Second that. I have an absolutely antique Brother MFC. It prints, scans, photocopies, and it has a $20 generic toner cartridge in it that gives perfectly good print quality. The only downside is having install a 32-bit binary driver to make it work in Linux, with an extra hoop to jump through - scanning won't work until you manually install another missing 32-bit dependency. But once that's done it works. For years. It's enough to make one not hate printing at home.
MacOS also has an Image Capture app that's explicitly made for scanning.
The only real problem I have with it is that it wants to do a preview scan first if you used the scanner bed last (as opposed to the document feeder) and it freezes it's interface while that's happening.
I honestly hate dealing with the scanning apps. They're ok, but they're not cheap and require a subscription. I've been looking to replace them with an actual scanner.
Genius Scan Enterprise is a non-subscription "pay-up-front" scanning app that I've used (on Android) for at least 3 years with complete satisfaction. Current price 25USD but I recall paying noticeably less (I share the app with other users in my family to defray the cost). I previously owned a Fujitsu fi-5110EOX sheet-feed scanner that I thought was the pinnacle of scanning goodness, but when it died after 15 years, Genius Scan proved a more than sufficient replacement for me[1], such that I returned the new Fujitsu sheet-feed scanner I'd bought to replace it for a refund.
I have no affiliation with any of the products I've mentioned above, just a user.
Yup. I’ve had the HL-2240 printer for at least a decade. I’ve changed the toner once during that time, and that was pretty recent. It’s boring and reliable.
I bought a stand-alone Brother feed scanner that I’m also happy with, but for occasional scanning, phone apps do quite well these days.
If I want to print something in color, I’ll go to a print shop.
That's terrible. I've had my Brother laser printer for 14 years now, and it keeps on trucking. I have only replaced the toner twice and do use 3rd party toner. However, I do note that it says that the toner is empty well before it is actually empty (like months or even years if you don't print often).
I have an old brother laser printer/ scanner. Unfortunately the driver doesn't work since Windows 10. It doesn't recognize either scanner or printer. Windows 8 was still fine...
Depending on how interested you are in getting it up and going again, Brother in the past has been good at providing Linux drivers. I use a small single-purpose lightweight linux PC as a print server and let it deal with the driver- and then just serve the printer to all computers on my network as a network printer.
If a driver like that is available for your model it could be a way to revive it.
I wonder if that's the old "take the toner cartridge out and tilt it back in forth a few times" issue of toner getting unevenly distributed in the cartridge?
Not everything is designed to run all the way empty.
Running your car at a very low fuel level is hard on the fuel pump - it has to work hard to slurp up what few drops are left - and on many newer models if you actually run it dry the consequences can range from having to re-prime the pump to the pump grenading and sending shrapnel into the injectors, ruining them TOO.
Isn't the interaction between the laser toner cartridge and drum completely electrostatic? I thought the toner just gets pulled out of the cartridge via static electricity?
Huh, thats the one I ended up grabbing on a whim for my parents from officemax when their old one kept giving them problems. They have not complained to me about it since, in comparison to the previous 3 printers we tried.
Brother laserprinters only here: two at my wife's SME, one here at our home here, one at our vacation place but... As someone already commented they've also started playing nasty.
It's still probably going to take a few years before they reach HP level of suckage but apparently it's coming.
When these recommendations come up on HN, It's always people who have had their printer for 10+ years. I always wonder if Brother is still the same way.
I bought a recent Brother and have been pleased with it, though I haven't yet tried to replace toner. I'm a bit worried because I've heard they do some firmware tricks with non-standard toner. I sure hope that's not true.
As long as it’s laser and doesn’t have obnoxious features it should be good. Mine is 4 years old and doesn’t have a scanner - I gotta say with mobile phone cameras and post processing I haven’t actually needed a scanner
I have a new brother printer (<2 years old). It works just fine. The quality of the printer, as a device itself, I have no complaints about. It's the DRM Toner bullshit that is the problem. Unfortunately, in the past, that kind of behavior has often presaged other things like degrading hardware quality in the future. Will Brother do the same? I have no idea. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a different company that both supplies a quality product and also doesn't do the DRM bullshit. So, in my opinion, Brother is not longer better than other companies, but it doesn't appear to be worse either. Which is more an indictment of the printer industry than anything good about Brother.
-edit- You can still (for now) get around the Toner DRM. The drm chip is pretty easy to remove and it just slots into a little spot on the toner. It's about a ~5 minute operation. So make sure to keep your OEM cartridge for now:
Even if it’s true, Brother toner is cheaper than HP :)
My 7-year-old Brother printer works well with third-party toner, I paid $29 for two refills and each lasts for 3 years or so. The printer itself was like $50 back then :) I bought it because it was cheaper than buying ink for my previous HP inkjet.
A more useful recommendation is: buy when they are making their money from the razor, not the blades.
Most (all?) printer companies now have a range printers models where that's true. HP calls theirs a "Smart Tank" printer, Brother names them INKvestment printers. Epson was first with their EcoTank printers. I have one of them, but I know other people with other brands, and we all swear by them.
That's possibly because they aren't cheap upfront, so they tend to load them with features so you feel like you are getting something for all that money aside from the privilege of getting ripped off on ink. For example they often come with 10's of thousands of pages of ink in the box and are typically warrantied for years and have a build quality to match.
In principle, I'm fine with them offering the razor model - even "you can't scan if you haven't paid the ink tax". In practice, they never spell out on the box the Faustian bargain you are signing entering into. So once again we have big corp exploiting the "oh you didn't read the fine print" power imbalance between them and the consumer.
...I give myself the benefit of doubt as not technically a native speaker... but "Envy"? Really?
I still have my HP LaserJet P<numbers> I got when I was a student, many lives ago, and I got it to the point where the power button - the only button - is mostly dead. I had pondered "opening it up" and just running bare wires out - hacker style! - but... This whole consumer-printer-industry-situation is still so sad I'm happy I need a printer only slightly more than once a month.
And I've seen videos of teletypes from a freaking half a century ago working fine today.
Apologies. I have also an inkjet-scanner box from an _even earlier life_ that I keep around because a) it has a space to be in, b) it still scans (!!).
It seems like HP have been using 'Envy' as a way to denote their mid-high end products. Never knew they used it with printers though, that does seem kinda odd. Who brags about having a high end printer?
Shiiiit, you gotta see what I got. It's a plotter. How big a piece of paper can you print on? Aw, 8.5" by 11"? This thing's measured in feet, baby.
At least I had that back in the day at college. Now I got a Brother color laserjet L8850CDW! It's got wireless and it duplexes and it's got scanning as well. Supposedly it does faxing but I don't have a hard line to try it out on. It's got this touchscreen display, and each cartridge has about 4,000 page!
...people will brag about anything. If you're in the industry, whichever industry it is, if you've got the best (along whichever metric is appropriate), and you want people to know, you'll brag about it.
> The Verge noticed that HP at least changed its language for the Envy 6455e's Amazon product page to say that you can "print, scan, and copy from your phone—from whenever, wherever" to "print, scan, and copy from your phone—from anywhere."
Doesn't one of the SV rich kids want to make the world a better place by building non-crappy printers? The only innovation would be to forbid anyone with a MBA from making any decision or suggestion at any level of the company. Normal basic printers, the tech is here, we want not even faster horses, thanks (actually that might be the impetus for someone to define what a faster horse would be).
What will happen is some startup will take VC funds to build the Juicero of printers, all the legacy competition will get squeezed out, and then printer cartridges for the sole remaining new entrant will skyrocket.
It just looks like another middleman. Bringing new manufacturing capacity online or R&D for new medicine that is sold at a low price is the only thing that would help.
Not every retailer that sits between the manufacturer and the consumer is a middleman. That is, it is literally a middleman, but not in the sense that it necessarily has to take on a rent-seeking, economically harmful role.
Most manufacturers don't have the expertise in dealing with retail and don't care to build it up. They stick to what they're good at, which is manufacturing, and let the retailer stick to what they're good at, which is dealing with the whole host of other issues that arise in retail commerce.
In a related current development, traditional automakers like Ford are angling to sell directly to the consumer, like Tesla does. People are generally on board with this because dealership experiences do suck often. But once dealers are all driven out of business, it's a good bet that the automaker will benefit from that surplus, not the consumer. It'll be interesting to see.
SV rich kids would rather cloud-enable everything to the point printers are obsolete, because:
- Margins for selling collected consumer data may be higher than than margins for ink. Ink has materials, production, and inventory cost that data storage does not, though this assumes cloud storage remains cheap.
- Renting storage space for consumer documents is recurring revenue versus the non-recurring revenue of selling ink (HP is trying to get people on ink subscription plans, maybe it'll work).
- Unique value-adds: E.g. Get people to store their personal documents online and they'll be sticky recurring revenue, because moving them is hard. Extra revenue opportunities by offering integration with other services for extra $$$. E.g. store your personal documents and use our integrated DocuSign like service.
- Abolish paper to save the forests. Printed matter soon becomes a hipster fad, then disappears. Though you do have to keep some around for faxes, which are never going away.
I think the problem is that as soon as such a company accepts VC money they take a sort of poison pill. After that they are contractually obligated to wring out every dime from customers. Hardware startups often require a lot of starting capitol.
Consumers by and large won't consume such a product. There is a vanishingly small market for a $600 printer that doesn't suck, does its job, and respects your rights as a consumer and doesn't pull bullshit like all the other printers do, except that every other printer costs $150 for the same feature-set.
Of course, I don't know for a fact that someone can't make a living making boutique printers like this. But I don't know that there would be an adequate return on the capital required for such an enterprise.
I do wonder how long HP can squeeze out this "pay gold prices for ink" business model. It used to be just techies sounding the alarm, but these days I feel like so many people have grown to absolutely despise inkjets, and I don't see that getting any better. People usually fall into one of two camps:
1. People who print frequently due to work or other business needs. These folks know that investing in a decent laser printer will pay itself off extremely quickly given the obscene charges for ink, and lasers are much better for larger print volumes anyway.
2. People who only print every now and then due to some external need. These people may be tempted to buy an inkjet originally for their lower prices, but due to their infrequent use, they are also much more likely to hit printer malfunctions due to ink drying up, or some other reason that inkjets seem to want to die if left idle for more than a month or two.
Inkjet (at least the consumer version of it) is just a technology that deserves the "PC Load Letter" treatment from Office Space.
I could not scan on a free, used, MFP in the 1990's because it needed ink. Buying ink seemed dumb because the print heads were ruined, and they cost more than a new printer.
I am glad to see this news story. It means the pendulum is swinging back towards stopping predatory marketing practices.
I would rather make the trek to my local FedEx to do my twice-yearly printing and pay exorbitant prices per page than have a ticking time-bomb take up space in my house.
I don't think the law would be effective. Design the printer in such a way that the cartridge contains the camera lens, and drip the ink over it as part of normal operation. Then before scanning, you run a cycle that wipes it with rubbing alcohol contained in the cartridge. No cartridge in the printer, no camera. And if you're out of lens cleaner, you can scan all you want, but it will just be black because the lens is covered in ink.
The underlying problem here is the patent system. The Shenzhen Market would be glad to sell you a $3 printer/scanner that doesn't require proprietary cartridges, I'm sure.
This is only ink-jet, correct? I went with a black&white laser printer-scanner years ago and am still on my second, generic, toner cartridge. I shake it when it gets low. (Canon MF3010)
This article is about an inkjet, but I've owned laser multi-function devices that will not print if the toner is out. The problem is linking the scanner working with the printer having filled consumables. I've also had devices where the printer failed, and you could not scan or fax because the printer failed self-testing.
> still on my second, generic, toner cartridge
There's a whole other can of worms around chipping cartridges in an effort to prevent refilling and competition. With newer printers, this may not be possible as cartridges "expire" often before the ink or toner is gone.
Ok, maybe a dumb question -- are printers still hard to make? Is the IP really locked down? If I search online for printer, I still see almost entirely stuff from big known players (HP, Canon, Epson, Brother). I can buy a knock-off smart-watch with a heart-rate monitor and bluetooth etc, and it doesn't try to get me to subscribe to some paid cloud service b/c so far as I can tell they're happy to just sell the device. Why isn't some Chinese company that I never heard of selling a dumb printer without the authorized ink, demanded network for auto-updates nonsense, etc?
I don't really use my Brother laser printer much anymore, but I'll be damned if I get rid of it. In fact, I should stock up on toner, since it's probably the last good printer they'll make for a while.
65 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread[0] https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
Scans from my Brother something-or-other with no apps or drivers whatsoever directly to PDF, over Wi-Fi. Perfect.
The only real problem I have with it is that it wants to do a preview scan first if you used the scanner bed last (as opposed to the document feeder) and it freezes it's interface while that's happening.
I have no affiliation with any of the products I've mentioned above, just a user.
[0] https://thegrizzlylabs.com/enterprise/
[1] NB: my use case does not involve a significant amount of scanning high page count documents.
I bought a stand-alone Brother feed scanner that I’m also happy with, but for occasional scanning, phone apps do quite well these days.
If I want to print something in color, I’ll go to a print shop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
If a driver like that is available for your model it could be a way to revive it.
Running your car at a very low fuel level is hard on the fuel pump - it has to work hard to slurp up what few drops are left - and on many newer models if you actually run it dry the consequences can range from having to re-prime the pump to the pump grenading and sending shrapnel into the injectors, ruining them TOO.
It's still probably going to take a few years before they reach HP level of suckage but apparently it's coming.
I bought a recent Brother and have been pleased with it, though I haven't yet tried to replace toner. I'm a bit worried because I've heard they do some firmware tricks with non-standard toner. I sure hope that's not true.
-edit- You can still (for now) get around the Toner DRM. The drm chip is pretty easy to remove and it just slots into a little spot on the toner. It's about a ~5 minute operation. So make sure to keep your OEM cartridge for now:
https://youtu.be/NzaRVEzYuz8
My 7-year-old Brother printer works well with third-party toner, I paid $29 for two refills and each lasts for 3 years or so. The printer itself was like $50 back then :) I bought it because it was cheaper than buying ink for my previous HP inkjet.
Also a networked printer is a lot less faff if you have a lot of Linux machines at home, from a drivers perspective.
A more useful recommendation is: buy when they are making their money from the razor, not the blades.
Most (all?) printer companies now have a range printers models where that's true. HP calls theirs a "Smart Tank" printer, Brother names them INKvestment printers. Epson was first with their EcoTank printers. I have one of them, but I know other people with other brands, and we all swear by them.
That's possibly because they aren't cheap upfront, so they tend to load them with features so you feel like you are getting something for all that money aside from the privilege of getting ripped off on ink. For example they often come with 10's of thousands of pages of ink in the box and are typically warrantied for years and have a build quality to match.
In principle, I'm fine with them offering the razor model - even "you can't scan if you haven't paid the ink tax". In practice, they never spell out on the box the Faustian bargain you are signing entering into. So once again we have big corp exploiting the "oh you didn't read the fine print" power imbalance between them and the consumer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113336
...I give myself the benefit of doubt as not technically a native speaker... but "Envy"? Really?
I still have my HP LaserJet P<numbers> I got when I was a student, many lives ago, and I got it to the point where the power button - the only button - is mostly dead. I had pondered "opening it up" and just running bare wires out - hacker style! - but... This whole consumer-printer-industry-situation is still so sad I'm happy I need a printer only slightly more than once a month.
And I've seen videos of teletypes from a freaking half a century ago working fine today.
Apologies. I have also an inkjet-scanner box from an _even earlier life_ that I keep around because a) it has a space to be in, b) it still scans (!!).
It is a very odd name. Maybe it's because people who own those envy people who don't.
At least I had that back in the day at college. Now I got a Brother color laserjet L8850CDW! It's got wireless and it duplexes and it's got scanning as well. Supposedly it does faxing but I don't have a hard line to try it out on. It's got this touchscreen display, and each cartridge has about 4,000 page!
...people will brag about anything. If you're in the industry, whichever industry it is, if you've got the best (along whichever metric is appropriate), and you want people to know, you'll brag about it.
Amazingly narrow update.
Most manufacturers don't have the expertise in dealing with retail and don't care to build it up. They stick to what they're good at, which is manufacturing, and let the retailer stick to what they're good at, which is dealing with the whole host of other issues that arise in retail commerce.
In a related current development, traditional automakers like Ford are angling to sell directly to the consumer, like Tesla does. People are generally on board with this because dealership experiences do suck often. But once dealers are all driven out of business, it's a good bet that the automaker will benefit from that surplus, not the consumer. It'll be interesting to see.
- Margins for selling collected consumer data may be higher than than margins for ink. Ink has materials, production, and inventory cost that data storage does not, though this assumes cloud storage remains cheap.
- Renting storage space for consumer documents is recurring revenue versus the non-recurring revenue of selling ink (HP is trying to get people on ink subscription plans, maybe it'll work).
- Unique value-adds: E.g. Get people to store their personal documents online and they'll be sticky recurring revenue, because moving them is hard. Extra revenue opportunities by offering integration with other services for extra $$$. E.g. store your personal documents and use our integrated DocuSign like service.
- Abolish paper to save the forests. Printed matter soon becomes a hipster fad, then disappears. Though you do have to keep some around for faxes, which are never going away.
I do like craigslist.org
Of course, I don't know for a fact that someone can't make a living making boutique printers like this. But I don't know that there would be an adequate return on the capital required for such an enterprise.
1. People who print frequently due to work or other business needs. These folks know that investing in a decent laser printer will pay itself off extremely quickly given the obscene charges for ink, and lasers are much better for larger print volumes anyway.
2. People who only print every now and then due to some external need. These people may be tempted to buy an inkjet originally for their lower prices, but due to their infrequent use, they are also much more likely to hit printer malfunctions due to ink drying up, or some other reason that inkjets seem to want to die if left idle for more than a month or two.
Inkjet (at least the consumer version of it) is just a technology that deserves the "PC Load Letter" treatment from Office Space.
0 - https://www.xerox.com/en-vc/office/multifunction-printers/wo...
I am glad to see this news story. It means the pendulum is swinging back towards stopping predatory marketing practices.
The underlying problem here is the patent system. The Shenzhen Market would be glad to sell you a $3 printer/scanner that doesn't require proprietary cartridges, I'm sure.
I even made it wireless with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
This article is about an inkjet, but I've owned laser multi-function devices that will not print if the toner is out. The problem is linking the scanner working with the printer having filled consumables. I've also had devices where the printer failed, and you could not scan or fax because the printer failed self-testing.
> still on my second, generic, toner cartridge
There's a whole other can of worms around chipping cartridges in an effort to prevent refilling and competition. With newer printers, this may not be possible as cartridges "expire" often before the ink or toner is gone.