I buy new Brothers for clients every month or so and have yet to see this. Nor have I seen any Brother DRM anything at any of my service sites, ever. If it's out there, it's hidden well.
That said, I have a Brother laser printer + fancy scanner that can upload direct to Google Drive and I’m very happy with it. And from my research other brand toner seems to be allowed on mine (L8895CDW).
... and then people wonder about competition from China.
Who wouldn't want to buy a cheap printer that can use HP's industrial print heads but the firmware just asks you - the owner - how much ink you put in and it doesn't bother with any kind of DRM? By now, some of these Chinese knock-off products are truly superior to the original design they were once trying to imitate. And mostly that's just because the "original" keeps getting worse.
They go for about $30 in authentic but used or $20 for a good factory-new counterfeit. And that printhead can also dispense UV ink like what you use for printing on plastic packaging and cans.
It's brilliant technology, made/designed in the US, and highly valued all around the world. But the HP printer that you usually buy together with this HP printhead, that's been fully enshittified.
EDIT2: this being hacker news, you might also be interested about this talk where someone builds a tiny esp32-based printer using HP print heads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717022
Jesus Christ that was obnoxious. I recall back then buying some DVD's and then pirating the movie so I didn't have to sit through that nonsense. There's no hard and fast rules about it, but today it's even more relevant - if you pay good money for a product, you shouldn't have to sit through the ads.
Some of the printers are very basic, more like a reprap 3d printer. Also they will be designed to work in factories, too. So I'd be pretty optimistic that you can buy models with SD card slot.
That said, I wonder if US-made printers phoning home is truly that much better than Chinese-made printers phoning home ...
The last time I looked around I didn't see much in that area except what appeared to be huge industrial-scale printers, but I agree that it's a market they could definitely disrupt, like they've already done for 3D printers. There's certainly a lot of demand for a simple printer with open-source drivers + firmware, no user-hostile features, and using widely-available standard parts (and bulk ink.)
I’ve been pretty happy with Xerox laser printers. If I was going inkjet I would probably look into those Epson Ecotank ones, but knowing how infrequently I use my inkjet today the nozzles would probably dry out in-between prints!
Oh man. I haven't seen LED in years. In 90s-00s, I set up every client I had with Okidata LED printers. Small footprint, quiet, light to med duty, inexpensive to buy and run. They lasted forever. I don't think I ever had one break.
Less moving parts/simpler transport path, LEDs are inexpensive to produce, every toner cartridge comes with the imaging unit integrated.
The 4096 resolution of the microled imaging can be a bit blocky on smaller details compared to laser, but for 10-12pt spaced documents it works quite well.
HP died after Carly Fiorina’s stint as CEO. All of the good will that HP had before was excised and basically anything was okay as long as it made money. HP went from one of the founders of Silicon Valley to one of the worst companies in the world. I never touched or trusted an HP product since Fiorina and every few months I keep getting reminded why this was a great idea.
I think you're giving too much credit to the people and their decisions and not the circumstances of the business that HP is in. The fact is that the printing business was completely reshaped by re-manufactured ink/toner.
The business is razors and blades, build the printer, take a loss on it and make it up on the back end with toner/ink sales. As soon as cheap 3rd party ink/toner became ubiquitous all of the printer manufacturers were put into an existential crisis. The most popular solution, DRM. The big boys got to it quicker than the little guys, but every one of them knew this was 100% necessary or they'd get their lunch eaten at either end (upfront sales from DRM'd devices because they are cheap and backend toner sales from remans). Ever since its been a cat/mouse game of breaking DRM for 3rd party toner suppliers and print manufacturers trying to stay ahead. Instant Ink is a play by HP to get out of this game.
Also, I feel like lot's of other product categories are doing the same thing, but get far less hate (e.g. Keurig, video game consoles). Not sure if printers are just easy targets or what.
They chose to embrace a razor-blades model-- they sold their soul chasing the consumer market.
People trusted HP printers at the high-end of the market, where words like "TCO" and "duty cycle" matter. That could scale that down to the "prosumer" end of the market very easily. They were pretty close to that already, with the LaserJet 6P and similar. I can recall my first job used two big networked HPs for the bulk printing, and a 6P for a special case (a few dozen sheets per day printing cheques with MICR toner). Despite the hundreds of pages per day volume we ran, the printers were pretty bulletproof.
They also missed the opportunity to take control of a new market: the "second printer" buyer. Target the people who took the "free" or dirt-cheap inkjet printer that came with a PC bundle. When they're fed up with 25 pages per cartridge, using three colours to print black, and drivers that are clearly a less whimsical GlaDOS, you can be there to say "now that you've learned why a $300 printer is worth it, here's one explicitly engineered to solve your pain points." Brother has now successfully captured this market entirely through word of mouth.
One would expect that's the long-term play: selling $49 inkjets was like deciding to double-down on manufacturing 56k winmodems: it might do well in 1998, when the market is flooded with first-time customers taking the cheapest thing they can get, but it doesn't provide you a place to take your brand as customer expectations march upwards.
> They chose to embrace a razor-blades model-- they sold their soul chasing the consumer market.
I really don't know what you'd expect from a publicly traded company other than to go after where the profit is at. At least in the 2000's through 2010's HP consumer products made the most money off of low end devices via toner sales. I'd argue that they were following the market and the tech savvy consumer is not their target audience anymore.
By that logic, Rolex is leaving money on the table by not selling a rebadged Chinese quartz watch for $129 in Walmart.
An established brand like HP had options. They had profitable product lines in the business and high-end consumer market segments, so it was a specific effort to start aiming for the low-end. It's not like they were a new kid in town, who couldn't sell to businesses without a proven track record, so they HAD to sell $50 inkjet printers to consumers who didn't worry about the brand.
HP as I assume you know is a lot more than just printers. HP has betrayed their customers across the board since Fiorina. This particular offense is just one in dozens committed against customers in the last 2 decades.
HP used to be one of the great companies of the world, with great guiding principles. I learned how to use a calculator with my dad’s HP Reverse Polish Notation calculator. Now it’s a nothing company that somehow stays alive tricking their customers and treating them like idiots. It’s truly sad.
>The business is razors and blades, build the printer, take a loss on it and make it up on the back end with toner/ink sales.
No, that's the business now. It wasn't like that back in the 80s. The printer companies chose to adopt that shitty business model.
>The most popular solution, DRM. The big boys got to it quicker than the little guys, but every one of them knew this was 100% necessary or they'd get their lunch eaten at either end
Yet some printer makers don't bother with this and are still in business, like Brother.
We owe it to the greed and incompetency of printer companies for speeding up the transition to a paperless world. I haven't printed anything in years now, and life is so much better because of it.
I remain infuriated that I cannot purchase a roll of ascorbic-acid based thermal paper that is the width of either US letter or A4, and perforated at the respective appropriate height.
Thermal printers have far fewer moving parts, no non-paper consumable, barely any maintenance duty, and much simpler construction. By extension, they are much more compact, capable of going long periods of not operating without issue, and are just obviously easier to manage. For most of my purposes in-printing, the negatives of thermal paper (namely, that it will warp with significant temperature fluctuation) are irrelevant; and the negative of ascorbic acid thermal paper specifically (that it's a bit yellow) is wildly outweighed by the benefit that it's dramatically less environmentally worrisome than the phenol-based options which are more common (both to the people handling it and everything else that exists).
I looked into this a while ago, and I'm pretty sure I could buy one thermal printer, with maybe 10 rolls of letter and 10 rolls of A4, and probably be set for my printing needs for the rest of my life (with occasional use of a print shop or library for in-color things or larger prints, etc.). And yet, no one makes ascorbic acid thermal paper in this form factor. It makes perfect sense that they would aim for receipt rolls first (because that's where it'll have the greatest societal impact and safety benefit, and unsurprisingly market), but please! This seems like such a no-brainer to me…
Even the cheap ones are good? I'll keep that in mind. I bought the cheapest instant ink HP printer for about 100 CAD years ago. It's still happily churning out a dozen pages a month or so.
> Instant ink is still well worth it for people like me who print < 1000 pages per year, sometimes from my phone.
I fall into this bucket, but it would never occur to me that I should want to sign up for a service that charges me per page printed. I feel like it would have negligible benefits over paying for ink as I use it, and it would make me think about whether/how much I need to print something every time I go to print. Most importantly, it would make me uncomfortable because I'd be at the mercy of unilateral price increases, like this one.
What sold you on the service? Was it when you bought a new printer that you signed up, or when you went to buy more ink/toner?
One of my printers is an inkjet. I used it so infrequently that the ink dried up in between uses and I’d end up wasting it all doing print head cleaning. A subscription service seems like it would have been beneficial for me, but I inserted switched to a laser printer. I do not regret that decision, yet.
> I fall into this bucket, but it would never occur to me that I should want to sign up for a service that charges me per page printed.
Instead of instant ink, I opted for getting a bazillion pages out of a toner cartridge. This Brother is the first printer I owned I didn't need to setup on anything. The first time I went to print from my phone it was there. Which was kind of weird but certainly welcome.
Anybody using the Epson Ecotank printers? Printing from linux? I've been thinking about switching. I print so infrequently I've been stuck with my HP for like a decade, but it's really struggling in it's old age (slow, doesn't want to print from devices randomly).
According to the article, instant ink isn't just you paying for ink but also per page. The lowest price has a max of 10 pages a month, then you pay extra.
My dad purchased a HP LaserJet 4 in 1986 - the year I came into this world. It was still working well into 2018 when I decided it wasn't worth moving with me as it made the lights in the house dim when it powered on, but it still printed just fine. Thing weighed a zillion pounds, and toner was like $15 - part of me still feels awful for disposing of it. Thing printed reams of paper off for documentation and software development stuff.
My LaserJet 5 (which I found on the curb when it was already old, and used for around a decade longer) also did the light-dimming pulse on each power-up.
Other than that, the only things I didn't like about it were: (1) didn't seem to have an idle mode, so I had to turn on the power switch every time I wanted to use it, and manually turn it off after; (2) I like my electronics black.
When a fan (which seemed hard to replace) failed completely, I decided to part out the LJ 5. I netted money on eBay for some of the easy-to-ship parts, so at least it lived on.
I wonder whether the lights-dimming was original behavior. I don't know power circuits, but naively wondering whether some component had gone out of spec (resulting in, say, it charging a capacitor more quickly than it was supposed to), and so the unit was drawing more than it should've from the wall for an instant.
I have an old B&W MFC that I was thinking of maybe upgrading but to be honest I have to real reason to other than to get colour and maybe document feeding for scanning but I print so rarely that I probably won't now as Brother was going to be my one and only port of call for this.
When did this happen?! Can we get older versions still maybe?
No, new Brothers are fine. A while back where were a very few models that got a questionable firmware release. As I recall, they weren't common retail models. The firmware might have been a beta.
Brother got some crap for it, people circulated the IPs of their update servers (for blocking) and that was the end of it.
I regularly buy new Brothers for customers. They're fully fine.
I was researching a brother laser recently and there were a shitload reports of the printer crapping out with non original toner after a power outtage. Also if you were buying non original toner you had to transfer your drm chip to the new toner.
Word for word, this reads like HP. It perfectly describes the Laserjet M402, for example. This stuff is my day job and what you describe isn't Brother-like in the least.
HP gear used to wear like iron because back when HP was Hewlett-Packard, they were primarily a scientific instrument company, and they built their computer peripherals like they built their instruments.
During and after Carly's tenure, they made some dumb M&A moves, like spinning off their scientific instruments division, acquiring Compaq, and going all in on consumer electronics. Thus began their slow, but steady, enshittification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38429291