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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Stop buying dirt-cheap printers that are sold at a loss. These are designed to be paid off by expensive toner / ink. These are designed to make you waste the supplies if you don't use them up fast enough. They are designed to reject third-party cheaper supplies.

Pay a couple hundred more upfront for a no-bullshit device. I hope those still exist.

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Ya, it's our fault for looking for a deal?

How can you guarantee that paying a couple hundred more upfront would save us all from this pre meditated corporate gluttony?

Stop buying printers from companies that build in mechanisms to purposely brick them. Buying a high-end HP is just as risky in my opinion, based on this story.

Cannon is another company to avoid. They just settled a similar potential class action: http://www.therecycler.com/posts/canon-faces-class-actions-o...

The problem with avoiding Canon is that essentially any desktop laser printer on the market is in fact largely Canon's product (and the best of them in terms of reliability and TCO are little more than Canon made print engine in a plastic box).

On the other hand I have reasonably good experiences with OKI and Brother LED printers. These printers tend to be reasonably cheap (I've got OKI multifunction on sale for ~150 EUR), are full Postcript/PCL printers and supplies are reasonably cheap too, both original and third-party.

I bought a cheap no branded Chinese black and white only laser printer for $15. Best printer I've ever owned. It just... Prints! The firmware is totally unobtrusive and no problems with non branded toner. It prints whatever I ask it to print and that's it!

Unless you are running a business a couple hundred dollars is way too much to pay for printing once in a while. A consumer printer should not cost hundreds of dollars.

How do you know the more expensive printer is a no bullshit device?

This is always the problem with using price to filter out bad behavior. Scumbags can demand a higher price with another SKU for the same crap.

I agree. Another option is to research which printers can trivially have their bullshit disabled. I bought a $30 printer about 5 years ago that I refill with bottles of toner for $2. The 'modding' involved a piece of tape over sensor.

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