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points by xrd 18 hours ago | 0 comments

I keep searching for Brother printers at Goodwill because apparently they are the best for non-DRM cartridges.

But, when I use my little pocket friend (an AI called Gemini, perhaps you know him?) he often indicates that the printer I'm seeing is 12 years old, and probably has wear and tear on the rollers.

Does anyone know if this is true? I would really like to get a printer that avoids the cartridge cartels.

But, Goodwill is no longer really inexpensive, and they often don't let you return things if they are broken. I would pay $20 for a used printer, but the few Brother printers I found are always $69 or thereabouts.

[–] wildzzz 15 hours ago

Printers definitely do wear out. We had a very nice Canon for 10 years and slowly got out of alignment. There's a method to realign the print heads but it got to the point where it was beyond the adjustment limits. You could see the offset between the black and color inks in plain text. An interesting effect but not so much when you're trying to make something look good. Additionally, it would jam more often. The paper dust accumulation in the mechanisms seemed to be what was causing that. Everything went downhill as we were doing a lot of printing for our wedding and it was unfixable by the time we were done. It was a good printer, it deserved its place in Printer Valhalla.

Now we have a Brother that is also very nice but lacks the photo printing quality that the Canon had. We so rarely print photos anyway that it's just easier to send an order to CVS or Walgreens to have them do it.

[–] nekusar 18 hours ago

Yeah, Goodwill is pretty much a scam these days, for everyone either working for or buying from. It used to be better. Not great, but at least they used to serve the community.

And since they opened up their auction site (like an early eBay) it's just gone upside down stupid.

I'm also unsure how they even keep their 501c3 status.

[–] throwup238 17 hours ago

> I'm also unsure how they even keep their 501c3 status

There’s a special carveout in the law. As long as they’re only selling donated items, they can remain tax exempt (or to be precise, that income is not counted as “unrelated business income” so they can keep it under the nonprofit).

[–] sixothree 14 hours ago

I used to believe it was an ideal way to curb waste from consumerism via reuse. But the high prices force people into a decision that often ends with them just purchasing a new item, the exact discussion happening here.

[–] ragall 14 hours ago

Due to automation, the used market has gotten more efficient so places like Goodwill are no longer a good deal because they're selling their high value items (like good electronics or 4K Blu-ray discs) to various intermediaries.