If anything, printers today are worse than they used to be in the 90s. For example, I don’t remember chips preventing you from using third party ink being a thing back then. So I believe the printing
industrymafia has been spending those decades adding antifeatures to their designs.And IMO it highlights how much we [society in general] need open hardware.
The old tractor-feed dot matrix printers never had great print quality, but they were built like tanks.
Absolutely.
Google used to be better as well. And Reddit. And… well, enshittification affects everything, not just tech, but printers and food containing micro plastics and everything else we can buy.:-(
We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.
So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.
Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.
This is for color laser printers only, and is not a legal requirement as far as I can tell. Manufacturers were urged by the US government to add it, but it is not a written law.
This is not why printers are terrible. Printers are terrible because they don’t follow a standard protocol.
I wonder if my sister still has in the attic, the Brother printer I found near the garbage bin and fixed… track that, feds.
I’ve had good experiences with Brother laser printers. The price tag is higher than an inkjet printer’s, but the cost over time is far less, and they keep working.
(FWIW, mine have all been black & white. I can’t vouch for color laser printers.)
The best laser printer is a Brother laser printer from 10+ years ago before the cartridge subscription bullshit.
I landed one for $5 on Craiglist and have it connected through a CUPS server so I still have the modern ability to print from any device on the network.
