[onyxringer]

There's already Brother, and fingers-crossed they will keep doing good job.

Please don't get distracted, Framework. What you're trying to do is challenging enough already.

Notably people will keep saying in every thread about HP that Brother exists, and I don't think Brother is dominating the market. At the end of the day if a ignorant customers keep buying garbage products, it's hard to help.

[offsky]

My brother laser worked great for years. Then I decided to save money and get generic toner. A week later my brother printer bricked itself. It won’t even turn on. Probably a coincidence, but still makes me angry.

[bestouff]

Coincidence. Mine has used generic toner for nearly 2 decades.

[tyleo]

Funny, I literally left a comment promoting Brother as you left this one. You speak the truth. :)

[MostlyStable]

Brother is enshittifying. They locked out non-OEM cartridges a year and change ago. Their hardware is good (for now), but their software practices are already to the point where I would instantly buy a Framework option and sell my current brother printer.

[MostlyStable]

Even though it is now more than a year since Brother did this, the vast majority of the comments about them are overwhelmingly positive, despite cartridge antics being the majority of the reason why people hate HP printers and others. I wonder how long it will take for their current status to fully penetrate the good will they built up from years of being the not-shitty option.

[resoluteteeth]

I think it will take a while for people to notice because Brother printers last so long, so most of the people praising them are using still printers they bought many years ago.

[happymellon]

My Brother laser must be approaching 10 years, and so from my experience I would completely recommend them.

However if they are really turning HP I could never recommend with a good conscious.

This is conflicting.

[kibibu]

I bought a brother laser printer last year, and it bricked itself when using third party ink. I have a printer shaped paperweight.

Solutions offered online are to use a knife to extract the chip from a genuine cartridge to stick on the new one.

[MostlyStable]

Yeah, I have an extremely sour taste in my mouth about them because their firmware update (which I didn't approve), disabled my non-OEM cartidge when it was only partway through.

Unfortunately, from an objective standpoint, I'm not sure there is anyone better to recommend. At least we can say that Brothers hardware is good and that, for the most part, it just works when trying to print. I've vertainly never had any issues with it _other_ than them forcing me to swap the DRM chip from my empty starter cartridge into my replacement non-OEM one (and, the fact that this is possible is a sort of half-mark in their favor? I guess?)

It's a shitty situation where I'd rather buy from a company that didn't do this but the entire product segment is so bad that I don't think it exists.

[emchammer]

Does this only apply to inkjet printers? I have noticed a number of firmware updates to my Brother black & white laser printer in the past year. I figured that those had to do with the integrated Internet services.

I recently bought a genuine Brother replacement toner cartridge, but that was locked out from my printer because the model number was off by one character or something. $65 lost, oops. There appears to be just a plastic tab on the cartridge keying it to the other model. I am not sure that I want to attempt pouring the toner into a compatible cartridge that I already have.

[resoluteteeth]

I don't think Brother has added drm in firmware updates like some other companies have (as far as I know) but all of their new laser printers have drm chips in the toner cartridges, so it's not just their inkjet printers.

[miah_]

I have a Brother Laser printer from ~2011 (HL-2280DW)that gets mad when I use non-oem toner. It still works, but it complains.

[JohnFen]

This is why Brother is on my do-not-buy list. Unless I can get an older one, anyway.

[jdboyd]

I don't know if this is part of some enshittifying or not, but at first my Brother MFC inkjet (purchased 2021) just worked. But then sometime last year I stopped being able to print from iOS or Android mobile devices and also started having to remove the drivers and reinstall them over and over on both Linux and Windows (and even sometimes macOS). My printer has has a fixed IP from the beginning, and I don't know what is changing, but it is really peaving me. I also was never able to get it scan to a SMB server either. At this point I starting to think of going with an Epson ecotank inkjet as my understanding is those don't enforce getting Epson ink. In the old days a printer might have a part break or wear out, but I never used to run into weird seemingly software problems after the first 2 years of use like I did with this and the Samsung before it.

[cyanydeez]

they're not ignorant, they're rich. _they dont need to discern a difference, money is all they need._