I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Can you share what competitor you bought and some of your findings?
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
Brother is the only non-evil company when it comes to printers. Every other printer company would literally stomp on your puppy given the chance.
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Hold up, HP printers don't let you SCAN without ink? You can make up some believable bs argument about why DRM ink is necessary, but there's no way you can convince anyone that scanning needs ink.
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Can't believe this is legal.. is there seriously a subscription model even if you've bought a printer? Does this happen with all hp printers?
It's worse than it sounds... You're not actually paying for ink, you're paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped "free" when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you're ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it'll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you're a member of the residual income brigade...
Jeez… with that you might as well do as I do and just go to Staples and print from there. No need to buy a machine or paper and it’s cheap.
I'm wondering if there's a open source firmware for printers like openwrt for routers
Edit: typo
This shouldn't be allowed. I hate products in 2023.
I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I'm riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.