We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.
So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.
Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.
I wonder if my sister still has in the attic, the Brother printer I found near the garbage bin and fixed… track that, feds.
They wouldn’t be able to track the printer to you from the fingerprint in that case, but if you ever end up on their radar, that printer is damning evidence even if all the memory on it is pristine clean.
This is not why printers are terrible. Printers are terrible because they don’t follow a standard protocol.
They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.
They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.
This is for colour printers for sure, to prevent counterfitting. Many black and white only didn’t have fingerprinting, previously anyway. The printers serial number and manufacturer is coded. They don’t need to change anything, its done by the printer (serial, Mac, model)
This is for color laser printers only, and is not a legal requirement as far as I can tell. Manufacturers were urged by the US government to add it, but it is not a written law.
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By the way, lot of crap paper out there too. Lot do not mark which side to print on first and this is related to curl and shineyness. One has to guess. If your getting a lot of jams try flipping the paper over.
Our last ream has a deffective narrow page every 4th page too. I had to manually pull those out.
I’ve got an ancient laser printer. Toner is cheap and it just works. Anything more complex? I send it to a print shop and let THEM deal with the suffering. I just get the results I’m expecting when I expect them, without wasting time and money on printers and ink and all the things that can go wrong with them. Works for me….
My first printer in the early 80s was an EPSON dot matrix for $800. The second was an Apple laser printer in the late 80s for $3500. The third was a Brother momochrome MFC laser printer for $500 in the 00s. You can see why they are crap, huge price reductiions. Even more if you consider inflation and capability.
Always look at per page cost. Generally that means monochrome laser.
Edit: The issues I have had with Linux and the Brother MFC is firmware upgade as it wants to use Windows for that. I have had some Postscript compatability issues too. The paper feeder for the scanner is not perfect either. It can skew the paper and you have to watch for double feeds. Not a defect but a missing function, I cannot figure out how to fax from my computer or USB stick. An oddity, it does not seem to maintain time when the unit is off and never has which is really annoying especially for faxing. Mostly like the printer but not the above issues so much.
I don’t recall the oatmeal seeming so agitated, maybe something personal?
This is from a long time ago.
If anything, printers today are worse than they used to be in the 90s. For example, I don’t remember chips preventing you from using third party ink being a thing back then. So I believe the printing
industrymafia has been spending those decades adding antifeatures to their designs.And IMO it highlights how much we [society in general] need open hardware.
The old tractor-feed dot matrix printers never had great print quality, but they were built like tanks.
Absolutely.
Google used to be better as well. And Reddit. And… well, enshittification affects everything, not just tech, but printers and food containing micro plastics and everything else we can buy.:-(
I’ve had good experiences with Brother laser printers. The price tag is higher than an inkjet printer’s, but the cost over time is far less, and they keep working.
(FWIW, mine have all been black & white. I can’t vouch for color laser printers.)
I have a colour laser brother that’s been happily working for over 10 years. They are solid printers.
Second hand brother laser printer for me. Apparently updated firmware may brick a printer using third party toner. No updating the firmware just for in case.
The best laser printer is a Brother laser printer from 10+ years ago before the cartridge subscription bullshit.
I landed one for $5 on Craiglist and have it connected through a CUPS server so I still have the modern ability to print from any device on the network.
I love my Epson Ecotank. It solves most of these issues.
Biiiiiig shoutout to the Epson Ecotank. Tank-based printers are the only acceptable consumer printers
sad laser noises :(
Canon megatank is pretty great too. The only complaint I have is that it’s weirdly insistent on having photo paper in the back paper entry, and not in the drawer. Other than that the thing just prints. No cartridge chip shenanigans either because there’s no cartridges, and besides the ink is actually affordable compared to cartridges.
