Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

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"I'm almost at the point where I consider any type of firmware update for anything to be actively hostile and to be avoided if at all possible with the sole exception of patches for specific, significant security bugs."

In recent years not one of my printers has been on the net, whether it's a printer on a standalone PC or one on a network.

The same applies to printer utilities. With driver bugs I'll download an updated driver, which these days is often in the form of an executable, and I'll block internet access before running it.

I take the view that printer updates include user-unfriendly afterthoughts that manufacturers have since dreamt up to further line their pockets at our expense. I always assume that manufacturers will slipstream crud and spyware into driver updates.

As for HP, I'd never buy another HP product let alone a HP printer, the last printer I bought would have been around 2005.

Why do people still buy HP printers when it's so widely known that to do so is to buy a 'lemon'—nothing but a pile of trouble?

I think it depends on the brand of printers you buy. I bought a Brother and had trouble getting AirPrint to work. Only to find out after a year that there was an update of the firmware I had not installed, which had been available all along, that fixed the AirPrint issue immediately.

Please just stop buying HP and Canon printers!

Just last week there was a news story about brother making a firmware update to "improve print quality" which of course meant refusing to print without "authentic" brother ink

I believe Brother came out and said this was a bug on their side; whether or not that is more #MarketingRuinsEverything speak I can't say.

They refuted these, but did not say it was a bug on their side. It seemed more like the user errors combined with usual influencers gone wild.

They did, HN 6 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43271507

I like Rossmann and watch his YouTube stuff regularly, he's a great advocate for Right-to-Repair, etc. It'll be interesting to see if he's correct on this one as it seems he got the info secondhand. Nothing wrong with that so long as the source is reliable (one can't do everything).

What's good about this story is that it's now got traction, Brother is on the record denying the claim and with a heap of Brother printers in the field we'll soon know one way or other.

From my experience Brother is definitely the best of a bad lot. Also, I've had no problems with 3rd party cartridges.

I agree, whilst HP leads the disreputable pack and second is Canon I've just had major poblems with Epson—cartridges not† being empty and the printer refusing to print, or refusing to print in B&W when a color cartridge is empty. I even had to exchange a printer and upgrade it for a more expensive one because it jammed paper—and even then the replacement had to be exchanged because of a fault (a thin black line running vertically down the page that couldn't be eliminated).

I've now a collection of partly-used and new cartridges from the first printer that I cannot use as they don't fit the replacement model. This whole system of forever changing cartridges from one model to the next is a fucking scam.

Does anyone know of say a source of firmware hacks that can override this crap?

† I now weigh cartilages and mark their weight in grams before using them, I then do the same when 'empty' which doesn't necessarily mean they're actually empty—which I determine by opening them. Doing this is also a sure way of determining the cost of the ink which where I am works out to be over $2,000/litre.

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