Okay guys, you literally made me decide and go buy old Brother printer for $20. Didn't have a printer and didn't realize good printers can get so cheap on secondary market.
CMYK printing typically uses CMY only for black/grey generation up through a certain point. When I'm profiling my printer at work for transmissive printing, I can set that in the profile at about 50%; anything less than 50% gray is going to be CMY only.
And here's another fun fact; pure black ink (or toner) doesn't give you very good blacks. If you use only black when you're printing the darkest areas, you end up with a very washed out looking blacks. The best blacks are achieved with 400% ink coverage, using 100% of each ink channel.
Text is the only place where you can get away with only using black and still have it look good.
So I’ve come across enough comments to know that Brother is the way I’m supposed to go for document printing if I don’t want to deal with enshittification. What if I want to print photos though? I don’t think Brother covers me in that area.
My color laser from Brother prints photos well enough for most of my uses for quick off things. But if want an actually high quality photo, I use Walgreens or the like. My prior inkjets was only in between the laser and the professional qualities anyway.
yeah I lived at a shared house and somone abandoned an HP 1020 laser printer. a sheet in 2.5 seconds and the toner cartridge lasts for a fuckin year, and I print flyers for events
Ink is a liquid that is sprayed in tiny dots and dries onto the paper, while toner is a powder that gets attached to the paper with electrostatic forces using lasers, and then fused to it with heat! It's a super neat process.
And, generally speaking, ink is the stuff with a ridiculously draining business model which costs consumers far more than is justified for cartridges which quickly dry out over time even when not in use, while toner is relatively inexpensive stuff which basically lasts forever and keeps just as fresh and usable as the day you bought it.
After losing my third or fourth shitty inkjet since college in a recent move, I needed to print something and found myself once again browsing the Staples flyer.
Eventually decided to spend a bit more up front and just got a Brother color laser.
Now it sits there quietly in the corner for months at a time, doing nothing, until I need it, at which point it is always ready, fast, and has great print quality.
I found a small Dell B1160W at Goodwill for $5 new in box! Best little printer I've ever had and I'm still on the original toner cartridge. My only gripe is that it's wireless or USB. Would love to have wired LAN, but for $5 I can't complain!
Some routers have USB ports that support printers. Or, if you know Linux, you could set up a raspberry pi to make the printer available on the network.
I have an epson with the ink tanks on the outside and haven't had this problem, but also I'm not american and I'm pretty sure it's against my country's consumers law
if you just need to print documents and other boring stuff, get a bw laser printer.
my canon mf3010 still works pretty well, even after like 7 years of use.
Until you get a call from them saying the can of unused paint has passed it support date and you need to purchase a new one, but we don't sell those outright any more you need to get a $20/m subscription.
Thank you for calling HP Painters! We would be happy to complete your painting job for the low, low price of $200! That's the up-front cost, then just a small subscription of $100/month on a 10-year contract.
Thanks again for calling, you can send in your deposit of your first born child to
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It's for the purpose of serialization for counterfeit purposes. Also, high end copiers have a device installed called the BDU (Bill Detection Unit) that all scans pass through before being post processed. If the BDU detects a bill being scanned it can error and shut down the whole device until the manufacturer can send someone out to fix it. I used to be one of those people resetting BDUs at schools where a teacher thought it was a good idea to copy images of money for teaching students.
Or their corporate masters! Its not always just the government, you paranoid conspiracy nut! Take your meticulously cited sources and century of baroque acid fueled clandestine horror and go home!
Hold up... Was "Reality Winner" the name of an individual or a business? Like, I was stunned by the fact the yellow dots thing is a thing, but then it starts talking about "Reality Winner" and I can't move on until I know what's up with that name. lol
She is a former NSA translator who sent some classified documents to The Intercept. The Intercept failed to redact the document properly allowing the NSA to view identifying marks on the printout and track her down. I believe she has been release from prison.
feature originally intended as a deterrent to counterfeiting currency with laser printers.
Honestly, the USA is something special. So they do this, instead of putting modern anticounterfit (like polimer notes with transparencies) measures onto their notes.
Our notes have several anti-counterfeit measures. But it's pretty easy to print up money that won't pass scrutiny, but will be spendable at busy nightclubs and such. Well... It used to be easy. Now printer/scanners won't even work if they detect currency.
It's obvious, more ink used = more profit. The government get the tracking they want, the printer company is slightly more profitable due to extra ink usage, and the customers got fucked. Win-win!
I can't find the article I read, but if I recall correctly, they use patterns of minute variations in the power of the laser to cause a machine-detectable pattern to appear in the final printed output.
They also use microscopic yellow dot patterns. Black and white only prints use a microscopic grey print pattern at the print boundary. The technique is a form of steganography. They aren't tracking you btw. It gets used primarily to investigate fraud. Printer companies do it primarily because if they don't, their brand will become associated with print related crimes. There are lists of printers that do not do steganographic serialization but those machines are almost entirely too poor quality to produce any convincing counterfeits anyways.
People use any device or service they want. It's a mix of crooks, tinkerers, journalists, etc.
A company or government makes some moral panic and pushes some privacy or civil rights erosion in the name of "security". The actual security benefit may or may not exist.
Then other companies do the same to keep up.
Then there's only a handful of companies not doing the thing, so anyone who doesn't want their privacy or civil rights eroded uses that, including crooks.
Then politicians and the other companies point to the holdouts as "PROOF!" their changes were good, because look how many crooks use that stuff! (The number of crooks hasn't changed, they've just been concentrated to a single location.) The moral panic deepens.
The non-criminal population that cares about their privacy or civil rights speak out, but get accused of secretly being criminals, or some other crap that can be used to dismiss their concerns. "If you have nothing to hide, why are you so upset?" and all that.
Now laws get passed to force all companies to do the same thing, to stop the criminals! But let's not worry about anyone else. The tinkerers, journalists, privacy-advocates, etc. They don't matter.
The law gets passed, and now all toasters are legally required to record your breakfast conversations, for a silly example.
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