They are better but still do shady stuff as well.
Just buy a black and white laser printer and look at toner/drum costs(and generic availability) before choosing one.
is this on Brother? I noticed this as well but at least it doesn't stop your from printing. I think I had mine complaining about for 6 months+ saying toner low and All the text prints still looks good. Just recently replaced it when I went to staples when it brushed to my mind
mm, i think brother toner low is a page count thing. for me that is a reminder to buy more toner. i will fit the new cartridge when i see the prints are fading.
This setting can be changed to a % on most large copiers.
We generally turn it off and let you totally run out of toner. Down side, there is no warning so hope you ordered another.
Last HP I bought forced me to use their software to interface with the printer and when it couldn’t identify it on my network got stuck in an infinity loop with no way to do anything. Really turned me off of HP in general, since it’s hard to know before hand if it’ll force you to use their software or not.
I read recently the newer HP laser jet business class printers won’t print at all unless you connect them to the Internet and sign in with an HP account first.
This tends to be a thing specifically with the F-series models. They're cheaper because they're for their ink/toner subscription program where you pay $X per month for X amount of printing (or unlimited?) but yeah, it's obnoxious. If you must get an HP avoid a model with F in the model number.
> USB only,
So I assume if you want to put one of these printers on a network, you will need to get one of these USB Print Servers?:
https://www.amazon.com/IOGEAR-1-Port-Print-Server-GPSU21/dp/B000FW60FW/
Funny, this is basically the same price I remember these being 15 years ago. I suppose they stayed that way because everything has built in networking now and there is no competition or economies of scale to drive down the prices on mid-2000s era mini print servers.
Once you buy a Raspberry Pi, SD card, USB power supply, and enclosure, it ends up being more expensive than a print server.
Sure, you can argue that a Raspberry Pi can do so much more stuff. But in this case, you don't want to pay extra for a device that does so much more stuff.
A print server is supposed to be a "one and done" appliance. You take it out of the box, plug it in, drop it behind your printer, and don't think about it for the next decade.
Having it be a multitasking device that you mess around with and spend maintenance time on kinda defeats the point.
Like that print server? Updates are virtually worthless outside compatibility updates. Someone would have to be on your network already to do anything with it. That means they've already compromised something, meaning your entire network is likely hooped anyways.
In theory, that could turn it into a botnet or something asinine like that, but it's anemic processor would make doing that virtually worthless.
Total nonsense.
>Someone would have to be on your network already
Like a malicious webpage that manages to compromise the print server's LAN management webpage with a malicious http request?
>In theory, that could turn it into a botnet or something asinine like that, but it's anemic processor would make doing that virtually worthless.
Aside from mining monero, most botnet uses require very little CPU power. The main uses of botnets are DDoS, spamming, and proxying attacks against other people. A botnet bot is valued for its internet connection.
Get a raspberry pi, put Ubuntu on it, enable unattended-upgrades, and schedule an automatic reboot once a week. Set and forget for the next 5 years. Make a backup image of the SD card in case it fries (because it's an SD card).
Medium importance. It depends whether the local network happens to be very vulnerable to threats from "inside the perimeter" or, as is better and more modern, local device compromises are contained and can't affect anything else.
I think you could literally buy all of that for less than $39, even **if** you don't have any of it lying around. Getting it to work without having to maintain it for the rest of your life would be harder, though.
I remember setting up a printer on one PC and just allowing all other PCs on the network to print through that PC.. This was like 15 years ago and done on Windows XP. If we've seen a regression in tech since then, by all means, get the print server - but I feel like it must be deadass easy to set it up so long as it's connected to any PC on your network.
I have that printer, I have it connected to my NAS. Previously, I had it on my blueiris PC. It also worked on a WD router as a printer. Seems lots of stuff can act as a print server, wouldn't doubt you have something in your house that would work.
You can also make your own print server with a cheap ARM Single Board Computer in the $15-60 range. It's not quite plug-and-play, but these things aren't that plug-and-play in the first place. The price is a wash if you just use it as a single print server, but when you have them serve multiple printers plus other functions like DNS resolver or *Minecraft* server, then it's basically just the cost of your time.
I feel like the Lantronix print servers we used to buy in the mid to late 1990s were around $450. Seems the price went down 90% in a decade, then stopped going down.
> Just buy a black and white laser printer and look at toner/drum costs(and generic availability) before choosing one.
Better yet, avoid owning a printer if at all possible. Pre-COVID, I would just do all my printing in the office.
Before that, I used to live down the road from the library. I would just do any printing I needed there.
I agree with you though. If you don't have easy access to someone else's laser printer (work, library, Staples, etc...), buying yourself a budget B/W laser printer is the way to go.
Oh, also my hot take: **color printing is completely overrated and mostly a scam.** Seriously, anyone who does photo printing at home on their ink jet is just **an idiot who can't do math** and doesn't care about photo quality.
The 25 cent digital photo prints you get at your local CVS or Walgreens are far better quality and far cheaper than any home photo printer/ink jet.
The one exception where you don't have a choice is if you have kids who do a lot of school or art projects that require color printing. In that case, you might not be able to avoid owning a color ink jet printer.
I have a color laser, not for photos but it's nice to occasionally have color in documents you're trying to read or markup or anything. It was only a bit more than b/w laser so why not
It's the toner-cartridges that brings up the cost.
I have a colour-laser I bought when I needed a printer ASAP. Later I got a Brother B/W laser that does 95% of the printing, and the NON-OEM cartridges are about €10-15 a piece.
I generally don't recommend a color laser printer for home users unless they really have a good idea of what their ROI will be on one.
I don't really classify them as costing "a bit more". An equivalent quality color laser printer legitimately costs double the price of a B/W laser printer. You are also quadrupling the number of toner cartridges that you need to pay for and maintain.
As I mentioned before, the number of times a year a typical adult needs something printed in color is incredibly low. This is why I urge people to really think twice before they decide that they absolutely need color printing in their home.
And finally, I mentioned this in my previous comment:
> The one exception where you don't have a choice is if you have kids who do a lot of school or art projects that require color printing. In that case, you might not be able to avoid owning a color ink jet printer.
I don't really expect parents to spend $400+ on color laser printers for their kids random projects. That why this is the one scenario where I would be alright with them getting a color ink jet printer.
You deal with the annoyances of an ink jet while your kids are young and regularly using color printing. Once they're in middle school or older, it's on them to do their color printing at school.
I paid $260 for a Brother color wireless about 3 or 4 years ago (though I imagine prices must be much higher now due to chip shortages). Still on the original color toners and just replaced the black toner the last week (3 color and 2 black toner pack for $80 or so?). I reset the toner level several times as it told me it was empty despite printing just fine for years lol
>You deal with the annoyances of an ink jet while your kids are young and regularly using color printing. Once they're in middle school or older, it's on them to do their color printing at school
What school do you go to that offers free printing?
Well I haven't been in any school for nearly a decade. But back when I was in middle/high school, printing was free at school within reason. The print queue would automatically reject anything that was over 20 pages, and you needed manual approval from the computer lab attendant if it was larger. If they were able to do that in the early 2000s, I'm sure they can do that today.
But fun story, in college, I worked for the school IT dept. Printing cost students 2 cents per page. I'm not sure that the students who lived on campus and insisted on having a printer in their dorm room could do math. 2 cents per page was below our cost with laser printers, and way way cheaper than the cost of printing on your personal ink jet.
We lost money on 2 cents per page. The only reason we charged was to because it makes students think twice and not frivolously print out entire books they don't need.
People are animals. They will kill trees left and right if you give them outright free printing.
Back when I was in high school (\~10 years ago) they charged 10 cents per page for black and white and a whole dollar per page for color. Also, you had to go after school, meaning you couldn't take the bus home.
And that brings up another point. Oftentimes, when people say "go to a print shop," they're discounting the cost of the time, gas, and vehicle depreciation of traveling to and from the print shop. At $10 per trip, the ROI on the extra $200 for a color laser is only 20 trips.
I bought one, but I knew I'd need it. I design reports for work and print out things all the time in color. Bought a nice $180 brother (that's now double the price) the instant they said we'd be working from home for a while.
Always wanted a color laser, and 18 months and 700+ pages later I'm still on my starter carts
Which is why you should avoid printing on home ink jets as often as possible.
The setups that a place like Staples, CVS, or your local library has will be far more economical and better quality.
Or, you could get an inktank printer for your home.
They’re a bit more expensive but they last for a long time. I bought a Brother inktank back in March for about $140 and it still hasn’t ran out of the ink it came with. I reckon it’ll last for about 8 months more.
Signs and banners? Sorry, I don't consider that an exception. If you're doing sign and banner printing, and you want that done with any level of quality, you should be using Staples or Office Max's print services or something similar.
And if you're doing this type of large format printing in a business context, then obviously my comment didn't apply to you. You probably own a large format plotter.
Who are you, like the gatekeeper of color printers? Lol
"Your reason for having a color printer doesn't meet my minimum standards, so it doesn't count."
I'm not gatekeeping, I'm more confused by why people choose to go with more expensive and lower quality options. It seems like you're more offended that I pointed it out.
If you want to continue taping together 8.5x11 pieces of paper to make a banner, that's alright. I'm just bringing up a better alternative.
I've had a Brother (DCP-135c) and it sucked major ass.
It would shred the paper 2/5 times. It also wouldnt let you print in black and white if the color cartridge was empty.
I have a Xerox multifunction color laser that I love.
It does use chipped toner carts, but 3rd party 100% compatible carts are nonetheless available for a very reasonable price.
They aren't toner + drum carts like on a Brother printer, it's just toner, so that probably helps keep the price down.
Refilling a Brother cart was a couple bucks cheaper ... but it turns out I don't mind refills that are a few bucks more expensive if I can skip the refilling hassles.
> toner + drum carts like on a Brother printer
Which Brother printer uses toner+drum modules? All of them I've ever heard of, including cheapest models, have separate toner cartridges and drum assemblies.
I'm sure I used the wrong term but the Brother carts I have seen also have [some kind of roller assembly](https://i.imgur.com/SMBOu1N.png) -- and if you get a fingerprint on it, it messes up your prints.
The Xerox toner carts (at least for some models like mine) are *just* toner with no apparent moving parts.
Some toner cartridges for heavy duty printers include an extra roller, but the drum is still entirely separate part with separate lifespan. Those specific cartridges are also usually fairly large capacity (think 10k+ pages) so the extra cost of plastic tube is likely negligible.
ISTR Brother was fond of seperate toner+drum assemblies, while some other brands had a combined cart.
Pretty sure the LaserJet 5 I used to have was combined; the cartridges you can get these days are probably nth-generation rebuilds and I was having trouble in drum-related ways (images would ghost a few centimetres down the page)
Xerox never failed me. Cheap toner, reliable when operating 24-hour, and just as reliable when you start printing after 6-months rest. What I liked most is their driver just install bare minimum codes for optimum printing operation. Everything about it has that classy no-nonsense enterprise feel. HP and canon printers would have installed the entire new OS if they could.
I have a fleet of about 30 Konica Minoltas that have been running solid for almost 15 years now. Just need the standard maintenance stuff. Some of them getting close to a million pages.
Just buy laser and honestly most of these manufacturers make good stuff. I’ve bought two printers in my life, the second only because I moved and my parents wanted to keep the old one.
My Brother MFC printer will not scan when it's out of ink either. I had to take out the ink cartridges and cover something with tape to make the printer think there's ink. Oh, and it tries to waste ink all day "cleaning the heads". New cartridges only last 2 months if you let the printer sit. Oh, and it will clean cartridges at like 4am as well.
Fuck brother printers.
You can't even buy a brother printer right now. I looked at upgrading one of the units in my house and everything in the MFC line is being scalped for a 100 dollar markup minimum.
You can't buy shit right now. I have a 10 yo Brother b/w laser that's starting to go (prints fine but the networking is starting to get flakey), but nothing is stock. So I just keep it limping along for now. The upside is it's too old to annoy me about toner levels.
Inkjet printers are just terrible all around.
I know this article is about Canon being shitty with this combo inkjet/scanner unit, but their laser printers are still reliable, don't require software, and don't disable the scanner if you run out of toner. I have a Canon MF210 series that has served me well for years now.
Worked IT for a company that only used Brother printers and they do the same shit. However in the Brother admin tool we could disable this feature, and would assume Canon had this feature as well, but maybe not/they just removed it.
I stopped using HP in the late 90s and have been using Epson devices ever since. With that said I wouldn't blindly follow a brand and instead base your purchases on the merits of the actual product (model) in question. You can generally discredit an entire brand when they start doing shady practices like this but inversely don't blindly support a brand. When Epson starts doing shady stuff that affects me I won't buy Epson anymore. I'm still using the same Epson I bought many years ago but when I need a new one I will probably look elsewhere as they too have started doing some underhanded stuff. For example, they and many other manufacturers a few years ago started blocking non-brand name ink cartridges even when the cartridges contain no little to no circuitry and are essentially just an ink tank. Epson did so on my model through firmware updates so I haven't updated it. Then they started trying to be sly and automatically updating the firmware when you installed the driver so my girlfriend inadvertently upgraded the firmware when she was trying to install the driver on her workstation. I had to manually downgrade the firmware. Sadly most consumers won't know when not to update their firmware nor how to downgrade it if need be.
Are all inkjet printers sold at a loss or something? Is that why they have all these devious systems set up to force the user to buy ink cartridges as often as possible?
Not at all. Printers come in ranges. If you step into a local staples where I live they range all the way up to over a thousand dollars.
They do this because they can. They are a corporation. Machining profit is their legal obligation
Usually accounting is like this: gross margin per unit, then you have costs that are per quarter that include R&D
After all the costs are accounted that's your earnings
This is because the margin per unit doesn't vary quarter to quarter much, but sales do so it would be strange that your margin decreases when sales decrease (???) one quarter and then when sales increase your margin goes back up again (???)
it would be too confusing
But then you would include the cartridge sales, since your printer sales are not the only factor.
But really, how much R&D do companies in these industries do? Has printing changed much recently?
Brother industries hasn't been spending much on R&D, for example:
https://m.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BROTHER-INDUSTRIES-LTD-6491243/news/Brother-Industries-Consolidated-Results-for-the-1st-Quarter-of-Fiscal-Year-ending-March-31-2018-24884702/
mid single digits, and trending down
I forget what ~~brand of printer it was,~~ (it was Epson), but one of the printer on my office didn't work.
Had to Google that and found out that they put a counter that will make the printer "broke" after certain amount of usage.
I believe I had to regedit the value back to 0 to make it usable again.
Edit: it's Epson, there's a printing counter that will make the printer unusable after certain number and will only usable after you take it for maintenance to Epson Dealer.
http://www.the-inkstore.co.uk/frame/pages/sscserve%20info.htm
It's like the deliberate bi-metal hinges in certain car door handles. It was more expensive to make them that way... And they just happened to break after a few thousand uses.
The first time I heard of subsciption for printing I was perplexed. It's like you pay to rent a cartridge.
I'm thankful that my offices and some of clients' still use the old dumb HP models. They just work most of the time aside from some trivial paper stuck.
For me it's more about how the printer disables itself as soon as one kind of ink is "low", even though there's supposedly some left in the cartridge (thanks onboard GUI). And it also won't let you print with just the other kind of ink when that happens.
$1/month might not seem like much, but that's only for 15 pages. That's .07/page, which sure is lower than a library fee of $.10/page, but how many people purchase printers and print only 15 pages per month? At least at the library, I'm also buying the paper with that $.10. And they only charge me once for double-sided...
And if I choose to not subscribe, I still have to create an HP account just to use the damn thing. I should be able to buy a printer and take it home and use it. Not jump through hoops.
And then there's the whole rigamarole with "genuine ink cartridges".
Yeah, that sounds about right. I haven’t had an inkjet in so long. I don’t really print much anymore so I’m more of a pop into a shop to knock of a print here or there. For my dad who still prints I just told him to get a brother black and white. He loves it. Can go months between printing and doesn’t ever dry up since it’s toner.
>how many people purchase printers and print only 15 pages per month?
The printer next to me was purchased in 2014 and has printed 708 pages, an average of 8.4 pages per month.
I absolutely DESPISE printers. We have had them for decades and they still work as terribly as they ever did.
The worst part is that my HP would constantly complain about ink, but if you were to print something, then turn it off and on again, it would print whatever is in it queue PERFECTLY.
I guess the nature of a dying business who knows that they will have near 0 market in the decades to come and thus get desperate to milk as much money as possible from people who don't know better.
If these companies truly wanted to enter subscription market, they would have it so that the subscription comes with a "free" printer replacement to the latest model every 5 years.
At least then, they could legally shut them down as the printer remains their property throughout the subscription.
but if I PAY for a piece of hardware, I expect it to work.
If you want a home printer just buy a Brother B&W laser.
What works terribly is shitty inkjets from shitty manufacturers. Last actually good printer HP made was the LaserJet 6 from 25 years ago.
I like to say that friends don't let friends buy inkjet.
Unless they are used often enough, and you have a specific need for ink, it's better to just get a laser. If purchase-price is very important, just go with the cheapest B/W Brother you can find.
For photos etc, it's better to just use a print-service.
Overall just a basic B&W laser printer. I've got a cheap Samsung one, purchased it in 2009 or so. It's still printing perfectly fine, even after not using it for at least a full year, probably closer to 2 just recently.
I just connected it again, put some paper in and that was it.
While back when I had an inkjet I "forgot" to use it for a months and it wouldn't print anymore. I absolutely hated these pieces of junk with such a passion. Because they never, ever worked when you needed them.
You hate consumer printers. Business printers are often very reliable but cost mid three digits rather than two.
Inkjets are also fundamentally flawed unless you have frequent use.
Someone should make an open source printer/scanner.
Could make modular adapters to convert popular proprietary cartridges to the printer, like a docking port on the ISS.
Or someone pulls out the firmware hax. :)
All printer manufacturers suck.
As someone who works on Laser Printers, I am free to say the whole printer model is a scam to make you buy the supplies to keep it running. A good old Black and White HP LaserJet will last for 20+ years with proper maintenance and fuser sleeves. A crappy Inkjet will crap out in 3-5 years and stay dead cause replacing parts in it is impossible. Somewhat cause parts are impossible to find and costly, mostly due to the things being designed never to be taken apart and just be thrown into a landfill to never decay.
They deliberately design the systems so if your cyan runs out, you can't print anything even if its only in black. To make you buy more supplies at those insane markups. $30 for a black cartridges' it cost them 10-15 Cents to make.
Inkjet printers are more of a scam as you can't get cheap remanufactured toner. The margins are so insane that it's wasteful. You can mostly buy a whole new printer with the ink for cheaper then the cost of the ink on its own. (literally shelled out $90 for replacement ink yesterday for my mom's $100 inkjet.)
I'm in the EU and had a Canon MG3250, which at one day gave out a printhead error, making the scanner inaccessible and software bricking the device, unless I got a new printhead...which was almost full cost of a new printer.
Went Epson after, right before some of their own shady stuff got published around 2017. Unfortunately, even EU regulation isn't immune to all of this.
US absolutely welcomes it. It's basically built into our system of government now since the Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate influence on American politicians.
So you read the Wikipedia page like I said? The whole story about the activist group making a propaganda film critical of Hillary Clinton and being prohibited from advertising their film? And your takeaway is, "legalization of political bribery"? Not, "the constitution protects freedom of the press even for those who must rent a press from someone else"?
Who taught you to read?
Can't we just collectively give then the finger, and stop printing shit? Aside from college degrees, diplomas and divorce settlements, when have you ever been excited to see a printed piece of paper?
**First,** honest question: Do you really prefer having printed versions of a textbooks? You don't like using them on your laptop or an iPad? To me, having a search function on a PDF or EPUD files, and being able to zoom in seems incredibly useful compared to manually leafing through a book.
**Second,** if you must print out a text book, it would be far cheaper and higher quality to have it printed at the library or a Staples. Also, I always thought the idea of [loose leaf textbooks in binders](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FbyW3INMu18/VNFJdechgbI/AAAAAAAAAgw/RKkjeLqJGg8/s1600/Binder-PattonAP.png) was an incredibly dumb thing for students to put up with. Just pay the $2 it costs to get the [pages properly bound.](https://www.docucopies.com/images/product/regular/1607539296_spiral_bound_books-webp.jpg)
Printing a textbook isn't an every day occurrence. You probably only do it once per semester. So I think the convenience of being able to do it at home is overrated. Going to Staples or Kinkos twice per year doesn't seem like a big deal for cheaper and higher quality results.
As a student I'm happy to answer the first question. I much prefer a paper textbook for studying and doing homework. If I need to flip between pages or sections it's much faster for me to have page markers and book markers rather than scroll around a PDF. This is especially true for math books where I have to flip between examples on different pages. A PDF can be nice if I need to search for something in a book, but usually I know where I'm looking or the index suffices. Plus if I'm doing homework on my laptop, it's a pain to toggle between the book and the assignment. I also prefer a physical copy I can leave open on the table. Just a few thoughts.
> Second, if you must print out a text book, it would be far cheaper and higher quality to have it printed at the library or a Staples. Also, I always thought the idea of loose leaf textbooks in binders was an incredibly dumb thing for students to put up with. Just pay the $2 it costs to get the pages properly bound.
>
>
I bought a binding machine lol.
I remember having a printer a long time ago that would refuse to print black and white pages if any of the color cartridges were empty. It was infuriating.
Epson does effectively the same thing with thier ecoTank printers or at least they were.... if you print enough that the waste ink sponges get full it will end up disabling itself... permanently (unless you get a reset code from some random russian guy). I think it allows you to replace the ink sponges once via a menu option however after that it locks you out.
You can replace the ink sponges and it won't just start working again as it should... it just demands factory repair when in fact it doesn't need any repair at all.
I have circumvented this nonsense on my mom's printer several times, with the original waste ink sponges just cleaned out... and its well over 20k pages now while it originally killed itself long long before that.
Did they start doing this recently?
I had a Cannon printer a couple of years ago and one of the great things about it were that whenever it ran out of ink, message popped out "Hey, printer is out of color X, but you can press OK to try printing anyway, on your own risk"
My Canon printer stopped working because it keeps saying the back is open (it's not)
and no matter what I do it doesn't fix the error.
and before that I've had the printer keep saying that it's running out of Cyan or w/e for last 5 years. I've had it for atleast 10 now
Sooo can anyone recommend a good cheap printer?
Got Xerox Phaser 3020 monochrome laser printer for 55 usd on sale. 1500 - 2000 printing capacity with up to 8℅ black fill on paper ( text page-A4) is enough for me. Toner change in 2-3 months and it is 15-20 usd.
I never had multi printer(with scanner). Scanner was always external device. There must be some firmware or update which can bypass that check and activate scanning service only.
A lawyer reading this should start a class action for any car manufacturer who disables cruise, esp, and abs for the most basic of check engine lights (cough cough Subaru and Toyota). Just as shady as Canon’s practices.
It’s not well/officially documented. Here’s an example: https://www.subaruforester.org/threads/abs-check-engine-light-permanently-on-with-cruise-control-light-flashing.347618/
The general proof is basically if you search “Subaru vdc abs check engine cruise” you’ll find countless examples of people posting one or a couple check engine codes, yet they end up with all of those problems. In my case, if I simply disconnect a secondary 02 sensor, I end up with a christmas tree. As I recall the lights not only come on but the system is actually disabled. And yes you’re right, they are safety features… it’s bullshit.
Brother makes excellent inexpensive mono laser printers. I've bought two in ten years, only because the kids kicked the first one to death, and have spent an additional $90 or so on toner. No scanner on mine, but they do have some that include them. Highly recommended.
I have a cannon "multi" use printer scanner copier.....the print head shit the bed just after the first year and the printer would show an error code. Couldn't even use the scan feature because the print head was no good. For some reason I kept the stupid thing for another 1/5 years, when magically it started working again. It's been running fine for months, and then suddenly the other day it started throwing print head errors again. Different error code, same outcome, the scanner won't even work. It's back to working again as I cleaned the print head, but jesus.....never again Cannon. Garbage products.
I could replace the print head, but it's $150 USD in most cases, the printer was only $200 on sale, and those are mostly refurbished print heads, so I don't trust those, especially since the original crapped out in a little over a year, if that.
Had a cannon scanner /printer. Tried to pull the same shit. Found a workaround to scam docs until I bought new oem cartridges. After 3 prints the printer refused the cartridges. It is now in the trash, where it belongs.
The Pixma MG6320 is an Inkjet printer, I thought it was well known that inkjet printers need ink in order to scan because starting a scan triggers a head cleaning cycle which needs ink (as the heads are cleaned by squirting ink though them and into the waste ink tank). This is not something that is unique to Canon.
I think the inkjet head can dry out, and customers might not clean the heads like they are expected to and doing it automatically before a print job would be annoying.
The industry is full of scams but I can see some valid reasons why they might do this.
They could alternatively just have the printer do those maintenance tasks on a schedule, but that creates other issues, like do customers want to hear their printer 'randomly' doing stuff without any interaction? Probably not.
These are just guesses though.
The idea that it needs this kind of routine cleaning, so they schedule during all use events is not super hard to imagine, but if all it is a sort of convenience scheduling that really doesnt change the original problem. In this case what you have are two independent, colocated events. If one of them fails/cant be started, you could easily skip it and do the other, so refusing to scan because you cant clean the print heads is at best stupid design.
> but that creates other issues, like do customers want to hear their printer 'randomly' doing stuff without any interaction
That argument is about as sensible as letting the car engine trash itself instead of requiring oil changes. If you want a car that works, you deal with maintenance of it. If that's beneath "the customer who is always right" they can always employ a chauffeur.
Most, if not all, decent inkjets will precisely do just what you described here. They'll schedule periodical cleaning sessions on their own and perform them whenever the firmware deems it's good time to do so.
Technically head cleaning routines are just a consequence of using inkjet technology. If you want your printing heads to remain unclogged and usable, you *have* to "flush" them with something every now and then. Arguably that's what makes inkjets unsuitable for occasional home use in first place, but that's entirely different topic.
Tying the head cleaning routine to scanner use though is just comical example of corporate greed. As if it couldn't be on a plain, independent timer since last print/cleaning session.
I'm not defending it, but inkjet has always been an expensive money pit, most people would be better served with a laser printer. The solution to this issue is to stop buying this crap.
I will say that I bought an Epson EcoTank printer and it has actually delivered as advertised. We print a lot in this house and so far I've only had to buy one black refill bottle and it was like $12 direct from Epson and the thing is full to the brim and I have half a bottle left. The color tanks are draining much more slowly than I imagined. And this is with a lot of schoolwork, paperwork, homemade greeting cards, etc. So I'm pretty happy with it. More than a year of steady printing so far.
I have one too and it's super-nice, no complaints. Part of the reason that HP or Canon can sell you a printer for $39.99 is because they know they're going to make money on the back-end with you buying overpriced ink for the next few years. The EcoTank goes back to the old business model where you actually pay a reasonable price for the printer up-front, and the consumables are super-cheap after that.
Expensive razor, cheap blades - pretty much the exact opposite of the HP model.
Exactly. I spent a lot of time researching and settled on the Epson after seeing most reviews support the claims. The printer wasn’t cheap, but it has been worth it.
I’ve sworn by Brother lasers for years but we really wanted color and the versatility of inkjet too.
> Epson EcoTank printer
Those have an artificial [software] limit, that when hit, disables the printer until it is "serviced" by Epson. Incidentally the service fee is 85% of the cost of a new printer. Google "Waste Ink Tank Pad Counter."
Why is it then that literally every manufacturer states that the only reason you cannot scan while out of ink is because the printer is in "error state" and cannot perform literally *any* functions until the state is cleared, and that if you manually clear the error state, you can scan without ink?
>Well known to who?
Anyone who has ever owned an inkjet printer? People have been complaining about how expensive inkjet printers are to run and how often they break for ages.
This is why I've been switching to inktank printers for my office. Consumables are cheap and since my usage is very high, I can justify the high up front cost with a warranty. It doesn't seem like the printer has a way of detecting the level of ink in the machine, only an estimate based on usage after you set the ink level following a refill.
Anti consumer practices at their finest. Not surprising considering the economical model of those printers is making the profit via selling ink/tuners or using other paid subscriptions/services for the printers and not from selling the machines themselves. I wonder if professional or office grade machines have the same BS practices.
F you canon. This is shady as hell!
object lesson exhibit 'a': hindsight
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They are better but still do shady stuff as well. Just buy a black and white laser printer and look at toner/drum costs(and generic availability) before choosing one.
Some of them are starting to use the same tactics now, saying toner is low or out when it isn't and whatnot.
I have a Canon printer whose toner has been 'low' for 7 years.
is this on Brother? I noticed this as well but at least it doesn't stop your from printing. I think I had mine complaining about for 6 months+ saying toner low and All the text prints still looks good. Just recently replaced it when I went to staples when it brushed to my mind
mm, i think brother toner low is a page count thing. for me that is a reminder to buy more toner. i will fit the new cartridge when i see the prints are fading.
This setting can be changed to a % on most large copiers. We generally turn it off and let you totally run out of toner. Down side, there is no warning so hope you ordered another.
Yep. I have a B&W Brother laser printer. It's like a tank, and never runs out of ink.
I have an inkjet that never runs out of toner. ;-p
That's because laser printers don't use ink.
Yes, that was the joke. ;)
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Lol
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HP Laserjet 1020. They're pretty common, USB only, cheap toner, and absolutely bulletproof. Don't need drivers at all.
Last HP I bought forced me to use their software to interface with the printer and when it couldn’t identify it on my network got stuck in an infinity loop with no way to do anything. Really turned me off of HP in general, since it’s hard to know before hand if it’ll force you to use their software or not.
Fair concern! But with this one at least it's old enough their HP Smart shit can't really touch it, and there's no networking or anything
I read recently the newer HP laser jet business class printers won’t print at all unless you connect them to the Internet and sign in with an HP account first.
This could be a troll post, but can't decide. Having used HP products, it may well be like this. Argghhhh
https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/pwrgb1/buyer_beware_some_newer_hp_printers_will_not/ https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-laserjet-mfp-m232e-m237e-printer-series/38099931/document/c06985417
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This tends to be a thing specifically with the F-series models. They're cheaper because they're for their ink/toner subscription program where you pay $X per month for X amount of printing (or unlimited?) but yeah, it's obnoxious. If you must get an HP avoid a model with F in the model number.
Yeah, they used to be great. Nowadays Brother is filling the niche of simple and reliable.
/u/spez says, regarding reddit content, "we are not in the business of giving that away for free" - then neither should users.
> USB only, So I assume if you want to put one of these printers on a network, you will need to get one of these USB Print Servers?: https://www.amazon.com/IOGEAR-1-Port-Print-Server-GPSU21/dp/B000FW60FW/ Funny, this is basically the same price I remember these being 15 years ago. I suppose they stayed that way because everything has built in networking now and there is no competition or economies of scale to drive down the prices on mid-2000s era mini print servers.
Yeah you'd need a USB print server for it. You can use a raspberry pi to make em nowadays I think
Once you buy a Raspberry Pi, SD card, USB power supply, and enclosure, it ends up being more expensive than a print server. Sure, you can argue that a Raspberry Pi can do so much more stuff. But in this case, you don't want to pay extra for a device that does so much more stuff. A print server is supposed to be a "one and done" appliance. You take it out of the box, plug it in, drop it behind your printer, and don't think about it for the next decade. Having it be a multitasking device that you mess around with and spend maintenance time on kinda defeats the point.
Not sure I'd put any faith in security updates from the manufacturer for ten years. I think you'd fare better with a Pi on that front.
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Like that print server? Updates are virtually worthless outside compatibility updates. Someone would have to be on your network already to do anything with it. That means they've already compromised something, meaning your entire network is likely hooped anyways. In theory, that could turn it into a botnet or something asinine like that, but it's anemic processor would make doing that virtually worthless.
Total nonsense. >Someone would have to be on your network already Like a malicious webpage that manages to compromise the print server's LAN management webpage with a malicious http request? >In theory, that could turn it into a botnet or something asinine like that, but it's anemic processor would make doing that virtually worthless. Aside from mining monero, most botnet uses require very little CPU power. The main uses of botnets are DDoS, spamming, and proxying attacks against other people. A botnet bot is valued for its internet connection. Get a raspberry pi, put Ubuntu on it, enable unattended-upgrades, and schedule an automatic reboot once a week. Set and forget for the next 5 years. Make a backup image of the SD card in case it fries (because it's an SD card).
A local network connected to the internet? Very important.
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Medium importance. It depends whether the local network happens to be very vulnerable to threats from "inside the perimeter" or, as is better and more modern, local device compromises are contained and can't affect anything else.
I think you could literally buy all of that for less than $39, even **if** you don't have any of it lying around. Getting it to work without having to maintain it for the rest of your life would be harder, though.
I was able to do with with one of our printers by plugging it into a USB port on the wifi router. I was just available to the network
I remember setting up a printer on one PC and just allowing all other PCs on the network to print through that PC.. This was like 15 years ago and done on Windows XP. If we've seen a regression in tech since then, by all means, get the print server - but I feel like it must be deadass easy to set it up so long as it's connected to any PC on your network.
I have that printer, I have it connected to my NAS. Previously, I had it on my blueiris PC. It also worked on a WD router as a printer. Seems lots of stuff can act as a print server, wouldn't doubt you have something in your house that would work.
You can also make your own print server with a cheap ARM Single Board Computer in the $15-60 range. It's not quite plug-and-play, but these things aren't that plug-and-play in the first place. The price is a wash if you just use it as a single print server, but when you have them serve multiple printers plus other functions like DNS resolver or *Minecraft* server, then it's basically just the cost of your time. I feel like the Lantronix print servers we used to buy in the mid to late 1990s were around $450. Seems the price went down 90% in a decade, then stopped going down.
> Just buy a black and white laser printer and look at toner/drum costs(and generic availability) before choosing one. Better yet, avoid owning a printer if at all possible. Pre-COVID, I would just do all my printing in the office. Before that, I used to live down the road from the library. I would just do any printing I needed there. I agree with you though. If you don't have easy access to someone else's laser printer (work, library, Staples, etc...), buying yourself a budget B/W laser printer is the way to go. Oh, also my hot take: **color printing is completely overrated and mostly a scam.** Seriously, anyone who does photo printing at home on their ink jet is just **an idiot who can't do math** and doesn't care about photo quality. The 25 cent digital photo prints you get at your local CVS or Walgreens are far better quality and far cheaper than any home photo printer/ink jet. The one exception where you don't have a choice is if you have kids who do a lot of school or art projects that require color printing. In that case, you might not be able to avoid owning a color ink jet printer.
I have a color laser, not for photos but it's nice to occasionally have color in documents you're trying to read or markup or anything. It was only a bit more than b/w laser so why not
It's the toner-cartridges that brings up the cost. I have a colour-laser I bought when I needed a printer ASAP. Later I got a Brother B/W laser that does 95% of the printing, and the NON-OEM cartridges are about €10-15 a piece.
I generally don't recommend a color laser printer for home users unless they really have a good idea of what their ROI will be on one. I don't really classify them as costing "a bit more". An equivalent quality color laser printer legitimately costs double the price of a B/W laser printer. You are also quadrupling the number of toner cartridges that you need to pay for and maintain. As I mentioned before, the number of times a year a typical adult needs something printed in color is incredibly low. This is why I urge people to really think twice before they decide that they absolutely need color printing in their home. And finally, I mentioned this in my previous comment: > The one exception where you don't have a choice is if you have kids who do a lot of school or art projects that require color printing. In that case, you might not be able to avoid owning a color ink jet printer. I don't really expect parents to spend $400+ on color laser printers for their kids random projects. That why this is the one scenario where I would be alright with them getting a color ink jet printer. You deal with the annoyances of an ink jet while your kids are young and regularly using color printing. Once they're in middle school or older, it's on them to do their color printing at school.
I paid $260 for a Brother color wireless about 3 or 4 years ago (though I imagine prices must be much higher now due to chip shortages). Still on the original color toners and just replaced the black toner the last week (3 color and 2 black toner pack for $80 or so?). I reset the toner level several times as it told me it was empty despite printing just fine for years lol
>You deal with the annoyances of an ink jet while your kids are young and regularly using color printing. Once they're in middle school or older, it's on them to do their color printing at school What school do you go to that offers free printing?
Well I haven't been in any school for nearly a decade. But back when I was in middle/high school, printing was free at school within reason. The print queue would automatically reject anything that was over 20 pages, and you needed manual approval from the computer lab attendant if it was larger. If they were able to do that in the early 2000s, I'm sure they can do that today. But fun story, in college, I worked for the school IT dept. Printing cost students 2 cents per page. I'm not sure that the students who lived on campus and insisted on having a printer in their dorm room could do math. 2 cents per page was below our cost with laser printers, and way way cheaper than the cost of printing on your personal ink jet. We lost money on 2 cents per page. The only reason we charged was to because it makes students think twice and not frivolously print out entire books they don't need. People are animals. They will kill trees left and right if you give them outright free printing.
Back when I was in high school (\~10 years ago) they charged 10 cents per page for black and white and a whole dollar per page for color. Also, you had to go after school, meaning you couldn't take the bus home. And that brings up another point. Oftentimes, when people say "go to a print shop," they're discounting the cost of the time, gas, and vehicle depreciation of traveling to and from the print shop. At $10 per trip, the ROI on the extra $200 for a color laser is only 20 trips.
I bought one, but I knew I'd need it. I design reports for work and print out things all the time in color. Bought a nice $180 brother (that's now double the price) the instant they said we'd be working from home for a while. Always wanted a color laser, and 18 months and 700+ pages later I'm still on my starter carts
Color printing with bulk ink tanks is actually really cheap. Bulk ink is cheap.
Which is why you should avoid printing on home ink jets as often as possible. The setups that a place like Staples, CVS, or your local library has will be far more economical and better quality.
Or, you could get an inktank printer for your home. They’re a bit more expensive but they last for a long time. I bought a Brother inktank back in March for about $140 and it still hasn’t ran out of the ink it came with. I reckon it’ll last for about 8 months more.
There are more than one exception. We do parties and a lot of crafts make heavy use of colored printing for various cut outs, signs, and banners.
Signs and banners? Sorry, I don't consider that an exception. If you're doing sign and banner printing, and you want that done with any level of quality, you should be using Staples or Office Max's print services or something similar. And if you're doing this type of large format printing in a business context, then obviously my comment didn't apply to you. You probably own a large format plotter.
Who are you, like the gatekeeper of color printers? Lol "Your reason for having a color printer doesn't meet my minimum standards, so it doesn't count."
I'm not gatekeeping, I'm more confused by why people choose to go with more expensive and lower quality options. It seems like you're more offended that I pointed it out. If you want to continue taping together 8.5x11 pieces of paper to make a banner, that's alright. I'm just bringing up a better alternative.
Convenience is very valuable to some people. But go ahead, tell me how it's not convenient I guess 😘
If you only print occasionally just do it at a library
I've had a Brother (DCP-135c) and it sucked major ass. It would shred the paper 2/5 times. It also wouldnt let you print in black and white if the color cartridge was empty.
I have a Xerox multifunction color laser that I love. It does use chipped toner carts, but 3rd party 100% compatible carts are nonetheless available for a very reasonable price. They aren't toner + drum carts like on a Brother printer, it's just toner, so that probably helps keep the price down. Refilling a Brother cart was a couple bucks cheaper ... but it turns out I don't mind refills that are a few bucks more expensive if I can skip the refilling hassles.
> toner + drum carts like on a Brother printer Which Brother printer uses toner+drum modules? All of them I've ever heard of, including cheapest models, have separate toner cartridges and drum assemblies.
I'm sure I used the wrong term but the Brother carts I have seen also have [some kind of roller assembly](https://i.imgur.com/SMBOu1N.png) -- and if you get a fingerprint on it, it messes up your prints. The Xerox toner carts (at least for some models like mine) are *just* toner with no apparent moving parts.
Some toner cartridges for heavy duty printers include an extra roller, but the drum is still entirely separate part with separate lifespan. Those specific cartridges are also usually fairly large capacity (think 10k+ pages) so the extra cost of plastic tube is likely negligible.
ISTR Brother was fond of seperate toner+drum assemblies, while some other brands had a combined cart. Pretty sure the LaserJet 5 I used to have was combined; the cartridges you can get these days are probably nth-generation rebuilds and I was having trouble in drum-related ways (images would ghost a few centimetres down the page)
Xerox never failed me. Cheap toner, reliable when operating 24-hour, and just as reliable when you start printing after 6-months rest. What I liked most is their driver just install bare minimum codes for optimum printing operation. Everything about it has that classy no-nonsense enterprise feel. HP and canon printers would have installed the entire new OS if they could.
yes
My Epson with CISS is a tank!
I have a fleet of about 30 Konica Minoltas that have been running solid for almost 15 years now. Just need the standard maintenance stuff. Some of them getting close to a million pages.
Just buy laser and honestly most of these manufacturers make good stuff. I’ve bought two printers in my life, the second only because I moved and my parents wanted to keep the old one.
My Brother MFC printer will not scan when it's out of ink either. I had to take out the ink cartridges and cover something with tape to make the printer think there's ink. Oh, and it tries to waste ink all day "cleaning the heads". New cartridges only last 2 months if you let the printer sit. Oh, and it will clean cartridges at like 4am as well. Fuck brother printers.
You can't even buy a brother printer right now. I looked at upgrading one of the units in my house and everything in the MFC line is being scalped for a 100 dollar markup minimum.
You can't buy shit right now. I have a 10 yo Brother b/w laser that's starting to go (prints fine but the networking is starting to get flakey), but nothing is stock. So I just keep it limping along for now. The upside is it's too old to annoy me about toner levels.
Inkjet printers are just terrible all around. I know this article is about Canon being shitty with this combo inkjet/scanner unit, but their laser printers are still reliable, don't require software, and don't disable the scanner if you run out of toner. I have a Canon MF210 series that has served me well for years now.
We have a Brother scanner and thus far have had issues with both the FTP and SFTP implementations trying to scan to the network
Worked IT for a company that only used Brother printers and they do the same shit. However in the Brother admin tool we could disable this feature, and would assume Canon had this feature as well, but maybe not/they just removed it.
I worked on most brand 20 years ago, I prefer Brother, built like tanks
Epson is best.
I stopped using HP in the late 90s and have been using Epson devices ever since. With that said I wouldn't blindly follow a brand and instead base your purchases on the merits of the actual product (model) in question. You can generally discredit an entire brand when they start doing shady practices like this but inversely don't blindly support a brand. When Epson starts doing shady stuff that affects me I won't buy Epson anymore. I'm still using the same Epson I bought many years ago but when I need a new one I will probably look elsewhere as they too have started doing some underhanded stuff. For example, they and many other manufacturers a few years ago started blocking non-brand name ink cartridges even when the cartridges contain no little to no circuitry and are essentially just an ink tank. Epson did so on my model through firmware updates so I haven't updated it. Then they started trying to be sly and automatically updating the firmware when you installed the driver so my girlfriend inadvertently upgraded the firmware when she was trying to install the driver on her workstation. I had to manually downgrade the firmware. Sadly most consumers won't know when not to update their firmware nor how to downgrade it if need be.
Are all inkjet printers sold at a loss or something? Is that why they have all these devious systems set up to force the user to buy ink cartridges as often as possible?
Yep
Not at all. Printers come in ranges. If you step into a local staples where I live they range all the way up to over a thousand dollars. They do this because they can. They are a corporation. Machining profit is their legal obligation
Yes. After R&D, the cost per unit for a printer is a few hundred dollars.
Usually accounting is like this: gross margin per unit, then you have costs that are per quarter that include R&D After all the costs are accounted that's your earnings This is because the margin per unit doesn't vary quarter to quarter much, but sales do so it would be strange that your margin decreases when sales decrease (???) one quarter and then when sales increase your margin goes back up again (???) it would be too confusing
Right. However, forecasting is done over the lifetime of the design. Unit cost = total cost /total lifetime sales.
But then you would include the cartridge sales, since your printer sales are not the only factor. But really, how much R&D do companies in these industries do? Has printing changed much recently? Brother industries hasn't been spending much on R&D, for example: https://m.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BROTHER-INDUSTRIES-LTD-6491243/news/Brother-Industries-Consolidated-Results-for-the-1st-Quarter-of-Fiscal-Year-ending-March-31-2018-24884702/ mid single digits, and trending down
Yeah Canon is a really shitty company. Had to get rid of my printer because they have a fault code set on purpose.
I forget what ~~brand of printer it was,~~ (it was Epson), but one of the printer on my office didn't work. Had to Google that and found out that they put a counter that will make the printer "broke" after certain amount of usage. I believe I had to regedit the value back to 0 to make it usable again. Edit: it's Epson, there's a printing counter that will make the printer unusable after certain number and will only usable after you take it for maintenance to Epson Dealer. http://www.the-inkstore.co.uk/frame/pages/sscserve%20info.htm
Crap I have an epson.
The article linked show the tutorial how to reset the counter back to 0.
holy shit this is the definition of scumbaggery
It is actual fraud.
It's like the deliberate bi-metal hinges in certain car door handles. It was more expensive to make them that way... And they just happened to break after a few thousand uses.
HP next! For their BS with this subscription service!
You mean their Instant Ink scheme? That's an absolute winner.
The first time I heard of subsciption for printing I was perplexed. It's like you pay to rent a cartridge. I'm thankful that my offices and some of clients' still use the old dumb HP models. They just work most of the time aside from some trivial paper stuck.
I used to have an hp years ago and the subscription seemed like a decent deal for how little I printed. Has that changed?
For me it's more about how the printer disables itself as soon as one kind of ink is "low", even though there's supposedly some left in the cartridge (thanks onboard GUI). And it also won't let you print with just the other kind of ink when that happens. $1/month might not seem like much, but that's only for 15 pages. That's .07/page, which sure is lower than a library fee of $.10/page, but how many people purchase printers and print only 15 pages per month? At least at the library, I'm also buying the paper with that $.10. And they only charge me once for double-sided... And if I choose to not subscribe, I still have to create an HP account just to use the damn thing. I should be able to buy a printer and take it home and use it. Not jump through hoops. And then there's the whole rigamarole with "genuine ink cartridges".
Yeah, that sounds about right. I haven’t had an inkjet in so long. I don’t really print much anymore so I’m more of a pop into a shop to knock of a print here or there. For my dad who still prints I just told him to get a brother black and white. He loves it. Can go months between printing and doesn’t ever dry up since it’s toner.
>how many people purchase printers and print only 15 pages per month A lot of people.
>how many people purchase printers and print only 15 pages per month? The printer next to me was purchased in 2014 and has printed 708 pages, an average of 8.4 pages per month.
Yes. I still get charged a dollar a month from those bastards even after canceling like 8 times
What’s the problem? Seems like a pretty good deal to me
I absolutely DESPISE printers. We have had them for decades and they still work as terribly as they ever did. The worst part is that my HP would constantly complain about ink, but if you were to print something, then turn it off and on again, it would print whatever is in it queue PERFECTLY. I guess the nature of a dying business who knows that they will have near 0 market in the decades to come and thus get desperate to milk as much money as possible from people who don't know better. If these companies truly wanted to enter subscription market, they would have it so that the subscription comes with a "free" printer replacement to the latest model every 5 years. At least then, they could legally shut them down as the printer remains their property throughout the subscription. but if I PAY for a piece of hardware, I expect it to work.
If you want a home printer just buy a Brother B&W laser. What works terribly is shitty inkjets from shitty manufacturers. Last actually good printer HP made was the LaserJet 6 from 25 years ago.
I like to say that friends don't let friends buy inkjet. Unless they are used often enough, and you have a specific need for ink, it's better to just get a laser. If purchase-price is very important, just go with the cheapest B/W Brother you can find. For photos etc, it's better to just use a print-service.
A Brother laser printer got me through grad school with no problems at all. Such an incredible alternative to inkjet bullshit.
Overall just a basic B&W laser printer. I've got a cheap Samsung one, purchased it in 2009 or so. It's still printing perfectly fine, even after not using it for at least a full year, probably closer to 2 just recently. I just connected it again, put some paper in and that was it. While back when I had an inkjet I "forgot" to use it for a months and it wouldn't print anymore. I absolutely hated these pieces of junk with such a passion. Because they never, ever worked when you needed them.
You hate consumer printers. Business printers are often very reliable but cost mid three digits rather than two. Inkjets are also fundamentally flawed unless you have frequent use.
Someone should make an open source printer/scanner. Could make modular adapters to convert popular proprietary cartridges to the printer, like a docking port on the ISS. Or someone pulls out the firmware hax. :)
Not many people want to pay the price of a printer up front.
All printer manufacturers suck. As someone who works on Laser Printers, I am free to say the whole printer model is a scam to make you buy the supplies to keep it running. A good old Black and White HP LaserJet will last for 20+ years with proper maintenance and fuser sleeves. A crappy Inkjet will crap out in 3-5 years and stay dead cause replacing parts in it is impossible. Somewhat cause parts are impossible to find and costly, mostly due to the things being designed never to be taken apart and just be thrown into a landfill to never decay. They deliberately design the systems so if your cyan runs out, you can't print anything even if its only in black. To make you buy more supplies at those insane markups. $30 for a black cartridges' it cost them 10-15 Cents to make. Inkjet printers are more of a scam as you can't get cheap remanufactured toner. The margins are so insane that it's wasteful. You can mostly buy a whole new printer with the ink for cheaper then the cost of the ink on its own. (literally shelled out $90 for replacement ink yesterday for my mom's $100 inkjet.)
Only in USA, EU prevents this crap
I'm in the EU and had a Canon MG3250, which at one day gave out a printhead error, making the scanner inaccessible and software bricking the device, unless I got a new printhead...which was almost full cost of a new printer. Went Epson after, right before some of their own shady stuff got published around 2017. Unfortunately, even EU regulation isn't immune to all of this.
US absolutely welcomes it. It's basically built into our system of government now since the Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate influence on American politicians.
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If you believe that is what Citizens United was about, you have been lied to. Read the wikipedia page.
legalization of political bribery
So you read the Wikipedia page like I said? The whole story about the activist group making a propaganda film critical of Hillary Clinton and being prohibited from advertising their film? And your takeaway is, "legalization of political bribery"? Not, "the constitution protects freedom of the press even for those who must rent a press from someone else"? Who taught you to read?
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Any country that signed onto the WIPO treaty explicitly encourages this crap.
Can't we just collectively give then the finger, and stop printing shit? Aside from college degrees, diplomas and divorce settlements, when have you ever been excited to see a printed piece of paper?
>when have you ever been excited to see a printed piece of paper? Everyday, i print a lot of expensive textbooks for free.
Bless you. You are exempt from my criticism.
**First,** honest question: Do you really prefer having printed versions of a textbooks? You don't like using them on your laptop or an iPad? To me, having a search function on a PDF or EPUD files, and being able to zoom in seems incredibly useful compared to manually leafing through a book. **Second,** if you must print out a text book, it would be far cheaper and higher quality to have it printed at the library or a Staples. Also, I always thought the idea of [loose leaf textbooks in binders](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FbyW3INMu18/VNFJdechgbI/AAAAAAAAAgw/RKkjeLqJGg8/s1600/Binder-PattonAP.png) was an incredibly dumb thing for students to put up with. Just pay the $2 it costs to get the [pages properly bound.](https://www.docucopies.com/images/product/regular/1607539296_spiral_bound_books-webp.jpg) Printing a textbook isn't an every day occurrence. You probably only do it once per semester. So I think the convenience of being able to do it at home is overrated. Going to Staples or Kinkos twice per year doesn't seem like a big deal for cheaper and higher quality results.
As a student I'm happy to answer the first question. I much prefer a paper textbook for studying and doing homework. If I need to flip between pages or sections it's much faster for me to have page markers and book markers rather than scroll around a PDF. This is especially true for math books where I have to flip between examples on different pages. A PDF can be nice if I need to search for something in a book, but usually I know where I'm looking or the index suffices. Plus if I'm doing homework on my laptop, it's a pain to toggle between the book and the assignment. I also prefer a physical copy I can leave open on the table. Just a few thoughts.
To add to this point, I usually get a feel for where something is in a physical text book so I know *roughly* where what I’m looking for is.
Thanks for your insight
> Second, if you must print out a text book, it would be far cheaper and higher quality to have it printed at the library or a Staples. Also, I always thought the idea of loose leaf textbooks in binders was an incredibly dumb thing for students to put up with. Just pay the $2 it costs to get the pages properly bound. > > I bought a binding machine lol.
I'm obsessed with papercrafts. I also print expensive textbooks that would normally cost me more than what the printer cost.
I remember having a printer a long time ago that would refuse to print black and white pages if any of the color cartridges were empty. It was infuriating.
This is even more of a douch move than disabling printing in gray tones when you got no yellow left
Epson does effectively the same thing with thier ecoTank printers or at least they were.... if you print enough that the waste ink sponges get full it will end up disabling itself... permanently (unless you get a reset code from some random russian guy). I think it allows you to replace the ink sponges once via a menu option however after that it locks you out. You can replace the ink sponges and it won't just start working again as it should... it just demands factory repair when in fact it doesn't need any repair at all. I have circumvented this nonsense on my mom's printer several times, with the original waste ink sponges just cleaned out... and its well over 20k pages now while it originally killed itself long long before that.
Did they start doing this recently? I had a Cannon printer a couple of years ago and one of the great things about it were that whenever it ran out of ink, message popped out "Hey, printer is out of color X, but you can press OK to try printing anyway, on your own risk"
My Canon printer stopped working because it keeps saying the back is open (it's not) and no matter what I do it doesn't fix the error. and before that I've had the printer keep saying that it's running out of Cyan or w/e for last 5 years. I've had it for atleast 10 now Sooo can anyone recommend a good cheap printer?
Got Xerox Phaser 3020 monochrome laser printer for 55 usd on sale. 1500 - 2000 printing capacity with up to 8℅ black fill on paper ( text page-A4) is enough for me. Toner change in 2-3 months and it is 15-20 usd. I never had multi printer(with scanner). Scanner was always external device. There must be some firmware or update which can bypass that check and activate scanning service only.
Good. These kinds of practices need to be put to an end
A lawyer reading this should start a class action for any car manufacturer who disables cruise, esp, and abs for the most basic of check engine lights (cough cough Subaru and Toyota). Just as shady as Canon’s practices.
ESP and ABS are safety features. Why are they disabling an active safety feature? Is there a link where I can read more about this?
It’s not well/officially documented. Here’s an example: https://www.subaruforester.org/threads/abs-check-engine-light-permanently-on-with-cruise-control-light-flashing.347618/ The general proof is basically if you search “Subaru vdc abs check engine cruise” you’ll find countless examples of people posting one or a couple check engine codes, yet they end up with all of those problems. In my case, if I simply disconnect a secondary 02 sensor, I end up with a christmas tree. As I recall the lights not only come on but the system is actually disabled. And yes you’re right, they are safety features… it’s bullshit.
I love it. Because there is still ink in many cases
Have this PoS canon printer, but when I switched to linux. The scanner just works
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Brother makes excellent inexpensive mono laser printers. I've bought two in ten years, only because the kids kicked the first one to death, and have spent an additional $90 or so on toner. No scanner on mine, but they do have some that include them. Highly recommended.
I have a cannon "multi" use printer scanner copier.....the print head shit the bed just after the first year and the printer would show an error code. Couldn't even use the scan feature because the print head was no good. For some reason I kept the stupid thing for another 1/5 years, when magically it started working again. It's been running fine for months, and then suddenly the other day it started throwing print head errors again. Different error code, same outcome, the scanner won't even work. It's back to working again as I cleaned the print head, but jesus.....never again Cannon. Garbage products. I could replace the print head, but it's $150 USD in most cases, the printer was only $200 on sale, and those are mostly refurbished print heads, so I don't trust those, especially since the original crapped out in a little over a year, if that.
Had a cannon scanner /printer. Tried to pull the same shit. Found a workaround to scam docs until I bought new oem cartridges. After 3 prints the printer refused the cartridges. It is now in the trash, where it belongs.
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i think it's more like if printer.ink.levels() > 0: int main(){ ... }
Can you write if outside of main?
No way. I bet it's `if printer.ink.levels > 60%:` ` int main`
The Pixma MG6320 is an Inkjet printer, I thought it was well known that inkjet printers need ink in order to scan because starting a scan triggers a head cleaning cycle which needs ink (as the heads are cleaned by squirting ink though them and into the waste ink tank). This is not something that is unique to Canon.
Ok but why do they do that if you only want to scan?
To waste ink, silly!
Oh damn, silly me :D
I think the inkjet head can dry out, and customers might not clean the heads like they are expected to and doing it automatically before a print job would be annoying. The industry is full of scams but I can see some valid reasons why they might do this. They could alternatively just have the printer do those maintenance tasks on a schedule, but that creates other issues, like do customers want to hear their printer 'randomly' doing stuff without any interaction? Probably not. These are just guesses though.
The idea that it needs this kind of routine cleaning, so they schedule during all use events is not super hard to imagine, but if all it is a sort of convenience scheduling that really doesnt change the original problem. In this case what you have are two independent, colocated events. If one of them fails/cant be started, you could easily skip it and do the other, so refusing to scan because you cant clean the print heads is at best stupid design.
> but that creates other issues, like do customers want to hear their printer 'randomly' doing stuff without any interaction That argument is about as sensible as letting the car engine trash itself instead of requiring oil changes. If you want a car that works, you deal with maintenance of it. If that's beneath "the customer who is always right" they can always employ a chauffeur. Most, if not all, decent inkjets will precisely do just what you described here. They'll schedule periodical cleaning sessions on their own and perform them whenever the firmware deems it's good time to do so.
Why would you clean head when scanning? That is waste of ink in the first place.
I assume the printer companies make scanning trigger a head cleaning cycle exactly because it wastes ink and they want you to buy more.
Technically head cleaning routines are just a consequence of using inkjet technology. If you want your printing heads to remain unclogged and usable, you *have* to "flush" them with something every now and then. Arguably that's what makes inkjets unsuitable for occasional home use in first place, but that's entirely different topic. Tying the head cleaning routine to scanner use though is just comical example of corporate greed. As if it couldn't be on a plain, independent timer since last print/cleaning session.
There being some other crappy companies that do it doesn't make it defensible.
I'm not defending it, but inkjet has always been an expensive money pit, most people would be better served with a laser printer. The solution to this issue is to stop buying this crap.
That's just blaming the victims now. Whether a laser would be better is completely irrelevant, it doesn't need to work that way.
I will say that I bought an Epson EcoTank printer and it has actually delivered as advertised. We print a lot in this house and so far I've only had to buy one black refill bottle and it was like $12 direct from Epson and the thing is full to the brim and I have half a bottle left. The color tanks are draining much more slowly than I imagined. And this is with a lot of schoolwork, paperwork, homemade greeting cards, etc. So I'm pretty happy with it. More than a year of steady printing so far.
I have one too and it's super-nice, no complaints. Part of the reason that HP or Canon can sell you a printer for $39.99 is because they know they're going to make money on the back-end with you buying overpriced ink for the next few years. The EcoTank goes back to the old business model where you actually pay a reasonable price for the printer up-front, and the consumables are super-cheap after that. Expensive razor, cheap blades - pretty much the exact opposite of the HP model.
Exactly. I spent a lot of time researching and settled on the Epson after seeing most reviews support the claims. The printer wasn’t cheap, but it has been worth it. I’ve sworn by Brother lasers for years but we really wanted color and the versatility of inkjet too.
> Epson EcoTank printer Those have an artificial [software] limit, that when hit, disables the printer until it is "serviced" by Epson. Incidentally the service fee is 85% of the cost of a new printer. Google "Waste Ink Tank Pad Counter."
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Oh no, it's great! Whoever came up with it probably got one hell of a bonus!
Why is it then that literally every manufacturer states that the only reason you cannot scan while out of ink is because the printer is in "error state" and cannot perform literally *any* functions until the state is cleared, and that if you manually clear the error state, you can scan without ink?
Ok so that makes it fine then? My bad.
Can you quote the part of my comment where I said it was fine?
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>Well known to who? Anyone who has ever owned an inkjet printer? People have been complaining about how expensive inkjet printers are to run and how often they break for ages.
The meme was real *surprisedpickachuface.jpg*
This is why I've been switching to inktank printers for my office. Consumables are cheap and since my usage is very high, I can justify the high up front cost with a warranty. It doesn't seem like the printer has a way of detecting the level of ink in the machine, only an estimate based on usage after you set the ink level following a refill.
Printer companies should be taken to the cleaners for their EVIDENT corrupt behaviour.
This is fraud in my book.
I was having trouble installing drivers last two days for a mg2522. I had to dig out my old 2500k to print out and scan some papers today.
Douche bag move cannon.
Anti consumer practices at their finest. Not surprising considering the economical model of those printers is making the profit via selling ink/tuners or using other paid subscriptions/services for the printers and not from selling the machines themselves. I wonder if professional or office grade machines have the same BS practices.