- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
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If you haven’t read the hackaday comments I highly recommend you do. Some really great behind the scenes experiences people are posting. Super cool.
Been looking for this sort of device for my Pantech laser.
The cartridge is good for 1,600 pages - no more, no less.
All well and good, they’re cheap, except… the vast majority of my printing is in A5 size (roughly half-letter, or exactly half-A4).
Those half pages count just like any other page against the total, and I get shorted by the better part of 800 pages or so.
I have a basic Brother monochrome laser for high volume. I can buy a compatible cartridge for 9€. An Epson A3+ (tabloid) inkjet for color and photos, not a real photo printer, only 4 inks. Compatible inks cost less than 3€.
A great option is to buy auto reset refillable carts, and refill with genuine epson eco tank ink, super cheap, and guarantees Epson quality
My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.
So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.
I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.
I have a brother ecotank…i know this one will wake every noon and do some quick maintenance, like attempting a 10 second print. I guess it’s exactly to avoid ink drying up.
Recently they threatened to brick HP printers that use third-party cartridges if detected
Simple. Don’t buy HP ever again.
If a company intentionally bricks your device then they are malicious and under no circumstances should you buy another product of theirs.
If you buy whatever Brother laser printer, the ink doesn’t dry up and you never have to print anything anyway. It’s like $100 and the cartridge lasts forever.
And also; don’t print. If you’re a developer, put in the css that says:
@media print { body,html {display:none;} }That might not completely do it because it’s a joke but slap !important or whatever wherever you want.
Disables print-as-pdf tho, could prevent some accessibility software too.
why would I put that in the CSS??
Brother invalidates its laser cartridges after a certain number of revolutions irrespective of how much toner is left. You used to be able to override this manually but they removed that in a software update recently. Am livid. If you know different do you mind sharing what model you have?
There is an official way to override this. In mine it’s pressing 7 times some button. I can’t
Remember what it’s called, but it’s in the manual. The mode essentially lets you print until the cartridge is empty
That’s what I used to be able to do. It was pressing the back and cancel buttons in some combination brought up a hidden menu where you could reset the toner levels. You can still bring the menu up on mine but now it ignores any reset you do.
Seriously though.
Bought an old second-hand Brother printer a while ago and couldn’t be happier.
Model is like 10 years old, yet all spare parts and cartridges as well as just toner are readily available and the printer is perfectly fine (damn how precise laser printers are!).
They just make it happen.
I was sold on laser the minute I had to print something after a month of not needing to and it just popped out before I could get to it (thanks for AirPrint/wifi printing). My old inkjet would’ve been dried up and had to be cleaned taking like 10 minutes and wasting paper. Yeah, laser is the only way to go.
We just print photos from Walgreens or Shutterfly if we need quality color photos. Super cheap and I don’t have to maintain the equipment. Although about the only photo printing we do these days is large for the wall on glass or canvas.
Our favorite photos are also displayed on our living room AppleTV’s screensaver. We just favorite them in the Photos app and they automatically show up. My parents are used to seeing our favorite photos from vacations when house sitting before we’ve even told them what attraction we’re doing. Best feature ever.
You are probably talking about toner (dry black powder).
Not that HP isn’t aware or not ticked off about this, mind. Recently they threatened to brick HP printers that use third-party cartridges if detected
Try that in EU.
I dare you. I double dare you.
<Jules Winnfield>What does ECCN look like?</Jules Winnfield>At this point if I have to print something I just go to the library. I’m fortunate, but it’s been like two years since I’ve had to print something on actual paper.
I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.
They died when inkjet ink became their core business the rest of the company revolved around.
Also Carly fiorina, she ruined it for women ceos for a while.
[…] inkjet throws another vague error when all you want is to just print a text document.
If that’s your usecase, it’s cheaper (and greener) to save as pdf.
Sometimes you need a hard copy
some ‘third-party’ printer consumables have custom chips on them already.
