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Comment by jmisavage | Hacker News Reader

Newer Brothers printers are starting to do the same tricks.

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

Is there any evidence for this? The HN post that you linked is sourcing a Reddit thread where the person is making that assumption based on a response from a support person from Brother and the fact that they're unable to manually calibrate the printer (which they're admitting is simply something they don't know how to do).

This would be extremely disappointing to me if Brother has gone the way of the dodo because I specifically bought a Brother printer for this reason and continued to buy their OEM cartridges and toners as a means of support. I've been voting with my dollars and would like some evidence that this is the case and possibly that this is intentional before I bring out the pitchfork on this one.

Here's someone else who just yesterday mentioned it happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39045792

Oh thanks for that. Looks like I should keep all revisions of firmware on oldest possible. I print through CUPS, so it should be quite safe to do since printer cannot require upgrade unless it's time-limited already.

So if Brother is out, which printer is still reasonable to buy? Are there any?

I've got a lot of respect for Oki. Granted they've left the US market but still in the EU and Asia. Heck, we were getting security firmware updates 7 years after initial purchase. Of the 10 we had at work, still rocking 9 of them 9 years after purchase. The only loss was due to a power spike after a power loss restoral.

I'd throw all our worthless Xerox in the trash if I could still get Oki.

Anyone have thoughts on Canon laser printer? My Brother laser printer keeps on having lines and dots despite changing the toner and fuser. I've kind of given up on them. Canon seems much lower price for a similar feature set so I'm wondering what is the catch.

I got a Canon LBP233dw, it's a bit wonky in terms of build quality (my old HP1010 is just such a tank), but it does work with 3rd party cartridges, one of which (10000 pages) I bought right away (it said "works without chip check removal"). The printer seems fine after almost 15000 pages, the only issue is that it complains about this 3rd party stuff, so you have to press "OK", when it starts up.

PS oh, and if you want super high print quality, probably you should get an LBP236dw, which adds PostScript support.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll seriously consider the Canon because the my Brother 5900DW is causing me so much problems. I don't print a lot so not too concerned about 3rd party cartridges.

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