So, IMHO, it’s no surprise that Brother gets design elements correct like “efficient use of toner” and “self-cleaning” and “optimizing for low wear on the print head” that other printer manufacturers struggle with.
(If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t. Then again, hardware-headed companies do seem to treat drivers as literal drivers, while software-headed companies seem to treat them as a fat shim that value-adds and makes noise all the time.)
That was, until the rise of Darth Carly at the earliest, not the case for HP, which made a name for itself as a manufacturer of scientific and industrial equipment before expanding into computers and printers (and bringing that manufacturing expertise to those fields). HP's printer business is based on rock-solid hardware chops from decades ago.
Do you think they still have any mechanical engineers working on typewriters? Which industry still has a need/requirement for typewriters?
Right now they make a lean, mean, CNC milling machine!
Also I have to confess, I've definitely bought used (tape-based) answering machines/typewriters at yard sales a few times solely to listen to the greeting/messages or typed messages, respectively. Having the device itself is nice, too, of course. :)
It's an interesting slice of the lives of people I'll never know, like picking up discarded shopping lists.
On Linux it certainly does. For some reason I can use network printing on my Brother laser from Windows and even Android, but not Linux.
(I'd nevertheless have expected AirPrint support to exist somewhere in Debian's multiverse repo — but it that doesn't seem to be there. Does nobody have that itch to scratch?)
Detects my printer just fine, then spites me by refusing to do anything until I give away my email address.
No way! I'll probably try to find a guerillamail equivalent and use that to sign up if I need to use the app.
All I really wanted was a wireless printer so I could stick it somewhere out of sight (small apartment) and be able to print easily. I settled on an HP because it was a good combination of cheap/decent reviews.
Setting it up was such a pain in the ass, including instructions telling me to install what I later found to be the wrong setup program. Now I have two separate programs (one that I can change printer settings including changing wifi networks, and another to use the scanner). It doesn't seem right and I feel like I should only need one, but whatever it works right now and I don't plan on changing anything until the printer or I die.
That feeling of dread and uncertainty is all too real for me.
The AirPrint abilities have been a little spotty at times, though that might just be my WiFi. I might hard-wire a raspberry pi to drive it though.
Also, I have no incentive for anyone to buy a brother printer. Just another happy user.
It took a fair amount of time to track down the error (a particular pattern of blinking lights) that meant "the ink cartridge is inserted incorrectly." Ok.... I thought to myself, this thing doesn't even have cartridges.
At which point I bought the Brother laser printer I currently have that has not failed me even once.
I've had to replace my (Brother) toner once in almost a decade. Granted, I do not print a lot.
The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.
At $1/mo, it's going to 6 years (thanks Ansil) for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.
And to the people saying brothers last forever: they don't. I've owned 3. When the drum wears out, the printer is trash because brother charges almost the cost of the printer for a replacement. That $100 brother has a drum that costs $89 and lasts for 12000 pages. So 12000 pages is the life of that printer.
Edit: Re: ink drying out. HP doesn't consider printer cleaning and maintenance pages in their page count. So you can actually clean the printer regularly so the ink doesnt dry out, and they'll keep sending you new cartridges.
As an aside, for a "don't print much" point of view, 12,000 pages is a long time (I, for example, print about 100 or so pages a year, which would give me a lot of time with my hypothetical Brother printer).
It's:
A) A way of getting people over that "How much for an official replacement cart‽" hump, which often causes them to buy 'fake' ahem carts, or a new printer
B) A way of getting people who "don't think they need a printer" to get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front.
A system that addresses one point is still capable of addressing a second - extracting a maximum 'value' from their customers.
> get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front
I'm sorry, but a company that changes the price of the contract is the complete - ideologically and practically - opposite of "knowing [your] costs up front".
I agree that I can't predict the costs exactly - but ballpark is good enough. Like cutting the cord. You don't know how your cable price might change, Netflix prices might increase, your provider might shift cost to your broadband to compensate - but for now it works out and presuming nothing major changes, you'll be fine with incremental stuff and maybe make another bold decision in a few years.
Not when it's at the cost of a customer's rights. Between abusing the DMCA to restrict what ink cartridges can be used and actively changing a "free" ink program after advertising that it's for the lifetime of the printer.
There's absolutely nothing we should be praising HP for here.
Programming ligatures are one thing. Your IDE manages them silently and transparently. They are client-side tech, not part of the actual data exchange. Teammates who find that they hurt code readability, rather than help it, are free to not use them in their own IDE.
But going out of one's way with escape codes or whatever, to insert a poorly-legible replacement for "?!", is simply awful.
I put it in my post, as I quite like the interrobang and will never pass up the chance to use it.
It's entirely legible, just uncommon - and "?!"?! just seems insert new character that represents gipping.
Is it "?!" or "!?" or "!?!" to indicate outrage, query and analysis, resulting in heightened outrage. Why not just add an f'in emoticon (shaped by you gurning at your iphone) seethes :)
Other countries and languages (Japanese, in particular) give the exclamation point the priority.
As a side note, I can't recall ever seeing the ligature of ?! before today. It feels like one of those typesetting relics we're better off not using.
I don't see anything wrong with the interrobang, although I don't think I'd go out of my way to use it, simply because it calls rather undue attention to itself. I wouldn't say that about most other ligatures, even some relatively uncommon ones; I'm sure that most people read text in set in Chaparral, for instance, without ever noticing that "Th" is a ligature in that typeface, because it looks optically correct in the same way the near-universal "fi" and "fl" ligatures do.
For the record, I can't find any supporting evidence about the ordering of punctuation marks; both "?!" and "!?" are non-standard in formal English, and the advice I've seen online -- and in the Chicago Manual of Style I have on my bookshelf I just checked -- suggest that an "exclamatory question" just uses the exclamation point. It's just that "?!" is more common when it gets used. (A question mark comes after an ellipsis not because of punctuation priority, but simply because the "..." indicates elided words, but doesn't replace the terminating punctuation mark.)
That's a matter of font choice, which (for HN, which doesn't go out of its way to stomp on user defaults) is, like the use of programming ligatures you have tried to distinguish on this basis, a client-side user decision.
Which characters are acceptable then? Only ASCII?
You can type it in X11 (and Wayland too IIUC) with Compose, !, ? (or ?, !).
Not a glowing example of DDG there.
You can also search “!s ‽” and get this: https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%E2%80%BD, but then you have to click “More” to see the full first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, and only then will it reveal the link to the full article there. The rest of the page is just clutter to me.
My highly used $30 Canon printer is in its 4th year, and 3rd cartridge. I’m well ahead of where I would have been with the HP (I print about 3-4 pages a day, so I’d probably have had to shell out for the $5 or $12 plan).
Also, much like most subscription services, even if the math works out, it only does until the next change in the pricing plan.
1. Buy an inkjet and pray that it prints every time you need to use it.
2. Spend a little more for a lazer and never worry again.
I've been using cheap laser printers for many years and will never go back to inkjets! But my needs are very simple, not trying to print photos.
>
> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.
>
> At $1/mo, it's going to take the rest of your life for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.
What? At $1/mo, it is going to take under six years for the price to work out in favor of the Brother. Are you suggesting the person you're responding to has six years to live?
At that rate of printing, ink is going to dry up in the headers. Which would require running the cleaning procedures. Which use a lot of ink.
Ink printers are a really bad proposition.
Also, it comes with toner. Just a starter cartridge, granted, but if you're not printing much it will last years.
Thank you, that's exactly what I needed: a reliable compact duplex printer (to carry most of the burden of the old color MFP that now jams every second page ...)
Edit: Seems to have been replaced by the HL-L2310D, or HL-L2350DW with WiFi
I don't do any maintenance, and I don't worry about the ink drying out.
I wouldn't take a one-time payment of $70 in exchange for having to do regular printer ink maintenance for 6 years, so it makes sense to pay an extra $70 to avoid that. Paying the extra $70 makes even more sense if you factor in the fact that I'd actually have saved $72 in monthly payments over that time period.
https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/733081/Brother-Monoch...
I have not yet hit the drum-replacement point on my Brother color printer yet so we'll see where that goes.
$1/mo = $12/y
(7 * 12) + 30 = 114
Do you know something about the rest of my life that I need to know? How much time do I actually have left!?
6 years is not a very long time. I've had my Brother laser printer for a decade now, am as happy as the day I bought it, and can easily imagine using it for another decade or more.
We need to rid ourselves of the mindset that electronic devices are inherently short-lived.
That $30 HP isn't going to last forever either, and will need periodic replacement.
Those $30 printers either don't come with ink cartridges or they come with very small "starter" cartridges, good for a few dozen pages at the most.
> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.
Toner, actually. The $100 Brother printer does come with a "starter" cartridge but it prints 700 pages. So even if you threw the printer away after the starter cartridge ran out, you'd still be paying $0.17 per sheet as opposed to the $30 inkjet's initial cost of $1.25 per sheet for the first cartridge.
If we're talking refills then, I can buy an aftermarket toner cartridge for my laser printer for under $20 and that yields 2600 pages. ($0.008/sheet). Black HP 67XL ink (240 pages) works out to $0.10/sheet. The laser is an order of magnitude less in both scenarios.
The drum unit in mine did start going bad after 3-4 years. I bought a new drum on Amazon for $20, far less than what I originally paid for the printer. It has been going strong for a few years since.
Sure, I wouldn't print 500 pages of B&W text on instant ink, but when printing things that require color, it's not ridiculously expensive.
Their most cost effective $25/700 pages plan will cost you over $425 to print that much assuming you use up the entire quota each month.
The inexpensive Brother model that we have at home is permanently out of stock everywhere. I've been looking for one so my daughter (college music student) can print sheet music from her apartment.
All I use my printer for is shipping labels for my home business.
Okay, that and Sudoku. ;-)
It would not have been difficult for them to provide CUPS drivers...
The Print&Scan app is a disaster, largely due to how Android works on Chromebooks. It can only access the totally separate Android filesystem, which isn't visible in the ChromeOS Files app. If you want to export a scan to the ChromeOS files, you have to use the "Share" button and pick the Files app. You can't use the very prominent "Save" button.
Not using ChromeOS though so can't comment on that.
For my situation I would never buy an inket type printer. When I need to print photos I send them to Costco, which is maybe every couple years.
Logged into the printer and see that I have only printed 3370 pages in all that time. I probably use the scanner feature more than the printer :)
If you print sporratically and don't need to print pictures, then it's perfect.
I didn't manage to get it to work, but my investigation led me to suspect it was because of some networking shenanigans it was doing (some kind of broadcast packet IIRC). At some point, it started working, maybe a firmware update fixed the issue. Might also have been a Windows issue to be honest.
I tried cleaning heads manually (there are a few tutorials out there that show how to do it with distilled water and some cloth). It's very dirty work and that didn't really work for me. It very quickly gets clogged again.
A trick that I found more useful is to not bother with the print head itself, but instead clean the parking spot and the tools that the printer uses to clean the heads itself (there's a rubber wiper, foam and some other stuff there). I unplug the printer, unlock the head and roll it off to the other side, and then use some cotton swabs and distilled water to clean the rubber and rinse the foam. I also keep the parking spot wet with water (the rubber seal + pad that rests on the head when the printer is turned off).
Keeping that part clean + the periodical head cleanings that the printer seems to do automatically works out reasonably well. Although every time I do a nozzle check I still always have a nozzle or two clogged so it's not perfect.
You probably have clogged black nozzles, and photo mode uses the 3 colours to make black.
(Lasers are prone to clump toner in those climates.)
Also my brother printer claims the cartridge is empty even though it is half full. I get around this by putting a sticker on the little window it uses to peek into the cartridge so it thinks it is full.
Insane.
But really the rare occasion I need photos printed, I just order them.
If you're a pro or hobby photographer, you can't beat pigment inkjets like Epson's, but then the drawbacks of inkjet (like drying out) won't affect you so much because you will use it a lot.
I'm interested in knowing Canon's level of evil, if anyone has any information about that.
I use a black-and-white laser printer at home (Brother MFC-8890DW).