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.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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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.
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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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I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I'm riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.
Exactly. I wish the Soviets made laser printers because then I'd get one from a car boot sale and it would probably outlive my grandchildren
Can't believe this is legal.. is there seriously a subscription model even if you've bought a printer? Does this happen with all hp printers?
It's worse than it sounds... You're not actually paying for ink, you're paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped "free" when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you're ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it'll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you're a member of the residual income brigade...
I'm wondering if there's a open source firmware for printers like openwrt for routers
Edit: typo
Who would spend their free time writing printer drivers/software?
It'd make more sense to work on software for a paperless world
Who would spend their free time writing printer drivers/software?
eh, judging by the size of this list you couldn't be more wrong
also, I'd argue most free software today isn't written by hobbyists on their free time, but by corporations instead
This shouldn't be allowed. I hate products in 2023.
Why is this video on a porn site?
aint you never watched halo noscopevids on porn hub? reliable, robust, usually pretty anonymous video hosting breh.
first i got an generic ssl error, and then i got a domain parking site
crypt keeper sounds huh?
Cause he's getting fucked by a massive corporation
is there a printer that ISN'T a scam???
Just buy from Brother. They're not over priced, reliable, and don't pull with nickel and dime shit.
I've had my laser printer for 16+ years without issue. And everyone I suggested get a Brother as well have all been happy.
I updated my Brother printer just for it to decide to stop detecting my off-brand ink. They're not free from bs.