The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created.
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
I also recommend your version. Had it for years. Changed the toner once. It’s been in storage for a year in hot Houston, moved cross country three times in a uhaul and gone months between prints. Just used it the other day to print a pumpkin stencil, prior to that printed immigration docs, 100+ pages in March.
No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
I use my Brother MFC-2740DW more for scanning than I do for printing. It does a great job with Apple's Image Capture on my Mac either using the document feeder or the flatbed.
What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long.
I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you.
We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
I sent my first brother back after I realised I misread duplex printing/vs duplex everthing. It's so handy to just dump a pile of pages in the ADF and let it chew through it all (when I was at uni with handouts etc, book extracts)
I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
I'm wary of multi-/omni-function printers (driver support for printers is bad enough and I don't want to spend a year's worth of PTO figuring out which particular unicorn multi-function will work with all the devices I currently have on hand), so I have a brother B&W laser (from a ~decade ago, still perfect, still works across all my platforms) and a fujitsu scansnap ix500.
the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi.
the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
I bought a Lexmark e232 back in 2006 for a mere €120. Fifteen years later and the damn thing works like a charm. It's not just HP that made high quality products.
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
I had a LaserJet 4 too, and I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here. I have a Brother DCPL2550DW that I got for $130 when the pandemic started and it's been better than the LaserJet 4 ever was in the following ways: more reliable (not a single jam), duplex printing out of the box, much cheaper, built-in networking (both Ethernet and WiFi), uses a modern interface (USB) that modern computers actually have ports for, built-in combo flatbed/feed tray scanner, better/more intuitive buttons on the printer, faster printer speed, and high enough data throughput to max out its print speed even for complicated pages. For a bit more money you can get a version of this that does duplex feed scanning as well (it wasn't worth it for me but it was for troydavis in one of the sibling comments).
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
> I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here
That may be anecdotal based on brand and model. I can agree with you in this case because I've got the Brother DCP-L2540DW. I got it on sale for $99 CAD (~$75 USD) when it was still the newest model available. I'm using the stock cartridge still, though I have a refill purchased and ready to go in case it's not possible to buy one when the original powder runs out.
This line of Brother printers is indeed good. It's impossible to say whether this applies generally to any laser printer, or to any Brother laser printer, or if we were simply lucky to have picked up these particular models.
Not sure of the exact model, but we had a brother laser printer at my old work. A few of them actually. They were fairly reliable most of the time. It would jam occasionally and figuring out errors with it was sometimes frustrating. But i never really hated them or have any ill feelings towards them the way i do with other printers.
I think I got it on the same sale. It was at Staples, I think, right?
But mine didn’t have a good life. It still works, but has a super weird issue where if you sent it more than a few pages it’ll hang with an error message needing a restart. Sending many pages as individual jobs is fine though.
Yeah the LJ4s jammed a lot. And they were real ozone generators. And would hold up the queue every time someone specified the wrong paper type "INSERT LETTER"
But I loved them because you could send a message to their screen with a PCL command. Even many of the matter models can still do this. I had so much fun with that.
> The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
...which is why I wrote "considering the time in which it was created"
I have a Brother duplex color laser printer connected to the network here at home and it's been reliable but I don't use it heavily so I don't know if moderate use would have broken it by now or not.
> HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
"The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. "
"The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[8]"
There are simple pull-tabs to remove them. The alternative is a hard shell (which decreases the space available for energy storage)... or letting the battery flop around inside the unit, I suppose.
Gluing something in instead of using screws is just faster and cheaper to manufacture.
And if it's a product like a phone that 90% of the customers will replace with a new one in just a few years, the large majority of customers actually won't care.
In some cases the effect is indirect but equally likely to be achieved somewhat on purpose. If I am under pressure to cut costs and I fire my QE team, I didn’t do it explicitly to achieve planned obsolescence, but I’ll get that result anyway. There won’t be anything on paper saying “we want quality to go down”, but everyone involved will just know what the game is.
I think, based on the other comments here, and my experience with my own Brother printers... I think they are the "less clever" people building reliable printers.
This advice has been good for the last 12 years or so. I never install their drivers; I just tell CUPS that there's a Brother in PS mode with a duplexer at a particular IP address, and then there's no further issue.
I still have an HP Laserjet 4 series printer with network card. I bought it 10+ years ago on Craigslist for $40 which included toner in it. I love it! Has two 500 page (1 ream) trays. That toner lasted a few years. Bought more toner that lasted 5+ more years. Bought another toner cartridge. Finally starting to look at replacing it with a multi function color laser printer.
Back when I used to do IT work, close to ten years ago, the HP LaserJet 4 and I want to say both the 3000 and 4000 were always the printers I was happiest to see when I walked into a new client’s office. They seemed to last forever, they broke the least frequently, their drivers were the easiest to install and the most stable. It’s both wild to me and not totally unsurprising that so many people have fond memories for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were still squeezing life out of theirs!
My nearly a decade old hp laser printer is chugging along nicely and in addition to my work related printing, has handled multiple kids going through middle, high school and college including snapchat picture wall phases!! On first set of toner cartridges.
> The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs.
My parents still have an HP LaserJet 4 series printer. As long as you are just printing text that thing generally works great (some PDFs seem to max out the buffer and take forever to print). It will be interesting to see how long their much newer HP all in one laserJet lasts in comparison.
Still running our LaserJet 5si on the network for 11x17 pages. Been out of service (maintenance contract) for years, but it's still working fine with some light cleaning.
I know someone still using a LaserJet 1100. Looks like it might be from 2002? She can still find toner for it, and adding a PCIe parallel port was enough to get the printer working in Windows 10.
You seem to be saying contradictory things... if printer quality has decreased so that printers now break quickly, wouldn't that make a second-hand one a really bad idea?
> Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
The HP8150DN was also awesome. It had extra's that could tack, sort, duplex, multiple trays for odd papersizes and a massive, massive 3000 (?) page bay.
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
If the US Secret Service went to printer and copier manufacturers, and convinced them all to make forensic markings, that's not collusion by the manufacturers.
I might have mistakenly said that date because plans have been difficult to keep track of. We have a cruise scheduled for May but nothing is written in stone. Our last trip was a short road trip in February.
Hardware is notoriously hard and there are so many moving parts where something can go wrong.
The real world is also messy and so many variables can lead to a failure. It's astonishing that we can print so easily most of the time, let alone send someone in space unharmed.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018. It's killer feature is third party ink support - cartridges can be reset and refilled and inks that are good enough can be bought in bulk.
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
If that is the only problem, wouldn't laser printers have fixed it? There's a ton of other things that don't work, e.g. paper jams. With the multi-function devices this gets even worse.
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
Paper jams are also related to use. Paper is dimensionally unstable. It swells and shrinks with changes in humidity. In a stack of paper the exposed top sheet will change more than the sheet below it. The edges of each sheet will change more than the center. Additionally paper has a grain structure and expands more in one axis than the others. Humidity also changes the thickness of paper.
That’s the nature of paper. Most people, and for a long time I was one of them don’t have a good working model of paper as a material. In part because mechanical printing was not common until thirty years ago. In part because in the first part of the PC revolution printing was more an everyday thing since online publishing was rarely a viable alternative.
After I wrote my previous comment, I fleshed out an idea it touches on tangentially.
Printers are not computational artifacts. Little more so than a dishwasher with a microprocessor. Though we tend to think of them as part of a computer, they act directly in meat space. Directly on paper with ink or toner.
Laser printers are less reliable because we print less. The old workhorse printers were workhorse printers because they were used so heavily that paper didn’t have much time to swell in bad ways.
There are printing methods that are good for infrequent use. Fanfold paper tractor fed through an impact printer is nearly bulletproof and dies gracefully as the ribbon ink depletes. But they are noisy, bulky, slow, feature poor, and inflexible. However most understand ESC2 and writing control software is accessible from any language that can send bytes to a port.
I took a tour of HP's Boise test lab [1] a few years ago, and the biggest take-away from that for me was that (in their opinion) paper quality is one of the biggest factors in printer reliablity.
The test lab includes lots of neat things: an RF chamber, acoustic chamber (in a dedicated separate vibration-isolated building), a couple climate simuation rooms (humid, cold), a bunch of robot arms that open/close drawers or use touchscreens/keypads. (Here's a 5-min video tour [2] of it if you're interested.)
Despite all that they were quite proud of their a massive inventory of paper from all over the world and testing they did with it. This included environmental (humidity/temp) testing after acclimatizing the paper for several days. They even went out of their way to get paper mills to custom create some of the crappiest papers they'd run across. I think the explanation was basically poor quality, rough paper leaves particles all over everything and causes rollers, drums etc to wear out faster.
Depending on your usage, it's at least worth considering when you're buying paper and looking at saving a few dollars on the cheaper stuff.
In 1992 I bought an HP Inkjet 550c. In 1994 HP sent me a roller cleaning kit and a floppy to run it. Basically a scotch pad scrubby for the paper pickup rollers.
It was the last great HP product I bought. The sound it made was magical. It was still well working after ten years when I gave it to a non profit administrator who lacked a printer. The 600 series printers I specked and bought for the office in 1995 banshee howled by comparison...though nothing like a dot matrix.
Thanks for sharing, this looks like an interesting place. I understand that it's challenging, I just don't think it's unsolvable given there is sufficient of a market for people to complain.
You won't get the same up to spec paper and humidity around the world, the printer should handle that and I think there are people willing to pay a premium on the hardware if they now it's going to play nice for the rare use in many years.
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
I have a brother MFC-J6520DW scanner/printer. It is inexpensive and I bought it mainly for its large format scanning capability.
Problem #1: I don't use it much. But every night (or two?) it does a self cleaning cycle which uses up some ink apparently. Despite saying the ink cartridges saying "500 prints", I might actually make 50 pages before it runs out of ink after a few months.
Problem #2: I only ever need it for black and white, yet I have to buy expensive color cartridge sets as it refuses to print B&W pages if it is out of color. And it runs out of color despite my not using it because of problem #1 above.
Problem #3: After it gives the ink low warning, if I ignore it for a while until it actually starts making splotchy prints, when I put the new ink cartridges in, I have to literally print dozens of test pages before the quality is acceptable again. I have no idea what is going on there. By that time the B&W cartridge will report it is at 60% capacity.
Once this set runs out in a few months, I've already decided to get a monochrome laser printer, and regret not doing it long ago.
The copyright on the 750c manual is 1997. It was a different era. The printer market was in a different place. And HP was a different company. Occasional home use is not the market segment it was twenty plus years ago. My 550c didn’t clog either.
One of the the big changes is inks print and dry faster. Those early inkjet inks needed thirty seconds or so to dry and similar times to print...at best - a full page of color in the 1990’s was minutes per page.
Razor-blade economies. It's most consumers who suck because they didn't wise-up to DRM, giveaway printers, ink drying-up, and expensive ink and instead get a used flagship laser printer. Convenience store vs. Costco or Staples Business Advantage.
From my own experience (my own history with printers and of those of the people around me who I've done pc clean ups for in the past) I fell that it's all down to the fact that consumer grade printers are built down to a price, often to the point where the profit lies in the ink refills and with inkjet printers consumer printers are not used enough to prevent them from drying out in between prints.
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
Yeah it does click when in standby / low power mode. I do the same and just power it down when its not in use. These days its only used once in a blue moon so its not really a bother to me. But yeah if someone was going to have it on 24/7 so its ready to go at a moments notice, I would recommend rigging up some kind of remote power management for the power supply (Not that I recommend any buying a 17 year old printer model).
Do they really? I can't remember the last time I had a printer problem, and I print a lot. Printer hardware and software have gotten a lot better since 10 years ago.
Exactly. Try to print every other month, and very different tasks - scanned images of cashier's receipts, color pictures a toddler drew in MS Paint, pages 87-112 from SICP, Bing Maps directions, an ASCII text from from a flash drive and the likes.
Sometimes you have to reset printer (with a button). Sometimes to cycle power off-on. Sometimes to download whatever's needed from a browser in a form of a PDF. Sometimes nothing works, and only by pure luck you can do something - not always - when completely misremembering steps which led to the printing.
I have a Brother entry level laser printer, first printer in years that I've liked. Will never buy an inkjet again, there is something inherently flawed with that technology.
I was about to say the same thing... It is really completely amazing how wide the gap is between standard, cheap ink jet and cheap Brother laser. Seriously do yourself a favour and just switch. Your sanity will thank you.
It's that Japanese engineering shit... my Brother label makers were a gift from a hackathon and one of them was a used on that had like 30,000 pages run through it. Powered it up, paired it through bluetooth, ran a perfect page through it.
I have used Brother MFC laser printers for over 10 years and I don’t hesitate to recommend them. Cheap enough to throwaway if they break, but otherwise the software stays out of your way.
The built in brother webconnect capability is nice to scan an OCR’d pdf directly to your dropbox/drive/box/one drive account. Too bad it doesn’t work with iCloud.
I have an Epson P900. Inkjet. 17x22” archival pigment prints at 1440 dpi. Paper feed isn’t the best ever but it’s usually not a problem. Inkjet is sublime and amazing.
I have a Canon Pixma Pro-100. Not quite as fancy but it does an amazing job. I've been using cheap matte photo paper for the few color documents I need and that works pretty well. It uses far less ink than I expected. It's cheaper to run than the terrible Epson photo printer it replaced.
There's nothing inherently flawed with inkjet printers. There are very good ones out there; look up something like the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000. You're using an overly broad brush to unfairly tar the entire technology based on your experience with the very worst cash-grab implementations of it. It'd be like saying smartphones as a technology suck because a $50 piece of junk Chinese Android performs terribly.
Inkjet isn't really a home office printer tech. It's a "super high quality photo" tech. If you got a cheap inkjet for black and white document printing then you bought the wrong thing, plain and simple. Cheap inkjets aren't suitable for any purpose; they should just flat out be avoided, like all those really cheap no-brand Chinese electronics on Amazon/Wish.
No, inkjets are an inherently flawed technology. The nozzles dry out and clog up. If you use them infrequently, you'll use more ink for cleaning than you do for printing.
They're not "inherently flawed". Color laser doesn't come close to the same high quality photo prints. If printing high quality prints is something you regularly do then inkjet is your only option.
It's not that the technology is inherently flawed, it's that way too many people are buying them for document printing when they should instead be getting laser printers. Inkjets are much more of a niche specialty product.
There have been so many horror stories about inkjet printers that I went directly from dot matrix printers to lasers in the mid-1990's. I have never been disappointed.
The last printer I purchased was a Brother. Some people criticize them for the quality, but they seem to be fine for home and small office use. They don't play games with toner and are reasonably compatible with whatever you throw them on to.
Yet you do have to be careful when choosing lasers. Some vendors seem to use the same approach as inkjet printers when it comes to supplies, and it affects both consumer and corporate models. I also recall doing a fair bit of research on Brother printers to ensure I ended up with a good (but inexpensive) model. That being said, at least there are options.
High-end ink is fine, just expensive. Both for the printer, AND for the inks.
You cannot reproduce photo-quality prints with just 4 colors (cmyk). Your high-end photo-level printers use 10 or 12 inks, with far higher resolution than a typical $200 Brother printer.
But if you're only doing office work / text / etc. etc., laser is great. Even mild graphics (diagrams mainly) work out fine with laser prints.
--------
The typical $200 ink printer however, is complete garbage.
I found we just went through ink like nobodies business. We don't print all the time (typically 3-4 times a year), and it would be sufficient gap that between prints we'd find the ink cartridges had dried up or just stopped working. No amount of cleaning runs would get it to flow smoothly again. It was getting stupid expensive to keep buying ink.
I bought a multi-function HP Laser printer a couple of years ago and haven't looked back (although we started having to print more and more frequently as our kids have got older). It's one of those devices that "just works" now. Even Linux automatically detects it on the network and configures itself for printing.
To add my voice to this, sure it’s nowhere near the quality of the super fancy laser printer at work, but for home use the brother laser printer I got (entry level) has been absolutely fantastic. At this point literally the only printer I’m not scared to recommend to friends when they ask.
That explains cheap hardware but doesn't explain why the software is as bad as it is. Amortized over any large hardware vendor's product line the per-unit cost of investment in the software has got to be nothing.
My experience is that hardware companies are almost universally bad at software. I can only guess it's because the hardware guys are treated like rockstars and the software guys are treated like a necessary evil.
This applies to pretty much any other computer-related thing sold to non-tech people. They either don't care or don't have the skills to judge the quality, so a better quality but more expensive product will always lose in favour of the cheapest crap.
There is no incentive to improve printers now simply because it is clear that they are on their way out. I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
You probably will if you need to RMA anything in the US. Just had to RMA to Lenovo and Amazon recently and both required me to print out a shipping label.
Amazon RMAs these days can optionally involve carrier pickup, and the carrier brings a premade thermal label with them. You just need to put it back in the box it came in.
Last year I bought an HP OfficeJet 8720 and it's a pretty amazing bit of hardware for $300. Yes, ink is expensive but I don't have to print that often so it's not a big deal.
I use a printer less and less, but I don't think I'll ever not need one in my lifetime.
I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
So between today and the end of your life, you will never sell anything online? Or never for the rest of your life send something you already own to someone else? You need a printer to print shipping labels, unless you take the item somewhere to be professionally packed and shipped.
I moved recently, and printed out the USPS form to change my address so that I didn't have to pay the fee to do it online.
I also had to print and mail a form to get a ballot mailed to me for today's election. In my state, this can only be done with a signed document, not online.
I don't limit my life experience to things that are online, so about once a month I use a printer to print envelopes to send checks for things that I buy over the phone. Sent one out today to a store in Seattle that deals in a specialty good my wife likes, but has no online presence.
According to the New York Times, there are top-end restaurants that only take reservations by letter. Not via an app. Not online. Not even via telephone.
I know interesting people who live in places beyond the reach of the internet. I write letters to them a couple of times a year.
Four of the last six property purchases I've made in the last few years involved printing and mailing forms. Not every government office in every county in every state is online. And very often legal forms have to be notarized. You can't do that online.
If you choose to live a simple life, you may never need a printer. If you choose to do more, then it's good to have one stashed away for when you need it.
While their use is hopefully dwindling, I expect there will be a long tail.
In my household, the printer gets used for a couple of things. The first is sheet music. Musicians are starting to use a big tablet screen, with a foot pedal to turn the pages, but adoption will be slow. Musicians seem innately impatient with technologies that don't just work instantly when you pull them out of the box.
The other thing is documents to read for school, which is still more ergonomic when done with paper.
At the office, I suspect nobody needs to print any more, because nobody reads any more. I can't count the number of times I've hit "send" on a report that I was supposed to write, and a manager will be in my cube a few minutes later asking me if I could just summarize it for them. The first paragraph in the report is a summary.
Tablets are well and good for reading sheet music, but I can't imagine scribbling rehearsal notes / markings on a tablet in a way that's not infuriating.
Get a monochrome laser or LED printer, if you can. Brother (my current favorite), Kyocera, whatever. They are generally quite good if you can limit your printing to text and b/w diagrams.
The problems start when you want to print color and photos.
Brother printers always suck in weird ways. I had one that had a thousand settings for things but not one controlled the volume, duration or existence of a loud, long beep when you opened the paper tray. That would be fine but single feed sheets never came up straight, so checks had to go in the tray each time.
I had to buy the first printer I’d ever owned this year due to switching to wfh indefinitely. Got the Brother HL-1110 just since it was the cheapest laser printer available here. It is a ridiculously austere and brutalist design, it really feels like they were optimizing out every penny on the BOM. It should be utter trash. In practice it prints fast, with good quality, and I have not had any trouble with it. It’s like the Citroen 2CV of printers.
So I find it hard to believe that printers really suck. Even the worst case was actually quite wonderful.
The trick is to buy a laser printer. Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time. Laser does not suffer from this problem.
My color laser printer has been working well for years now! Each toner cartridge lasts at least 1000 pages (current winner in my printer is black with 1553 pages). It is a little slow to load big documents but I don't see any need to upgrade any time soon. Wifi was really the latest beneficial technology.
Ditto, I picked up a Samsung CLP-620ND in 2010 and it's still going strong. I get about 5000 pages on a black cartridge, about half that on the colors, and it's time for a transfer belt but I think I can probably clean the old one and get a few more years out of it.
I have the same one. Haven’t had any issues with it. I don’t know when I originally bought it, but according to my records, I purchased toner cartridges in 2012, 2015, and 2020. The usage report says I’ve printed 6,111 pages. It has been a fantastic product.
Spot on. Have a laser printer since 2010 and the only thing apart from toner that I had to buy for it was a drum about 2-3 years ago. Not even buying branded toner. Only from Aliexpress.
One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
... although I was disappointed recently by my usual go-to of the Brother brand. Their Linux/CUPS drivers are some sort of bizarre concoction of Perl scripts and x32 binaries... and still cannot print in duplex :/.
(I believe the duplex problem is probably a typo somewhere in the PPD or Perl script, but I don't know enough about PPDs and/or Perl scripts to be sure. I do know programming, hence my suspicion.)
Lesson is: Research if the EXACT printer you're purchasing is supported by the usual Gutenprint or whatever.
Brother drivers are every bit as crap as every other brand.
I have one of their all-in-one office machines. It prints pretty well. The wireless scan is complete garbage. A known issue with their drivers, apparently.
Warning: HP has bought Samsung printer division few years ago. As a result, there are HP-branded printers that are really Samsung inside, and they need the uld driver, which is binary-only abandonware. So caveat emptor.
Not sure whether there is any systematic way to identify them.
I've been looking for a cheap b/w laser for my parents and have found HP LaserJet 135/135w. It looked very familiar, and behold, it is a rebranded Samsung SL-M2070w that I have in the office.
Hardware-wise, it is actually a nice printer. Software-wise... It works in Linux, but you have to install the binary-only uld driver. For MacOS it is more interesting: printing is not a problem, scanning in B/w is also OK, but scanning in Image Capture/Preview in color into PDF produces garbage output. What works is scanning in color into TIFF, then stitching and reexporting into PDF manually. The alternative, the EasyScan Samsung software no longer works in Catalina, it has 32-bit components.
Edit: from the ppds in the driver package, they are:
I wonder if that's why our Samsung color laser failed? Never used anything but genuine Samsung cartridges, but the blue cartridge developed a leak that we just couldn't get rid of. Replaced with a Canon B/W that has been rock solid.
The Brother printers I've used all support IPP, which works great from Linux or any other operating system. I would discourage buying a non-IPP printer in any case.
My recently bought inexpensive Brother printer worked with CUPS without any special drivers, thanks to the IPP support. I just connected it to the network and it's automatically discovered and supported.
On MacOS, our wireless Brother won't wake up without the official drivers installed in the Mac. Dunno what magic packet it's sending, but I couldn't get it working with generic drivers. Ymmv, obviously.
... and I believe it. Unless you researched it heavily that was just good luck, honestly. Your printer has a good OSS driver, and it worked. Mine did not, even though I thought Brother was generally OSS-friendly. :(
Well, at least the binary (x32!, if you can believe that) driver basically works, but no duplex... which is sad because I bought said printer because it had the duplex capability :/
Good information! I may try this tonight. I like everything about my Brother laser printer except that I have to have an old computer sitting next to it that does almost nothing but print stuff.
I've got mine networked with an old Orange Pi using some old cell phone charger plug running the brlaser driver and it works great. Before that, I'd always have issues between Mac/Windows/Linux for seemingly no good reason. I'm glad brlaser came around.
I had that problem. Then I realized that it is just a generic pcl printer and any driver will work. I do have to manually change the queue from binary_p1 to pcl_p1, but other than that it just works. (there are other queues in the printer for postscript and the like, the printer info page lists them all.
Laser printers are better in so many ways. Just make sure that they are not placed too closely next to your desk or in rooms where you spend a lot of time in since they can emit toner dust and volatile compounds that could potentially be harmful to one’s health over a long period of time.
Seriously? If that is true, how have the manufacturers not gotten sued into oblivion?? This seems like the kind of thing that would be easy to prevent and a liability nightmare if you don't, so I doubt the companies would sell that kind of product.
In Germany at least, companies are not allowed to put the printer in 'busy' areas. Starting from a certain company size, a seperate room may even be required. I believe particulates are explicitly given as a reason for this.
I'm also not sure how this would be 'easy' to prevent, without adding a whole sealed enclosure around the printer.
Because the danger of fume is negligible. It's a thing if you put it in a 2m^2 storeroom and sniff the exhaust for 8 hours straight but in any other case it doesn't come close to concentrations you get on the street anyway.
I've been looking into this and couldn't find any studies or reports that showed any notable negative effect of particulate emissions by laser printers.
I like the suggestion. For most people I think laser printers probably are a huge win.
As someone who mainly wants to print some photos now & then, sometimes in large-ish sizes, I'm not sure if there are offerings that will suit me here. Where-as, when they are running well, there are some very nice many color inkjets.
There have been some neat attempts to make economical better inkjet printers. Epson make a L1800 wide format printer with 6 refillable "ecotank" ink tanks, but it was targeted for non-primary markets & vanished with no replacement. Whether it was any more reliable than the other notoriously finnicky inkjets, and what, exactly, it's quality was, are unknown. But I think it's an interesting example of a product that was willing to break product segmentation boundaries that have been long standing, and deliver a lot of great capabilities- tank based rather than cartridges, many colors, wide format, good specs- at a very competitive price point, many times less expensive than what one would normally have to pay for such a printer. To me, it seems like strong evidence that the problem is markets, markets that don't want to compete, & that are reluctant to deliver better capabilities. Companies would rather raise the limbo bar, allow a little more fat; pushing for better is hard, but also, why do it, if you don't have to? Sell & compete at the next tier up.
If you print less than monthly, you are likely better just taking your print jobs to Kinkos, Costco, FedEx, etc... you'll likely get better quality prints too.
The comment I was replying to was referring to photos, not tax returns. I file taxes electronically, in fact almost every legal document I've had to print in years has been done electronically.
But if you are worried about that, this thread is about having laser printers which are quite good at leaving in the closet so you can print your annual tax returns.
I typically print only a few times per year, so I use the printer at the public library, which is a short walk from my home. They even have an online service for submitting print jobs.
This is almost exactly my reply. I don't print a ton anymore, but I've bought exactly 2 laser printers in the past 25 years, the first I think I replaced because it was less expensive to replace than buy toner. The second I still own. Ink jet never seems to last more than a year.
There are still many ways for laser printers to suck. My Samsung C460, for example, gets a paper jam just about every other sheet. Or imagines a paper jam, because quite often there's no problem at all, but it complains anyway.
I also suspect that just about any wireless printer will suck when used with Windows. Windows certainly has a lot of trouble finding mine.
Seriously. Brother has sold laser printers under $100 for many years now -- they're reliable and last seemingly forever, and toner is cheap.
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
I think many people don't know better and when you go to a store you see ultra-cheap inkjet that can print in color or significantly more expensive B&W laser (or much more significantly expensive color laser, that's still not as good for pictures) and if you don't know any better it's hard to justify going for the laser.
I suspect that they might also be a strange factor that inkjet managed to corner the market by being crap, and not despite of it. People now effectively expect two things about personal printers:
- They're cheap
- They're crap
TFA is an example of this mindset. But then if you go to the store expecting to get a piece of shit printer, you're clearly going for the cheapest available option. Which means that you get a crap inkjet that you'll have to replace in two years, and then you'll buy an other crap cheap inkjet.
But I agree with both of you: after a few iterations of this cycle I finally decided to know better and bought the cheapest Brother B&W laser printer and it's been a joy. It just works.
I had to google, and found I picked up my Brother HLL8350CDW (color, wireless, 4 independent colors) back in 2014 for $377 on Amazon. Thing has been rock solid - surviving both my daughter's high school years and my Bride using heavily for her work. When that beast finally dies, another Brother - no questions.
Up until about 6 months ago I woulda agreed with you but in the last 6 months all my brother printers have had odd connection issues, something about the driver changed and now I need to restart the print spooler each time I want to print something.
If you don't buy a crap inkjet but instead get a more expensive one you're looking to get ripped off when the manufacturer stops producing the special ink cartridges you need for your super cool expensive inkjet.
Printers were the trial run for how to do customer relations on the IoT.
I bought a refurb Brother for like $90 (black and white) and it was setup and working over WiFi in 15 minutes. My kids use it freely. Print quality is sharp and it hasn't jammed once.
I went though around 4 crappy unreliable inkjets before getting myself a Brother HL-3150CDW. It's been ultra reliable and fast, even though I only print about 2-3 pages a month.
It has a super low-power standby and is always ready.
I bought a HL-3170CDW years ago and I've had the same experience. Bought a couple new black toner carts, and maybe one set of color ones, all OEM. Affordable supplies compared to my previous Samsung color laser (toner got outrageously expensive after 2 years of owning it).
I followed this advice and apparently ended up with the one garbage laser printer that Brother makes. The fuser roller melted and Brother's warranty service was impossible to navigate.
Ended up replacing it with an HP Office Jet that's worked fine for years. I participate in the HP ink hostage program but you know what, it's worth it to me for the hassle it saves.
They are the best options for home users. But I’ve had businesses buy them and they will last about 5,000 pages and then they either fail completely or you spend more money on a new fuser than the printer costs.
Worth it, though. Most will replace it every few months if they are using them to print a lot.
I'm not sure your piece of anecdata is representative of the whole. My piece of anecdata is that we have several Brother printers at work, the oldest of which has been going for 7 or 8 years and the page counter shows somewhere around 150,000. We did change the fuser unit once but it was around the same cost as a toner cartridge.
Brother (and all others) make different grades. You can pay a little more for a printer that is rated for more prints before needing a new drum. At work we were chewing through 2 brothers per year of the cheaper consumer grade type. Paid just a little more for an office version and it lasted until we stopped with faxes a few years ago. Now they bought an HP without asking me and it just sits in a corner because no-one can get it to work for very long. On the other hand paper usage is way down now so eco friendlier :)
Agreed. Inkjet makes little sense. I’ve had a $60 (on sale) Brother laser printer for 10+ years. I finally had to buy new toner just this year. Still prints like the day I bought it.
I had a B&W LaserJet for so long that I couldn't easily get it to work on Windows anymore, which is rare, especially for a basic printer. It seemed likely possible as a slightly later but very similar model was still in the included drivers, but it was a decade+ old.
Even color laserjets are decently cheap these days.
Over the past five years, I've bought two HP printers (based in part on recommendations from the Wirecutter) and then three Brother printers, and have also read a dozen HN posts like this.
My summary is that Brother is the way to go, period. The HP printers are constantly fighting me by, e.g., demanding internet access to print, failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down, putting up baffling errors, etc. The Brother printers just work.
The fact that Wirecutter recommended HP when Brother is so clearly superior has forever lowered my faith in their recommendations.
Brother makes a basic AF black laser printer that costs $88 (back when I bought it). It's been 4 years and I have yet to replace the replaceable materials (toner). I was planning on upgrading but I don't wanna throw away useful hardware.
I have that same one. I've had it for years and years.
Here's a message for your future self: that printer has a very important, very small piece of plastic inside it that occasionally breaks and it won't grab paper internally. The part number is LY2579001 and here's how to replace it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcZ5gF0t7Kc
If you have this printer, print out this comment and then stuff it under the printer or tape it to the side or something (stuff it in the owners manual, etc.).
Home-office stuff got better when started taping shit to the side or under my printers / monitors / homelab servers. Same deal as a label maker in the data center...
I think I have the same one, but I haven't been thrilled with it. Even at the best print quality, I don't get nice, crisp letters from it. The print quality is really only good enough.
I have not even had to replace the toner in it. It stays asleep the vast majority of the time and wakes on WiFi. I print directly from my phone or laptop wirelessly. It is everything a home printer should be.
I don't think it's sending my printouts, because I don't think they have any use for them. But I do think it's phoning home as a precondition to print in order to get me to buy more ink at the right times. I've never bought anything from HP since that happened.
That's probably the HP Instant Ink service, which sends your ink levels to HP every freaking time so they can send a new set of cartridges if it's running low. You can set it up without that.
HP printers will still look for updates and take their time installing them even when you need to urgently print 2 sheets, as I found out myself :/
I swore off HP products for a run of crap in the 2005-2010 era. What finally did it was a wireless printer. We got a new router, and I spent a couple of hours trying to get the printer to work again. I finally contacted HP support and the answer was, yeah, with that printer, you can't change the router. No way to get it to forget the old network and move to the new one.
Maybe I've just been terribly unlucky with that brand, but I also swore off HP products more or less in that period, after almost everything me, my friends and my coworkers had from that brand (laptops, Palm-like pre-tablet devices, inkjet printers, etc.) failed or gave oodles of problems (the exception was an expensive laser printer at work which worked fine for a long time).
Years after that, around 2017, my SO buys a rather high-end HP laptop in spite of my discouragement (can't blame her, it was a really attractive offer in terms of specs vs. price). She had to take it for repair shortly after buying it, the WiFi card never really worked (it's unstable, with constant disconnections, so an external one is needed) and the battery totally died a few days after warranty expired.
I suppose my experience with that brand is not representative because otherwise it should have been out of business for a long time...
I won’t do business with anyone that employees Meg Whitman. She was the CEO of HP while it imploded. The damage was obviously self-inflicted and driven by upper management.
My wife bought an HP printer about 15 years ago, and I've never had problems with it, but they wanted something like $500 for a memory upgrade, which was something like 128MB or 256MB, whatever was max for the printer. Even at that time, that was an absurd price. I was eventually able to find a third-party compatible memory module for about a 1/3 of the price.
But the printer has always worked well for us. Maybe this is from the days before HP got bad.
I am unsure how to guess how long the HP DRM'd laserjet ink cartridges will continue to be manufactured before they either jack up the price due to low production volumes or discontinue them to force people to buy new printers.
So instead I got a Brother printer. Sorry HP, not this time.
I mean if non-DRM'd cartridges work, they work on any printer you own, so third parties will manufacture cartridges and it will continue to work until it breaks.
Not that Brother isn't a wildly better experience but.
I'm saying that the currently available HP printers all have DRM that makes them potentially not work with 3rd party ink. I called them to be sure and was told that this is to ensure quality. This is doublespeak for "so that we have more control over how you use it".
I get the impression that right now they have the technical capability to disable 3rd party cartridges but do not use that capability for the most part. But they're quite upfront that they may change their mind.
So yes, non-DRM'd cartridges work on HP printers for now. That might change at any time though, at only their discretion. I don't know why you'd expect the same cartridge form factor to work in every printer you own.
I am saying that HP is making it so that third parties may be technically unable to manufacture cartridges and are left instead doing workarounds like refilling old HP cartridges.
I mean, they work with third party supplies for now on the current firmware, you could always lock onto that version to avoid updates.
Given how deeply it sounds like the HP drivers call out yeah that's going to be a problem eventually, I agree with you. Even if not with these models, maybe the next.
HP's drivers are super fucked, can't encourage people to stay away enough.
I think HP already tried to block 3rd party ink and was sued?
Either way, the DRM has been used to 1.) void your warranty as soon as a non-HP cartridge is installed and 2.) activate a kill bit in the cartridge DRM so it can’t be refilled and sold by 3rd party services. Any printer that reads a flagged cart will reject it.
Thanks, I was looking to get a cheap home laser printer. Seems you and everyone recommends them, so it's ordered. Pleasingly, at least on the website I bought it from, the OS compatibility is listed as "Linux, Windows, iOS, macOS", which suits me quite well.
...and when the toner warning appears, stick a piece of electric tape over the sensor and keep going! I printed for literally years after the toner warning appeared with no decline in quality (I didn't print often, but still!).
I got a HP 477 or something. Network connection works well, printer shows up on all machines at home immediately, there was a bit of setup required on Android (I think I had to install some hp print plugin). However I regularly get smears on the prints - even after shaking the toner, or printing a "clean up" page. I mean the rest is nice, but print quality is the most important thing...
Also have the 477. Print quality and speed is great for my use. Scanning-to-file over the network... refuses to work. I'm forced to use the USB thumb drive for that. It also seems to forget it's network connection if it sleeps for too long. The single-page feeder on the top is also very fussy... but I don't use it much.
About 12 years ago I stumbled upon second hand Brother laser printers and haven't looked back. They've even worked in Linux using the Windows driver and some sort of wrapper I found just searching online.
I've currently got a Brother HL-2132 I paid $AU30 for sitting on my desk in a dusty metal fabrication workshop. When the printer tells me the toner is low I start looking for another same or similar model just for the toner cartridge. When the drum goes I just switch over to the next second hand one.
The current one has only had two paper jams that needed the printer blowing out with compressed air, despite the dust in the workshop being full of metal particles and grinding disk particles.
Second this. I don't know what toner prices are over there but I've got a used Brother HL-2170W that I got for $20 and it works great from linux, mac, and windows. I've been able to refill it with generic toner @ $25 / two pack.
Say you have a kid in elementary school. Say you need to print something for a school project or even a home craft she's doing urgently (because if course kids don't plan long term - else they wouldn't be kids). BW prints look ugly. Color lasers are crazy expensive. Inkjets suck but the come with reasonably priced nice colour and photo paper printing options with a scanner built in. The inks are expensive but you're not printing much anyway. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just fire a print from the printer at home than check if the nearest print shop is open and mount an expedition
Color lasers are not crazy expensive anymore. I bought a Xerox color laser about 8 years ago for under $300. It's one of the best hardware purchases in terms of value for money I've ever made.
Don't buy modern Xeroxes though! I have a Versalink with huge useless OS that takes forever to boot and errors that require multiple reboot to 'fix'. Guy on the phone said it was because of drivers on client machines (what sort of crap printer crashes when there is a wrong driver installed?) but evrn with his updated version it hasn't fully gone away. I've had Xerox for 20 years but this will be the last one.
Not really. Honestly, I find the space taken by the duplexing color laser all-in-one I have from Brother a bigger deal than the up-front price was, but it's fast, excellent quality, and total cost of printing is much lower than a cheap ink-jet.
Color laser printers are not expensive, but their toner is not that cheap. I think it was estimated to be about 15 cents per color page. If you know better, do let me know - that's what's keeping me away from them.
I think the goal for consumers here is to look for a printer with a separate black cartridge and print most of your output in B+W mode and not full color.
it looks like brother's do? I'm looking at HL-L3210CW ($199).
They are not that expensive anymore. You can buy a Brother HL-L3210CW for $199, or you can get a second hand printer (I paid $5 for a Fuji Xerox CM205fw).
Color laser has actually pretty terrible color, especially for photos, prints or any output that requires any sort of vibrancy or color accuracy.
Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.
Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.
My color laser provided significantly better color than any of the inkjet I have used. It provided nice even color. Whereas the inkjet color was often banded.
Yeah most inkjet printers still suck. The Epson mid range to high end tend to be decent to great. The photo printers also have archival grade inks, some of which are rated for 80 years.
If you want great color you should get a dye sublimination photo printer instead, nothing beats the finish on those, and they're colorfast in water.
Only trick is they recently tend to run small for producing 4x6s for frames or scrapbooking. Letter or A4 sizes are less common and more expensive. I'd check eBay to be honest, for used stuff like the Sony UP75D.
Frankly, color laser printers that would print a decent photo cost a lot, and the quality is but decent, not perfect.
An inkjet which can do justice to a photo is also usually not as cheap, its inks cost like French perfume (and sometimes there are 6 of them, not 4), and you also need to use expensive photo-quality paper. This allows you to have really great photos. Using such a device for printing business documents or school handouts is wasting it.
So yes, go with a laser, a color laser if you need, and just take your photo printing to a good lab, they usually have one of these inkjet beasts anyway.
And the really nice thing about Brother is there's none of this "500mb universal printer driver" shit. Want just the printer driver? 10 mb. Want linux drivers? Here's CUPS drivers. They sell you a printer, here's drivers that work, end of story.
I adore (and have always adored) my Brother B+W lasers and am thinking about one of the color lasers one of these days, especially now that I am living at home instead of having access to a Xerox network copier at work (we are allowed reasonable personal usage of office supplies, no worries).
The Brother fan club is loud and for very good reason.
In contrast (I had a brother B+W at home) I owned an HP color laser for my office at school, and nope, never again, the driver package was fucking terrible and while I could usually get it to work after some finangling, it was constantly a pain. Literally threw it in the trash and got a B+W brother MFC instead even though that was a "step down".
I recently bought a dirt cheap Brother B+W printer to replace a Canon inktjet printer and am very happy with the decision. It is a small printer, Windows/Linux network printing is easy to setup and just works. My only gripe with it is that it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi. It has been a pleasure to use the printer again.
> My only gripe with it is that it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi
I noted the same thing and eh. While this means your router has to continue to support a 2.4 GHz AP, I don't think that's an unusual decision as far as the "internet of things", due to cost reasons (as opposed to migrating every IOT to 5 GHz). I think you will have to maintain all three now.
Devices are eventually going to segregate themselves onto their own networks: 2.4 GHz for legacy / low-cost / IOT, 5 GHz for data rate, wigig/wifi 6/etc for extreme data rate. The performance hit on your other bands should be minimal even considering contetion.
There's no sense updating the wireless module for faster wifi and probably not any sense updating past 100 mbit wired ethernet either.
> I recently bought a dirt cheap Brother B+W printer to replace a Canon inktjet printer and am very happy with the decision.
Do note that canon inkjet printers can often be easily retrofitted for bulk "continuous tank" ink, which can actually make them surprisingly affordable to run as far as inkjets go! The ink itself isn't really that expensive, just packaging (it's a "priced according to demand" product). I'd look at bulk ink "cost per page" for photo before you toss it.
I think it'll probably still work out to being economically cheaper per page to get a brother B+W or color laser but if you can argue the bulk ink inkjet with printing some photos or school projects at home then maybe. Laser (color or B+W) is cheaper for b+w and occasional color presentation, and sending out to costco/kinkos/whatever is better for photos or premium presentation.
(There still is no comparison to professional photo printers of course - check out White House Custom Color, despite the "we're a pro service house! what is your professional account number" facade they're open to you even if you just want a couple family photos printed nice, and they have equipment and expertise you don't. Work out your cost per page and if you fuck up once on a big print you probably lose vs just sending it out, I bet.)
>Devices are eventually going to segregate themselves onto their own networks: 2.4 GHz for legacy / low-cost / IOT, 5 GHz for data rate, wigig/wifi 6/etc for extreme data rate.
That would be rather annoying. Wifi is so usefull because you can connect everything to the same network. Especially when most consumers are oblivious to any computer architecture design decisions. And can you really expect someone living in a tiny apartment to purchase three network types? (2.4; 5ghz; wifi6) or one expensive device with all three technologies? Communicating data rates and transmission power will be the way to go I believe.
If I can hook up a printer to a network switch then that's what I usually go for. And pray that the printer actually works.
I mean, it's still the same network. They show up as different options in your wi-fi menu, but devices can still talk to each other on 192.168.0.x, right?
Most (?) wi-fi routers now support 2.4+5, and it's not meaningfully more expensive. I assume wifi 6 will have the same kind of gradual introduction 5 had?
I've never heard of anyone buying separate routers for multiple wavelengths.
For me cost per print is not an issue since I print very rarely. When I do need to print, the printer should just work, and there the Canon printer had some issues (Pixma MP620).
After upgrading to Windows 10 it turned out the printer was no longer (support stopped after Windows 7). I never got the CUPS driver for it to work; it is an unofficial unmaintained one. other people have reported success with it.
The Brother worked (almost) out of the box on both Windows and Linux. Knowing that decent Linux drivers are available gives me some comfort that upgrading an OS will no longer disable the printer.
In the end I was surprised just how cheap the laser printer was. All in all I paid less than 120 euro for the printer plus one extra toner that is probably going to last a lifetime considering how often I print.
Regarding the WiFi situation I agree, it is not a big problem. I have a separate 2.4GHz network in the house now and that does not influence the speed of the 5GHz network in a way I notice.
I just got a Brother duplex color laserjet. I plugged it into our network and went to my computer expecting to need to spend the next half hour setting it up on Linux.
It was just... there. Printed immediately with no fuss, including duplex.
But honestly, I got the Brother printer because HP ink cartridges are filled with DRM and I have no reason to think they won't obsolete a cartridge model in order to force people to buy new printers. In fact it seems naive to think they won't, even if they try they will inevitably have to discontinue things.
I also have a Brother (laser, color, duplex). It literally just works. It has everything you would expect. It is a little bit too loud when printing and a minute after (after cooling it falls back to 0 rpm).
This was more or less my experience. My old HP laserjet (P1005) was a crap: it required to be connected to a computer through the USB cable every time it was turned on, so that the 500MB HP Windows driver could be able to upload the firmware (the printer apparently has no permanent memory). And, boy, the Windows driver was awful: it was a pain to install, and in fact my wife has never been able to print from her Windows laptop. I used a patched driver found somewhere on Internet for my Linux laptop that worked miraculously well.
Last month I bought a wireless Brother laser printer, and the difference is astonishing! I was immediately able to print from my Linux laptop (no, I did not need to install any driver, the printer just got installed and configured automatically through wifi), and the same for my wife's computer. And, best of all, we can now print documents from our Android devices as well. I am moved to tears when I think of all the time I've spent in past years to re-configure my HP printer for the 1000th time!
I've only ever considered purchasing an inkjet because of the many special use cases it has out of the box with standard ink: photos, transparencies, stickers, shirt transfers, and more. I know some lasers can do these things, but color laser printers are a lot more expensive and the quality is lacking in my experience.
I recently bought a random cheap Canon PIXMA inkjet, and with proper photo paper, the photos it prints are indistinguishable from what you'd get from a regular photo printing service. No smudging, no bleeding, nada. It also uses big refillable ink tanks that are way cheaper and longer-lasting than overpriced HP-style disposable cartridges.
Now I'll admit that from a strict dollars-and-cents perspective, it's probably still more expensive per picture than using a photo service, but it's way more convenient. And it does a fine job with B&W printing too.
I had a Canon PIXMA around 5 years ago (I forget the exact model number), and it wasn't great. It could print decent photos, though I'd say ones from a professional print shop were still obviously superior. But it had all the usual inkjet problems - eating copious amounts of ink and needing constant maintenance.
Because home users are primary needing printer for those annoying homework projects. And being able to print in color late in the evening for cheap is massive help for that.
I just can't praise Brother laser printer high enough. I own one for few years and it is cheap to maintain and never let me down so far. Last Saturday my SO tried to print something but printer refused to work (I thought it finally gave up). She told me to fix it (ugh..), I got to the printer with my computer but then got message from colleague, which I decided to prioritize ;-)
After 4 minutes, with me not touching anything printer decided it'll print and spew out few pieces of neatly arranged printed papers. Looks like it lost wi-fi connectivity but was able to reconnect and do the printout.
One thing I have been surprised by is the quality of photo prints from my colour laser (Brother dcp-l8410cdw). Admittedly, my expectations were very low, and it's certainly a long way off high-quality professional printing.
But for something temporary like a photo to pin to the fridge for a few weeks, it's actually good enough.
I think this is relevant for quite a bit of the market. Most people getting photo prints online don't seem to care much about quality - the results vary a lot between companies and many cheap ones are really bad.
I'd say the colour laser get fairly close to bad ones ordered online, and is significantly better in quality to some other photo products (custom birthday cards, that sort of thing).
So I think for many causal users/uses it's pretty viable
I print on photo paper to make front panels for electronic projects. It's fine under thin acrylic sheet.
Yeah, the toner transfer method[1] produces superior results, but when it's gear for my own use, I cant be bothered with the faffing around.
Sometimes I print photos too, just to have them around. With me it's "out of sight, out of mind", so I like to have the physical object as a reminder of something. Using your own printer on site has much less friction than using an upload-and-wait service.
All that said: yes it's getting to be a niche thing these days.
1. Laser print a reversed image in heavy lines onto an overhead transparency sheet, then use a hot clothes iron to melt the toner onto your shiny aluminium front panel. Three layers, tea towel, OHP, front panel. Then spray your panel with satin or semi-matte clear lacquer--once you've scrubbed off the metal front panel and repeated the printing and ironing often enough to get something that looks OK.
I bought an Epson inktank inkjet b&w printer a few months ago. This thing is a beauty. Printing cost is ridiculously low , way lower than with a laser printer. A bottle of ink costs €10 and lasts for 12k pages. Sure, the speed is nowhere near that of a laser and neither is the functionality, but that just doesn't matter if you can print a 200 page document with less than €1 including the paper.
I had one of those too, and it worked great for about 6 months, until one of the print nozzles became clogged. It turns out that on most printers, the print heads are part of the cartridges (=replaceable), but on the ecotank printers they're built-in to the printer - so if the printer's built-in cleaning system doesn't work, it's almost impossible to unclog.
> And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
If you're in the need (like me right now) to print +300 photos in several formats, even shopping at best prices around me, that's something like 150€ for them. For that kind of price I could get a nice home printer, supplies, and afterwards just keep the printer for the future.
I'd like to see your BOM. ;) I'd estimate 10-20 EUR for high quality paper; undoubtedly the ink supplied with the printer will not be enough to print 300 photos, that's another 40-80 EUR, leaving 50-100 EUR for the printer. Are the prints from a ~100 EUR printer really equivalent to professionally developed prints?
And assuming the OP meant an inkjet printer, they'll probably go through 4 whole sets of cartridges to print 300 photos.
And they'll need to "realign the heads" and "clean the nozzles" at least 17 times, which will consume hours of your time, paper, and probably another whole set of cartridges too.
I battled with Epson and HP inkjets for years - I haven't looked back since I bought a small black and white Brother laser a couple of years back. No more wasting time, no more new cartridges every 5 pages - you just hit print and it prints.
I think that'd be a use-case for HPs "ink hostage" (instant ink or something like that), as another commenter put it, program.
If i recall right, i even read somewhere here on HN that someone basically printed full page color prints all day long and HP happily keeps sending him fresh cartridges, which is, at the rate he is paying monthly, a steal...
I guess nothing stops you from ending your membership after you're done with your printouts :)
Yes. Get a Brother laser printer, and be done with it.
I've also been using a Lexmark printer for several years now, from the "workgroup" class. These are more expensive, but generally better built and if you print a lot, you can use larger toner cartridges which come out fairly cheap per page. But Lexmark software has weird quirks and you inevitably end up having to reset your printer, because it isn't on WiFi for some reason (have you tried turning it off and on again?).
None of that with Brother. You plug it in, set it up, and you're done, works with all of your devices (including iOS).
I'm looking for a Brother duplexing color laser that works with their Mac drivers. I have the HL-3170CDW but it has a known issue with Macs waking up from sleep; it isn't a problem on Windows, Linux, or iOS, but with the latest firmware and latest drivers on the latest macOS patches, freshly power cycled and then allowed to sleep in low-power mode, it will intermittently not power up, though I see the print job spooling down from the flashing LED. Power cycling the printer always kicks the print job out, but I'm not a fan of that much power cycling.
Has anyone else run into this with their Macs in one of the older generation model Brothers and found a later Brother model that permanently fixes this behavior?
Since 2009, my requirements for a printer has always been:
* Color (switched away from laser for this)
* Printing and scanning (all-in-one)
* Duplex printing and scanning
* Automatic Document Feeder
* Network print/scan (Wireless and sometimes ethernet)
Before that, I'd been very happy with the Canon Pixma inkjets, and so I upgraded to the Pixma all-in-one (MX860, and later MX870), and I've sworn by this line. Reasonable ink/printing prices, great performance, fantastic network support.
Two years ago, we moved temporarily, so I bought a bargain basement Pixma TR4550 that checked off all of the boxes, but it was terrible. The first time my wife used it, she thought it was garbage. We made do, but I knew I wanted to change.
A year ago (after moving again), I had to add a requirement to the list. My new daily computer was a chromebook, which doesn't have scanning support, so I wanted a printer with some sort of scan-to-cloud solution. I was also eyeing color laser printers, which are now at reasonable prices, since I used to prefer laser printers before color became a requirement.
Enter the Brother MFC-L3750CDW, which I bought for $340. It's a color laser all-in-one with everything I wanted (including ethernet)... and it supports both scan-to-Google Drive and scan-to-email! This printer is nothing short of amazing. I've never printed from my phone before, but my wife and I both do this regularly now. I have two shortcut buttons in the interface, one for scanning directly to my email, one for my wife's. I have never installed a printer driver, every OS I've tried just prints directly to the thing (it's autodiscovered when adding).
My Epson printer just died an untimely death, after ~10 years of decent service.
I am exactly in the same use-case as you (color / multifunction / ADF / network & Chromebook) and spent hours trying to get some of the Canon printers working with a Chromebook. But I'm not finding that printer anywhere at a reasonable price!
I sort of disagree with this article, except the fact that inkjet ink is overpriced.
I have a 5 year old basic consumer grade Canon color inkjet with a scanner built in. It's wireless, I can quickly print a photo on photo paper (no waiting multiple days for a printing service), any BW document I'm likely to print in 2020 (and let's be honest...how many documents do you really need to print in 2020?) come out at 10 pages per minute or so. It prints in duplex. Ink is about €50-€75 per year. I've had one paper jam in 5 years, solved by pulling one handle and removing a crumpled piece of paper.
I have way more issues with my €1500 laptop or my €800 phone than with my €100 inkjet printer.
Yeah, just last weekend, I was checking out various equipment in my office. I have a large format photo quality inkjet but one cartridge is empty and the other two are dried out. Would cost me over $100 to refill it and I just don't use it enough to keep the cartridges fresh. Not worth buying new cartridges for it. My B&W laser is fine for most things, the few photos I want printed are easily done online on choice of media and size, and if I decided I really have to print in color at home, I'd replace my B&W laser with a color laser printer.
I like the laser printer that I bought a year ago because it is fast but I haven't had issues with the HP PSC 1410 inkjet printer that I bought about 10 years ago...
For the brother multifunctions I've used, the fuser is replaced at 100k-120k pages; the large toner cartridges are like 6k pages. So, yeah, you don't replace the fuser with every toner replacement, but I don't see how that's a mark in favor of HP, if they replaced it with the toner (but doing some googling, it looks like HP also uses separate fuser kits.)
> Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time.
Modern printers are much better in this context, however what you pointed is true. To avoid heads clogging, when I moved from Laser to Inkjet, I planned a way to save the printer from inactivity by preparing a directory of family photos I already planned to print, but instead of printing lots of them in a single take, I print each of them every two weeks, so the printer heads never get dried.
The printer is a Epson WP4515, and of course I use refilled consumables (€3.50 per cartridge). Admittedly from time to time I forgot about printing my photos, nothing that one or two heads cleaning passes couldn't solve.
In short, it is definitely possible to have an Inkjet printer, make it print no more than a few hundred photos in years, but never clog a head or have to ditch new cartridges or worse, that is, an extremely low cost of operation.
It requires some attention though.
Even assuming you dedicate such time to it, very often the hardware itself is pretty poor and fails you. I recently had to basically take apart an (admittedly cheap) HP inkjet printer in order to reposition part of a hall-effect switch that helped it detect a paper jam - it was detecting a jam continuously because of it.
And because the same printer hadn't been used in 5 months, I also had to clean the clogged head with a syringe afterwards.
I have a Samsung CLP-315W, and kept having problems detecting my first-party replacement toner cartridges because there were DRM chips in them [1]. I think a firmware upgrade even made the DRM worse.
This was almost a decade ago. If I had to get a high-volume home printer now, I'd probably consider one with refillable ink tanks.
I've had an HP multifunction laser printer for at least 5 years maybe 8 years. In that time I've bought two black toner cartridges and no colour cartridges.
This time period included going back to school, a technical college, where I printed a ton of reports (and many misprints).
Try to get a laser with automatic duplex printing if you want to save paper. With manual duplex printing mistakes can cost a significant proportion of paper and may require significant amounts of effort to do correctly.
I currently have a Brother HL-2140 (also has HL-21 model number) and it has 'manual duplex'. This means if I want to save paper I have to mark a corner of the first page before printing and see what orientation it prints compared to that mark (it is not intuitive). I have been printing one page at a time because of this, although now I have written this down I realise I could do better.
If you read the article, the reason why he cannot print has nothing to do with the type of printer he has :) It's all to do with an idiotic "always connected to the internet" subscription plan.
Yes, this is the answer. I'm looking at a HP LaserJet 1320N next to my desk that is yellow with age and it still manages to smash out B&W pages at a solid clip. I think it's close to 16 years old and I've bought exactly 3 ink refills.
I had a laserjet 1200 for a very long time, must have been 15 years or so. But it developed a problem where it would often pull multiple sheets at a time, and when the toner ran out I conveniently got my hands on a laserjet P2055dn that my old job was throwing out. Threw in a 3rd party toner cartridge (I guess that model is old enough to not suffer from the DRM crap of newer models) and it was good to go. Been rock solid so far.
That being said, based on what people write every time this topic comes up, whenever this one dies I'll replace it with a Brother.
I fear I will jinx my 20-yr-old hp 1200 laser jet that's on maybe it's 4(?) toner and hooked up to our home network via a parallel port to usb adapter. It's yellower than an 8-bit computer but still prints great and fast. One of my best tech purchases ever; I'm glad I resisted the lure of color inkjet and spent 3x much for a b&w laser.
Every person, their dog, and their printer has provided a recommendation thus far, so here are mine:
I have a Brother colour duplex printer for bulk printing (was useful for printing weekly school plans before schools went back a few months ago: https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=... . As noted by others, it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi.
One year ago I bought a Lexmark Laser Printer (Color) for 60€. I've barely printed more than 12 pages but it doesn't care about the long idling (currently working on disconnecting power when not in use). It prints full-duplex pages with no hardware margin in A4. The color is on par with all the color printers I've used in my life.
The replacement toner is 20€. Why would I ever touch anything else?
" (currently working on disconnecting power when not in use"
Watch out, modern printers run a full OS that doesn't expect power to be fully cut regularly. My Xerox does a full filesystem check every time I turn the power to it on, which takes about 5 mins. For my next printer I will carefully research how this works on it.
I'm fine with that. It sits in my homelab rack on the lowest rung, it uses a bunch of power that could be saved. I only print once a month or so, for those cases, it's entirely fine if it takes the 5 minutes it needs to boot.
yup 100%. I've been laser now for at least 15 years. The final nail in the coffin for me was when inkjet clearly became a loss leader on the printer made up through exorbitant ink replacement. The final-final nail was when manufacturers started selling all in one cartridges, so that when cyan ran out you could no longer print b/w.
I concur, back in 2011 I bought a Dell 3210 on an amazing deal (buy the toner get the printer free). It has built in networking (wired and wireless). It’s survived four house moves including one international move and works every day. Third party toner cartridges work in it no problem and last forever. I think I’ve bought maybe two sets of toner in the time I’ve owned it. Prints fast and rarely jams. We use online services for photo printing so we almost entirely only use it for documents and for that it’s been flawless.
I'm on my 2nd Brother laser printer now, the first one lasted nearly nine years with pretty heavy use (for a home office user). I would never consider going back to the dark days of ink jet.
The problem is that once you start adding features they get absurdly expensive. The bare minimum for me is color (printing colored things as grayscale in 2020 is frankly an embarrassment), built-in networking, automatic duplex printing and a scanner.
But you can't buy just that. The only printers that have those features also have a feeder on the scanner, a fax machine, all kinds of cloud crap, an "app" system (?!?), access control... which drive the price way up the their own - and that's before they slap on the "enterprise" markup because that is no longer considered a SOHO device.
I bought mine (Canon Laser) about what, 10 years ago? I'd say it's one of the best office appliance I bought and I think it can comfortably last my lifetime.
I print some pages about 5 times/year max. The toner that comes with it is nearly running out, but still able to print some greyish image if I want quick physical form of some files. ZERO maintenance.
and it's not even the expensive model, it's the base model, almost the cheapest. Such quality, really.
On another story, I also used to own Brother's multifunction scanner-inkjet printer. It was a nightmare.
I have a smallish Brother inkjet MFD, that absolutely can be left idle, unless you pull the power plug (clogged a few nozzles by leaving it without power)
It periodically, uh, does that printhead thing, was idle for a few months, no new clogs.
I see lots of recommendations for brother laser printers here.
One word of warning: Avoid their inkjets. I had one with permanent heads. Less than 100 sheets in, it jammed (this ream was fine with the printer before and after it).
It failed to put the head back on top of the seal that keeps it from drying out. I didn’t notice the jam, and a few days later it was permanently ruined.
I do recommend the brother ADS line (standalone USB document scanners), with the caveat that the Linux drivers on my old one are x86-only.
Inkjets suck. Don’t even think about it. Dye sublimation is (was?) nice.
We have a Samsung laser, which is great, except there’s a “disable the wifi until you plug me into ethernet” button labeled WPS on the top that the cats like to press.
Also their printer business was acquired by HP, so it’s only a matter of time until HP manages to somehow remote brick it or stop selling consumables.
I started up my laser printer after letting it gather dust for a good 4-5 years. It still works as good as new (and it was already 6 years old by then). This thing is unkillable and the toner lasts what feels like forever (while also being absurdly cheap).
And DO NOT buy a multifunction. If you get a printer printer with nothing else Linux, macOS and Windows will probably auto detect and configure it automatically and every time.
I've been using the same Brother MFC laser printer for like 10 years without a single issue, and the cartridges are cheap and last an incredible amount of time.
513 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadThat said, I've seen IT professional break down in frustration of not getting their printers to work as intended.
Also, it seems cheaper and easier to just replace the printer than it is to replace toner. I am ashamed.
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long.
I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you.
We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi.
the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
That may be anecdotal based on brand and model. I can agree with you in this case because I've got the Brother DCP-L2540DW. I got it on sale for $99 CAD (~$75 USD) when it was still the newest model available. I'm using the stock cartridge still, though I have a refill purchased and ready to go in case it's not possible to buy one when the original powder runs out.
This line of Brother printers is indeed good. It's impossible to say whether this applies generally to any laser printer, or to any Brother laser printer, or if we were simply lucky to have picked up these particular models.
It's monochrome but I almost never need to print in color. For photos I just upload to Walgreens and pick them up a mile away.
I went through 2 HP Inkjets and I don't print very much and the ink always went dry after a few months and I know there was still ink in them.
But mine didn’t have a good life. It still works, but has a super weird issue where if you sent it more than a few pages it’ll hang with an error message needing a restart. Sending many pages as individual jobs is fine though.
But I loved them because you could send a message to their screen with a PCL command. Even many of the matter models can still do this. I had so much fun with that.
...which is why I wrote "considering the time in which it was created"
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
"The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&ol...
And if it's a product like a phone that 90% of the customers will replace with a new one in just a few years, the large majority of customers actually won't care.
- ethernet
- BR/Script3 (their PostScript clone)
- duplex
This advice has been good for the last 12 years or so. I never install their drivers; I just tell CUPS that there's a Brother in PS mode with a duplexer at a particular IP address, and then there's no further issue.
Great to use in a corporate environment with lots of ventilation and power--home environment, not so much.
- failure rate: 50% per year to ensure sales
what's next ?
- > 300MB driver install with at least 5 annoying 3rd party crap
Now I can be wrong ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
I now have a multifunction Officejet Laser, so scanning multiple pages over wifi is an added bonus.
Buy a second-hand older, simpler, more reliable device rather than a newer, not-as-well-made, less reliable device, second-hand or not.
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
Which of the many printer manufacturers has a monopoly?
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14501894)
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
That is a bad thing, but it is an entirely different thing from an anti-competitive cartel.
There's a reason your color printer always runs out of yellow ink first.
The real world is also messy and so many variables can lead to a failure. It's astonishing that we can print so easily most of the time, let alone send someone in space unharmed.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018. It's killer feature is third party ink support - cartridges can be reset and refilled and inks that are good enough can be bought in bulk.
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
That’s the nature of paper. Most people, and for a long time I was one of them don’t have a good working model of paper as a material. In part because mechanical printing was not common until thirty years ago. In part because in the first part of the PC revolution printing was more an everyday thing since online publishing was rarely a viable alternative.
After I wrote my previous comment, I fleshed out an idea it touches on tangentially.
Printers are not computational artifacts. Little more so than a dishwasher with a microprocessor. Though we tend to think of them as part of a computer, they act directly in meat space. Directly on paper with ink or toner.
Laser printers are less reliable because we print less. The old workhorse printers were workhorse printers because they were used so heavily that paper didn’t have much time to swell in bad ways.
There are printing methods that are good for infrequent use. Fanfold paper tractor fed through an impact printer is nearly bulletproof and dies gracefully as the ribbon ink depletes. But they are noisy, bulky, slow, feature poor, and inflexible. However most understand ESC2 and writing control software is accessible from any language that can send bytes to a port.
The test lab includes lots of neat things: an RF chamber, acoustic chamber (in a dedicated separate vibration-isolated building), a couple climate simuation rooms (humid, cold), a bunch of robot arms that open/close drawers or use touchscreens/keypads. (Here's a 5-min video tour [2] of it if you're interested.)
Despite all that they were quite proud of their a massive inventory of paper from all over the world and testing they did with it. This included environmental (humidity/temp) testing after acclimatizing the paper for several days. They even went out of their way to get paper mills to custom create some of the crappiest papers they'd run across. I think the explanation was basically poor quality, rough paper leaves particles all over everything and causes rollers, drums etc to wear out faster.
Depending on your usage, it's at least worth considering when you're buying paper and looking at saving a few dollars on the cheaper stuff.
[1] https://garage.hp.com/us/en/business/boise-test-lab-hp-print...
[2] https://vimeo.com/242827801/8322d83960
It was the last great HP product I bought. The sound it made was magical. It was still well working after ten years when I gave it to a non profit administrator who lacked a printer. The 600 series printers I specked and bought for the office in 1995 banshee howled by comparison...though nothing like a dot matrix.
You won't get the same up to spec paper and humidity around the world, the printer should handle that and I think there are people willing to pay a premium on the hardware if they now it's going to play nice for the rare use in many years.
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
Problem #1: I don't use it much. But every night (or two?) it does a self cleaning cycle which uses up some ink apparently. Despite saying the ink cartridges saying "500 prints", I might actually make 50 pages before it runs out of ink after a few months.
Problem #2: I only ever need it for black and white, yet I have to buy expensive color cartridge sets as it refuses to print B&W pages if it is out of color. And it runs out of color despite my not using it because of problem #1 above.
Problem #3: After it gives the ink low warning, if I ignore it for a while until it actually starts making splotchy prints, when I put the new ink cartridges in, I have to literally print dozens of test pages before the quality is acceptable again. I have no idea what is going on there. By that time the B&W cartridge will report it is at 60% capacity.
Once this set runs out in a few months, I've already decided to get a monochrome laser printer, and regret not doing it long ago.
One of the the big changes is inks print and dry faster. Those early inkjet inks needed thirty seconds or so to dry and similar times to print...at best - a full page of color in the 1990’s was minutes per page.
It was $499 from Sears.
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
Oh my god. I bought that model years ago after reading reviews that all agreed it was a great machine. And it printed well.
The reviews also mentioned a persistent clicking noise from the power supply. I dismissed that, I'm not terribly sensitive to things like that.
Was I wrong! It was maddening. I always pulled the plug the instant my printing was done.
Exactly. Try to print every other month, and very different tasks - scanned images of cashier's receipts, color pictures a toddler drew in MS Paint, pages 87-112 from SICP, Bing Maps directions, an ASCII text from from a flash drive and the likes.
Sometimes you have to reset printer (with a button). Sometimes to cycle power off-on. Sometimes to download whatever's needed from a browser in a form of a PDF. Sometimes nothing works, and only by pure luck you can do something - not always - when completely misremembering steps which led to the printing.
And that's without ink problems.
The built in brother webconnect capability is nice to scan an OCR’d pdf directly to your dropbox/drive/box/one drive account. Too bad it doesn’t work with iCloud.
For photos. It’s a pretty crap document printer.
Not cheap to acquire though.
If I need colour, I'll go for a Brother colour laser.
Have a Canon inkjet, it's ok but expensive.
For printing photos, inkjet with a continuous ink supply can serve well, but for text you won't beat laser even at more than double the price.
It's not that the technology is inherently flawed, it's that way too many people are buying them for document printing when they should instead be getting laser printers. Inkjets are much more of a niche specialty product.
The last printer I purchased was a Brother. Some people criticize them for the quality, but they seem to be fine for home and small office use. They don't play games with toner and are reasonably compatible with whatever you throw them on to.
Yet you do have to be careful when choosing lasers. Some vendors seem to use the same approach as inkjet printers when it comes to supplies, and it affects both consumer and corporate models. I also recall doing a fair bit of research on Brother printers to ensure I ended up with a good (but inexpensive) model. That being said, at least there are options.
EDIT: negation in the wrong place.
You cannot reproduce photo-quality prints with just 4 colors (cmyk). Your high-end photo-level printers use 10 or 12 inks, with far higher resolution than a typical $200 Brother printer.
But if you're only doing office work / text / etc. etc., laser is great. Even mild graphics (diagrams mainly) work out fine with laser prints.
--------
The typical $200 ink printer however, is complete garbage.
I bought a multi-function HP Laser printer a couple of years ago and haven't looked back (although we started having to print more and more frequently as our kids have got older). It's one of those devices that "just works" now. Even Linux automatically detects it on the network and configures itself for printing.
Edit: for documents and such, not photos.
HP, please, just give me an 'enterprise' driver and nothing else, that's all I need.
I hate pay walls.
Apple does RMAs via FedEx.
Last year I bought an HP OfficeJet 8720 and it's a pretty amazing bit of hardware for $300. Yes, ink is expensive but I don't have to print that often so it's not a big deal.
I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
So between today and the end of your life, you will never sell anything online? Or never for the rest of your life send something you already own to someone else? You need a printer to print shipping labels, unless you take the item somewhere to be professionally packed and shipped.
I moved recently, and printed out the USPS form to change my address so that I didn't have to pay the fee to do it online.
I also had to print and mail a form to get a ballot mailed to me for today's election. In my state, this can only be done with a signed document, not online.
I don't limit my life experience to things that are online, so about once a month I use a printer to print envelopes to send checks for things that I buy over the phone. Sent one out today to a store in Seattle that deals in a specialty good my wife likes, but has no online presence.
According to the New York Times, there are top-end restaurants that only take reservations by letter. Not via an app. Not online. Not even via telephone.
I know interesting people who live in places beyond the reach of the internet. I write letters to them a couple of times a year.
Four of the last six property purchases I've made in the last few years involved printing and mailing forms. Not every government office in every county in every state is online. And very often legal forms have to be notarized. You can't do that online.
If you choose to live a simple life, you may never need a printer. If you choose to do more, then it's good to have one stashed away for when you need it.
In my household, the printer gets used for a couple of things. The first is sheet music. Musicians are starting to use a big tablet screen, with a foot pedal to turn the pages, but adoption will be slow. Musicians seem innately impatient with technologies that don't just work instantly when you pull them out of the box.
The other thing is documents to read for school, which is still more ergonomic when done with paper.
At the office, I suspect nobody needs to print any more, because nobody reads any more. I can't count the number of times I've hit "send" on a report that I was supposed to write, and a manager will be in my cube a few minutes later asking me if I could just summarize it for them. The first paragraph in the report is a summary.
It's usually stuff like an insurance card or temporary registration for my car.
The problems start when you want to print color and photos.
Cheap inkjets, or in fact all inkjet printers suck.
So I find it hard to believe that printers really suck. Even the worst case was actually quite wonderful.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312501
HP CP1525nw
Screw. Inkjets.
One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
... although I was disappointed recently by my usual go-to of the Brother brand. Their Linux/CUPS drivers are some sort of bizarre concoction of Perl scripts and x32 binaries... and still cannot print in duplex :/.
(I believe the duplex problem is probably a typo somewhere in the PPD or Perl script, but I don't know enough about PPDs and/or Perl scripts to be sure. I do know programming, hence my suspicion.)
Lesson is: Research if the EXACT printer you're purchasing is supported by the usual Gutenprint or whatever.
I have one of their all-in-one office machines. It prints pretty well. The wireless scan is complete garbage. A known issue with their drivers, apparently.
I've been looking for a cheap b/w laser for my parents and have found HP LaserJet 135/135w. It looked very familiar, and behold, it is a rebranded Samsung SL-M2070w that I have in the office.
Hardware-wise, it is actually a nice printer. Software-wise... It works in Linux, but you have to install the binary-only uld driver. For MacOS it is more interesting: printing is not a problem, scanning in B/w is also OK, but scanning in Image Capture/Preview in color into PDF produces garbage output. What works is scanning in color into TIFF, then stitching and reexporting into PDF manually. The alternative, the EasyScan Samsung software no longer works in Catalina, it has 32-bit components.
Edit: from the ppds in the driver package, they are:
* HP Laser 10x Series
* HP Laser MFP 13x Series
* HP Color Laser 15x Series
* HP Color MFP 17x Series
So weird that HP would buy Samsung's printer division but not kill it off.
This one doesn't appear to have Ethernet.
... and I believe it. Unless you researched it heavily that was just good luck, honestly. Your printer has a good OSS driver, and it worked. Mine did not, even though I thought Brother was generally OSS-friendly. :(
Well, at least the binary (x32!, if you can believe that) driver basically works, but no duplex... which is sad because I bought said printer because it had the duplex capability :/
I'm also not sure how this would be 'easy' to prevent, without adding a whole sealed enclosure around the printer.
As someone who mainly wants to print some photos now & then, sometimes in large-ish sizes, I'm not sure if there are offerings that will suit me here. Where-as, when they are running well, there are some very nice many color inkjets.
There have been some neat attempts to make economical better inkjet printers. Epson make a L1800 wide format printer with 6 refillable "ecotank" ink tanks, but it was targeted for non-primary markets & vanished with no replacement. Whether it was any more reliable than the other notoriously finnicky inkjets, and what, exactly, it's quality was, are unknown. But I think it's an interesting example of a product that was willing to break product segmentation boundaries that have been long standing, and deliver a lot of great capabilities- tank based rather than cartridges, many colors, wide format, good specs- at a very competitive price point, many times less expensive than what one would normally have to pay for such a printer. To me, it seems like strong evidence that the problem is markets, markets that don't want to compete, & that are reluctant to deliver better capabilities. Companies would rather raise the limbo bar, allow a little more fat; pushing for better is hard, but also, why do it, if you don't have to? Sell & compete at the next tier up.
But if you are worried about that, this thread is about having laser printers which are quite good at leaving in the closet so you can print your annual tax returns.
I also suspect that just about any wireless printer will suck when used with Windows. Windows certainly has a lot of trouble finding mine.
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
I suspect that they might also be a strange factor that inkjet managed to corner the market by being crap, and not despite of it. People now effectively expect two things about personal printers:
- They're cheap
- They're crap
TFA is an example of this mindset. But then if you go to the store expecting to get a piece of shit printer, you're clearly going for the cheapest available option. Which means that you get a crap inkjet that you'll have to replace in two years, and then you'll buy an other crap cheap inkjet.
But I agree with both of you: after a few iterations of this cycle I finally decided to know better and bought the cheapest Brother B&W laser printer and it's been a joy. It just works.
Printers were the trial run for how to do customer relations on the IoT.
Probably because retailers try their best to steer customers to them because of higher profit margins on ink.
It has a super low-power standby and is always ready.
Ended up replacing it with an HP Office Jet that's worked fine for years. I participate in the HP ink hostage program but you know what, it's worth it to me for the hassle it saves.
Worth it, though. Most will replace it every few months if they are using them to print a lot.
Even color laserjets are decently cheap these days.
My summary is that Brother is the way to go, period. The HP printers are constantly fighting me by, e.g., demanding internet access to print, failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down, putting up baffling errors, etc. The Brother printers just work.
The fact that Wirecutter recommended HP when Brother is so clearly superior has forever lowered my faith in their recommendations.
And furthermore, Wirecutter uses affiliate links to make money. And then they got bought by NYT.
So, they definitely aren't completely unbiased.
Here's a message for your future self: that printer has a very important, very small piece of plastic inside it that occasionally breaks and it won't grab paper internally. The part number is LY2579001 and here's how to replace it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcZ5gF0t7Kc
Home-office stuff got better when started taping shit to the side or under my printers / monitors / homelab servers. Same deal as a label maker in the data center...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZS5EEI
I have not even had to replace the toner in it. It stays asleep the vast majority of the time and wakes on WiFi. I print directly from my phone or laptop wirelessly. It is everything a home printer should be.
Excuse me, why are your printouts being uploaded to someone's server?! How did you not return this junk immediately after finding out?
HP printers will still look for updates and take their time installing them even when you need to urgently print 2 sheets, as I found out myself :/
They fell so far.
What model was this?
Years after that, around 2017, my SO buys a rather high-end HP laptop in spite of my discouragement (can't blame her, it was a really attractive offer in terms of specs vs. price). She had to take it for repair shortly after buying it, the WiFi card never really worked (it's unstable, with constant disconnections, so an external one is needed) and the battery totally died a few days after warranty expired.
I suppose my experience with that brand is not representative because otherwise it should have been out of business for a long time...
But the printer has always worked well for us. Maybe this is from the days before HP got bad.
So instead I got a Brother printer. Sorry HP, not this time.
Not that Brother isn't a wildly better experience but.
I get the impression that right now they have the technical capability to disable 3rd party cartridges but do not use that capability for the most part. But they're quite upfront that they may change their mind.
So yes, non-DRM'd cartridges work on HP printers for now. That might change at any time though, at only their discretion. I don't know why you'd expect the same cartridge form factor to work in every printer you own.
I am saying that HP is making it so that third parties may be technically unable to manufacture cartridges and are left instead doing workarounds like refilling old HP cartridges.
Given how deeply it sounds like the HP drivers call out yeah that's going to be a problem eventually, I agree with you. Even if not with these models, maybe the next.
HP's drivers are super fucked, can't encourage people to stay away enough.
Either way, the DRM has been used to 1.) void your warranty as soon as a non-HP cartridge is installed and 2.) activate a kill bit in the cartridge DRM so it can’t be refilled and sold by 3rd party services. Any printer that reads a flagged cart will reject it.
https://i.imgur.com/3tjKV.png
I've currently got a Brother HL-2132 I paid $AU30 for sitting on my desk in a dusty metal fabrication workshop. When the printer tells me the toner is low I start looking for another same or similar model just for the toner cartridge. When the drum goes I just switch over to the next second hand one.
The current one has only had two paper jams that needed the printer blowing out with compressed air, despite the dust in the workshop being full of metal particles and grinding disk particles.
(Source: Switched from laser to inkjet)
Not really. Honestly, I find the space taken by the duplexing color laser all-in-one I have from Brother a bigger deal than the up-front price was, but it's fast, excellent quality, and total cost of printing is much lower than a cheap ink-jet.
it looks like brother's do? I'm looking at HL-L3210CW ($199).
If the printer uses four-color toner so it has pure black, your cost for B&W pages will be significantly less.
I admit my kid is only in second grade so far, but I disagree with you that color is mandatory. We've been very happy with the B&W laser.
Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.
Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.
I wouldn't buy a general consumer inkjet though.
I used to have an Epson A2 printer and a full set of inks cost more than £500.
You can get ink reservoir systems but they're messy and rather fragile. Although they do pay for themselves if you're printing at scale.
Only trick is they recently tend to run small for producing 4x6s for frames or scrapbooking. Letter or A4 sizes are less common and more expensive. I'd check eBay to be honest, for used stuff like the Sony UP75D.
The photos they print are awesome.
But I won’t buy another one. I would tend to print in “batches”; sometimes, months apart.
Epsons don’t sit well. Each printing session would start with a whole bunch of “throat-clearing.” I’d waste a ton of ink, just cleaning the heads.
Also, the printers required a significant amount of desk space.
Used about 6 reams of paper (I don't print that much really) and haven't replaced the ink cartridge once! Still works great.
Here's the printer: https://www.fujixerox.com.mm/en/Products/MM-Printers/DocuPri...
An inkjet which can do justice to a photo is also usually not as cheap, its inks cost like French perfume (and sometimes there are 6 of them, not 4), and you also need to use expensive photo-quality paper. This allows you to have really great photos. Using such a device for printing business documents or school handouts is wasting it.
So yes, go with a laser, a color laser if you need, and just take your photo printing to a good lab, they usually have one of these inkjet beasts anyway.
I adore (and have always adored) my Brother B+W lasers and am thinking about one of the color lasers one of these days, especially now that I am living at home instead of having access to a Xerox network copier at work (we are allowed reasonable personal usage of office supplies, no worries).
The Brother fan club is loud and for very good reason.
In contrast (I had a brother B+W at home) I owned an HP color laser for my office at school, and nope, never again, the driver package was fucking terrible and while I could usually get it to work after some finangling, it was constantly a pain. Literally threw it in the trash and got a B+W brother MFC instead even though that was a "step down".
I noted the same thing and eh. While this means your router has to continue to support a 2.4 GHz AP, I don't think that's an unusual decision as far as the "internet of things", due to cost reasons (as opposed to migrating every IOT to 5 GHz). I think you will have to maintain all three now.
Devices are eventually going to segregate themselves onto their own networks: 2.4 GHz for legacy / low-cost / IOT, 5 GHz for data rate, wigig/wifi 6/etc for extreme data rate. The performance hit on your other bands should be minimal even considering contetion.
There's no sense updating the wireless module for faster wifi and probably not any sense updating past 100 mbit wired ethernet either.
> I recently bought a dirt cheap Brother B+W printer to replace a Canon inktjet printer and am very happy with the decision.
Do note that canon inkjet printers can often be easily retrofitted for bulk "continuous tank" ink, which can actually make them surprisingly affordable to run as far as inkjets go! The ink itself isn't really that expensive, just packaging (it's a "priced according to demand" product). I'd look at bulk ink "cost per page" for photo before you toss it.
I think it'll probably still work out to being economically cheaper per page to get a brother B+W or color laser but if you can argue the bulk ink inkjet with printing some photos or school projects at home then maybe. Laser (color or B+W) is cheaper for b+w and occasional color presentation, and sending out to costco/kinkos/whatever is better for photos or premium presentation.
(There still is no comparison to professional photo printers of course - check out White House Custom Color, despite the "we're a pro service house! what is your professional account number" facade they're open to you even if you just want a couple family photos printed nice, and they have equipment and expertise you don't. Work out your cost per page and if you fuck up once on a big print you probably lose vs just sending it out, I bet.)
That would be rather annoying. Wifi is so usefull because you can connect everything to the same network. Especially when most consumers are oblivious to any computer architecture design decisions. And can you really expect someone living in a tiny apartment to purchase three network types? (2.4; 5ghz; wifi6) or one expensive device with all three technologies? Communicating data rates and transmission power will be the way to go I believe.
If I can hook up a printer to a network switch then that's what I usually go for. And pray that the printer actually works.
Most (?) wi-fi routers now support 2.4+5, and it's not meaningfully more expensive. I assume wifi 6 will have the same kind of gradual introduction 5 had?
I've never heard of anyone buying separate routers for multiple wavelengths.
After upgrading to Windows 10 it turned out the printer was no longer (support stopped after Windows 7). I never got the CUPS driver for it to work; it is an unofficial unmaintained one. other people have reported success with it.
The Brother worked (almost) out of the box on both Windows and Linux. Knowing that decent Linux drivers are available gives me some comfort that upgrading an OS will no longer disable the printer.
In the end I was surprised just how cheap the laser printer was. All in all I paid less than 120 euro for the printer plus one extra toner that is probably going to last a lifetime considering how often I print.
Regarding the WiFi situation I agree, it is not a big problem. I have a separate 2.4GHz network in the house now and that does not influence the speed of the 5GHz network in a way I notice.
It was just... there. Printed immediately with no fuss, including duplex.
But honestly, I got the Brother printer because HP ink cartridges are filled with DRM and I have no reason to think they won't obsolete a cartridge model in order to force people to buy new printers. In fact it seems naive to think they won't, even if they try they will inevitably have to discontinue things.
I cannot recommend Brother enough.
Last month I bought a wireless Brother laser printer, and the difference is astonishing! I was immediately able to print from my Linux laptop (no, I did not need to install any driver, the printer just got installed and configured automatically through wifi), and the same for my wife's computer. And, best of all, we can now print documents from our Android devices as well. I am moved to tears when I think of all the time I've spent in past years to re-configure my HP printer for the 1000th time!
It was the right shape, but had 'physical rights management' - tabs that prevented it from fitting in the holder. Quite clever.
Easily enough modified with a knife, but I was still foiled by DRM.
Now I'll admit that from a strict dollars-and-cents perspective, it's probably still more expensive per picture than using a photo service, but it's way more convenient. And it does a fine job with B&W printing too.
A credit must be given when it's due. They're reliable, reasonably priced and have Linux drivers.
I bought color printer for much less then 100$.
After 4 minutes, with me not touching anything printer decided it'll print and spew out few pieces of neatly arranged printed papers. Looks like it lost wi-fi connectivity but was able to reconnect and do the printout.
Of course I took the praises.
One thing I have been surprised by is the quality of photo prints from my colour laser (Brother dcp-l8410cdw). Admittedly, my expectations were very low, and it's certainly a long way off high-quality professional printing.
But for something temporary like a photo to pin to the fridge for a few weeks, it's actually good enough.
I think this is relevant for quite a bit of the market. Most people getting photo prints online don't seem to care much about quality - the results vary a lot between companies and many cheap ones are really bad.
I'd say the colour laser get fairly close to bad ones ordered online, and is significantly better in quality to some other photo products (custom birthday cards, that sort of thing).
So I think for many causal users/uses it's pretty viable
They actually created very nice, waterproof prints.
I think inkjets ended up knocking them out.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printing
Yeah, the toner transfer method[1] produces superior results, but when it's gear for my own use, I cant be bothered with the faffing around.
Sometimes I print photos too, just to have them around. With me it's "out of sight, out of mind", so I like to have the physical object as a reminder of something. Using your own printer on site has much less friction than using an upload-and-wait service.
All that said: yes it's getting to be a niche thing these days.
1. Laser print a reversed image in heavy lines onto an overhead transparency sheet, then use a hot clothes iron to melt the toner onto your shiny aluminium front panel. Three layers, tea towel, OHP, front panel. Then spray your panel with satin or semi-matte clear lacquer--once you've scrubbed off the metal front panel and repeated the printing and ironing often enough to get something that looks OK.
If you're in the need (like me right now) to print +300 photos in several formats, even shopping at best prices around me, that's something like 150€ for them. For that kind of price I could get a nice home printer, supplies, and afterwards just keep the printer for the future.
And they'll need to "realign the heads" and "clean the nozzles" at least 17 times, which will consume hours of your time, paper, and probably another whole set of cartridges too.
I battled with Epson and HP inkjets for years - I haven't looked back since I bought a small black and white Brother laser a couple of years back. No more wasting time, no more new cartridges every 5 pages - you just hit print and it prints.
If i recall right, i even read somewhere here on HN that someone basically printed full page color prints all day long and HP happily keeps sending him fresh cartridges, which is, at the rate he is paying monthly, a steal...
I guess nothing stops you from ending your membership after you're done with your printouts :)
I've also been using a Lexmark printer for several years now, from the "workgroup" class. These are more expensive, but generally better built and if you print a lot, you can use larger toner cartridges which come out fairly cheap per page. But Lexmark software has weird quirks and you inevitably end up having to reset your printer, because it isn't on WiFi for some reason (have you tried turning it off and on again?).
None of that with Brother. You plug it in, set it up, and you're done, works with all of your devices (including iOS).
Has anyone else run into this with their Macs in one of the older generation model Brothers and found a later Brother model that permanently fixes this behavior?
Other than that I agree, Brother all the way.
Before that, I'd been very happy with the Canon Pixma inkjets, and so I upgraded to the Pixma all-in-one (MX860, and later MX870), and I've sworn by this line. Reasonable ink/printing prices, great performance, fantastic network support.
Two years ago, we moved temporarily, so I bought a bargain basement Pixma TR4550 that checked off all of the boxes, but it was terrible. The first time my wife used it, she thought it was garbage. We made do, but I knew I wanted to change.
A year ago (after moving again), I had to add a requirement to the list. My new daily computer was a chromebook, which doesn't have scanning support, so I wanted a printer with some sort of scan-to-cloud solution. I was also eyeing color laser printers, which are now at reasonable prices, since I used to prefer laser printers before color became a requirement.
Enter the Brother MFC-L3750CDW, which I bought for $340. It's a color laser all-in-one with everything I wanted (including ethernet)... and it supports both scan-to-Google Drive and scan-to-email! This printer is nothing short of amazing. I've never printed from my phone before, but my wife and I both do this regularly now. I have two shortcut buttons in the interface, one for scanning directly to my email, one for my wife's. I have never installed a printer driver, every OS I've tried just prints directly to the thing (it's autodiscovered when adding).
In short, Brother laser printers for the win!
I am exactly in the same use-case as you (color / multifunction / ADF / network & Chromebook) and spent hours trying to get some of the Canon printers working with a Chromebook. But I'm not finding that printer anywhere at a reasonable price!
Inkjets suck. You don't need color. Buy a Brother.
I have a 5 year old basic consumer grade Canon color inkjet with a scanner built in. It's wireless, I can quickly print a photo on photo paper (no waiting multiple days for a printing service), any BW document I'm likely to print in 2020 (and let's be honest...how many documents do you really need to print in 2020?) come out at 10 pages per minute or so. It prints in duplex. Ink is about €50-€75 per year. I've had one paper jam in 5 years, solved by pulling one handle and removing a crumpled piece of paper.
I have way more issues with my €1500 laptop or my €800 phone than with my €100 inkjet printer.
Finally wisened up and bought a (Brother) color laser ~9 years ago and it has been flawless.
The Brother is a separate fuser that is replaced after some number of toner replacements.
I am not sure if it is still like this for Brothers.
why can't I scan to the SD card inserted, is there no write capability?
why is this wireless printer looking for a wired computer to scan to?
why can I only scan to Google Drive or Dropbox?
why is it app so slow?
why can't I just tap it with NFC or bluetooth to get this data?
Just like really common frustrations which should be default by now in even the cheapest models.
Modern printers are much better in this context, however what you pointed is true. To avoid heads clogging, when I moved from Laser to Inkjet, I planned a way to save the printer from inactivity by preparing a directory of family photos I already planned to print, but instead of printing lots of them in a single take, I print each of them every two weeks, so the printer heads never get dried. The printer is a Epson WP4515, and of course I use refilled consumables (€3.50 per cartridge). Admittedly from time to time I forgot about printing my photos, nothing that one or two heads cleaning passes couldn't solve. In short, it is definitely possible to have an Inkjet printer, make it print no more than a few hundred photos in years, but never clog a head or have to ditch new cartridges or worse, that is, an extremely low cost of operation. It requires some attention though.
And because the same printer hadn't been used in 5 months, I also had to clean the clogged head with a syringe afterwards.
I have a Samsung CLP-315W, and kept having problems detecting my first-party replacement toner cartridges because there were DRM chips in them [1]. I think a firmware upgrade even made the DRM worse.
This was almost a decade ago. If I had to get a high-volume home printer now, I'd probably consider one with refillable ink tanks.
[1] http://fcartegnie.free.fr/lines/?p=25
This time period included going back to school, a technical college, where I printed a ton of reports (and many misprints).
I currently have a Brother HL-2140 (also has HL-21 model number) and it has 'manual duplex'. This means if I want to save paper I have to mark a corner of the first page before printing and see what orientation it prints compared to that mark (it is not intuitive). I have been printing one page at a time because of this, although now I have written this down I realise I could do better.
That being said, based on what people write every time this topic comes up, whenever this one dies I'll replace it with a Brother.
I have a Brother colour duplex printer for bulk printing (was useful for printing weekly school plans before schools went back a few months ago: https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=... . As noted by others, it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi.
I use this Canon for scanning and photo printing: https://www.canon.co.uk/printers/pixma-ts9150-series/
It seems to be the best of both worlds for the price point and physical space.
The replacement toner is 20€. Why would I ever touch anything else?
Watch out, modern printers run a full OS that doesn't expect power to be fully cut regularly. My Xerox does a full filesystem check every time I turn the power to it on, which takes about 5 mins. For my next printer I will carefully research how this works on it.
fuck.that.
But you can't buy just that. The only printers that have those features also have a feeder on the scanner, a fax machine, all kinds of cloud crap, an "app" system (?!?), access control... which drive the price way up the their own - and that's before they slap on the "enterprise" markup because that is no longer considered a SOHO device.
I print some pages about 5 times/year max. The toner that comes with it is nearly running out, but still able to print some greyish image if I want quick physical form of some files. ZERO maintenance.
and it's not even the expensive model, it's the base model, almost the cheapest. Such quality, really.
On another story, I also used to own Brother's multifunction scanner-inkjet printer. It was a nightmare.
It periodically, uh, does that printhead thing, was idle for a few months, no new clogs.
Why it is not common practice for other brands?
One word of warning: Avoid their inkjets. I had one with permanent heads. Less than 100 sheets in, it jammed (this ream was fine with the printer before and after it).
It failed to put the head back on top of the seal that keeps it from drying out. I didn’t notice the jam, and a few days later it was permanently ruined.
I do recommend the brother ADS line (standalone USB document scanners), with the caveat that the Linux drivers on my old one are x86-only.
Inkjets suck. Don’t even think about it. Dye sublimation is (was?) nice.
We have a Samsung laser, which is great, except there’s a “disable the wifi until you plug me into ethernet” button labeled WPS on the top that the cats like to press.
Also their printer business was acquired by HP, so it’s only a matter of time until HP manages to somehow remote brick it or stop selling consumables.
I freaking hate multifunction printers.
I think the issue is that Inkjet printers suck.