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HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I am always reminded of this tweet from ProZD when printers come up:
This type of printer exists. It's called a Brother laser printer.
I have a brother laser printer for years, can confirm.
My friend has one that's like ten years old, works fine too.
The software is a bit janky and all that but it works.
My monochrome Brother Laser is around 15 years old. Works great on Linux, as it should on any cups system. It's still the same printer or was 15 years ago, drivers shouldn't change.
I think I'm on the 3rd drum for that thing. Lord knows how many pages. Just keeps trucking.
I’ve got one new enough to have networking, that’s still pretty old. It needs zero configuration using ethernet and just works on mobile devices (iOS & Android) without issue.
I have a Brother laser printer. It regularly goes into such a deep sleep that no force on this Earth can wake it up when it's time to print, because it's too deeply unconscious to respond to "wake up" signals from computers. It cannot print without first being brought out of its coma by a troubleshooting software.
So I'm not going to put that in the category of printers that just prints every time like it's supposed to without issue.
Huh, that's strange. Does pressing the power button not work? Are you using wifi or Ethernet?
I think there's a way to disable the deep sleep mode.
Nope, pressing the power button doesn't work, and I've tried it on both wi-fi and ethernet, with the same problem either way. I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I do not get along with printers.
Strange. You could try go to its web UI (just go to the printer's IP in your web browser) and disable both sleep and auto power off, and see if that helps? You can also change those option through the menu on the printer itself.
I don't print a lot (average 1 page a day), so having the printer actively "awake" and consuming electricity all the time is pretty wasteful. So that wouldn't move it into the category of "not evil" for me.
That makes sense. Too bad the sleep mode isn't working well for you :(
To me it's just part and parcel of owning a printer. They're awful devices, but one I unfortunately need to use on occasions.
That said, the university printers aren't bad. I've only threatened to throw them out of the window once. 😀
I recommended Brother laser printers to some older relatives and this happened. The printers required a power reset every few days.
It's good relative to what we have now, but it can't hold a candle to some of the warhorses we had in the past.
Brother still can't do inkjet right? I read somewhere there's a big patent that lets only a select few companies be able to sell inkjet printers.
I used to have a laser printer, and they're great for documents, but now what I print most are photos, and for that pigment-based inks rock.
I have an Epson printer but even if they're nowhere near as bad as HP, Epson also has some weird shit from time to time.
I own a brother inkjet and it works fine, although it complained when I put the wrong brand of ink in it.
Ooo fun, a printer that never goes out of sleep mode... Nah fuck that brand, it shouldn't have taken an hour for my brother laser printer to start up. Soo stupid man. Whenever I need something printed I just put it on a USB stick and get it printed at my local library. It's faster anyways, and I don't have to deal with my stupid hibernating brothers printer
Printer companies are probably the reason most people no longer own a pinter.
The main issue with a lot of “printers” nowadays is that they’re usually not just printers anymore - it’s a printer/copier/scanner with faxing capabilities. The more complicated shit you cram into a single machine, the more likely something else completely unrelated will break.
I have a HP laser printer that is literally just a printer with the Wi-Fi turned off and it’s been working well on the odd occasion I needed to use it. Only reason I got it was because the Bother printer I wanted wasn’t on sale and this HP was going for under $100, so I went for it since I needed it at the moment and figured I could use it until it either dies or HP decides to not offer the toner anymore, whichever happens first.
Nah the main issue is they're designed to be shit, to force you to spend more money.
Firstly there's no reason the loss of say a scanner should result in failure of the printer functionality, that's poor design. Secondly, why are so many of these extra features failing when so many people rarely if ever use them? Sounds very much like planned obsolescence. Printers are a total scam.
My $300 Brother laser printer that does everything works just fine because it wasn't designed to be a money-siphoning piece of shit.
I had one of those printers in the 90s.