Didn't I read recently that they're losing money and shedding staff? Really? Is that the way Brother want to go?

Oh yes. It was here. https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/28/hp_cuts_jobs_as_profits_slide/

Strange times I guess. Oh Brother.

Maybe the staff that HP shed have gone to Brother bringing with them the evil disease of toner games.

I really enjoyed the Toner Games films. Especially the one where the children were all killed by having printers thrown at them by trebuchets - then their corpses ground down into paste to make new printer inks.

Or did I just dream it after eating all that cheese I found underneath the fridge?

That's what happens when you wipe the wheels down with old ink and let it age. You'll get different hallucinations depending on the colour used

Aye but it does force it to print in much lower quality, and I'm sure when questioned directly you'll blame the ink cartridge you lying snake.

Yup. Lawyeristic weasel-wording which does not address the issue (reduced print quality and degraded or blocked features when using 3rd-party-provided ink).

I've had third-party ink cartridges randomly rejected by Brother printers as "unrecognised" either on first installation or after they've been working and are still almost full. The best hypothesis I can come up with is that some (re-) manufacturers are reusing date-coded chips from official cartridges whose lifetime is expiring.

I've just bought a very solidly-built Canon printer, despite the almost unbelievable cost of the miniscule-capacity official ink cartridges (which include a print head), on the basis that a UK supplier offers an ink-replenishment solution. I'm not updating the firmware and if the source of cheap ink dries up the printer is heading for landfill. Weird way to run an industry.

I was just about to remark on this type of behaviour with my Canon color laser printer. MF733CDW. I guess they all go to the same golf country club.

I see no reason why a printer needs to have connection to the internet to get firmware updates. My 2005 Epson inkjet has been working for almost 20 years without one.

I do have a Canon colour laser but its blocked from Internet access as If there was some bug that requires a firmware update I will do it manually, once i am sure its not gonna cause other issues.

Yep. Same thing with my Brother DCP-L8410.

I have many times recommended Brother printers as this one has been an excellent performer and works well in my (Linux-based) environment.

As it happens, I do use Brother toner (my usage is low and so the cost is small - and my local IT shop provides it on 24 hours notice, so the convenience is worth the price). However, if they really start doing these tricks I will certainly not be recommending them again!

I see no reason why a printer needs to have connection to the internet to get firmware updates.

Likewise. I selected and purchased a printer which does what I want it to do, and see no reason for wanting to modify it, so why would I want to update the firmware?

[...] so why would I want to update the firmware?

You don't, of course. But what you want doesn't mean a tinker's damn to the C-suite.

What? Do you actually think you're the customer ?!?

Firmware and other automatic were never about improving features or security for end users. They were always about improving profits for vendors. And I'm not just talking about printers. I'm talking about literally everything that receives automatic updates.

Does your device seem to be a little slower after the latest major update? Well, it is starting to get a bit old. Have you thought about getting an upgrade?

I've blocked my Epson from direct contact with the web with the router's firewall, blocked all of the dozens of packages it installs using a software firewall and deleted the Epson updater app just in case. I still suspect the printer of shenanigans because it seems to need head cleaning more than it used to do but that could also be due to age and the fact that I no longer print very often.

That's the problem with inkjets. If you're not using them at least once every couple of weeks, they become very heavy on the ink for cleaning or the quality falls off a cliff - if they don't clean themselves automatically.

There are two rules of printing:

1. You choose an inkjet printer and it is used so frequently a laser would have been cheaper.

2. You choose an inkjet printer and it is used so infrequently that you waste all your ink cleaning the heads and a laser would have been cheaper.

All true, but the printer still works and it has a good resolution scanner and prints A3, both of which are useful to me. When I find I'm using it more than normal I run a cron job to print a test page every morning which keeps the heads clear and probably uses less ink than running the cleaning routing every few days. When it eventually gives up the ghost or they stop supporting drivers I'll look at a laserjet.

If there wasn't such a huge difference between the prices of OEM and third-party consumables, more people would be OK buying OEM.

For my printer I can buy two full packs of third-party ink for the price of a single Epson cartridge, and I'm running a Workforce printer, not one of the printers that costs less than the ink...

Overpriced consumables is a way for printer OEMs to recoup the revenue lost by flogging their hardware ridiculously cheap. It's an onerous penalty paid by higher volume users.

The Xerox Workcenter 6027 I use is a decent color laser, and also does network scan and fax. As to after-market cartridges, it only shows 'Non-Xerox toner' on a restart screen, and that's it. No features etc seem to be impacted.

Same here, have a couple of Xerox Versalinks and the only mention of non-geniune toner is when you look in the maintenance menus.

That's good to hear. I was wondering if the Xerox brand still bore any relation to Xerox, of it if had been bought up by someone to use and abuse as has happened to Kodak and Polaroid.

I'm on the look out for a cheapish laser printer for Mum - as her inkjet is dead, and I don't want to replace it with a new one - given how little she prints nowadays. But she refuses to be without a printer - even though I suspect it's only getting used once every 2-3 months. Hoping to pursuade her that black and white is fine for what she needs.

Got rid of mine years ago, but can steal the odd printout from the office, if needs be. But that seems to only be once a year.

"what brand is left to recommend?"

Quite.

Pencil and paper.

Crayons as well, I would think. I always liked the big box of 64.

Dynamic Revenue Security Feature

FTFY.

"HP CEO Enrique Lores said in a 2024 interview that HP was concerned about potential security threats [PDF] posed by third-party ink cartridges."

How's that even possible? An ink cartridge is just a little plastic container with some ink.

/s

Perhaps because the HP CEO believes that HP has not coded the printer's interface used to communicate with the print cartridge with sufficient input sanitisation.

"

A researcher found a vulnerability over the serial interface between the cartridge and the printer. Essentially they found a buffer overflow. That's where you have got an interface that you may not have tested or validated well enough..."

"

https://www.action-intell.com/2022/10/05/hp-bug-bounty-program-finds-reprogrammable-chips-open-printers-to-malware.

An ink cartridge is just a little plastic container with some ink.

Actually, Canon and HP cartridges usually have an integral (thermal) printhead whereas Brother and Epson printheads (piezoelectric) are usually integral to the printer.

The security issue comes, ironically, from the choice to include chips on the cartridges. There has (allegedly) been a case of third-party cartridges exploiting a bug in a printer's firmware (by carefully crafting a response) resulting in the printer subsequently rejecting cartridges from other sources. That of course is not an argument against third-party supplies, but a condemnation of the poor design choices and implementation of the printer manufacturer, but it appears to have been spun as a positive for aspiring monopolists.

The security issue comes, ironically, from the choice to include chips on the cartridges.

Another fun one I heard recently was a general supply chain risk. So a chip on a cartridge should only need to contain a fairly small number of bits to do pretty much any sane function. So say a 16kb chip should be waay more than enough. Except chip makers often aren't producing anything with that small a capacity, so have a 2 or 4Mb instead.. Which then has a lot more memory to install a payload, and then arrange a delivery of printer cartridges to your target. I wonder how many businesses would look a delivery of gift toner in the mouth?

Like you say, it's a risk entirely of the vendors making by deciding to install DRM or make 'smart' ink cartridges instead of keeping them as dumb, low risk consumables.

If it's definitely just a plain, entirely passive, ink/toner cartridge with absolutely zero ability to directly sense what's being printed (i.e. it doesn't *also* incorporate a print head/toner drum), and which sits in a location within the printer from where it wouldn't be able to use any embedded sensors within the cart to independently sense what's being printed, then yup.

If not, the question then becomes just how much do you think someone out there might want to be able to access the information you're printing, and how far might they be prepared to go to achieve it?

That said however, if you're working in an environment where you think someone *would* go to those lengths to steal your data, then even using OEM supplies isn't in itself a guarantee of security, because unless you've got your own security team watching every inch of the manufacturing and delivery process to ensure that the supplies you're using cannot contain anything other than what the OEM says they should contain, then how do you *know* for certain they don't contain something?

If you're working in a space where data is that sensitive and you need to go to great lengths to protect it, and it's so valuable that a bad actor could try to intercept it on the printer....then you've already got a big budget for security and can stretch to own-brand ink cartridges

Moderator: The issue before us is, 'how can we make more money?' Ideas?

Newbie Engineer: By making high-quality, reliable printers, with reasonably-priced parts and ink?

Everybody Else: (Uproarious laughter)

My Canon inkjet still prints ok using the third party cartridges I've been getting from Amazon for the past three years, although the front panel keeps reminding me there is a firmware update available on the server, but I just cancel the message each time. I recently changed three of the cartridges as they were empty and found that text printing was fine but photos were awful. After a bit of faffing around I confirmed it was the printer and not the Linux and Windows PC's in the house, so I tried a deep clean on the print head which fixed the issue. Was a little bit concerned for a few minutes until the though of trying a little maintenance occurred.

It's looking like Canon or Epson are some of the few printer manufacturers still respecting their customers.

It's the Gilette business model. I understand they want to make money from consumables, but they want to make too much money. And in the past four years inks had crazy price increase, the inks for my Canon photo printer went from about 50 to 80 for the 5-pack box (two different boxes needed for the full 10-inks set).. That's a 60% increase - far higher than inflation.

It is true third-party inks have less costs - often they recycle used cartridges because they can't make new ones (one of the reason I avoid them for photo printing), or make cheapr ones, but the price delta really looks to big. It looks they are offsetting the smaller printing market by increasing consumables costs. And the lose customers both for inks and new printers, if the costs become too high.

Rossmann also noted that Brother's support recommended switching to OEM toner to deal with quality issues, although that sounds an awful lot like a scripted step in a tech support fault tree: "Is the customer complaining about print quality using official products?"

To be fair, if they're not made by Brother how do they know the composition of the ink? They could be knock offs refilled by some Del Boy off the market who grabbed a couple of bottles of Quink from W H Smith and thinks he's now an IT mogul...

Lies about ink mixed with a side of racism.

Go away.

[Brother's US limb did, however, tell Ars Technica: "We are aware of the recent false claims suggesting that a Brother firmware update may have restricted the use of third-party ink cartridges. Please be assured that Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines."]

The complaint wasn't that third-party ink was blocked... just the performance deliberately downgraded in that case.

Given the cost of laser printers and the fact that seldom-used inkjets end up with serious quality issues (crystallised ink in the jets) which usually require ink-heavy purge routines(*), why would anyone bother with buying inkjets in this day and age unless they have very specific use cases?(**)

(*) Going heavy on the purge routine is a staple go-to for manufacturers when non-OEM cartridges are detected. No print quality issues but your cheap cartridges have to be replaced N times more often than the OEM ones

(**) Usually cases which justify continuous ink systems and commercial grade printers anyway. The consumer printers are mostly nasty toys and have been for a while.

The rise of tablets and phablets has seen a "need" for printing to fall off a cliff. These days it's mostly for long term archival use and ink is an expensive way to do that

The drone on the chat went on and on and on about the 'superior' quality of Brother supplies, totally ignoring me when I said that I used Brother supplies, I was just concerned about price increases. I suspect that I have made my last Brother purchase. Anyone know anything about the Canon MF653Cdw?