Re: [PLUG] Off-topic Rant: Don't Buy Brother Products!

With the brother cartridges they actually have a wheel on the end that once fully rotated claims the toner is empty. You can reset that and use the rest of the toner but every company does things like that it's not just brother but atleast with brother I can spend 7 bucks to buy 2 refills instead of a new toner.

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015, 1:15 PM Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:

A month or so ago, my Brother DCP-7065 printer started giving me "Toner Low" error messages. I was pretty sure the toner was still good, but the printer refused to work and would only flash the toner low error.

I considered buying a new toner cartridge, but hesitated because (as we all know) a new cartridge is almost as expensive as a new printer.

I concluded that the printer was likely dead and a new cartridge might not fix the problem. If this theory was correct, a new cartridge would not fix the problem and would be a waste of $100. Instead, I bought an HP. (Brother's Linux support is hit or miss, anyway, although I generally like their equipment.)

This morning, I was reading on-line about laser printers and how they play games with the cartridges. They mentioned that a hard reset might clear the low toner, and even listed the button sequences to do the reset for a different Brother printer. A little googling and I found the sequence for my printer.

Luckily, I had not yet thrown away the printer (it was sitting in my e-waste pile). 10 minutes later, my old printer came back to life.

I am really ticked at Brother. The only good news is that they outsmarted themselves and lost a customer. They tried to trick me into buying another expensive cartridge, and instead I bought a competitor's product (that has aftermarket toner cartridges at half price).

So, to my friends at Brother, I say "Good riddance to bad rubbish"

Casey Bralla

Chief Nerd in Residence

The NerdWorld Organisation

www.NerdWorld.org
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