this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Stallman Was Right
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Nobody listens to him. But he was right all along.
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I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.
Can you share what competitor you bought and some of your findings?
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
Brother is the only non-evil company when it comes to printers. Every other printer company would literally stomp on your puppy given the chance.
+1 for Brother HL printers. 2 toner bars got me through 3 years of nursing school.
If I need something printed in color, I'll just let a professional do it.
And it's extremely easy. Upload the PDF, wait for your mail. Thanks. The last time I needed something printed in colour was years ago, and the money and hassle I saved myself by buying a monochrome laser printer isn't offset by this one print job I had to pay for.
I have even gone one step further I don't have a printer at all. If I want anything printed, I will either do it when I'm at the office or get it printed by a stationary store for a small fee (like .05 USD per A4 page in local currency where I live).
I can count with one hand how many times I needed hard copies in the past couple of years.
Currently divorcing. Printer/scanner pays off 😞
I hate multifunction printers. They try to do everything but end up sucking at doing everything.
I ended up getting a separate, high speed Fujitsu scanner with built in auto file naming and OCR and it's been fantastic. I can just scan in all the things and shred them. Less paperwork cluttering the place.
That's rough. Good luck mate. I wish you'll come an emotionally lighter and happier person from the other side.
Thanks. I'm kinda ok, just alone. And it's a lot of paper.
They've got color laser printers too, just bought a HL-L3290CDW last week to replace my roommate's cheap Canon printer that I got tired troubleshooting every time we needed to print something. Absolute monster of a print device: color laser printer+scanner+copier+fax machine and a seamless printing process to boot.
I got curious how that works, thanks for piquing my curiosity.
Video for the curious.
Funny, I knew it was going to be a Brother from your first post. Glad to see the confirmation. I still have am HP from like 2016 which they started doing firmware updates to lock ink to their official brand only so I couldn't buy 3rd party. I had to roll back the firmware and removed the default gateway address to keep it from getting out to the internet and possibly updating again. I have made 1 3rd party ink purchase and been using it ever since. Printer works great still. The day it breaks will be the day I stop using HP going forward. I still can't believe they pulled that, and now this.
Yeah, I used to have a lot of goodwill for HP. They used to be good print quality at a good price. I remember many print projects I was stupid proud of with HP, but after I fell out of printer use and saw what they had been up to, from initially shorting the included cartridges to using DRM to lock out perfectly good cartridges, I vowed I wouldn’t buy a product of theirs for myself when I did need one again.
On a side note, I just realized you said “an HP” and it made me realize that an is usually used before vowels but H isn’t a vowel, but it was grammatically correct to the ear, but ambiguously correct on ‘paper’ when it dawned on me that we say HP as “Ay-tch Pee” and it suddenly made so much sense, and I wondered if there was a name for that exception in English.
Except some parts of UK pronounce it Haitch Pee, so a HP would make sense in some areas and an HP in others
I have an old Brother that I inherited from my mother... I had to buy toner once (I use it 5 years). It just works. I am really glad to hear that the company didn't turn evil like (almost?) all other.
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A Canon!? how in the world!
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Hold up, HP printers don't let you SCAN without ink? You can make up some believable bs argument about why DRM ink is necessary, but there's no way you can convince anyone that scanning needs ink.
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If you need a inkjet printer buy one with an ink tank. Like Epson’s EcoTank line. Much cheaper in the long run, since 3rd party refill bottles are super cheap.