I bought a $400 brother laser printer MLC 9 something or other around 9 years ago. All I have ever had to do is replace the toner as needed and the drums once. It accepts 3rd party cheap toners, you just have to know how to open it, hold down the "*" key on the dial pad (built in fax machine and scanner), then go through the options to manually reset the ink level display.
Epson and HP were always the worst, using ID chips to prevent you from using 3rd party cartridges while telling you they were empty when in fact there was still 30% left in them. And that's when they weren't getting emptied in forced unecessary head cleanings/calibrations.
What sad sack of a human devotes their career to writing such anti- human code?
The hand rubbing tribe.
The one thing I wish I could disable from ALL printers is the invisible code using yellow ink. Even if I'm printing in all black (high capacity cartridge) the yellow is going to run out first.
I don't even have to press * on my brother printer, I just swap them out and it just works. I upgraded from an hp laserjet before they had issues. Thing is ~15 years old now.
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