For a while now I have been a Brother evangelist because they just worked, they did not lock you into first party only printing supplies, and they were overall a good value.
THEN: my printer firmware auto updated and suddenly my toner cartridges were no longer recognized. Its not that they ran out and I put in new ones, simply the ones that had previously worked (3rd party already) just stopped and it reported an error.
I managed to find a guide on downgrading the firmware, and now I am back up and running and auto update is turned off. I am also saving all the little chips from the Brother branded cartridges.
So Dear Brother Printers, Please choke on a bag of dicks. I spent $500ish on a laser color printer so I would not have to deal with the shitification that has happened to inkjet. Seeing hostile and profiteering consumer behavior from other printer companies you decided to copy them for short term gains.
Well I will no longer recommend your products, and I will go out of my way to fix and downgrade your older printers with the sole purposes of putting them back into use and costing you new sales.
1 down, 1 in the cue, feel free to stop being anti consumer and breaking hardware we already paid for.
URL referencing the last time I know they got caught messing with Firmwares: https://www.therecycler.com/posts/new-firmware-updates-affect-aftermarket-cartridges/
Hm, I feel Brother was the last brand which didn’t do that, are there any alternatives?
I bought a new Brother laser printer in 2021 and it has no problem with third party toners.
I actually had a little bit of a panic attack because I just bought a shit tonne of toner for my Brother and I was afraid I might get locked out of it, but I just bought this printer last year and it’s not giving me any hassle with third party toner.
wtf. well. I guess I’ll have to block this user just in case it’s a spam bot.
I don’t think there’s any point on spamming articles just for points since there’s no algorithm that would weight their future posts higher. Please just assume the poster had good intentions and found it interesting and wanted to share.
I’d recommend the Epson EcoTank series. They don’t use cartridges, the ink comes in bottles and are quite cheap and lasts a while. They are inkjet tho, unless you’re doing lots if colour printing, theyre ok. Not sure if theres 3rd party inks.
My wife has bought 3 of them for her sublimation projects, they’ve all been great. The only issue I’ve had is the god damn windows 11 PC she runs that kills the tcpip port I set up, which deletes her color profiles.
