…I remember Brother intnetionally making their stuff VERY user servicable.
Wha happen
Line go up
Shit come down
LINE GO UP
Summary for those who can’t watch at the moment?
Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don’t weight ongoing costs as much – happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.
For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn’t have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.
Rossman: What Rossman’s saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He made a wiki page listing all the things that they’re doing. He says that he doesn’t know of a type of printer to recommend now.
He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream. A substantial portion of the video is his cat licking him.
He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges
This is not supported by the references in the linked article. They only talk about the printers refusing to do automatic registration with third-party cartridges.
Am I just jaded about the whole internet or does this read like an AI summary? It feels too specific to be written by a human.
Humans are still able to watch a video and understand what is being said in the video
If we reach a point where an AI can summarize a video to that degree and provide background summaries, I’d happily use it. I mean, I’d mark the origin, but nah, this is just me.
Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There’s nothing to lock out.
Only if you can keep it working for ten consecutive minutes. I went through three of them under warranty until my warranty expired, then Epson told me to fuck off.
If have a Canon color laser now. If that conks out and everything on the market by then is locked out shit I’ll just convert my 3D printer to a plotter, or maybe go back to clay tablets.
Oh, color laser is the way to go, for sure. Refills are expensive, but rare; the biggest problem is if you have to move them, they’re a nightmare. And far heavier than inkjet. But, all things being equal, I’d take a color, duplex laser any day.
You’re not the first person I’ve heard who’s had trouble with Ecotanks. I’ve been very fortunate and have not had any issues. I did learn that you need to print at least once a week or the heads tend to clog; the downside of never replacing the heads with the cartridges, I guess. But now I just have a cron job that prints a test page once a week and it’s fine.
Both Ecotanks and laser eliminate that “print anxiety”, where you’re afraid to use the device because each page costs $2 because of the cartridges costs.
To paraphrase Quint: “I’ll never replace a cartridge again.”
We need an open source RepRap printer. Like, I wonder if this thing could be reverse engineered, given they still make the ink cartridge/head units for it.
What we actually need is to stop fucking printing.
We need a foldable A3 size e-ink reader that you can use like a folder.I’d be more interested in something more iPad sized with an e-ink display that is more generally usable.
The ReMarkable tablets for example have interesting hardware but the software fits such a narrow use case and I don’t think you could slap like, Linux on it or something.
Canon has a tank printer line too. Absolutely recommend any tank printer (you’ll have to check reviews for specifics obviously).
My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter. 😂
Are there no good guys left?
Just buy an ink tank printer, it fixes 90 percent of your printer grief
Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous
I’ve had an Epson Ecotank for the last couple years and I have no complaints. I just refilled my black ink and it was $11 for 9 oz., which should last me years (but I don’t print that often).
Ink dries out, probably better to fill it part way and refill more often.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I would assume dried ink could clog up your cartridge or the printer
Good tip, thanks.
Brother sucks now!?
Truly, this is the canary in the coal mine moment.
It’s just capitalism. Don’t make it more then what it is.
I don’t think I’m making it more than it is. Just can’t believe the God-damned Russians got to Brother, too.
Me omw to hack and blackmail brother ceo to get him to enshittify all their printers
Nah, that time has long passed. Brother is probably less bad than many of its competitors, but that doesn’t make it good.
It’s funny how far ahead 3d printers are in terms of consumer experience, everything is open, everything works and the tech is like 300 times more complex.
2D printer companies should be shamed to death.
Idk if the tech for 3d printers is really more complex. All of the parts are readily available, basically nothing needs to be specially made except the hot end (one single metal part)
The consumer experience for 2d printers worse IMO but that’s probably because I’m stuck on Windows with its terrible printing system
Over time as 3D printers go from tinkerer’s toy to household staple, I’d expect them to become more locked down and anti-consumer.
They would have to become sci-fi level capable before they would be considered household staple items.
By my count, it’s been tried twice.
Makerbot after the Stratasys buyout.
There were a bunch of companies that tried right after the FDM patents expired in 2009. Most of them were completely forgotten or ignored because they were closed source (and more importantly closed material) companies and never got very far off the starting blocks.
Bamboo learned from them and decided to pull the rug out after getting a foothold with finally selling decent prebuilt hardware for less than a fortune (see Ultimaker before buying out MakerBot at least).
Bambu is working on it already — can’t print unless you’re connected to the internet and send your files through their server, can’t connect to the printer with other slicers besides their slicer.
They had to walk that back some; there is now a “developer mode” where old standard functionality is still exposed, but they’re clearly working as hard as they can to turn it shitty.
Don’t worry. Companies like Bambu and others are trying to lock down shift their printer business in the style of 2d printer companies. I hope it at least happens very slowly, but the enshittification is happening…
deleted by creator
It’s not that hard to convert a cheap 3D printer into a pen plotter is you want to do some 2D printing.
Except those who aren’t.
This is mainly because consumer 3d printer have been developped by 3d printing enthusiast first and not a company, Prusa which was leader for some time used a lot of open sources project to build their printers. As it’s getting mainstream as time goes by more and more companies shows up with closed sources project sadly.
Isn’t prusa now doing anti consumer / closed source stuff?
Aren’t you confusing them with Bambu?
Their slicer is based on Prusa’s exactly because Prusa isn’t doing closed source.
One of the latest Prusa printer is closed source If I remember correctly Core xy
What is that even supposed to mean?
Thanks for the link.
Looks like not really closed-source, but not fully open as the previous printers were.
And the reasoning is the usual, other companies stealing their designs. :/
You are not completely wrong, they have one printer with closed sources.
They’re actually behind. 3D printers are a much newer industry. Most industries start out super open, competitive and collaborative. This speeds up development to consumer-grade products. Eventually one or two companies gain sufficient marketshare to start enforcing anti-consumer shitfuckery. Look at the recent drama with Bambu printers and you’ll find that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s a tale as old as time.
Framework actually trolled us into thinking they were going to release a printer but instead they went into a market segment where everything was already modular, repairable and upgradable and gave us something that was not, at all. But hey, they gotta capitalize on the AI nonsense too, I guess?
Enshitification is the word of this century
Of this species.
The consumer getting a product is just a byproduct of generating profits.
People that Weasle their way up the corporate ladder have been prefectly groomed to have no shame.
and to be as amoral as possible.
2D printers used to be like this.
They all worked with open, universal drivers, no additional software, and any ink cartridge that fit inside the bay.
But then companies figured out that people will just buy the cheapest printer on offer, regardless of everything else.I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.
We’ve seen shifts like that before.
There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn’t exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.
The change started when some people…I think Quakers…decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back…lemme see if I can go dig it up.
Yeah, here we are:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577
Relevant snippet
Episode 633: The Birth And Death Of The Price Tag
JIANG: The whole world I’ve known is in this price-tag world. Everything has a price, one price.
GOLDSTEIN: But when you take the long view of the historical world, this price-tag world is like a bizarre aberration. You know, for almost all of the history of human commerce - for thousands of years - you walk into a store, and you point to something. And you say, how much does that cost? The guy at the store is going to say, how much you got? You know, everything was a negotiation. And there were good reasons the world was this way.
JIANG: Say I have a store and - I don’t know - I’m selling eggs. And a guy walks in, and he looks like he has all day to haggle. And he’s really been scouting out the best place to buy eggs. So I sell him a dozen eggs for a buck 50.
GOLDSTEIN: So then, a few minutes later, somebody else comes in. This guy’s wearing fancy shoes, clearly does not have a lot of time to haggle. So you sell him eggs for twice as much. You sell him eggs for 3 bucks.
JIANG: Each customer pays what they think is a fair price. I make a profit. We all win.
GOLDSTEIN: This was just the way things were, and almost everybody accepted it, everybody except this one religious group, the Quakers. Robert Phillips, the consultant we talked about the Coke thing, he said the Quakers did this really fringy, radical thing.
PHILLIPS: They would have a fixed price. The Quaker would - the merchant would say what the price is, and that price would be the same for everybody.
GOLDSTEIN: That’s it. Having one price for each item, that was the Quakers’ radical thing. They thought haggling was just fundamentally unfair. They thought charging different people different prices for the same thing was morally wrong.
JIANG: You can imagine walking into a store and pointing to a dozen eggs and getting all fired up to do an egg haggle.
GOLDSTEIN: Let’s go. Let’s do this.
JIANG: And then your friend, like, kind of elbows you and says, no, no, this is a Quaker store.
GOLDSTEIN: No haggling. No haggling here.
JIANG: What are you doing?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, the Quakers were definitely, definitely in a real minority with this no-haggle thing.
JIANG: But as the modern economy got going in the 1800s and businesses starting getting bigger and bigger, haggle worlds got to be a hassle.
GOLDSTEIN: You know, if you are running a store, if you’re working at a store, you need to know a lot to haggle. You need to know how much you paid for the stuff, how much your competitors are selling it for. You need to know how much different customers are willing to pay. Robert Phillips says you couldn’t just hire some kid on summer vacation to come and sell stuff at your store.
PHILLIPS: Clerks usually had long apprenticeships before they could actually be allowed behind the counter. So they had to spend a couple of years learning the business.
GOLDSTEIN: Years?
PHILLIPS: Yeah, typically. Learning how to haggle before you would let them be left alone.
JIANG: Haggling is a pain for customers, too. Imagine you’re at some store and there are five people in front of you in line. And you have to wait for them to all go through that haggling process before you can buy your shirts or whatever.
GOLDSTEIN: So finally around 1870, a few people decided to take a big risk. They decided to break with haggle world. They invented the price tag, this actual piece of paper stuck on each thing that tells you the price - not some starting offer subject to negotiation, but the price. And inventing the price tag was not just about fairness or what was morally right; it was about building really big stores.
PHILLIPS: Two stores here in New York, Macy’s. And Macy was a Quaker. And he featured fixed prices. The most famous one was Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia.
JIANG: Wanamaker and Macy’s, they’re building these new things, these department stores. And they’re trying to hire all of these clerks, but they don’t want to train them for years and have them become master hagglers. So the price tag solves this problem. It makes it easy for them to hire the clerks.
PHILLIPS: All they had to do was be essentially what clerks are today, you know, knowledgeable about the fabric. Oh, madam, this would look wonderful on you. They didn’t have to do pricing. They didn’t have to haggle. They didn’t have to know the cost of items.
JIANG: Wanamaker becomes this kind of evangelist for the price tag. He says, look, the price tag, it means you, the customer, you don’t have to arm wrestle with the clerk anymore when you buy things.
PHILLIPS: There’s no longer a war between the seller and the buyer, which is what he called the higgling and the haggling. Everyone can come into Wanamaker’s and know they will be treated the same.
JIANG: Customers loved it. The price tag spread. It was everywhere.
That wasn’t driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it’s possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don’t also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.
Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.
Has anyone figured out how to 3d print a 2d printer yet?
Edit: actually, scratch that entirely. How difficult do you suppose it would be to create an aftermarket non-malicious logic board to drive the hardware in lieu of the malicious OEM board? After all, it’s not the cartridges refusing to print.
There is a piece of software which will take a word document and convert it into an embossed 3D print file. So you could always just skip the middleman and 3D print yourself a plaque version of your document instead.
Just print it, roll some ink on it and slap a sheet of paper on top. There you go, printing 2.0 or something.
That sounds like a 15th century printing press with extra steps.
Kind of, but with less wood and a lot more micro plastics. That’s how you can tell it’s modern.
I used to have wood a lot more often, before microplastics.
If you start sieving your urine you’ll never have to buy filament ever again. Really it’s a blessing in disguise.
There are some projects out there that do the entire frame. Steppers, hotend, and control boards are out of reach. There’s some hypothetical ways you could do it, but it’d be far more expensive than buying off the shelf stuff and probably get worse results. Even the frames tend to take a lot of filament.
It’s more of a nice idea than something practical.
Has anyone figured out how to 3d print a 2d printer yet?
“Bröther, please dö nöt becöme anti-cönsümer!”
“I töö yearn för the cöntrölled mönöpöly, thë ensittificätiön, the röt ecönömy!”
“Brother…”
“I’m leäving töö müch möney on thë täblë! We also hävë öür men Ëlön Müsk as thë shädöw prësidënt, Trümp ïs jüst hïs, ör räthër - öür püppët. Hë wïll dïsmänlë äll cönsümër prötëctïons, as thëy’re in thë wäy öf öür pröfits.”
“Bröthër… Plëäsë rëcönsïdër!”
“Änd whät ärë yöü gönnä dö if not? Go tö thë cönsümer prötection agencies Ëlön Müsk’s DÖGË jüst dïsmäntlëd? Üse an öld HP LaserJet until yöü cän get repläcemënt rollers för it? You know öther parts öf it cän brëäk töö.”
“Bröther… You became… ËVÏL! You betrayed EVERYTHING you previously stood for!”
“And Ï wïll dö it as mäny tïmes as nëëded. Ëvil? It’s jüst büsïnëss. Mäybë yöü shöüld hävë rëcönsïdërëd yöür vötë för Trümp.”
“Bröther… Büt thë tränsës hävë cäncëlled Pikamëë för thë wïzärd gämë! The wökenëss häve been deströying the gäme ïndüstry! I nëëded tö vötë för Dönäld Trümp! Why isn’t it wörkïng äs ït wäs süppösëd tö!”
“Yöü vötëd ägäïnst yöür cläss interest öut öf püre hatred. I like ït vërÿ müch! Yöü knöw önë rëäsön she wäs älsö cäncelled wäs düë tö lölï? Ï dön’t think Pröjëct 2025 wïll ällöw it för sö löng düë tö tötäl pörn ban!”
“PLEÄSE BRÖTHËR, NÖT THE LÖLÏ! PLEÄSE LET ME KEEP THË CÜTË ÄND FÜNNŸ!”
“Yöü vöted against yöür class interest, yöür personal interest… hahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHAAAA! Yöür sö fünny! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct vötër för më! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct cönsümër ëvën! Töö dümb tö rëälïzë äll thë pöliticäl wörkings aröünd yöürself. Änd when anything göes wröng, yöü bläme the minörities öf this söciety. Nöw get exited för Bröther AI, a sübscriptiön service which is essentiäl för öperating the printer! Get ready för price hikes! Get ready för shörter lasting printers!”
“You’re truly despicable bröther!”
You are crazy, but good crazy.
Wake up babe, new copy pasta just dropped.
Sad to hear Louis is having family issues
Took me three tries to figure out what was happening, then I was sad.
I didn’t even know he had a brother.
Old printers on ebay are going to be the new game, until we start seeing kickstarter flooded with new printer companies.
I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it will just be cycles (assuming we all survive long enough). I’m in an industry where the large companies are imploding and smaller companies are starting to shine again, eventually those companies will likely become big as well and implode.
When I saw this title. I thought another YouTube hardware advocate turned their back on Louis and started an anti-consumer group to fight off policy debate that Louis does. My brain is wild.
Same but I thought Louis had a brother who became evil for some reason 😭
Me too! I was like. Who is this brother? How have we not met him!
Framework printer.
Make it happen.
sorry maybe I missed a memo, people are still printing things… like, on paper?
I personally don’t, on the off chance I do need to print something I do it at work.
Not saying they couldn’t/shouldn’t but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it’s a miracle, mostly of HP’s marketing department, that they’re a household object.
Back before everyone had maps on their phone, printing MapQuest maps was fantastic. This was the early 00’s though and we all had money to burn still.
dude I would pay gold for that
Welp, I guess that pen plotter I built last year is going to be my full time printer
I’m glad there’s a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There’s also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer/scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
Damn, Brother was the only company left I was happy to blind purchase from by name alone.
Brother’s been anti-consumer for at least 5 years now. Not sure why people are just learning about it now.
Brother blocking 3rd party toner was the primary reason why I went with Canon back in 2020.
