My wifi printer apparently changes its IP address quite often, and then my Ubuntu Linux installation loses track of it. It's really easy to fix though: I just reinstall the printer driver. In fact, it's so easy that WHY THE F*** DOESN'T UBUNTU DO THIS AUTOMATICALLY?!?!?
how hard would it be to take a standard off-the-shelf printer and replace its controller board?
it's not like you can put DRM on a motor. and let's be honest, sourcing the parts for a printer is the real hard part. programming it/figuring out how to drive it is hard, sure, but it's just firmware, anyone can download it off the internet.
you wouldn't buy printer parts. but you can buy a microcontroller and download firmware.
Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man
MAN
Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race
Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating
EDIT 2023-11-27 2130 UTC: I muted this thread a while back because wew lad this got too big. I won't see your reply but the lurkers (and commentors) of Hacker News might.
Yeah, definitely stay away from ink spitters. They just don't provide good value compared to laser printers.
I once bought a perfectly acceptable brand new small laser printer for $50. To me, that was when the laser printer market hit it's peak.
That was a Samsung, and I had bought a few other Samsung laser printers (some introduced at $400 and dropped to $180). Unfortunately for consumers, HP bought Samsung's printer division and turned it into crap.
The last printer I considered buying was a Fuji-Xerox. That was for an employer that had an $800 all-in-one that was reaching end-of-life. For $3000, I could have assembled a unit that would have allowed the company to bring its outsourced document production in house and add OCR capability to scan hardcopy archives that were piling up. (They instead spent more to lease an older machine that took up more of the already-cramped office.)
Embedded in the pavement outside the Ramshorn Theatre on Ingram Street in Glasgow is this somewhat enigmatic flagstone. It's a reminder of a time when the neighbouring Ramshorn Cemetery was larger and marks the last resting place of Robert and Andrew Foulis, both of whom died in the 1770s.
The Foulis brothers not only ran one of Glasgow's first book shops (opened in 1741, some ten years before John Smith opened his), but also ran the much-respected Foulis Press and were printers for the University of Glasgow.
IDK, I've only used HP printers for about 30 years now.
Set up/installation of HP printer has always been the simplest & easiest, even going back to the 80's and all of the HP printers I've owned have lasted a very long time. The current one I have is about 10 years old and still working fine.
The ink cartridge tie-in is a rip-off but what other choices do you have, if you're "old school" like me and still feel the need to print stuff? 🤷♂️
I thought about buying an Epson EcoTank on the theory that I'd save $ on ink but, after reading a lot of negative reviews about the line, I decided against it, at least until my current HP printer dies.
I own a HP LaserJet Pro M12a, and the most confounding thing about it is, outside of Ubuntu, it is seemingly unusable.
Windows? No drivers, not even a website for driver downloads.
openSUSE Tumbleweed using HPLIP? Doesn't exist.
Get the foo2zjs PPD file in a Debian package, seemingly the only place left in the universe to retrieve it? Printer refuses to work as if out of principle alone.
Ubuntu virtual machine with USB passthrough, it Just Works™️. The cursed thing is installed into its subsystems as if you had Miles O'Brien, the most important person in Starfleet history working on your machine.
It was faster downloading Ubuntu 23.04 and installing it as a virtual machine than trying to get it working natively.
A judge has ruled that a class action suit against #HP over its all-in-one #printers can proceed. The printers obnoxiously disable their document scanning and fax-sending capabilities when the printer's ink is low, even though those features don't require ink.
that's how fast can it go... I hate #Printers but I like it when people who never done anything with electronics, manage to fix their crap with cheap tools and a lot of patience.
We have here a Samsung printer which flashed the orange warning light while turning on and it shutdown again.
My friend decided to try and repair it and found this lil rocket.
He replaced it with a new capacitor and the printer was working again.
Internet, do ink tank based #inkjet#printers suffer from the same problems that cartridge based inkjet printers have? I.e they dry out and then waste half a cart cleaning themselves?
I assume the ink isn't DRM protected and I can use 3rd party ink just fine?
I need a new printer, and also want to experiment with dye-sublimation printing, but don't want a printer that won't work half the time.
If you buy an #HP#printer and sign up for the optional HP Plus #service, you'll get a #firmware#update that will FORCE you to #purchaseonly new HP #ink cartridges — for the life of your printer. And once that firmware update happens, there is no way to undo it.