habitualcynic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
According to Brother and covered list in Arstechnica, it’s not true.
I know we shouldn’t take the manufacturer at their word, but reading the Ars comments, there’s a lot of reasons why third party toner would cause problems on their own and Brother can’t support trying to fix another company’s product in their own.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 weeks ago
I don’t know, man. Maybe it is lies. Cory Doctorow and Louis Rossman are not just random idiots on YouTube, but they are just as susceptible as anybody to reading some hearsay and repeating it.
On the other hand, the claims are very specific. “When you install third party toner, on this particular model of Brother printer, it stops respecting the calibration settings meaning that your colors are misaligned and color prints will look weird.” That’s pretty verifiable. It doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s also actually not directly contradicted by anything in the Ars article. The article just says that Brother said you can use third party toner. Which everyone (as far as I saw) was agreeing that you can. Your prints will just look bad, after a particular firmware update, for reasons that are completely separate from any theoretical issue with the toner being third party.
IDK. I will not claim to know the truth here. But I’m not convinced by what I have seen so far that the story is definitely bullshit. And the whole thing of sidestepping the issue of “the printer starts refusing to apply color calibration”, and just talking in generalities, is also a little suspicious. That has nothing to do with third party toner being lower quality or something.
habitualcynic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah I definitely have to agree there. I don’t want to side blindly with a manufacturer, but I like how you said it about the YouTubers being just as susceptible as anyone else to falling for hearsay.
I will try a third party toner on my Brother when it finally needs a refill to see. Looks like I’ve been running the newer firmware a long time but haven’t had to refill toner since well before. Might as well be moot with how rarely I print lol