Brother laser printers are widespread suggestions for folks looking for a printer with not one of the nonsense. By nonsense, we imply printers suddenly bricking features, like scanning or printing, if customers set up third-party cartridges. Some printer corporations outright block third-party toner and ink, regardless of buyer blowback and lawsuits. Brother’s laser printers have traditionally labored high quality with non-Brother equipment. A YouTube video posted this week, although, in addition to older social media posts, declare that Brother has gone to the darkish facet and degraded laser printer performance with third-party cartridges. Brother tells Ars that this isn’t true.

On March 3, YouTuber Louis Rossman posted a video saying that “Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company.” The video, noticed by Tom’s Hardware, has 163,000 views as of this writing and appears to be based mostly on a Reddit post from 2022. In that publish, Reddit consumer 20Factorial stated that firmware replace W1.56 precipitated the automated coloration registration function to cease engaged on his Brother MFC-3750 when utilizing third-party cartridges.

“With the colours not in a position to be aligned, the printer is successfully non-functional,” 20Factorial stated. The Redditor went on to say that when requested, a Brother customer support agent confirmed that “the printer is non-functional with out real toner.”

Rossman created a Wiki web page breaking down the reported points, together with “printers proceed to operate with third-party toner however print at degraded high quality until OEM toner is put in.” He additionally famous that Brother printers routinely replace when linked to the Web and that Brother doesn’t provide older firmware variations to customers.

Brother’s response

Brother denied to Ars Technica that it deliberately bricks printer performance when customers set up third-party toner or ink. In an announcement, the corporate stated: