HP printers used to be among the best.
I had a HP Deskjet 500 that ran perfectly for 15 years across multiple PCs.
Now I would never buy or recommend HP printers to anyone. They have been fully enshittified to boost HP's profits.
I had a HP Deskjet 500 that ran perfectly for 15 years across multiple PCs.
Now I would never buy or recommend HP printers to anyone. They have been fully enshittified to boost HP's profits.
Other than that, the only things I didn't like about it were: (1) didn't seem to have an idle mode, so I had to turn on the power switch every time I wanted to use it, and manually turn it off after; (2) I like my electronics black.
When a fan (which seemed hard to replace) failed completely, I decided to part out the LJ 5. I netted money on eBay for some of the easy-to-ship parts, so at least it lived on.
I wonder whether the lights-dimming was original behavior. I don't know power circuits, but naively wondering whether some component had gone out of spec (resulting in, say, it charging a capacitor more quickly than it was supposed to), and so the unit was drawing more than it should've from the wall for an instant.
I have an old B&W MFC that I was thinking of maybe upgrading but to be honest I have to real reason to other than to get colour and maybe document feeding for scanning but I print so rarely that I probably won't now as Brother was going to be my one and only port of call for this.
When did this happen?! Can we get older versions still maybe?
No, new Brothers are fine. A while back where were a very few models that got a questionable firmware release. As I recall, they weren't common retail models. The firmware might have been a beta.
Brother got some crap for it, people circulated the IPs of their update servers (for blocking) and that was the end of it.
I regularly buy new Brothers for customers. They're fully fine.
During and after Carly's tenure, they made some dumb M&A moves, like spinning off their scientific instruments division, acquiring Compaq, and going all in on consumer electronics. Thus began their slow, but steady, enshittification.