submitted 9 months ago by crossmr@kbin.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Piracy adjacent here. We have a printer, colour laserjet, that is from another 'region', was a really nice printer and we bought it just before moving and decided to bring it. There is an equivalent printer here with the same cartridges but we've found out they're 'region locked'. Brand is HP/Samsung.

I was wondering if anyone knows if third party cartridges which work around the chip also work around the region protection? We can actually region reset our printer, however 2/4 toner cartridges still have quite a bit in them so we'd like to use those up completely before switching.

Anyone know much about this?

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[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 24 points 9 months ago

Brand is HP

Yup. You fucked yourself. HP printers are absolute garbage in every conceivable way. Genuinely not worth your time or effort to try and work around it.

Buy any other brand. Brother is usually the recommendation if you actually want quality that will last and be serviceable.

[-] ErwinLottemann@feddit.de 6 points 9 months ago

another +1 for brother. i have a bw laser printer from 2005 or 2006, still works fantastic.

[-] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

Another +1. Brother does make garbage printers in some cases, but their laser printers have been great.

[-] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Another another +1 here. Does that make it +3 now?

We don't print a ton so we bought a basic monochrome Brother laser printer/scanner and used the included demo toner cartridge for almost two years. When that ran out, we swapped it for one big knockoff toner cartridge over four years ago and it's still printing like a champ.

Pro tip: if a Brother printer says it's out of toner, it's only estimating this based on the number of pages printed. You can override it (at least in every model I'm familiar with) and keep on printing.

[-] crossmr@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

It wasn't an HP printer when I bought it, it was samsung, and it's a very good printer.

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago

But I'm guessing HP bought out that particular line of printers; they then would have pushed a firmware update to make those just as bad as their own offerings. They make their money forcing you to use their cartridges; that's why a whole printer with both cartridges is only ~$10 more than just the ink most of the time.

Seriously, cut your losses and move on.