Brother Printers Dirty Little Secret
I hate Brother printers.
A couple of years ago, I purchased a $400 Brother HL-4040CN colour laserjet printer. Prints great, but I hate that it lies to me about the printer being out of toner.
After a little while of using it, all three colour toner cartridge indicators started flashing that they were out of toner. That’s ok; I did get a lot of use out of them.
The thing that got me angry was, that the black toner was NOT empty, but the printer refused to allow me to print anything in just black. In other words, even though I had black toner, I had to spend over $200 to replace the colour cartridges before it would allow me to print using the black.
I refuse to be the victim of Brother Printer’s extortion, so for the last year, this printer has been a $400 paperweight sitting on my filing cabinet.
I’ve had dreams of finding a construction worker with legal access to dynamite, and creating a protest video of us blowing this printer to smithereens, rather than succumb to Brother’s demands that I spend a couple hundred bucks just to get the printer going again.
Then today I found something that made me even more certain I will never, EVER buy a Brother printer again:
Seems there is a hidden menu in this printer that allows me to reset the printer life. I found the information here: http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806#66
So by pressing a few buttons on my Brother printer’s menu I was able to re-set the “automatic end-of-life” settings on my toner cartridges. This information, of course, can be found nowhere in the printer documentation or on the Brother printer web site.
So not only did I find that yes I can print with my black toner, but the colour toner cartridges were NOT empty. I can print beautiful colour photos and documents, even though I did not spend the hundreds of dollars Brother printers tried to trick me into spending.
According to the fixyourownprinter web site, I can expect to get HUNDREDS more print outs.
And so now I have been looking at my Brother MFC-240C Colour inkjet printer, and did a search on that, and found instructions for blocking the ink cartridge sensors. That printer says its out of ink, but when you shake the cartridges, you can hear that they are at least half full. (I’m an optimist, or they’d be half empty).
So the moral of the story is, Brother Printers lies to their customers. DO NOT BUY BROTHER PRINTERS unless you enjoy being lied to, and being forced to replace ink or toner when they are not even empty.
If you want to know if your printer is “really” out of ink or toner, just go to Google and search on “reset toner indicator for _______” and replace the underline with your printer make and model. Or if it’s an inkjet printer, replace the word toner with ink.
Really sad when companies who’s names we are supposed to be able to trust, turn out to be con artists like Brother printers.
Anyone out there got some dynamite I can borrow?