Brother printer owneers

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rb99

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#318925 5-Mar-2025 12:43

Just in case you haven't seen this (or don't care...)

https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/brother-accused-of-locking-down-third-party-printer-ink-cartridges-via-firmware-updates-removing-older-firmware-versions-from-support-portals

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

rb99

nitro

656 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3350458 5-Mar-2025 13:11

hardly surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.

i liked their approach of encouraging people to buy originals, e.g. with extended warranties, vs hp's. but lo and behold...

senorloadenstein

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3350468 5-Mar-2025 14:05

When we moved from the UK back to NZ, we threw our beloved brother laser all in one in the container.
We brought an official toner from a NZ retailer, and lo and behold it doesn't work.
Turns out the cartridge/printer combo are region locked.
We ended up popping the chip off the old one and putting it on the new one.
Seems to work for now, otherwise we will need to order from Amazon UK.

💩

nzkc

1571 posts

Uber Geek

#3350474 5-Mar-2025 14:49

This practice by printer manufacturers needs to be outlawed.

I guess arguably it is - its anti competitive.

Dynamic

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#3350476 5-Mar-2025 14:56

Brother have a fantastic 4 year warranty if you use only genuine consumables. Using a chip to monitor compliance with this would be fine in my book, as long as you warn the user after installing the third party consumable that they are voiding the additional warranty. Disabling third party consumables makes a good company look bad.

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Jvipers2

213 posts

Master Geek

#3350495 5-Mar-2025 16:05

brother is amazing to deal with under warranty...they gave me a new $600 printer when I complaint about a blocked nozzle after using it for 12 months without even sending a techie to check it out...

richms

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#3350507 5-Mar-2025 17:29

If you own a colour printer and put the general low quality knockoff toners in it, you don't care about print quality so IMO not calibrating is fine, since its not like they know the density that things will be coming out with the non-genuine toner to be knowing what to calibrate too.

What I think is the bigger problem is that no-one else can make toners that can be as good as genuine. They have the particle size etc all locked up and do not share it. More to the point would be making it so that consumable data has to be shared and others allowed to make actual compatible consumables. This is the case for oil for cars, so should be the same for other things to push the consumables away from being a profit centre for the businesses.

Richard rich.ms

MurrayM

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#3350610 6-Mar-2025 09:29

I don't need to worry about my recently purchased Brother laser printer updating itself to the update that locks out third-party cartridges.

After bringing it home and setting it all up the first thing it told me is that there's an update available and do I want to update it. Of course I answered "Yes", but then I got an error saying there's not enough memory to do the update. I tried to do the update manually, but turns out you can't do manual updates for this particular model via my Linux PC. I reached out to Brother and one of their tech guys investigated for a few days and then came back to me and said nope, you're out of luck.