Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

Years ago, I ran out of ink in a HP All-in-One printer at my business at an inopportune time. To make sure it didn’t happen again, I bought a bunch of extras on Amazon. The extras arrived, everything looked normal, and I set them aside for a rainy day.

Some time later when I finally used the ink I bought, imagine my surprise when the printer wouldn’t accept the ink because it was from the “wrong region”. HP printer ink is region locked!

I called HP support and they fed me an unbelievable story that this was for my own good. You see, ink in different regions is turned for the climate in that region, the support rep explained! I was dumbfounded at such a stupid explanation.

With no other option and wanting to prevent others from making a similar mistake, I tweeted about my experience. Magically, HP support promptly contacted me and sent me replacements. So now I’ve learned that not only is HP unscrupulous and manipulative, you are wasting your time bothering with normal support channels. You’ll only get results if you embarrass them publicly.

I’ve purchased my last HP printer, but I fear each of their competitors is just as bad.

> I fear each of their competitors is just as bad.

I can't speak to current practices, as my current Brother printer is now 7 years old and is still on its second toner cartridge. It's a B&W laser with wifi, a duplexer, and whatever discovery stuff that iDevices need to find and print to it driverless.

It replaced a very similar Brother printer that had gotten a solid 10 years of service, and which I chose to replace rather than repair when the fuser died mostly because I wanted the iDevice affordances.

Both of those printers also worked smoothly from Linux desktops, too, thanks to pretty good PostScript emulation.

Maybe they've gone to crap now, but I'm optimistic that if I needed another B&W laser, something like their current HL-2350DW or HL-2370DW would provide a similarly inexpensive, no-bullshit experience now.

The thing that worked for me was giving up on color printing. The supplies for that are eye-wateringly expensive IMO, and I seldom really need it. Last time I had a color printer at home, it was an Epson ink jet of some description, and my color prints were so infrequent that sometimes the cartridge would dry out after a few dozen pages. And worst of all, it'd refuse to do B&W prints if one of the colors was dry. I decided I'd just go to Kinko's if I needed a color document, or to one of several drug stores that lets you print photos if I needed photos. Black and White lasers are stable. Taking apart my Brother, it is extremely similar to the Canon engines from the 1980s. Which were themselves extremely similar to photocopiers that have been in production since quite a bit earlier than that.

B&W laser printing is such a well-solved problem, if you can stand to go with that you can save yourself a ton of aggravation and quite a bit of money.

Brother is one of the VERY few companies I'd choose without thinking twice. At least in terms of printers. So far, only had good experiences.

And now I realize that sounds like astroturfing.

Agreed. Brother (laser) printers are extremely reliable in my experience too. I’ve been using them for close to 20 years now.

HP probably would have been my only other choice if/when I have to replace my superb (and crazy cheap) Brother B&W laser but after reading this post I will never go near HP printers again.

Edit: just read about Brother’s nasty firmware update elsewhere in the comments here. Sigh. I guess I’ll just have to stop buying printers altogether.

Unfortunately, Brother also seems to have switched to pulling this kind of crap recently too. :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Well... time to flip some tables.

There's still Ricoh. I literally found a big one in the streets that worked perfectly (I suppose the small company that was at this address needed something bigger).

Generic cartridges are just find and you refill them easily.

I have a Kyocera color laser, no nonsense, it’s a great printer and works fine out of the box with both Linux and iDevices.

Is the color toner super-expensive?

I used 3rd party toner and it's cheap / fine.

I’ve had good luck with the Epson LABELWORKS LW-PX400 label printer and they’re projectors, but yeah for printing now we just pay the $0.05c/page at ups or FedEx or wherever.

Fascinating. I wouldn't at any time choose Brother. A friend of mine got a new Mac with a new OS. Printer was around 4-5 years old.

There was no support on the new OS at all. With a lot of luck one could print b&w, but color never worked again.

I never experienced that using HP or Xerox.

Was your friend using os9 or something? Until it finally bit the dust last week I had a 10 year old Brother printer (MFC 7440 or something like that) that worked fine on both Windows and Mac versions up through High Sierra

Can't remember it exactly. Is already a year ago. It was some kind of color laser and the latest OS X at that time. The support forums were full of posts describing the same issue and the (only) unofficial solution was to fiddle with ither drivers or a generic PS and sonehow be lucky to make color printing work again. I gave up after an hour or two.

IMHO, those are mostly personal experiences that lead to preferred manufacturers. For each story where one tells you he never had any issue you'll find one that for sure had issues.

> There was no support on the new OS at all. With a lot of luck one could print b&w, but color never worked again. I never experienced that using HP or Xerox.

the cost of the old Brother and then a new Brother at that point would have been cheaper than the cost of either the HP or the Xerox

and if you were using linux (and almost as often Windows too), the old drivers would have still worked.

I own a secondhand Brother inkjet printer. I bought it on eBay under the influence of posts like these. TLDR, they now DRM their cartridges. Each ink cartridge has a chip in it. One of the first experiences I had was my printer refusing a back ink cartridge. I had to throw away a full cartridge.

We recently bought a brother aio to replace my mom's previous HP Deskjet aio, zero issues with it from phones, laptops, desktops, etc. I'd still recommend them in a heartbeat.

Are you me?

Brother is still good. The main issue is the usual one: It stops printing when toner is a bit low even though you could probably still print another 50-100 pages. But you'll find workarounds on the Internet.

I've owned two Brother laser printers in the past 15 years. I've run into this issue with the newer one: it will just refuse to print at a certain point. However, I was able to find a work-around (probably the same one you found) by typing some magic code I got from a YouTube video into the front panel and then it worked for awhile until I did replace the toner cartridge.

Was quite frustrating but nowhere near as bad of some of the HP stories like this that I read on HN.

Magic code? This is from the Brother support site:

To enable Continue Mode, perform the following steps:

1. Press Menu.

2. Press ▲ or ▼ to select General Setup. Press OK.

3. Press ▲ or ▼ to select Replace Toner. Press OK.

4. Press ▲ or ▼ to select Continue. Press OK.

5. Press Stop/Exit.

It probably varies from printer to printer. I definitely needed to enter a magic code.

That's pretty much what I did, save that I never had to replace my printer and I'm on the 2nd thing of toner since many, many years ago. For someone who doesn't print a whole lot, but occasionally needs to print a bit, it has been awesome.

I got burnt out after dealing with an old Epson inkjet back in the day. Never want to go back to that.

My laser printer is a OKI I think. It's similar. One toner cartridge, can't remember what year I bought it.

I have an older Brother HL-3070. Main issue is that when printing files of certain complexity, they print fine if I do it under Windows but it takes sometimes 5 minutes to render each sheet if doing it under Linux. Not sure if it is due to the printer's age, or what. The replacement printer is a new er HP M283 which hasn't had this issue. (I finally had to replace the Brother due to color streaking, even with replacing the drums and new toner cartridges, plus the toner was getting hard to find).

I have a Brother HL3075CW color laser and scanner combo that's just under 10 years old. I've replaced the toner only once. I may not print much, but color is nice to have and not that expensive unless you print a lot.

Tangentially, can we talk about old printers being too scary to connect to the network? No firmware upgrades ever. I've been thinking of setting up a RPi or something as a bastion host and print&scan server, preventing direct traffic.

I do this to give a HL-2270DW air print capabilities. Tiny VM on my home server, works great.

I used two Brother laser printers heavily, a color one and a monochrome one. I went through multiple cartridges over several years, Brother's and third-party. Zero issues. Windows, Mac, and Linux drivers available.

When a printer signaled that the toner should have run out, I checked the cartridge. It apparently had enough toner left, so I entered a special code and reset the counter for the cartridge.

I can only recommend their laser lineup.

I used a piece of tape to achieve the same thing. Printed for a few years (yes, a rare need) after that small operation.

It's sad that manufacturers resort to these schenaningans at all.

Well, that's a laser printer, which is very different from an inkjet. I haven't owned a printer in a long time, because I don't need to print often enough for it to be worth the hassle and cost, but the last time I looked into it (which was also years ago), brother inkjets were maybe a little better than other brands, but not by a lot, and that is a low bar.

The problem with laser printers is that they have a much higher upfront cost, especially if you actually need color. Sure, they are probably worth it in the long run, but that bigger price tag stops a lot of people from getting one.

Can confirm, I have an HL-2390DW using CUPS shared to a numerous Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android devices with absolutely no issues, it takes 3rd party toner cartridges and works without issue.

I have a generation older Brother HL-2270DW and it also has never given me issues. The only thing missing is proper support for iOS cloud printing but that has been an issue in my household zero times. The included toner cartridge is smaller than even the standard side replacements Brother sells, I am not really sure of the reason.

There might have been an update to add iOS printing to it via some software bridge, but I never checked. There are multiple tutorials online about setting up a Raspberry Pi (even a zero w) as an AirPrint server and interfacing with the printer via CUPS. This allows using a lot older printer models as well that don't have built-in wifi.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-print-serve...

This is the way. However, it’s a bit sad that all these decades later, quality color printing at home is still such a mess because of a few profiteering companies.

They haven't gone to crap. I bought their basic laser b&w printer and it works without any of this nonsense.

Whilst I also recommend Brother if people ask, and also go to a local bureau for colo(u)r, the mono laser printers I've had at home for the last 20 years have been HP, simply because those are the ones needing very minor repair that I've picked up for free!

I have 10-year-old Brother MFC-9970CDW, purchased June 12, 2012. Replaced a couple of toner cartridges over the years, and that's it. Still going strong.

Can also vouch for Brother. I have their J5330DW color inkjet. Everything works very solidly and I can replace all 4 cartridges (CMYK) separately. Depending on how much I print, that’s about €90 in ink per year.

Same here. I went through two Brother laser printers (wireless, scanner), the previous one having had an unfortunate mechanical accident (ach, children...).

It works great. The only negative comment is that it starts to cry for a new cartridge some 6 months early, but I just go on printing and there are no problems (they even have a setting with what to do when "ink is low": stop and cry or go on)

I have a Brother color inkjet, since 2015. The first few years were great but now its been a royal hastle to get it to print more than a page or two at a time. I've been considering switching to B&W laser. Thanks for the model recommendations.

The problem I have with laser printers is they draw a lot more power than an inkjet. I can run an inkjet printer off my pedal-powered generator. I can't do that with a laser printer.

> HL-2350DW

They do. I have this model and aftermarket toners work effortlessly. I'll never buy HP or Lexmark. They're the worst.

I bought a Brother printer about a year back and the toner stopped working because Brother decided it was "empty" instead of allowing me to continue until it fades and I decide it's "empty". (In this case, the print quality was perfect until it was declared empty.)

So it seems Brother is not immune from giving into the temptation of turning into a terrible printer company. Hopefully they don't continue down that path.

(I can't remember which model I have and am away on travel, but I can update assuming anyone cares...)

>I’ve purchased my last HP printer, but I fear each of their competitors is just as bad.

you're probably right, but I purchased an Epson 'EcoTank' printer, black-and-white printing only & with a refillable ink hopper and couldn't be happier for simple document printing.

The only gotcha i'm aware of is that they use this 'primer box' thing to squirt excess ink into during nozzle procedures that apparently will eventually fill up and require replacement, but I haven't heard of any need to do so after 3+ years of printing, so i'll count that as a win as compared to cartridge replacement which seemed to be a constant burden with our previous HP units.

I went with Epson as well after having a xerox laser printer for about a decade. The xerox allowed me to do aftermarket toner and it work decently well, but it's still had issues. Sadly a good laser printer, the toner is just far too expensive.

When I was researching the Epson printers, I learned about pigment ink and how it doesn't smear with water like traditional inkjet printers did. It's worked really well for the last few years I've had it.

Sadly Epson is getting out of laser printer business [0], which to me signals they’ll be fully focusing on screwing users going forward.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/epson-completes-business-mfp-...

>You see, ink in different regions is turned for the climate in that region, the support rep explained! I was dumbfounded at such a stupid explanation.

If I had my fuck you money I'd get a lab to put that to the test and then instruct my high priced lawyer to serve papers. There must be consequences for telling blatant fibs like that.

I don't think you need a lab. I'm pretty doubtful the region it is locked to would be smaller than the united states. And the US has several very different clomates. Just order ink from a few states with different climates, say florida, maine, arizona, etc. If they all work on a printer bought in the US, clearly climate isn't the reason. Or even just point out that by that logic, in many areas you should then need to use different ink in different seasons.

I wonder if they also have special cartridges for the southern hemisphere where documents print bottom to top.

Exactly maybe is not climate, but Coriolis effect on the toner.

Don't be silly - the coriolis effect is way to small. It has been proven with the sink water turning clockwise experiments.

This is clearly a quantum mechanics effect, of the less known ones. The same one that makes all alien land in the US (or at least this is what I saw in various documentaries)

If so then every call center in America is ripe for lawsuit because they're just making shit up to placate you half the time.

> I called HP support and they fed me an unbelievable story that this was for my own good. You see, ink in different regions is turned for the climate in that region, the support rep explained! I was dumbfounded at such a stupid explanation.

I don't doubt their explanation for a moment.

We all know the weather in Alaska and Florida is very similar, while the weather in London is completely different.

Well, they're not going to tell you there's something in the US ink that's banned in the EU, or vice versa — this is purely an example of another type of explanation, of course.

> You’ll only get results if you embarrass them publicly.

This is sadly official common practice. I’ve had experience with a major cloud provider, who wouldn’t budge until you mentioned “social media”.

Which sucks on many levels - the more polite customer gets screwed over, and the impolite (and perhaps outright rude) gets reinforced to be more impolite sooner next time.

Hobbes said that “man is a wolf to man”, and modern economy does its best to prove him right.

I bought a Canon Maxify GX7020 a year ago and I've been quite happy with it. Ticks all the boxes of having printer, scanner, fax, and full duplex on both scanning and printing.

Most importantly it uses ink tanks. They don't last as long as laser toner, but if you want an ink jet, it's great because there is no cartridge. You just fill it up with ink. I also stopped buying HP after I noticed all the scams they pull with their ink cartridges.

As others have mentioned, a simple Brother printer is also a great option.

> I called HP support and they fed me an unbelievable story that this was for my own good. You see, ink in different regions is turned for the climate in that region, the support rep explained! I was dumbfounded at such a stupid explanation. [...] you are wasting your time bothering with normal support channels.

I worked in a call center for 8 months and I'll tell you this is pretty much all of them. You call up and talk to a front-line agent who wasn't really clued in on the reasoning for anything and isn't empowered to do much that falls outside standard workflows. You might as well ask your friends why HP does something because he'll come up with an answer from as much information as the agent has. You might be able to escalate to somebody who actually has the power to make any kind of exception if you insist on it but that's definitely not the first layer.

The climate explanation is not entirely without basis, judging by the relative popularity of inkjets compared to lasers in (moist) Southeast Asia; but if that was the real reason rather than price differentiation, they should've been far more transparent with it.

I know some cartridges also have expiry dates, which is at least somewhat more reasonable as ink does dry, but instead of being simply a label you read, they're encoded on the cartridge chip and the printer refuses to use them if they've expired.

> You’ll only get results if you embarrass them publicly.

Tips on how to do this most effectively?

Post on Usenet.

I stand by what I wrote 9 months ago. [1] And it was probably the same 9 years before when I last had to deal with it.

>I had to install a new inkjet printer because kids now need to print out their homework during COVID.

>I swear to god if I ever become wealthy the printer industry is what I intended to completely destroy. Not in it for profit. Not positive sum whatever startup thinking. It will be Zero Sum.

>Edit: Lasers are fine. That will be left alone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553662

    I tweeted about my experience.
    Magically, HP support promptly contacted me and sent me replacements.
    You’ll only get results if you embarrass them publicly.

This is the only actually useful reason why I keep a twitter account.

Literally, the only actual value in twitter, as an user, is that if you embarrass a company publicly you'll get actual support.

For everything twitter is pretty much worthless.

I had a similar experience where I discovered that the HP printer I’d bought from a major UK retailer had come with the wrong region ink and was now permanently locked to US cartridges.

I’ll never give HP money for anything ever again.

Another surprise is that if you want to use the printer over USB you have to purchase that cable *separately*. If you purchase online is very easy to fall for this one as people won't check for this, this happened to me around ~2 years ago with one of these low end pieces of crap.

Honestly, I prefer this, it seems to save millions of excess cables being sent to landfill ... a good company would allow you to order one free with the printer, or have a coupon in the box to get one for postage.

It's done to offer the office supply shops a bonus by giving them the extra sale of their ridiculously overpriced USB cables.

They make more profit on those than on the printer itself as they're just cheap Chinese $1 cables.

Another scam in this totally broken market.

Is it a custom cable? Every one I've ever seen (in the USB era) is a standard Type B cable. https://www.newnex.com/usb-connector-type-guide.php

I never understood the reason for separate Type B connectors when the standard A, micro or now C-type connectors would work just as well and allow people to use the millions of cables of those they already have.

Pre-USB-C: USB A is host, USB B is device - be it normal-size-B or micro-size-B. Those should be the most common cables. (I'm not sure I'd have any standard-A-to-A?)

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