Hacker News Reader

Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

I have a brother printer. I swapped out OEM toner for 3rd party. The printer stopped working with a mysterious error message. Support told me to replace with geniune toner. Taking the DRM chip off my empty (OEM) cartridge and installing into the 3rd part cartridge fixed the issue (and it has remained fixed for many months at this point).

Brother is lying. It might be that not all of their printers have this restriction. But I do not see another explanation for my experience other than DRM locking of the printer.

-edit- I experienced this with both a HL-L2350DW and an MFC-L2690DW

View on HN

Pulling from a few Reddit threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_afte...

> No firmware blocks them out. Major issues have to do with the chip holder and brothers intellectual property on their floating chip technology. Additionally, when power cycling the chips on aftermarket tend to blow the little battery capacitor in them. 2 main aftermarket chip suppliers and awhile back they made some progress in the chip design. I sell ink and toner for a living and for the past year, have had 1 defective only pertaining to the chips...and considering how often they had trouble before..a solid result. Trouble is most consumers have no idea of the technicals, and just order whatever. Not great for this model.

https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarke...

> Tbh, if u want an actual fix, it's to get some better toners...for a few years now we have no longer had this issue. It goes back to the chip assembly, and quality of the chip. There is so much variation on these depending on what factory in China they are pumped out of.

> If you utilize a remanufactured tn227 with oem floating chip technology, with the current chips that don't seem to short, you'll have no issues.

>There really is no suggestion or work around in my book besides better supplies. I am glad this issue is behind us based on the workmanship of the supplies.

The issue seems to be that aftermarket manufacturers had problems manufacturing the chips, not that Brother was enforcing DRM on them.

That is somewhat confusing. If the problem is that 3rd party toners can't get the "chip holder design" right, then why would putting in a new chip fix it? Either that is a confusing name for something about the chip itself, rather than the mechanism on the cartridge for holding it in place, or else swapping the chip won't work because the "chip holder" is on the cartridge.

The capacitor is, I suppose, a more credible explanation and would explain my observations, but tbh, Both options sort of just seems like DRM by a different name. I can't think of a legitimate reason for requiring such a feature, other than making it more difficult to use 3rd party cartridges.

That would mean that it isn't a firmware issue, which is good to know, but it also means that Brother is engaging in the same category of practice: making it unecessarily more difficult to use 3rd part toner.

“If they can’t get lightbulb design right, why did replacing the lightbulb fix it?”

Because the replaced chip worked, not in the sense that it passed a drm check, but in the sense that it functioned and wasn’t a broken counterfeit.

The fact that Brother cartridges even contain a DRM chip at all proves that the company is lost to the dark side.

Is it a DRM chip? Or is it just a basic flash chip that tells the printer roughly how much toner is left and to alert the user that they put the toner in the wrong color slot.

It's a DRM chip if your working printer stops working after a firmware update because your third party toner cartridge doesn't have the chip, but the printer works again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to stick the chip onto the third party toner cartridge. That's what's been reported.

It's no different than the lids you could stick on third party K-cups to magically get the DRM infested Keurig machines to work.

> It's a DRM chip if your working printer stops working after a firmware update because your third party toner cartridge doesn't have the chip, but the printer works again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to stick the chip onto the third party toner cartridge.

Well consider if you had a USB charging cable with a junk-tier emarker chip that stops working when your phone updates its firmware because it adds some additional checks to prevent charging problems. (But the phone starts charging again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to replace your cheap cable's emarker chip with a properly engineered one.)

I don't think anyone would reasonably consider the emarker chip in a USB cable to be a DRM chip.

A real world scenario of this happened. 3rd party iPhone screens were using the controller chip from the previous iPhone, but it still worked fine. Until a new iOS update released, since that iOS version wasn’t going out to the previous iPhone, the driver for that controller got removed since in theory there would be no devices using it anymore.

Causing all the replacement screens to stop working until Apple added the driver back.

I got a Brother printer (MFC-L2750DWB) entirely because they were the only good guys on the market when it came to this sort of thing. But instead of buying a 3rd party toner cartridge, I reused the original starter cartridge and refilled it with 3rd party toner (inkowl). Then had to override some setting on the printer and lie that I had replaced the cartridge with a high yield one. Seems to be working fine.

It was very cheap. $11 for a high-yield refill, $85 for the official one, $30 or so for a 3rd party cartridge.

I have an HL-L2370DW, since probably 2020 or 2021. I've installed multiple third party toner cartridges in it, as recently as last week, and never had any problem. However I also have never knowingly updated the firmware.

Your third-party toner chip could've been defective.

Given the number of reports (and the fact that this is common enough that I found a youtube video explaining how to swap the DRM chip), that seems possible, but less likely. These chips are not complicated or hard to make. The prior on failure rates should be extremely low. But the next time I need a toner cartridge, I will make sure to test it before I swap the chip, just to double check.

If the chip isn't defective, why did it work with a known good one? If it isn't complicated to make them, why does your chip not work?

To answer these questions, we need to know: what do the chips do? Where did the replica cartridge companies get them from? Etc. You said you would test the chip before swapping, how do you do that? Is it just a flash chip? If it is, why are the replica manufacturers not putting the correct information on it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com