Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of my Brother Printer/Fax/Scanner. Once ANY of the 4 ink carts is empty, you can no longer do ANYTHING. No scanning to a SD card, no outbound faxes, etc, until you replace the ink. Of course, there is a simple "tape over the holes" hack to get around this, but it's still lame.

View on HN

I haven't looked much at the color ones, but if it's networkable get it on a network and poke around in its web-based management interface. On the mono lasers there's a setting for "Toner out" behavior - the default is "stop" but you can change it to "continue".

This is disappointing -- I really like my barebones brother laser printer, I thought they might be one of the few honest printer manufacturers.

I think inkjets and lasers are basically different companies. From every vendor. The laser products just work, the inkjet products just don't.

I could not agree more. I also have a Brother Laser, and it's been rock solid for years. Inkjets were always a waste of money, ink, and time!

My Brother laser is the first printer I don't hate. Can't speak highly enough of them. And it even let me print (while throwing up a "No Ink" warning) until the pages came out blank.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com