironically, from the choice to include chips on the cartridges.
Another fun one I heard recently was a general supply chain risk. So a chip on a cartridge should only need to contain a fairly small number of bits to do pretty much any sane function. So say a 16kb chip should be waay more than enough. Except chip makers often aren't producing anything with that small a capacity, so have a 2 or 4Mb instead.. Which then has a lot more memory to install a payload, and then arrange a delivery of printer cartridges to your target. I wonder how many businesses would look a delivery of gift toner in the mouth?
Like you say, it's a risk entirely of the vendors making by deciding to install DRM or make 'smart' ink cartridges instead of keeping them as dumb, low risk consumables.
An unexpected delivery of toner is usually a scam. They ask the receptionist what kind of printer it is, then bamboozle them into "placing an order". So the toner turns up, then a bit later a bill arrives. The bill is really expensive.
Not heard of that one, but am familiar with sales pressuring businesses to 'save money' by renting printers and copiers. Then discovering the per-page charge they've signed up for. Or it's a variation on PAYG consumable deals the likes of HP try to flog customers. Ink & paper every month, whether you need/want it or not.
Getting malware-loaded cartridges into a business would need a bit of social engineering to identify the printers in use and if they're vulnerable. But if a box of ink arrives with a delivery note, would a business quarantine that until delivery is cross-checked with against an order? Recon would probably just need a bit of dumpster diving to find packaging that had been left out for recycling.
FWIW, in some of the more "secure" orgs I deal with, they would. And do. Anything with a chip in it gets destroyed if it's being replaced. Including toner and ink carts.
I was once asked specifically to attend a site to remove the HDDs from the soon to be scrapped printers. I had very specific instructions. When I pointed out there was also an SD card in the printer, the job came to an immediate halt, various people who wear shiny brass adornments on their jackets and hats got involved and the job was put on hold while "procedures" were examined and re-written. I often wonder if anyone ended up peeling spuds or whitewashing rocks for that screw up or was it just civvy contractors involved (like me!) :-)
It was true a long time ago, when inkjet printers were a lot simpler. Thing changes. Some models may still have a print head in the cartridge, many don't. I had a six-ink HP where the cartridge were not on the moving print head - more separate inks don't allow to use a small head on each cartridge. My Canon photo printer has a separate head (you can even replace that, if you can find one, but it's not cheap). Printers using refillable tanks obviously have a separate print head.
If it's definitely just a plain, entirely passive, ink/toner cartridge with absolutely zero ability to directly sense what's being printed (i.e. it doesn't *also* incorporate a print head/toner drum), and which sits in a location within the printer from where it wouldn't be able to use any embedded sensors within the cart to independently sense what's being printed, then yup.
If not, the question then becomes just how much do you think someone out there might want to be able to access the information you're printing, and how far might they be prepared to go to achieve it?
That said however, if you're working in an environment where you think someone *would* go to those lengths to steal your data, then even using OEM supplies isn't in itself a guarantee of security, because unless you've got your own security team watching every inch of the manufacturing and delivery process to ensure that the supplies you're using cannot contain anything other than what the OEM says they should contain, then how do you *know* for certain they don't contain something?
If you're working in a space where data is that sensitive and you need to go to great lengths to protect it, and it's so valuable that a bad actor could try to intercept it on the printer....then you've already got a big budget for security and can stretch to own-brand ink cartridges
At that point, ink on dead trees becomes itself a liability. Especially when said ink is applied to the dead tree in such a pattern as to store sensitive information, then said dead tree with it's proprietary pigment pattern can be folded and safely concealed in ones nickers.
"plain, entirely passive, ink/toner cartridge with absolutely zero ability to directly sense what's being printed"
I don't think it's a question of detecting what's being printed, I think it's a whole overblown rigamarole to handshake with the printer to say "look! this sucker bought real unicorn tears!" and the printer reasons "awesome, I like you, start making ink splats for me, cheers". All so unnecessary, especially for those cartridges that also have expiry dates. This isn't a box of eggs (though, to be fair, American eggs are soon to be as expensive as printer ink) so why the date? Oh, right, to enhance consumption silly me, either you use it or you lose it (and, of course, you then have to buy more - that's what it's about).
I read that PDF. Some BS about the ink cartridge's flash chip injecting malware that makes the printer send a copy of your prints to China or something.
I don't think that's the biggest risk. That would be having a 'trusted' device on an internal network that has permissions for connections to servers. So inject malware, use that to open connections from the 'trusted' devices and ping your C&C server that you're into the network. If firewalls don't have a strict policy about outbound connections, then the network is compromised.. And a printer shouldn't really need to open those connections.
My Canon inkjet still prints ok using the third party cartridges I've been getting from Amazon for the past three years, although the front panel keeps reminding me there is a firmware update available on the server, but I just cancel the message each time. I recently changed three of the cartridges as they were empty and found that text printing was fine but photos were awful. After a bit of faffing around I confirmed it was the printer and not the Linux and Windows PC's in the house, so I tried a deep clean on the print head which fixed the issue. Was a little bit concerned for a few minutes until the though of trying a little maintenance occurred.
It's looking like Canon or Epson are some of the few printer manufacturers still respecting their customers.
It's the Gilette business model. I understand they want to make money from consumables, but they want to make too much money. And in the past four years inks had crazy price increase, the inks for my Canon photo printer went from about 50 to 80 for the 5-pack box (two different boxes needed for the full 10-inks set).. That's a 60% increase - far higher than inflation.
It is true third-party inks have less costs - often they recycle used cartridges because they can't make new ones (one of the reason I avoid them for photo printing), or make cheapr ones, but the price delta really looks to big. It looks they are offsetting the smaller printing market by increasing consumables costs. And the lose customers both for inks and new printers, if the costs become too high.
Rossmann also noted that Brother's support recommended switching to OEM toner to deal with quality issues, although that sounds an awful lot like a scripted step in a tech support fault tree: "Is the customer complaining about print quality using official products?"
To be fair, if they're not made by Brother how do they know the composition of the ink? They could be knock offs refilled by some Del Boy off the market who grabbed a couple of bottles of Quink from W H Smith and thinks he's now an IT mogul...
Or perhaps you should have to have a certain number of posts under your belt before you're allowed to post AC (bronze badge?). I occasionally post AC because I mention events from my past which could identify an employer or me personally, which is important because I know that I have past coworkers who read El Reg.
The AC troll infestation has definitely gotten worse, which appears to correlate with a certain tangerine twatwaffle entering public office again.
Whilst your suggestion has merit, some badges come and go - like my bronze.
I also agree that there are times it is necessary if you are posting close to the employment knuckle. I've done that too.
Perhaps a % would work, with some absolute thresholds. It should be possible to register (no pun intended) and make a few topic relevant posts on a single/couple of threads. Beyond that, some accrual of kudos may be necessary - number of posts, up votes, down votes
[edit for spelling]
[Brother's US limb did, however, tell Ars Technica: "We are aware of the recent false claims suggesting that a Brother firmware update may have restricted the use of third-party ink cartridges. Please be assured that Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines."]
The complaint wasn't that third-party ink was blocked... just the performance deliberately downgraded in that case.
Given the cost of laser printers and the fact that seldom-used inkjets end up with serious quality issues (crystallised ink in the jets) which usually require ink-heavy purge routines(*), why would anyone bother with buying inkjets in this day and age unless they have very specific use cases?(**)
(*) Going heavy on the purge routine is a staple go-to for manufacturers when non-OEM cartridges are detected. No print quality issues but your cheap cartridges have to be replaced N times more often than the OEM ones
(**) Usually cases which justify continuous ink systems and commercial grade printers anyway. The consumer printers are mostly nasty toys and have been for a while.
The rise of tablets and phablets has seen a "need" for printing to fall off a cliff. These days it's mostly for long term archival use and ink is an expensive way to do that
The drone on the chat went on and on and on about the 'superior' quality of Brother supplies, totally ignoring me when I said that I used Brother supplies, I was just concerned about price increases. I suspect that I have made my last Brother purchase. Anyone know anything about the Canon MF653Cdw?
Hence my brother colour laser has for almost a year been blocked from accessing the internet (static IP and router set to deny internet access to that IP address - one use for avm parental controls lol)
I figured this was afoot, note the brother USA statement DOESN'T reference the claims about colour registration or degraded print quality and instead deflects by saying it doesn't block printing (which isn't the allegation being made)
Doublespeak at work?
Yesterday a friend's MFC-L2750DW refused to print until we went into task manager and killed the 'Brother Utilities' application that had been running. As it because obvious it had been 'intercepting' print jobs from windows. After the program had been killed, all the print jobs that were being artificially held up, suddenly started printing...!!!
I have an MFC-L2710DW, but I have mind plugged in via USB and I do not and have NEVER allowed the 'Brother Utilities' application to run in the background as I don’t need the clutter. And even I had allowed it to run in the background, it would have been blocked from accessing the net by default. TLDR, you don't need the Brother Utilities' application running to print or scan. And what ever you DO NOT allow the Brother Utilities' application to access the internet.
So to Brother, I call bullsh1t. You bunch of money grabbing sanctimonious sh1ts. Carry on denying the truth, carry on trying to gaslight your customers, and see where is fc*king gets you.
While printer ink and toner cartridges are notorious (and rightly so) the problem also applies to replacement parts.
I have a Dell Inspiron laptop. The battery didn't last a year, even though 99% of the time I used the laptop while it was plugged in. The premature decrepitude of the battery was not covered by the warranty, since I couldn't prove it wasn't normal wear-and-tear.
When I obtained a quote for an original Dell replacement battery, the price came close to half the price of the entire laptop. Which was obviously ridiculous. So I tried a third-party battery. At that point I discovered that Dell batteries contain a chip that serves no other purpose than to provide the BIOS with the information that the battery is a Genuine Dell Product <tm>. A third party battery doesn't have that chip, so the laptop simply refuses to charge it.
Dell's official response is that third party batteries can't be trusted and will probably explode as soon as they are plugged in, so this is a very important safety feature. I kid you not, that's what they say. They stick some code in the BIOS that is specifically designed to prevent me from using a third-party battery, but that's only because they are so deeply concerned about my safety.
Safety, my brown asterisk! The cells I've found in third party battery packs are, by and large, of the same quality or better than what Dell puts in their products, and I have yet to encounter any problems. Except with this Dell laptop that has been rigged to enforce the use of ridiculously overpriced Dell battery packs when the shoddy rubbish they ship with their products conk out.
The whole industry is riddled with practices like this. The problem is as old as Compaq tweaking firmware in the 1990s so that regular SCSI controllers wouldn't work in some of their servers (SCSI controllers, NICs, etc.) unless you ordered the "Compaq version" from a certified Compaq supplier at several times the price.
Printer ink is just the tip of the iceberg.
>>The battery didn't last a year, even though 99% of the time I used the laptop while it was plugged in
err - that is a very easy way to break a laptop battery (unless that one has a charge limit you can set). Best use for LiON batteries is charge to 80%, let run back to 20% and charge again to 80% (or so I am told; I aim to do that but my 7 year old Acer is still on its first battery despite my best efforts to forget to unplug it about 1:10 times I plug it in)
But the rest of your post is straight up dope. I guess you could just buy cells and solder/weld them into the old Dell battery pack...
We had Dells here which broke batteries because people couldn't resist plugging them in... but they are old enough that the BIOS doesn't care about who made the battery pack (School innit? things ain't old/obsolete till they are FUBAR)
I have an older HP printer I've had for years and use HP cartridges in it. I tried some aftermarket units and they were really poor. I have a brand new cartridge in the supply closet and when that one gets installed, I'll put up my search of eBay for another OEM cart in a factory sealed box. They come up often enough and I don't print so much that a new cart won't last for a good year, so I have time to search.
I'm not fussed with paying a reasonable price for a printer and reasonable prices for quality toner cartridges. It looks really bad when the HP cart is well over $100 and an aftermarket version is less than $50. Why couldn't HP, with their greater economy of scale and quality, not be able to sell replacements for ~$60. I may have Scottish blood, but I'm not going to try and save $10 taking a chance on some fly-by-night toner cart. Wow, I'd save $0.003 per page if it prints the promised number of pages (yeah, right).
Ugh. I've never knowingly updated my firmware at all, since I threw out the HP and got the Brother close on a decade ago. It *is* networked, but foolish me, I had hope that a device that "old" would predate automatic updates.
How would I tell? What's the naughty firmware version in questions (suspect it varied by model)? Will I have to add it to the blacklist, just like my Samsung TV which I expect would have otherwise started to shove ads right into my Kodi-based stream by now?
I too (many years ago) did the whole resetting trick with a little yellow turd (tm) using pogo pins.
Interestingly the failure mode on my printer was actually a ribbon cable issue and not repairable.
Did look into this, seems that the expiry date on at least pre-2006 units can be worked around by
taking out a coin cell battery thus 'fooling' the printer into accepting that cartridge.
Supposedly there is a patch for bad ribbon cables, what you do is swap ends and 'bend' the bad end
so it makes contact as typically there is a miniscule crack in one or more of the flex cables.
Its barely worth it but someone with an antique may have a use for this.
*cough*
Thursday 11th April 2024 15:24 GMTPeshman
Re: This feels like an own goal...
I ditched HP for an Epson EcoTank model. Ok, so 300 quid is a bit steep for an inkjet MFD but it came with 6000 pages of ink (Colour and B/W) and a replacement set of refills costs a whopping £30.63 for Epson branded or £16.14 (Amazon prime pricing)...and a 3 year warranty.
HP can do one!
The cost of parts and manufacturing processes, shipping etc. and the retail value of the printers now means most printers will lose money. Print device companies according to HP in the past don't sell printers they sell Toner the Print device is just a means of getting the product on to the paper/Medium.
Still doesn't make it right to restrict the use of non OEM Ink/Toner. Sadly we aren't paperless yet, its only been on the cards since 1988 where companies tried to go full paperless, then i believe only Scania managed it at the time (didnt end well for SAAB).
You're not going to like this. My Brother MFC is on the pseudo-DMZ (between the office firewall and the router firewall), and calls home, and updates itself, constantly.
Every 3 months I get invoiced - 1.9p (UK pence) mono, 12.4p colour. The toner turns up automatically in the post when it's low.
Why? Because I've spent 25-odd years buying lasers and laboriously calculating cost-per-page, and most of the time the cost was way above this (sometimes 18-20p). Life is way too short to be worrying about whether your toner is good enough, whether Brother's updating your firmware, sourcing another toner supplier, placing orders, counting pages, whatever. I've got better things to do. Not right now, obviously.
I still prefer Brother for my laser printing (even if it's a massive colour printer).
Guess I won't update the firmware though (not that I usually do).
"Please be assured that Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines"
Blocking and degrading isn't the same thing, however. I used cheap toner in my Brother colour laser. I noticed the high (electrical) tension wires needed a clean (banding evident).
Canon for inkjet printing.
(But my 20 year old pigment Epson prints still hold up. So that's worth pondering. I can't say iIkject tech has moved on much.)
I've had good luck with Oki C6xx and C7xx color lasers, purchased off-lease. Large, heavy, and the office lights briefly dim when the motors start to churn, but none of this phoning home nonsense. Most toner works without complaint, though my source freely replaces the odd cart that doesn't. Not sure of newer models.
By comparison, SWMBO's HP multifunction inkjet is an unmitigated PoS. Won't do third-party toner, needs a new driver installation every couple of weeks, and phones home sporadically. Probably a good thing that the axe is inconveniently off in the garage when this happens.
"Updates" are notorious for deleting functionality in order to make customers pay again to buy (RENT!) the same functionality back.
You know for a fact this is happening when they block you from reversing any "update".
I swear, "the cloud" has come to mean nothing but manufacturers doing secret communications to sabotage their own products... MY PERSONAL PROPERTY!
They try to sanitize what they're doing by invoking an image of puffy nimbus cloud. But what it really is, is a toxic sooty belch of burned diesel smoke.
Or more accurately... think Steven King "The Mist". An opaque haze full of hidden monsters that come out of nowhere & rip your guts out!
Reading all these comments has made me realise how much I appreciate my old Laserjet 6p. 25 years old, genuine cartridge (off fleabay) and fed with decent quality paper. A bit of minimal maintainence to keep it clean inside and it just keeps on going. Admittedly it's had an ethernet server fitted (PrintSir) to make it available to everyone, but it really is a great little machine.
I really must say thank you to it more often ...
TLDR; Canon multifunction inkjet seems OK for the moment, Samsung also sold out to HP, I always printed minimally and had unique solutions.
Work: Buyer found Canon multifuncion inkjet fits the bill. My annoyance is driver proliferation, every model variance needs a different driver no matter how similar the printers or model numbers look. Seem to do well otherwise and take a beating.
Home: Current is an old Samsung multifunction laser flatbed scanner (& unused fax) SXC-3405W. It does not phone home and no Windows machine to help it do so. I have updated the firmware a couple of times, but stopped when I found the next would be hostile to non-OEM consumables. That may have been near the time Samsung handed the printer division over to HP. It still chugs along. Early built-in WiFi era printer also has USB-B.
The SCX-3405W replaced a ML-1740 laser only Samsung. That is also still going strong, I just installed a driver in daughter's Windows 11 laptop (she needs Windows for a work software requirement). Win11 cannot find the driver on its own. The ML-1740 has never had a firmware upgrade, I do not know if it has the "feature" of consumer upgrade-ability. The reason I replaced this printer was Windows (I was a user at the time) dropped support for the flatbed scanner I had and the manufacturer played along. USB-B and Centronics era printer. I would still be using it had I not found the printer/scanner at a good price.
Prior I had two inkjet printers which I deemed to be crap, did not last long, so much trouble with ink, not worth the effort just to have color.
Before that I had a 9-pin and later a 24-pin dot-matrix. This is when my printing needs had dropped so low that I had taken to storing the ribbon cartridge sealed in plastic wrap in the freezer. I would take it out to acclimate prior to unsealing and then print, and put it back in cold storage for months or a year between printing.
Way back in my Apple //c ownership era, I sourced a serial interface thermal printer intended for the IBM-PCjr. It could use fax paper or the paper for and Apple thermal printer. A copier would produce an excellent copy from the thermal printout for a longer lasting and not curled document to turn in homework at college.
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