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Dear Brother Printers: Eat a [Sponsor friendly words here] (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by infinitevalence to c/technology@lemmy.world

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For a while now I have been a Brother evangelist because they just worked, they did not lock you into first party only printing supplies, and they were overall a good value.

THEN: my printer firmware auto updated and suddenly my toner cartridges were no longer recognized. Its not that they ran out and I put in new ones, simply the ones that had previously worked (3rd party already) just stopped and it reported an error.

I managed to find a guide on downgrading the firmware, and now I am back up and running and auto update is turned off. I am also saving all the little chips from the Brother branded cartridges.

So Dear Brother Printers, Please choke on a bag of dicks. I spent $500ish on a laser color printer so I would not have to deal with the shitification that has happened to inkjet. Seeing hostile and profiteering consumer behavior from other printer companies you decided to copy them for short term gains.

Well I will no longer recommend your products, and I will go out of my way to fix and downgrade your older printers with the sole purposes of putting them back into use and costing you new sales.

1 down, 1 in the cue, feel free to stop being anti consumer and breaking hardware we already paid for.

URL referencing the last time I know they got caught messing with Firmwares: https://www.therecycler.com/posts/new-firmware-updates-affect-aftermarket-cartridges/

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[–] maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I spent a bunch of money a few years ago to get the laser(ish) print+scan+telegram+allthethings Brother MFC-L3750CDW. Imagine my rage when I found that this thing has a document feeder but no way to scan both sides of a document stack. Not even with a manual step in their software such as flipping the stack over and running the back sides through. Infuriating and I didn't realize it until about a year later when I suddenly had to scan a ton of stuff. If someone knows of a good workaround, I'd love to hear it.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Many PDF software (the stock scanning app on my Linux distribution, PDF24 and PDFSam for example) can let you merge two documents with alternating pages.

So I scan the stack, flip it over and scan it again. The flipped over ones are mixed in but I have to select reverse order to what was scanned. It works best on small stacks of 10 to 30 pages, you have to double check the page count for them to be the same. If the scanner mistakenly skips scanning one a good chunk of the doc ends up out of order.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In Linux I'm pretty sure you can do that directly with the scanning tool.

[–] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is it brothers fault that you bought something without checking if it has the features you need?

[–] maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah I mean who doesn't read up to page 630 of the manual and then interpret the lack of automatic 2-sided scanning to mean it won't even do manual 2-sided scanning, despite nearly every scanner on the market supporting that.

https://download.brother.com/welcome/doc100914/cv_hll3290cdw_use_oug_b.pdf

[–] Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My L3770CDW can. Maybe that's the difference between the two, we could never figure it out when we bought it.

[–] maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It is. There's a feature table in the manual and it's one of the glaring differences between the two. I never even thought to look into the details that closely, and even if it doesn't have the hardware to flip the paper around and scan the back, it should be a simple software feature to add.

For some big stacks I've just got the pair doc_front.pdf and doc_back.pdf and I was thinking about making my own stupid script to interleave the two docs into one.