Brother laser printers are popular recommendations for people seeking a printer with none of the nonsense. By nonsense, we mean printers suddenly bricking features, like scanning or printing, if users install third-party cartridges. Some printer firms outright block third-party toner and ink, despite customer blowback and lawsuits. Brother’s laser printers have historically worked fine with non-Brother accessories. A YouTube video posted this week, though, as well as older social media posts, claim that Brother has gone to the dark side and degraded laser printer functionality with third-party cartridges. Brother tells Ars that this isn’t true.
↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica
I find this an incredibly interesting story. We all know the printer space is a cursed hellhole of the very worst worst types of enshittification, but Brother seemed like an island of relative calm in a sea of bullshit. In turn, people are so used to printers being shit, that any problem that comes up is automatically explained by malice, which is not entirely unreasonable. Borther insists, though, that it does not break printers using third-party toner or ink through firmware.
Brother does make it very clear that it is standard procedure to only perform troubleshooting on Brother printers using ‘genuine’ Brother ink and toner, which is not entirely unreasonable in my book. There’s no telling what kind of effects third part cartridges – which do contain electronics – have on the rest of the printer, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect Brother to be able to document all of those possible issues. As long as using third-party toner and ink cartridges doesn’t invalidate any warranties, and as long as Brother doesn’t intentionally break printers for using third-party toner and ink, I think Brother meets its obligations to consumers.
If you choose to use third-party ink and toner cartridges in Brother printers, I think it’s only reasonable you remove those during the troubleshooting process to ensure they’re not the cause of any problems you’re experiencing.
“””If you choose to use third-party ink and toner cartridges in Brother printers, I think it’s only reasonable you remove those during the troubleshooting process to ensure they’re not the cause of any problems you’re experiencing.”””
I would say this depends what the problem is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/comment/m8glv4j/
This problem here is the options to adjust printer output are disabled because the printer does not detect a genuine cartridge.
Yes what brother wrote is true your printer still prints. Problem the print results are bad and you are using more ink than you should.
Thom Holwerda there is problem. Using more ink than what you should does long term brick your printer. Yes Brothers going to say your printer failed because you use non genuine ink not that the printer applied too ink resulting into ink bleeding into the mechanics killing the printer. Its a completely different matter if the non genuine inks were causing the print outs come out washed out(as in under inked) as this would make the third party cartridge produce bad results and print more pages and do no long term mechanical damage..
There is kind of important reason to allow users to adjust ink outputs for printer lifetime so if for some reason you have over ink issue you can reduce the ink..
Yes what brother has done will result in more companies making third party Brother cartridges putting on chips that report the cartridge is brother so making trouble shooting worse because non genuine cartilages will be more likely not to be detectable by by the printer firmware. Nothing good to come from this change. Lot of ways Brother best thing reverse it and say sorry we locked some options that should have always been available no matter the cartridge and give warning to those using third party cartridges that don’t have protections from over inking that can long term damage their printer that a genuine cartridge standards and chips provide so to be careful in these settings.
Yes I can see how someone in the technical department disabling these controls would protect end user from self harm because not having the chip information they no longer has valid max ink output limits then missing that opps the default could be above .max safe ink output limits with a third party cartridge without the chip result in too much ink used.
@oiaohm
This is the very same policy in big modern commercial digital machinery. An associate of mine advises me they swap out generic parts every time they want HP to service or repair a digital press, HP threatened loss of warranty if they find generic parts in place, and that type of machine I’m discussing is worth Million$! However, in sourcing parts people have found grey market prices are just 20% of what HP charges, and in some cases the grey market components are superior. I’ve seen a quote that showed what would be a $2000 generic part, available as genuine in stock from HP for $15000.
Another vendor was recently caught out charging EU$4000 to repair a fault caused by a failed EU$0.40 plastic part.
This is a problem caused by serialisation of parts, and I suspect eventually it will be forced to end, at least in the EU.
I’ve recently had to troubleshoot a Brother laser printer that would not recognise 3rd party cartridges. This is definitely a thing.
The printer itself isn’t “bricked”, but the brand new cartridges we bought for it no longer work in it. So in a way, the cartridges are bricked.
There was a time when the less expensive Brother laser printers used cartridges that didn’t have a chip or other electronics, they were fully mechanical and relied on a gear based indicator to determine if a cartridge was new or used. It was trivial to refill those cartridges with new toner and reset the gear on the cartridge so it appeared “new” to the printer. At my workplace I took advantage of this over a decade ago and nearly all of our printers were inexpensive Brother laser units.
These days new Brother printers are using chips to measure the cartridge life, but thankfully the third party market keeps the replacement cost almost as low as the old refill/reset method and it’s still cheaper to use Brother printers versus HP. The quality is the same, and honestly I don’t care for HP’s “Smart” software having access to my networks, so the only HP printers we have are ancient USB-only 2035 units at a few workstations.
I got one of their ink printers (DCP-T420W). It’s an ink tank, and even their ink is reasonably priced, In fact, I didn’t have to refill the tank yet since I bought it and I had it for over 2 years. And I print a lot.
And how much is the ink? The ink for that printer in the amount that lasts for 2+years (the complete CMYK set) costs about the same as much as just the black ink for a HP printer.
Brother is such a bro.