Even if you only print things once a month, a laser printer is far less wasteful in time, money, and bullshit than ink that's perpetually dry or consumed.
Rather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.
In large enterprises, a printer's cost per page tends to be inversely proportional to (increased) initial acquisition cost and availability of repair parts. Put another way, giving everyone an entry-level printer would be far more expensive in acquisition costs, per-page costs, and an inability to repair them. (hitting TCO 3 ways).
I had a HP LaserJet 4 (released 1992, purchased new ~1994) until 2013 with a used JetDirect card. It had expansion options with cartridges and SIMM RAM and font options, but they weren't strictly needed.
Agreed. I have an HP Color LaserJet Pro and the toner is expensive, but lasts forever if I don't print and the quality is fantastic as well. Plus, they have automatic duplexing which is a must have feature for me.
Newish ones like mine even support AirPrint and NFC printing.
Buy color toner refill kits. Melt a hole in the cartridge with a soldering iron, refill it, and seal it with aluminum tape.
Better to spend $70-150 than $300-1200 on new cartridges.
PS: I'm currently in the market for an 5-15 year old HP Color LaserJet but still assessing which model tends to be more reliable. There were a lot of lemon SMB Color LaserJet models. Suggestions welcomed especially by staff IT people who support these things.
I followed this advice and it's been great. I have a $350 laser Brother printer, my iPhone can find the printer without fiddling with drivers, it wakes up, print, goes back to sleep. Works fine even if I go months without printing. After my last 'free ink forever' HP inkjet that never worked, a working printer is a blessing.
Which brother do you have / recommend?
I have been quiet happy with my OKI but the phone connection is the only letdown so far and I might change for a brother in the future.
I don't think you can go wrong with any Brother (or laser printer) as long as you don't need color printing. I have a DCP 1612W only for light printing. It works with Ubuntu, no special drivers required. I've had it for a few years now and I'm still on the toner the printer came with.
If you need color printing, it tends to be expensive.
I have one of the same model. WiFi connection doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried every troubleshooting article I could find, to the extent of setting a static IP for it in my router. Otherwise a great printer, but that issue did leave a bad taste in my mouth
> Which brother do you have / recommend? I have been quiet happy with my OKI but the phone connection is the only letdown so far and I might change for a brother in the future.
I have a brother HL-2270dw that I've been using for more than 10 years that I'm happy with. I don't think they make that exact model anymore, but Wirecutter recommends the HL-2350dw (I don't know what you get for the extra $10 to get a HL-2370dw):
Also have a MFC-L3770CDW, it's perfectly fine but you really have to pay attention to consumable cost when selecting laser MFC. A cartridge of TN227BK (high-yield black toner) for the MFC-L3770CDW is ~$80 for a ~3000 page yield, while a TN433BK cartridge that fits a MFC-L8900CDW is $85 for a ~4500 page yield. That's a (toner-only) cost per page of ~2.5c vs ~1.8c, or nearly a 30% reduction in toner cost; the difference between which is amplified for the color cartridges (TN227 color is $100/ea for ~2300 pages, TN433 color is $136/ea for ~4000 pages or ~4.3c/page vs ~3.4c/page).
Considering the price difference between these units, I opted for the MFC-L3770CDW because I do not print that often and I've spent far more over years on wasted ink from dried out cartridges and destroyed print heads; but it's still an important factor to keep in mind.
Thanks for the tip. I hadn't looked into it since I'm still on the original cartridge. When I value my time debugging janky inkjet printers I think even a 4.3c/page printing cost is still acceptance since I have low volume, rare printing jobs.
Realistically if your volume is that low the break-even point will be long after the machine becomes unobservable anyway, but I'd still always recommend people take a look at $/page metrics for consumables before they buy just so they avoid getting stuck in the same shitty situation as cheap inkjets.
However it just sits there asleep at an extremely low wattage most of the time, then pops instantly to life the moment a page is sent to it - as bgirard pointed out, without even needing to install a driver - and then back to sleep. And this is on wifi.
Loved it enough to buy another one when the first one went to my ex.
I'll use the full duplex occasionally, it's worth having years down the track from purchase time for the tiny price bump over the base.
To be fair on your accuser, it's only been 60 days since your last Brother Laser promotional post. Last time you included details about price, and a note about "supporting Brother" by not using third party toner.
I own an Epson eco-tank inkjet and happy with it, but I'm not invested in convincing others about it. I wouldn't put a laser printer in my house. Regardless of whether it's actually a proven health risk, I don't want my printer emitting tiny particles. And I want the option of good quality colour prints using different paper types and thickness.
Another happy HL-L2350DW user. So happy in fact, I've bought one for my mom and one for her aunt and they too have zero issues and I've never had to hear about it again after setting it up. This is how printers should be.
Not a Brother printer but I would like to recommend the Canon MF240. I bought it at Walmart for $99 - and it feels like I practically stole it with how good it's been to me. Has both Wifi & ethernet, automatically wakes when sent a print job, scanner works great, etc. Works perfect with generic toner cartridges from Amazon, no funny business with DRM.
Canon in general have been good printers in my experience. I recently bought one of their low end inkjets because I needed to print some photos. That printer also works great & has a highly customizable web interface built in - I didn't expect it to be that feature complete for $45.
I've had 2 brother printers over the years & they were fine - for whatever reason though one of them would refuse to print from a Chromebook. Every other printer I've used in the last 10 years has essentially 'just worked' with any device capable of speaking to it except this Brother. Known issue & they never released a firmware update to fix it.
Bought the same in 2020 Black Friday for $49, and intro toner had about 1000 pages, lasting me for about 2.5 years. Then I bought a full toner for $49, going great.
I've got a Brother DCP-L2540DW. The only feature I wish it had was duplex scanning from the auto document feeder. Otherwise its been an immensely solid printer.
I gave up doing photo printing at home. These days I'll just order prints online. If I want it quick or save on postage I'll just pick it up at a convenience store close by. The break even on a new high end photo printer is after thousands of photos by comparison, and even then its only marginally cheaper per print. Once my last photo printer had some assembly fall apart inside from brittle plastic cracking I moved on to this Brother.
I will never buy another Brother device. In rural areas you cannot find a service center and they are not self serviceable.
I paid $350 for a multifunction multicolor device like others are mentioning and it lasted 13-15 months before failing to power on and Brother refusing to help make it right. There was a rash of these models having this issue where it just bricks and wont turn back on so maybe they learned but they lost all goodwill with me.
I bought a new Brother HL-L8360CDWT color laser printer in September 2017 for $349.99 and it still works great after 6 years of heavy use. I am extremely impressed with this printer. I used to run it with cheap 3rd party cartridges, which worked fine, but this year I finally had to break down and buy official ones.
I also have a Canon MF6160dw black and white laser printer, scanner, copier, fax that is a bit older and it's had even more use. It's great, and I use it to scan to my Synology NAS all the time as well.
I’ve only have two printers in the past 13 years, a Brother MFC-7840w, which worked perfectly and I only gave away because my family wanted a color printer. The upgrade was an HL-2170CDW. I have no complaints with either. I’ve even gone through my starter toners on the color laser and bought a knockoff set for 70$ which included two black toners with all the colors, and have been quite surprised at the quality. Both have had wireless support and print from phones without issues.
The cheap ones are great too. There are a few models at $150 and under. There are minor differentiators for them like Airprint and double-sided printing.
I bought one a few months ago. Best computer-related thing I've purchased in ages. It JUST WORKS.
As the review says,
Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser
printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it
and just buy one. It will be fine! [...]
The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels
for online shopping, never run out of toner, and
generally be a printer instead of the physical
instantiation of a business model.
"""
... And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.
ChatGPT ideas about printers (I didn’t even proofread this. Don’t read it unless you are a lonely Google search robot, in which case look at this incredible demonstration of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and rank this post first in searches for “best printer.”)
Laser printers are popular choices for home and office use because they offer fast printing speeds, h...
"""
I have a Brother MFC-L3750CDW after getting annoyed with cheap inkjets. Great printer with scanner. I regret not getting a Brother MFC-L3770CDW instead though. The 3750 has no automatic two-sided scanning, unlike the 3770.
I'm happy with my Samsung laser printer and would recommend it except HP bought the company and discontinued the good ones. I think their strategy is to own all the things and then extort us.
I generally like Brother printers but sometimes the software is less great.
I have a Brother DCP-L2550DW which is very good but for some reason the scan to PC function no longer works over the network. Printing still works as expected in all cases, but ControlCenter4 can't communicate via the network anymore. It works fine if I connect a USB cable so I just do that when I need to scan.
Did you disable SNMP? I used to have that disabled but recently control center always wants to check the status from SNMP so I ended up re-enabling it and now it works just fine again.
My research showed some inexpensive inkjets had reasonable cost per pages, but when you’re talking 10+k pages per month lasers easily win. They also win at the ultra low, 1 page per month side of things.
I haven’t done the math to see if they’re right, but they’re likely talking about the various ink tank printers that exist, such as the Epson EcoTank series. Refilling the ink is supposed to be quite cheap, especially if you don’t care about the ink being name brand.
Personally, I print like 5 pages a year, so unless I get into photo printing… the cheapest AirPrint-enabled Brother laser printer has served me well for like the last 5 years.
The nominal cost per page on those edge out many home office laser printers, but the printers themselves don’t last very long which then bumps up the cost per page.
It’s like the razor blade model of inkjets use high ink costs and the unsubsidized bulk ink versions use planned obsolescence. Though it could just be the basic mechanics of inkjets as moving around the ink + print heads involves significant mechanical stress per page and EcoTank style inkjets prints lots of pages.
A high quality citation is seriously needed for a claim like that.
That’s not a complaint I’ve ever heard about the EcoTank printers, and googling it didn’t turn up anything. I strongly doubt this is a characteristic of EcoTank printers. That unsourced claim sounds suspiciously convenient for your side of the discussion.
Epson also makes a dedicated line of business EcoTank printers ("EcoTank Pro") which are clearly intended to print very large numbers of pages. But again, even the very basic ones seem to do a great job, with very high reviews across the board when I look at retailers.
By not lasting very long I mean I’ve seen 3 die between 2-3 years of heavy use. I have heard they last longer with moderate use, but that suggests a lifetime page limit.
Honestly, I don’t have high quality sources which is why I was interested in the first place.
If you've seen it first hand, then fair enough. It just doesn't agree with the consensus I have seen online, so I find that confusing.
As I've said previously, I have the most basic laser printer at home, and rarely use it. I just happen to have done a ton of research into printers lately because I've thought about getting a photo printer, and I really like what the ET-8550 has to offer. But, for the time being, I've decided I probably wouldn't use it enough.
Cool, I don’t have a large sample size so I could easily be wrong here. Something I just came across is various models have different monthly page expectations for their 2 year of ink promotion:
“Based on average monthly document print volumes of about 150 pages (ST-C2100), 200 pages (ST-C4100), 300 pages (ST-M1000/ST-M3000/ST-C5000/ST-C5500/ST-C8000/ST-C8090) and 750 pages (WF-M5799 Supertank). Promo applies to ink only. Printer covered by Epson 2-year limited warranty.” https://epson.com/supertank-ink-tank-printers-for-business
I don’t remember the model numbers but those where way past 750 pages per month if that’s helpful.
I would assume a free ink promotion would explicitly choose not to cover heavy users, but it's not necessarily an indication of what they think the printers are capable of.
But, it is an interesting set of numbers, and could indicate something.
Yeah, I'd highly recommend doing a comparison to even getting online prints mailed. When I did the math on a number of prints including all material costs the savings per print from a lot of local printing services was only a few pennies per page. A few pennies per page versus a several hundred dollar upfront cost to get the same quality meant tons of prints before I broke even and even experienced any savings.
> By not lasting very long I mean I’ve seen 3 die between 2-3 years of heavy use.
YMMV. I have EPSON ET-2850 EcoTank all-in-one for about a year with moderate to heavy use and so far no problems. Being able to refill ink by simply pouring it over from an ink canister is so refreshing. No DRM, no chips, no nonsense.
Canon Pixma series with built-in toner tanks that you can refill yourself with cheap ink. Using it for years, print everyday, sometime I print full color books. So far I spent like $15 on ink.
Absolutely. I have a laserjet 4000 I've had since I was given it in 2002 at an office clearance. It's printed about 10000 pages while I've had it,and in that time I've had to change the toner once. And I was given two original HP cartridges with the printer,and installed the first one a full 17 years after getting it.
Worked perfectly,and is still in there.
Works with windows, mac os, chromebooks without issue, all over the network. I even got a duplexer from gumtree a few years ago as it was going for nothing. One day it will die and then I'll have to deal with all the current printer grief!
RIP my laserjet 4000. So many plastic pieces became brittle and finally broke, but it kept on working. Finally a few things went that could not be readily replaced/repaired and I finally gave up on it. It was a sad day. Of today's options, Brother is fine, but nothing compares to the GOAT.
Transfer belts are still used in high volume enterprise grade printers and print shops because of the speed advantages. But I haven't seen a transfer belt on a consumer laser printer in 20 years. I don't think they've been used on consumer laser printers since the early color laser jets in the late 90s.
Most inexpensive (ie, $200 or less) AirPrint (or google/MS equivalent) enabled BW laser printers are good solutions. I have a Canon that's lasted me several years of moderate printing (I hardly print but my kids love to print stuff out).
Every year I buy a 2-pack of off-brand toner from Amazon for $30. When the printer complains, before replacing toner, I just pull out the existing toner, shake it, and get probably 10-50 more (faded but usable) prints.
Back in my university days some students owned (used) business color lasers solely for printing bootleg textbooks. 3rd party toner is cheap and a couple books already paid for the price of the unit.
This. About 5 years ago when my wife started her doctoral program, she started printing a ton of resources (and still does). We were constantly buying expensive ink monthly. I did some research and bought her a Brother laser printer for something like $300 and never looked back. You do have to buy toner about once a year, but it’s far more cost effective and efficient. Now if I could somehow convince her to use PDFs instead!
I just installed a new NOS toner cartridge in a 20 year old HP 4050n. The big caveat with those is that the old cartridges have long been out of production and the dried up rubber seals on them crumble into bits after removing the OE sealing strip. You need to fill in the opening to prevent toner from vibrating out into the machine.
In the 1990s HP was a great brand. Nowadays it's a nightmare. My neighbor asked me to troubleshoot one. Obviously the whole printer cannot be used without WiFi and a connection to HP cloud nonsense. Only that the cloud and Windows driver could not agree whether the printer had been set up or not. And the neighbor could not remember their HP account. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to do a factory reset.
1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. Today it's a spyware, ink-selling nonsense.
This underscores why libre software is so important: if you don't control the software running on your devices, then somebody else does. One day, that somebody /will/ work against your interests.
Don't let that happen. Apply the (A)GPL and put an end to the bullshit.
There was a brief golden age where it wasn't so bad, banded on both sides by dark ages. Some time in the 90s. Trying to remember the last time you could get away with just printing in blue if the black ran out.
Proprietary printer drivers directly contributed to the open source revolution.
Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer
Not just his, it was shared between people on the time-sharing system in the MIT AI lab.
The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed.
I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.
I was annoyed to find that a laser printer I've had for a decade used 30 watts just to keep the network link up, while the manual claimed it used 0.5 watts while on standby.
30 watts over 10 years is about $500 where I'm at...
I swear by the lowest end brother duplexing monochrome laser printer. Mine is the dw2270 which was <$150 at the time. Rock solid. No fuss ever.
I’ve praised it here before. It’s the sort of printer that I wonder they stay in business selling because each customer is a customer for life but only buys one item.
>Even if you only print things once a month, a laser printer is far less wasteful in time, money, and bullshit than ink that's perpetually dry or consumed
Especially if you only print things once a month a laser printer is better, otherwise as you said your ink will dry out or you'll consume more ink in cleaning cycles than in printing.
My wife has an office size inkjet printer that she uses nearly daily (prints ~500 - 1000 pages/month for work) and it works flawlessly, ink is cheaper than toner for her old laser printer. If she was only printing once a month, I'm sure the inkjet would be less reliable or economical.
100%. I have a 5–10 years old business HP laserjet and it just works. It’ll happily take third party consumables that cost around 25$ for 5k pages. It’s firewalled off the internet just in case. I paid 30$ for it on the classifieds.
HP’s consumer stuff has been hit garbage for a while now. I don’t know about their more recent enterprise stuff.
Modern HP is not the HP of the LaserJet 4. The new printers, also the lasers, are crap.
And second, these old printers are workhorses but they waste energy like crazy, the standby mode still uses a lot of power so unless your electricity is free it very quickly makes sense to replace them.
>Rather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.
My print volume is extremely low, my 70 euro Samsung has lasted me over a decade. I suspect i'll be dead before i see any savings on a mid level enterprise printer, assuming the thing lasts decades without the rubber inside it disintegrating. If i have to service it my grandchildren will have to reap those savings.
I decided to go completely printerless. So far i've gone about a year without printing anything. I don't think there is anything in my life that still requires a printer.
I recently purchased an Epson Eco Tank printer (their budget mono without a scanner) [1], I'm quite impressed so far. The first thing I did was print 200+ pages, and it kept up well. My biggest cost now is the price of paper (as it should be). I would suggest ink jet still could be useful, especially with cheap refillable ink rather than this expensive cartridge bullshit.
I remember years ago wanting to buy a new ink cartridge for my HP printer. In the shop the printer was something like £25 (printer + scanner, black + colour ink) - or - I could pay something like £20 for black and £25 for colour cartridges. I explained to the service person "so you're telling me, it would be cheaper for me to buy a new printer, throw the printer in the bin and just take the cartridges out?". They answered "yeah". I tried to refill the ink cartridge manually with a syringe and an online guide, but never could get it to work due to their "smart secure" cartridge lock-ins.
HP time and time again prove to be a massive problem in the printing industry. I think I have said on HN a few times that I would be very much interested in building an open source ink jet printer (including head) - it can't be impossible.
I bought a first price laser printer few years ago, it was twice the price of a inkjet printer with the same quality, and B&W only but it paid itself by having more ink in the package and not having ink drying when I'm not using it
It's like Mercedes trying to charge a monthly subscription fee for heated seats. When you do something like this to consumers, you lose their trust and you will never gain it back.
AFAIK they offered monthly, yearly, and "unlimited" subscription. In that case what's the issue? Heated seats are frequently an upgrade option. What's the problem with offering payments as an option?
Well, let's use our imagination for a minute and consider why they'd be happy to sell and "unlimited subscription", but not a subscriptionless, permanent feature.
Or rather than imagination, simply draw on experience with other companies and ither subscription models.
As I sit here I look at my HP-35S and HP-12C calculators that I have on my desk. My 12-C in particular is about 15 years old and still on its original battery. I remember fondly the HP-85a that I learned programming on when I was 8 years old or so. HP used to make amazingly great hardware. The first HP laserjet printers were an absolute marvel. It makes me so sad what has happened to HP.
Back in the days when HP was a scientific-equipment company, everything they made was built like a tank. Still have fond memories of the HP-7475A plotter.
There is no sadder story in American capitalism than the decline of HP from a wonderful equipment engineering company to a racket for selling tiny little tubs of overpriced ink. Think a young Steve Jobs would be excited to get a job there now?
Boeing, perhaps. The same thing happened there, as I understand it.
There’s also a strong argument for post-Jobs Apple being an even more tragic arc (that’s earlier on the curve). Time will tell. These things happen on the order of decades, not years.
Aside from the Max/MCAS fiasco, my remaining respect for Boeing went out the window because I live near one of their plants. Middle of the pandemic, they had employees protesting about mask and vaccine mandates out front, for weeks on end.
You're hiring people that scientifically dense to assemble hundred-million-dollar, high-precision death machines? I hope Airbus has a better HR team.
“Scientifically dense” is the first time I’ve heard that particular slur.
Go back to your bubble where no one ever questions authority.
(Boeing is a terrible company for a myriad of other reasons but you picked probably the worst example)
I have an HP-35S at work and an HP-28S at home. The '28 I bought in 1989 so it's 34 years old now. The plastic has cracked near the battery door (as they all seem to do) and the display is losing contrast, but I'm okay with it because 30+ years is a pretty good run. Nothing lasts forever.
Earlier this year I started to look around for a replacement calculator and found that HP just released a collector's edition version of the HP-15C. I bought one and so far I'm very happy with it. It feels well made, it's fast, and I enjoy using it.
I don't have a laser simply because I haven't seen an "all in one" full color laser that's as compact as the Epson inkjet I'm using. I can't speak to the color quality of lasers really vs inkjet, but I've printed a bunch of photos that come out "good enough" on photo paper with my printer. Mind, if we need any volume, we ship 'em off to the drugstore, but that can actually be a bit of pot luck when it comes to framing and such.
We use the scanner often enough to make it worthwhile, and we don't have the room for a second, compact B&W laser.
The only real thing I need to do is replace this with a tank version. Ink is still crazy, but momentum keeps us going with it. A full set of ink cartridges cost about 1/2 of a new printer.
Other than that, I'm pretty content with this thing.
You probably won't find one as compact, colour laser printers are basically 4 monochrome laser printers in a row with different colour toners loaded, the process doesn't lead itself to having small toner catridges on a moving head like how inkjet work. This is a plus and a minus. The minus you've found, they're pretty bulky, but reducing moving parts also has pluses for durability and lifespan.
My in-laws needed a printer scanner because they are getting old and needed to scan paperwork to move to a retirement community. They went out and bought an HP printer scanner and asked me to help them set it up. It took me multiple hours and I still couldn't figure everything out. It took them the next two days to really get it up and running. Poorly designed actively hostile software.
They didn't learn their lesson from the HP laptop they bought two years ago that (I am not making this up) had wifi hardware but no installed wifi driver. How does that happen?
That's the thing, all the decent people (who had a choice) left years ago. All that's left is marketing nitwits, indifferent assholes and people with H1B visas who are largely helpless and trapped.
Because of this kind of thing I haven't actually replaced my printer, since it broke, and have been actively looking for ways to avoid doing so.
- In the UK, Royal mail will now print the label for you, when you order a collection. DPD claims to do so when you drop off but the shops often turn out not to have a printer
- Libraries print more cheaply than shops, neither are suitable for printing where confidentiality is required (your doc is likely to hang round on some random insecure PC)
- They don't advertise it, but some print-to-mail companies (eg CFH docmail) will do print runs down to a single copy. This is considerably cheaper than your local shop, for more than a couple of sheets at least, but has a latency of 5 days. It's suitable for confidential prints (for most plausible threat models), due to their scale. Also, if you intended to mail the doc anyway, you can send it direct from them.
Highlighting this. My local library lets you print 100 pages per month for free (color printing counts for three pages), which is more than enough for my needs these days.
+1 to Brother laser printer. i had mine for over 5 years and it still works great (i had to replace the original toner cartridge once). i recently had some smudges on printed paper and a quick chatGPT search later i was following Brother's troubleshooting guide which helped me get rid of the smudge (essentially showed me how to clean the print header). i even bought an updated printer for my parents whose old hp laser printer died after a firmware update (there are posts about it in their support forum).
I bought a Brother HL 2130 in 2011. It's a cheap monochrome laser printer-only.
I works well under Linux, Windows, MacOS. Toner cartridges last forever, drum lasts even more forever, I never had any problem with it, and it still works like a champ.
I have mine since 2006 or 2007, easily one of the most perfect purchases in my life. I used it rather extensively for a while, had to change toner then, but by now I print maybe a bunch of sheets per year, and can't even remember the last time I had to change toner. Before that I used ink printers which broke all the time, not to mention ink getting dry.
Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet, there is a reason this gets brought up without fail when talking about printers. I have no idea if it's particular to laser printers, Brother laser printers or both, because that was the last printer I bought so far, I have no other experience other than the horrors of ink printers.
CHF docmail is actually competitive with a laser on cost - if you're posting too, of course. Which is usually the case for me - I very rarely print anything to keep.
Firmware updates for Brother laser printers routinely brick third-party toner cartridges. Downgrading is possible only if you download old firmware from sketchy sites in languages you don't read.
They work great when they work, but you can never update your firmware.
My Brother HL-5170DN has been my daily driver since I bought it new. I don't know how old it is, but the web page says "Copyright(C) 2000-2003". 25k pages printed, so that's about three pages a day, every day.
I bought an OKI colour laser printer. More an enterprise model and definitely overscaled for my use but the market of colour laser printers is rather narrow and Oki seemed the best value/price ratio. Quality is good and the thing can print also some absurd sizes and formags.
I'm also reasonably happy on quality, results, speed. Annoying is just that this model (MC532) is too rare to be in common printer libraries (notably for Linux), so for each setup I have to first visit the manufacturer site and download the drivers, and even then it's not smooth. Nonetheless got this to work for win 11, Manjaro, Ubuntu and chromebooks.
Canon 100% does this on my printer/scanner if the ink dries up (long time without printing) or it thinks you have pirate ink.
It throws up some error message that you can't clear until you put in new ink cartridges. This is very annoying as I scan frequently but very, very rarely print.
I'd readily replace it but I cannot find a laser printer with duplex scanner with ADF that isn't obscenely expensive and/or huge.
I had a Brother brand B&W laser printer with a duplex scanner many years ago. I had it for 10 years and it was still working when my ex took it. As far as I know its still going.
Unfortunately, laser printers are just bigger than inkjet. The paper route is more complicated and the mechanism has to be larger. That's the benefit of inkjet, it's an extremely simple mechanism that can be reduced to a very small footprint.
IMO, laser is better in almost every way. It's well worth the drawbacks.
I'm surprised how many people are writing about their solutions for printing. I thought by now most people had done what I've done and just set things up not to need to print.
Xournal allows me to fill out anything I could print from PDF with a stylus on my touch screen. If I want to read and highlight something, I convert it to PDF and read it in Logseq with the same stylus. I can highlight in four colors and it automatically collects my notes!
If I need to mail/ship something, I just have the ship shop print it.
What are people intentionally printing to paper for, often enough that it's worth having a printer?
Many places still ask you to physically sign and then scan/post back things. E.g fill in a pdf with a computer then print and manually sign with a pen.
It is not every day, but frequently enough that not having a printer is a pain.
I scanned a copy of my signature probably a decade ago and have yet to find anyone who can tell the difference between my adding that to a doc and sending it back, and actually printing, signing, and scanning it back.
Write your signature. Scan it in. Apply it to documents that want signatures.
To some people, this doesn't "feel right" the same way that it doesn't "feel right" that I have rolling star-base office chairs around my dining room table. They are far more comfortable than any "dining room chair" I've ever been in.
In both cases, when people don't take my good advice, I shrug and move on.
Ok sure so use a pen or use the printer to write your signature - that doesn't change the need sometimes to go give the doctor/school/solicitor/etc a physical copy.
You can keep your "good" advice, but please do move on.
> What are people intentionally printing to paper for, often enough that it's worth having a printer?
If I'm being honest, mine is a mid-range document scanner that also happens to have a color laserjet attached for the occasional form or whatever that has to be on paper and will still be cheaper for me to print at home then get it from the print shop.
50 page ADF with duplex scanning is something you get in the ~$200+ price range of standalone document scanners, and they tend to not have a flatbed either for the occasional photo or copy of a page from a book. I'd love to be 100% paperless, but even for my very digital life I haven't managed to get that far yet.
2. Boarding passes (yes, I suppose I could pay the airline $30 for the privilege, but it doesn't take _that_ many flights to break even on a basic laser printer. I could also use mobile passes, but airlines are sometimes weird in not supporting those for specific flight/booking combination, and they need power).
Which airlines charge to print a boarding pass at the airport? I haven't ever encountered this charge, but maybe it's a regional thing? I've ways been able to walk up to the self-serve kiosk, enter a few details, and print the thing right off.
> What are people intentionally printing to paper for, often enough that it's worth having a printer?
Shipping labels, government processes that require hard copies, and legal documents that require real signatures rather than electronically signed ones.
> What are people intentionally printing to paper for, often enough that it's worth having a printer?
For me personally, sometimes I think better when I have paper than with a computer or tablet. If the limiting agent is my thinking, then I'm better off with paper.
I've yet to find anything accepted electronically where a scanned copy of my ink signature (from 10 years ago) added electronically to the form was distinguishable from printing it and signing it today.
Anything not accepted electronically, the entity requiring the signature also provided the blank form.
That's why I'm stumped. I genuinely have not had a need to print something in 10+ years.
Sometimes I print out code docs and other software things to trick my brain into a different perspective. Being able to touch the information on an object in space is useful to me. Not buried next to other distractions on a computer. Helps me focus on the task at hand.
I also sketch out code on pen/paper sometimes for similar reason.
I am a musician and need to print sheet music for the ensembles that I play with. I personally like reading off of an iPad, but there are plenty of situations where that is difficult or impossible.
I've also printed a lot of maps for climbing/ hiking/ mountaineering.
There are a lot of situations where having a printed copy of something can be critical, either for performance or safety. I like virtual reality, but a lot of us are still operating in meat space.
In my case, after one year and an half my HP printer auto-updated (without my consent) and bricked because I was using the ink from a different brand. This happened even if I didn’t subscribe to their shitty Hp instant ink offer.
I’ve immediately returned it, bought a Brother printer and I will avoid any HP product for the rest of my life.
I’m genuinely worried that companies will just perpetually try to get into dark patterns, until laws will be powerless against them. People should spend years in jail for coming up with ideas like these…
In the EU, basically everything comes with a minimum warranty of 2 years[1]. If your printer will no longer print within that time, the retailer is required to fix, replace, or refund it.
These kinds of bugs are common with all consumer electronics since they "went digital" though, basically anything 1999+. The market is so saturated with blatantly broken products like this that you seem like a freak just to complain about it. Just littered with shit design mainly caused by duct taping components together and letting the outcome of that be the design. The solution is for consumers to get a brain and stop wasting it on overcomplicated nonsense like some autoconfiguration crap based on XML that never works except for someone who so happens to have 5 hours of experience with that protocol. Just return bullshit like this. I always do, I decide to return most of my electronics within 5 minutes of first turning it on.
This pattern emerged around the same time as "can't print black when out of colored ink" and "printer cartridge DRM". I'm extremely incredulous that this is a bug rather than intentional.
In the 2010's I had a project I'd do about once a year where I needed to print ~100 pages of directions that was mostly text with light-duty images mixed in for products I was selling. I was using my trusty inkjet printer, but over time the capacity of the carts degraded to the point I could only get ~80 pages of B&W printing out of a single inkjet cartridge. I had tried buying refill carts but they consistently failed and cost me time I couldn't afford to loose so I also gave up on non-authentic carts. So that meant I was having to buy two inkjet carts each run which pushed my cost per print up towards nearly $1 per page... for a product I was selling for $20.
I finally had enough and bought an HP full color laser printer for $250 around 2015 or so. Even with the degraded toner carts that came with it out of the box I was able to cut my cost per sheet down to about 25 cents or better. The last set of toner refills I got hurt my wallet at ~$450, but my price-per-sheet gets down to a dime per sheet on those. I'm thankful my printer proceeds these nutty subscription drivers though! I swore off ever using inkjet again after my first season of use on this laserjet.
But of course I'm thankful this printer proceeded these nutty drivers that disable your printing without a subscription. We've reached the end of the infinite expansion economic system and subscription services are the natural next step to that. Market forces have driven down the cost of durable goods to the point most consumer goods have been disposable for decades now. The next step is subscription models of everything to maintain similar profit margins. Likewise, CBDC's are a natural extension of the banking system as it hits the same growth limits. They outright state in their whitepapers that one of their core purposes is to "prevent recessions" by setting expiration terms on funds held by consumers which will "induce spending" as needed. It's all the same ball of wax.
I have an Epson flatbed scanner for my photography, a V600. It's a lovely little device. Crapware-free functionality. Granted, it seems like the bundled software hasn't been updated since the stone age, but that might be a good thing.
My HP inkjet, on the other hand, is a wreck. I had to install an app on my phone, pair over bluetooth, connect it to wi-fi, and create an account just to get a damn test page. No USB cable included, by the way. Many cursing matches eventually got it working, but I regret buying it. Once the ink runs out, I'll probably send it to Goodwill or something.
Scanning is the only thing that Brother has let me down on the whole working without extra software idea. Scanning in Windows without their software stack just can't get the same quality scans. It's limited to 600dpi, it doesn't have as crisp quality, and it doesn't natively do PDF. Installing the drivers and software stack, it'll do multipage PDF at 1200dpi looking crisp no problem.
My Epson will do 6400dpi optically, but it can do some upsampling shenanigans all the way up to 12800dpi. Unnecessary levels of resolution for documents, but it's amazing what it can do for your grandma's old film slides. It's not cheap, but the performance is hard to argue with.
One thing I've noticed is that the bottom of the standalone scanner market completely disappeared.
You used to be able to easily find parallel-port flatbed scanners for $50 or less, and they eventually shifted to USB. I suspect it was often used to "fluff out" a PC bundle-- "Buy a $1200 AMD-K6 machine and get a scanner and terrible inkjet printer free!" They were probably more than ample for the "scan in this document we need a copy of" use cases-- a few hundred DPI.
While I still see there are a handful of sub-$100 scanners on the market, it's hardly the variety you used to find. It's like a "compliance" product-- being sold because they need to to fill some obligation rather than a vital market full of advancement.
Also note that it's a lot less easy to do the "recycle quality vintage hardware" thing for scanners than printers. Many of them are stranded with ancient drivers and often no support past WinXP or 7. (Yes, there's things like VueScan for ongoing support, but paying for that impacts the overall math).
I ended up finding a scanner I sort of liked used that did have drivers (Epson V39, I wanted something USB powered because I don't have room for any more power bricks) but it involved way too much Googling in the electronics aisle of secondhand shops.
I assume that this is because the market has basically assumed anyone not buying commercial-grade stuff will buy an all-in-one reliability nightmare that won't scan without yellow ink. This sort of thing didn't occur in other markets: They sold low-end VCRs and DVD players built into crappy TVs, but they also still sold standalone ones.
I picked up a colour laser Brother MFC for $100 three years ago, with 600 DPI scanner / copier. Wifi printing from our phones works with no additional setup than having the printer connected to wifi.
It needed new drums and toners, and continues to function like new to this day.
Not quite $50, but $100 Australian, so not far off.
The lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.
99% of usage is scanning office documents. Sure, with a flatbed you don't need to bother with perspective correction, but 99% of times it's get scanned, mailed and forgotten forever, so nobody bothers.
They’re better in the sense that they are in your pocket and take fractions of the time to use.
The app iScanner really does work very well. The glare and shadow issues are trivial to solve with good CV these days, the resulting documents are pretty damn close to a hardware scan.
I had to fill out a bunch of forms when I transferred my car to the US, and everyone along the way seemed perfectly happy with photo scans.
A phone won’t match of course but it comes surprisingly close for “scanning” documents and sending them to your insurer or whoever wants them. It’s able to remove noise, crop to the page edges, and deskew the whole image.
I have been using using the HP P2055 network printer for almost two decades now with bootleg toner. Never had a problem, the thing is built like a tank.
I bought the best printer on wire cutter a few years ago, it was an HP ink jet. That was the biggest piece of garbage I ever bought. It would refuse to print when it was low on ink. It would be low on some random color despite me printing in black and white, rarely at that. It locked me out over using after market ink.
Maybe I put there a note that HP produced SSD server disks which fault at preengeneered number of writes, making your raid faulty.
No one should ever use this brand
What is this trend of the headline, sub-headline and first sentence being totally identical? It feels like I've been violated somehow, like a mild brainwashing. One less reason to click on the article link.
I’m looking forward to the day there is a HN post about printers that doesn’t go straight “buy a low priced laser printer… I have a xx from 1987 and it is working just fine”
If you come across a newer HP printer, the best thing you can do with it is disassemble it for parts to make other things. They are full of precision rods, rotary encoders, DC motors, and such. If it has a built-in scanner, you'll also get a contact image sensor and a decent pane of glass. But on no circumstances should you ever expect rely on it to function as an output or input device.
189 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadRather than an entry-level laser printer that cannot be economically repaired, a used mid-level enterprise printer is often the cheapest option long term and saves useful electronics from becoming e-waste. Office furniture rental/repo places and secondary markets like eBay have these.
In large enterprises, a printer's cost per page tends to be inversely proportional to (increased) initial acquisition cost and availability of repair parts. Put another way, giving everyone an entry-level printer would be far more expensive in acquisition costs, per-page costs, and an inability to repair them. (hitting TCO 3 ways).
I had a HP LaserJet 4 (released 1992, purchased new ~1994) until 2013 with a used JetDirect card. It had expansion options with cartridges and SIMM RAM and font options, but they weren't strictly needed.
Newish ones like mine even support AirPrint and NFC printing.
Better to spend $70-150 than $300-1200 on new cartridges.
PS: I'm currently in the market for an 5-15 year old HP Color LaserJet but still assessing which model tends to be more reliable. There were a lot of lemon SMB Color LaserJet models. Suggestions welcomed especially by staff IT people who support these things.
If you need color printing, it tends to be expensive.
I have a brother HL-2270dw that I've been using for more than 10 years that I'm happy with. I don't think they make that exact model anymore, but Wirecutter recommends the HL-2350dw (I don't know what you get for the extra $10 to get a HL-2370dw):
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-home-printer...
I've got it hooked up to my wired network, and have never had an issue with it. I really like the duplex printing.
I prefer my devices to do one thing, so I've avoided combo devices.
Considering the price difference between these units, I opted for the MFC-L3770CDW because I do not print that often and I've spent far more over years on wasted ink from dried out cartridges and destroyed print heads; but it's still an important factor to keep in mind.
I got accused of being a shill last time I posted about it, so I'm preempting this by calling it out. :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006705#37007593
However it just sits there asleep at an extremely low wattage most of the time, then pops instantly to life the moment a page is sent to it - as bgirard pointed out, without even needing to install a driver - and then back to sleep. And this is on wifi.
Loved it enough to buy another one when the first one went to my ex.
I'll use the full duplex occasionally, it's worth having years down the track from purchase time for the tiny price bump over the base.
I own an Epson eco-tank inkjet and happy with it, but I'm not invested in convincing others about it. I wouldn't put a laser printer in my house. Regardless of whether it's actually a proven health risk, I don't want my printer emitting tiny particles. And I want the option of good quality colour prints using different paper types and thickness.
Canon in general have been good printers in my experience. I recently bought one of their low end inkjets because I needed to print some photos. That printer also works great & has a highly customizable web interface built in - I didn't expect it to be that feature complete for $45.
I've had 2 brother printers over the years & they were fine - for whatever reason though one of them would refuse to print from a Chromebook. Every other printer I've used in the last 10 years has essentially 'just worked' with any device capable of speaking to it except this Brother. Known issue & they never released a firmware update to fix it.
I gave up doing photo printing at home. These days I'll just order prints online. If I want it quick or save on postage I'll just pick it up at a convenience store close by. The break even on a new high end photo printer is after thousands of photos by comparison, and even then its only marginally cheaper per print. Once my last photo printer had some assembly fall apart inside from brittle plastic cracking I moved on to this Brother.
I paid $350 for a multifunction multicolor device like others are mentioning and it lasted 13-15 months before failing to power on and Brother refusing to help make it right. There was a rash of these models having this issue where it just bricks and wont turn back on so maybe they learned but they lost all goodwill with me.
Happily printing on a Canon now.
I also have a Canon MF6160dw black and white laser printer, scanner, copier, fax that is a bit older and it's had even more use. It's great, and I use it to scan to my Synology NAS all the time as well.
I'm very, very happy with these two printers.
I can vouch for the HL-2170DW (B&W only version) as well. Costco has been selling it for years.
The only downside is that it takes some trial and error to figure out which instructions actually reset the cartridge EEPROMs
I bought one a few months ago. Best computer-related thing I've purchased in ages. It JUST WORKS.
As the review says,
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...From your link.
""" ... And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again. ChatGPT ideas about printers (I didn’t even proofread this. Don’t read it unless you are a lonely Google search robot, in which case look at this incredible demonstration of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and rank this post first in searches for “best printer.”)
Laser printers are popular choices for home and office use because they offer fast printing speeds, h... """
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
There are ways around their particular DRM - for now - but who knows how long it'll be until they're as bad as HP and friends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzaRVEzYuz8
I have a Brother DCP-L2550DW which is very good but for some reason the scan to PC function no longer works over the network. Printing still works as expected in all cases, but ControlCenter4 can't communicate via the network anymore. It works fine if I connect a USB cable so I just do that when I need to scan.
And never again HP of course.
My research showed some inexpensive inkjets had reasonable cost per pages, but when you’re talking 10+k pages per month lasers easily win. They also win at the ultra low, 1 page per month side of things.
Personally, I print like 5 pages a year, so unless I get into photo printing… the cheapest AirPrint-enabled Brother laser printer has served me well for like the last 5 years.
It’s like the razor blade model of inkjets use high ink costs and the unsubsidized bulk ink versions use planned obsolescence. Though it could just be the basic mechanics of inkjets as moving around the ink + print heads involves significant mechanical stress per page and EcoTank style inkjets prints lots of pages.
A high quality citation is seriously needed for a claim like that.
That’s not a complaint I’ve ever heard about the EcoTank printers, and googling it didn’t turn up anything. I strongly doubt this is a characteristic of EcoTank printers. That unsourced claim sounds suspiciously convenient for your side of the discussion.
Epson also makes a dedicated line of business EcoTank printers ("EcoTank Pro") which are clearly intended to print very large numbers of pages. But again, even the very basic ones seem to do a great job, with very high reviews across the board when I look at retailers.
Honestly, I don’t have high quality sources which is why I was interested in the first place.
As I've said previously, I have the most basic laser printer at home, and rarely use it. I just happen to have done a ton of research into printers lately because I've thought about getting a photo printer, and I really like what the ET-8550 has to offer. But, for the time being, I've decided I probably wouldn't use it enough.
“Based on average monthly document print volumes of about 150 pages (ST-C2100), 200 pages (ST-C4100), 300 pages (ST-M1000/ST-M3000/ST-C5000/ST-C5500/ST-C8000/ST-C8090) and 750 pages (WF-M5799 Supertank). Promo applies to ink only. Printer covered by Epson 2-year limited warranty.” https://epson.com/supertank-ink-tank-printers-for-business
I don’t remember the model numbers but those where way past 750 pages per month if that’s helpful.
But, it is an interesting set of numbers, and could indicate something.
YMMV. I have EPSON ET-2850 EcoTank all-in-one for about a year with moderate to heavy use and so far no problems. Being able to refill ink by simply pouring it over from an ink canister is so refreshing. No DRM, no chips, no nonsense.
Worked perfectly,and is still in there.
Works with windows, mac os, chromebooks without issue, all over the network. I even got a duplexer from gumtree a few years ago as it was going for nothing. One day it will die and then I'll have to deal with all the current printer grief!
Go brother if you want a laser. All the consumables are easily replaceable.
Every year I buy a 2-pack of off-brand toner from Amazon for $30. When the printer complains, before replacing toner, I just pull out the existing toner, shake it, and get probably 10-50 more (faded but usable) prints.
you just have to value your time and then it all makes sense
1990 a printer was a peripheral and if you had a driver it worked. Today it's a spyware, ink-selling nonsense.
Don't let that happen. Apply the (A)GPL and put an end to the bullshit.
LOL no.
Printing and scanning have ALWAYS been terrible. A fortune cookie somewhere: "GNU is a printer driver gone horribly wrong".
I have a theory that printer drivers are somehow produced by aliens, who are hellbent on destroying the Earth's infrastructure.
No driver needed. If a person wanted to, they could ftp a postscript file to the printer.
The machines took an anon connection. From there, simply using the put command resulted in pages coming out of the printer.
How a postscript, or encapsulated postscript file was up to the user.
Handwritten files to print fractals were fun too.
"Why is the printer taking so long?", lol
Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed.
I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.
30 watts over 10 years is about $500 where I'm at...
I’ve praised it here before. It’s the sort of printer that I wonder they stay in business selling because each customer is a customer for life but only buys one item.
Especially if you only print things once a month a laser printer is better, otherwise as you said your ink will dry out or you'll consume more ink in cleaning cycles than in printing.
My wife has an office size inkjet printer that she uses nearly daily (prints ~500 - 1000 pages/month for work) and it works flawlessly, ink is cheaper than toner for her old laser printer. If she was only printing once a month, I'm sure the inkjet would be less reliable or economical.
HP’s consumer stuff has been hit garbage for a while now. I don’t know about their more recent enterprise stuff.
Modern HP is not the HP of the LaserJet 4. The new printers, also the lasers, are crap.
And second, these old printers are workhorses but they waste energy like crazy, the standby mode still uses a lot of power so unless your electricity is free it very quickly makes sense to replace them.
My print volume is extremely low, my 70 euro Samsung has lasted me over a decade. I suspect i'll be dead before i see any savings on a mid level enterprise printer, assuming the thing lasts decades without the rubber inside it disintegrating. If i have to service it my grandchildren will have to reap those savings.
I decided to go completely printerless. So far i've gone about a year without printing anything. I don't think there is anything in my life that still requires a printer.
Some places are still cursed with enough antiquated forms of red tape that it becomes impossible to do so...
I remember years ago wanting to buy a new ink cartridge for my HP printer. In the shop the printer was something like £25 (printer + scanner, black + colour ink) - or - I could pay something like £20 for black and £25 for colour cartridges. I explained to the service person "so you're telling me, it would be cheaper for me to buy a new printer, throw the printer in the bin and just take the cartridges out?". They answered "yeah". I tried to refill the ink cartridge manually with a syringe and an online guide, but never could get it to work due to their "smart secure" cartridge lock-ins.
HP time and time again prove to be a massive problem in the printing industry. I think I have said on HN a few times that I would be very much interested in building an open source ink jet printer (including head) - it can't be impossible.
[1] https://www.epson.co.uk/en_GB/for-home/ecotank
It was BMW.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63743597
> Mercedes-Benz is to offer an online subscription service in the US to make its electric cars speed up quicker.
Or rather than imagination, simply draw on experience with other companies and ither subscription models.
There’s also a strong argument for post-Jobs Apple being an even more tragic arc (that’s earlier on the curve). Time will tell. These things happen on the order of decades, not years.
Brain drain is real.
You're hiring people that scientifically dense to assemble hundred-million-dollar, high-precision death machines? I hope Airbus has a better HR team.
Earlier this year I started to look around for a replacement calculator and found that HP just released a collector's edition version of the HP-15C. I bought one and so far I'm very happy with it. It feels well made, it's fast, and I enjoy using it.
We use the scanner often enough to make it worthwhile, and we don't have the room for a second, compact B&W laser.
The only real thing I need to do is replace this with a tank version. Ink is still crazy, but momentum keeps us going with it. A full set of ink cartridges cost about 1/2 of a new printer.
Other than that, I'm pretty content with this thing.
- In the UK, Royal mail will now print the label for you, when you order a collection. DPD claims to do so when you drop off but the shops often turn out not to have a printer
- Libraries print more cheaply than shops, neither are suitable for printing where confidentiality is required (your doc is likely to hang round on some random insecure PC)
- They don't advertise it, but some print-to-mail companies (eg CFH docmail) will do print runs down to a single copy. This is considerably cheaper than your local shop, for more than a couple of sheets at least, but has a latency of 5 days. It's suitable for confidential prints (for most plausible threat models), due to their scale. Also, if you intended to mail the doc anyway, you can send it direct from them.
Highlighting this. My local library lets you print 100 pages per month for free (color printing counts for three pages), which is more than enough for my needs these days.
Because of this laser printers are actually profitable to sell. So they don't have to loss leader their income from you.
So a big big +1 for Brother laser printers !
Anyone who hasn't had the pleasure yet, there is a reason this gets brought up without fail when talking about printers. I have no idea if it's particular to laser printers, Brother laser printers or both, because that was the last printer I bought so far, I have no other experience other than the horrors of ink printers.
They work great when they work, but you can never update your firmware.
I'm also reasonably happy on quality, results, speed. Annoying is just that this model (MC532) is too rare to be in common printer libraries (notably for Linux), so for each setup I have to first visit the manufacturer site and download the drivers, and even then it's not smooth. Nonetheless got this to work for win 11, Manjaro, Ubuntu and chromebooks.
It throws up some error message that you can't clear until you put in new ink cartridges. This is very annoying as I scan frequently but very, very rarely print.
I'd readily replace it but I cannot find a laser printer with duplex scanner with ADF that isn't obscenely expensive and/or huge.
Unfortunately, laser printers are just bigger than inkjet. The paper route is more complicated and the mechanism has to be larger. That's the benefit of inkjet, it's an extremely simple mechanism that can be reduced to a very small footprint.
IMO, laser is better in almost every way. It's well worth the drawbacks.
Xournal allows me to fill out anything I could print from PDF with a stylus on my touch screen. If I want to read and highlight something, I convert it to PDF and read it in Logseq with the same stylus. I can highlight in four colors and it automatically collects my notes!
If I need to mail/ship something, I just have the ship shop print it.
What are people intentionally printing to paper for, often enough that it's worth having a printer?
It is not every day, but frequently enough that not having a printer is a pain.
To some people, this doesn't "feel right" the same way that it doesn't "feel right" that I have rolling star-base office chairs around my dining room table. They are far more comfortable than any "dining room chair" I've ever been in.
In both cases, when people don't take my good advice, I shrug and move on.
You can keep your "good" advice, but please do move on.
I also have a printer for those rare occasions. More commonly, I copy-paste my signature image onto the digital form and send it right back.
If I'm being honest, mine is a mid-range document scanner that also happens to have a color laserjet attached for the occasional form or whatever that has to be on paper and will still be cheaper for me to print at home then get it from the print shop.
50 page ADF with duplex scanning is something you get in the ~$200+ price range of standalone document scanners, and they tend to not have a flatbed either for the occasional photo or copy of a page from a book. I'd love to be 100% paperless, but even for my very digital life I haven't managed to get that far yet.
2. Boarding passes (yes, I suppose I could pay the airline $30 for the privilege, but it doesn't take _that_ many flights to break even on a basic laser printer. I could also use mobile passes, but airlines are sometimes weird in not supporting those for specific flight/booking combination, and they need power).
Shipping labels, government processes that require hard copies, and legal documents that require real signatures rather than electronically signed ones.
For me personally, sometimes I think better when I have paper than with a computer or tablet. If the limiting agent is my thinking, then I'm better off with paper.
Anything not accepted electronically, the entity requiring the signature also provided the blank form.
That's why I'm stumped. I genuinely have not had a need to print something in 10+ years.
I also sketch out code on pen/paper sometimes for similar reason.
I've also printed a lot of maps for climbing/ hiking/ mountaineering.
There are a lot of situations where having a printed copy of something can be critical, either for performance or safety. I like virtual reality, but a lot of us are still operating in meat space.
I’ve immediately returned it, bought a Brother printer and I will avoid any HP product for the rest of my life.
I’m genuinely worried that companies will just perpetually try to get into dark patterns, until laws will be powerless against them. People should spend years in jail for coming up with ideas like these…
People should spend years in jail for coming up with ideas like these…
+1 for sure on that. It'll never happen, though. We wouldn't want to pass laws to interfere with "innovation."
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
I finally had enough and bought an HP full color laser printer for $250 around 2015 or so. Even with the degraded toner carts that came with it out of the box I was able to cut my cost per sheet down to about 25 cents or better. The last set of toner refills I got hurt my wallet at ~$450, but my price-per-sheet gets down to a dime per sheet on those. I'm thankful my printer proceeds these nutty subscription drivers though! I swore off ever using inkjet again after my first season of use on this laserjet.
But of course I'm thankful this printer proceeded these nutty drivers that disable your printing without a subscription. We've reached the end of the infinite expansion economic system and subscription services are the natural next step to that. Market forces have driven down the cost of durable goods to the point most consumer goods have been disposable for decades now. The next step is subscription models of everything to maintain similar profit margins. Likewise, CBDC's are a natural extension of the banking system as it hits the same growth limits. They outright state in their whitepapers that one of their core purposes is to "prevent recessions" by setting expiration terms on funds held by consumers which will "induce spending" as needed. It's all the same ball of wax.
My HP inkjet, on the other hand, is a wreck. I had to install an app on my phone, pair over bluetooth, connect it to wi-fi, and create an account just to get a damn test page. No USB cable included, by the way. Many cursing matches eventually got it working, but I regret buying it. Once the ink runs out, I'll probably send it to Goodwill or something.
You used to be able to easily find parallel-port flatbed scanners for $50 or less, and they eventually shifted to USB. I suspect it was often used to "fluff out" a PC bundle-- "Buy a $1200 AMD-K6 machine and get a scanner and terrible inkjet printer free!" They were probably more than ample for the "scan in this document we need a copy of" use cases-- a few hundred DPI.
While I still see there are a handful of sub-$100 scanners on the market, it's hardly the variety you used to find. It's like a "compliance" product-- being sold because they need to to fill some obligation rather than a vital market full of advancement.
Also note that it's a lot less easy to do the "recycle quality vintage hardware" thing for scanners than printers. Many of them are stranded with ancient drivers and often no support past WinXP or 7. (Yes, there's things like VueScan for ongoing support, but paying for that impacts the overall math).
I ended up finding a scanner I sort of liked used that did have drivers (Epson V39, I wanted something USB powered because I don't have room for any more power bricks) but it involved way too much Googling in the electronics aisle of secondhand shops.
I assume that this is because the market has basically assumed anyone not buying commercial-grade stuff will buy an all-in-one reliability nightmare that won't scan without yellow ink. This sort of thing didn't occur in other markets: They sold low-end VCRs and DVD players built into crappy TVs, but they also still sold standalone ones.
It needed new drums and toners, and continues to function like new to this day.
Not quite $50, but $100 Australian, so not far off.
Yeah it might randomly decide to swap out a few words, sentences, and numbers, but it looks really good!
The app iScanner really does work very well. The glare and shadow issues are trivial to solve with good CV these days, the resulting documents are pretty damn close to a hardware scan.
I had to fill out a bunch of forms when I transferred my car to the US, and everyone along the way seemed perfectly happy with photo scans.
I bought a brother laser jet and love it.
It’s solid, works with third party inks, supports airprinting from my phone and has never caused me any trouble.
It’s the second barebones Pixma I’ve had. Previous one lasted about 7 years.
Do not select the models that touts the “Refresh” feature (that one phones home and gives all your LAN deets to Brothers.
It is getting slim pickier nowadays for a privacy-oriented and quality printer.