Tell HN: Brother printers no longer consumer friendly | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Brother printers no longer consumer friendly

36 pointsSimonPStevens16 comments

I dislike the tactics many of the other printer manufacturers employ such as subscription services, DRM on cartridges, etc. I've always used and recommended Brother laser printers as they seem to largely not employ these non-consumer friendly approaches. They have always let you continue printing even when one cartridge was empty. I've always brought official cartridges out of respect for their business model.

But no longer. I have a newish Brother HL-L3230CDW, and it refuses to print because one colour cartridge is reporting as low. I've followed the reset instructions here [0] which has worked previously on this printer, but it doesn't any more. I don't know if it's a firmware update, or a limit to the number of resets it allows.

So tonight I'm unable to print a black and white document I need for work tomorrow because my yellow toner cartridge is reporting low. And I'm going to have to buy new colour cartridges despite very rarely printing in colour.

So I revoke any past recommendation of Brother I've ever made. I hope others stop recommending them too, the new ones are no longer functional. These printers are now as useless as the rest.

(Also - I'm looking for recommendations for actually decent colour laser printers)

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkgak9S1h7U

Doesn't make it any less frustrating, at least Brother could say something in the manual, but this may be the proximate cause.

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-your-printer-leaves-invisible-...

Yeah, I suspected this could be related. Additionally frustrating as I'd honestly not a massive fan of printer dot codes either.

Wow. I had no idea these yellow printing codes were required by the Secret Service.

I also have a color Brother printer. I switched the cartridge to monochrome years ago. Now I know whose to blame for using up all the yellow.

That's my suspicion, too, being that it's yellow that's empty.

Similar threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37825653

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I occasionally do see people recommending Brother printers on HN, but maybe they too are unaware that they're like the other printers.

Look first for cheap 3rd party color inks. Then get the printer (probably off eBay) that they support.

> And I'm going to have to buy new colour cartridges despite very rarely printing in colour.

I stopped buying color printers about 20 years ago because of this issue.

Monochrome forever!

I have a brother printer + scanner from 2016, because it's out of ink the scanner doesn't work.

Very bad thing to do to clients

Not sure if this trick still applies, or if it applies to your printer, but if you wrap the visible part of the cartridge with black tape the printer will think it's full and let you print.

Unfortunately it's not one of the transparent window ones. Nice when it used to work though.

Brother had denied this claim

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using...

I just print in office. Not many to print anyway.

Make sure when you hit print it actually says “black and white” and not color. If that doesn’t work just pull out the yellow and put it back in. It’s usually enough to print the page. Good luck

Details please.

Does the printer refuse to print, or does the operating system printing subsystem refuse to print?

What is your operating system?

Have you given Brother support an opportunity to respond?

Printer refuses to print. "Replace toner" message. Operating system does appear to submit to print queue. (Windows 10)

Printer toner indicator says Black is almost full (recently changed as I print mainly b/w), Cyan & Magenta are low, Yellow is empty and the one it complains about when trying to print.

I've continued messing with it for the last hour and even putting the printer into "black and white" mode, and changing the printer options in the OS to "Mono" it still refuses to print. Brothers own help page says it works [0], but I've followed these and it still doesn't print.

I've tried resetting the printer, updating the firmware and drivers, rebooting both printer and computer.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52457/s...

The yellow toner is needed to print the yellow steganographic dot pattern containing the printer serial number. My guess is that for Brother to comply with its agreement with the US Secret Service, the printer has to have yellow toner to print anything at all.

Also the wording in the Brother tech support article you linked to tells us how to print *using* only black toner, it does not say that this works when the color cartridges are empty. Sneaky bastiches!

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