The suit, filed earlier this year, argues that HP all-in-one printers stop all functions when ink levels reach some arbitrary point.
If you don’t need an all-in-one printer, then the Brother HL-L2350DW is great. The best thing about it is that it prints. These accolades are really the bare minimum you’d expect from a device called a “printer”, but that’s where we are in the world of consumer electronics.
I made the mistake of recommending Brother printers without identifying the exact version. The Brother printer my coworker bought took a page from HP’d bullshit. He returned it after a week.
Imo - Look for ones that don’t need internet or just perform 1 extremely specific thing. Or in my case, I printing a lot of b&w docs as cheap as possible.
My recommendation would be the brother laser printer HL-L2300D from 2014. The 2350DW looks similar and is more recent from 2021 and might be okay too.
It bugs me to hear that. My mantra for years has been “Buy a Brother printer, they just work”. Do you know what model of Brother had a HP style limitation, and what the limitation was? I’d like to educate myself before I recommend them again.
I don’t think it’s the same printer/issue but recently my brother printer that I bought in '21 decided it was out of toner and refused print without replacing the toner. I forget what setting I had to find to reset it but it works fine now, on the same toner cartridge I bought with the printer (I don’t print often).
Off the top of my head it was a dcp-l2550dw, can’t check it right now.
It was mildly annoying to deal with, I remember the instructions not working exactly and having to troubleshoot, I can’t recall what I had to do to fix it. I can imagine somebody with less time on their hands just giving in and replacing the toner.
I had a Brother MFC something that had page counts on the toner cartridges: they would only print so many pages before saying they were out of ink, regardless of how much ink was left. You could access a secret menu and reset the counts using a special button sequence, but it was a gigantic pain at the time.
It’s crazy how as soon as printers became reliable to function, companies purposely made them shit again.
You’re certainly not wrong. I have two Okidata 320 Turbos in my basement that were manufactured some time in the late '80’s that still work just fine, if I ever have occasion to fire one up (which is almost never). They don’t need a single damn thing, ever, except some tractor feed paper and a ribbon. They’ll probably outlive me.
I have a 2700DW and have been happy with it for years. I recommend Brother to everyone, but I’m curious what Potatos_are_not_friends has to say about their experience below.
Some Brother printers received a firmware update that locked out 3rd party toner supplies. Wasn’t a nice thing to do.
I still recommend them, but less enthusiasticly then I did. It’s not the sure-thing no-shit printer brand they used to be, but they do make some great printer models if you get the right one.
We’ve got three of these or in our office for just that reason. I can say by way of largely meaningless observation that there was at least one design revision of these things in recent years, because the current ones have been cheapified by removing the little one line LCD display and replacing it with a couple of blinkenlights. I much prefer the older ones with the display, because the readout can at least in theory give you a clue as to what the damned thing has its knickers in a twist about this time.
Two of our units turn into print job motels on a regular basis, as in print jobs go in but they don’t come out (usually with no error thrown). Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in causes it to spit out all of the print jobs that were stuck in it, which typically total in the dozens because our (l)users’ only method of troubleshooting if something did not print the first time is to try to print it again seven or eight more times. The third one we have doesn’t do this, but it’s in a location where it is used a lot less which may be a contributing factor. I wonder if this is some kind of variable overflow issue or something.
We have a couple of their multifunction machines around, too. Whatever implementation Brother uses to link the client software on the PC and the machine itself is also hot garbage. In particular, ours constantly lose association with their PC’s for the “scan from console” feature, for no readily identifiable reason, and there’s evidently no way to force it to reassociate other than uninstalling and reinstalling the PC software suite which is a monumental pain in the taint to be doing on a regular basis.
The dinky Canon ImageClass I have squatting in my personal office, however, has never given me any issues.
that’s quite exactly the opposite of my experience. I’ve had two different Canon inkies that went to shit real quick.
My Brother laser has printed far beyond both of those, and with no issues
That doesn’t seem to be an all in one though? It looks like just a BW laser printer. I ended up with a really cheap epson that meets my limited needs but those can be hit or miss and the ink sure isn’t cheap if you use a lot, which I do not. It doesn’t have the problems of the HP units at least.
Pretty sure that’s the exact same one I have and while it is black and white only, it does scan/fax/copy like every other all-in-one
Thank god, this has been one of the most anti consumer things of our time and it needs to stop.
I’m in IT, and anything HP can just fuck off.
Edit to add: Never buy any printer that comes with an ink/toner subscription service.
founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard were so customer trusting and had such probity that it revolutionized corporate america and empowered startups to bootstrap from nothing. if they saw what became of their reputation they would’ve forced a name change. thanks Carly Fiorina for destroying an amazing institution. I hope your resume refuses to scan.
They were engineers, and made stuff they liked and were proud of, and it showed. When they exited the leadership roles, the MBAs took over and it was all downhill from there.
You know, I’m starting to have a stronger dislike of MBAs than I do lawyers. Even though lawyers were the traditional wiping boys.
Lawyers get a bad rap. If you are ever falsely accused of a crime, you’re going to really wish you had a lawyer.
MBAs are agents of decay and corruption.
It’s amazing how so many MBAs can tank a business. I’m seeing the same thing in my organization: as the number of people who have ever worked in the field decreases relative to the MBAs, things get worse, in both cultural and functional ways.
Half the PMs in my company have MBA degrees and they’re all morons.
Want to cosplay as a person with a MBA from Wharton?
Snort a bunch of coke, drive a expensive car you bought with loan money and micromanage while vaguely gesturing and quoting Wolf of Wall Street
This is great news… if HP loses we might all be rewarded $1.89 for years of extortion-level ink prices! Problem solved!1!!
Don’t worry, the lawyers who win these type of case will be able to afford lots and lots of happy meals. They typically are the only ones who ever make out in the end.
