Canon is getting away with printers that won’t scan sans ink — but HP might pay

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 368 points –
Canon is getting away with printers that won’t scan sans ink — but HP might pay
theverge.com
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It's shenanigans like this that make me never want to buy a Canon or HP product. If I need a high end inkjet for printing photographs, it's Epson all day. For anything else, I swear by a good used bulletproof Brother.

Brother was good but I’m disappointed by the last units I had. After 4 years of light home usage (one page here and there), they are not picking up paper in the tray. Same for some relatives which bought similar units. Feels like scheduled obsolescence …

The printer might just need a maintenance kit done to it. Those rollers are meant to wear out over time.

Pretty much guaranteed. The rubber stops working as a function of time just as much as pages printed.

A maint kit is cheap and takes about 5 mins to install.

It is surprising they'd stop working after only occasional use. The rollers on my scanner are good for 30k scans.

You say "occasional use", I read "given time for dust to collect".

It's this. All the printers at my office started screwing up in 2022 after barely any usage from 2020-2022.

Like WagesOf said below, the rollers wear out over time and use. So even if you don't use them they do eventually just wear out.

If it's just that, then the rubber on the rollers had probably dried out. I had the same issue with a 10 year old HP inkjet. Some mg chemicals "rubber renue" worked great.

Sometimes a good cleaning of the rollers with rubbing alcohol will bring it back.

I had this same paper issue! I solved it by using heavier weight paper. I think it's just wear making parts looser. I think it just sincerely can't grab the cheap, thin sheets as well as it used to. If I were more mechanically minded, I'd be tempted to get in there and see if there was anything I could adjust. But just using heavier paper solved it, so I haven't gotten to the "if it doesn't work, force it; if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway" stage.

Brother printers aren't good and haven't been for a while, but they're cheap