I have a printer story for you young whipper-snappers.
Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing.
We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky.
There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time.
But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation....
So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape.
You had me at whipper-snappers. I think more people should write books filled with stories just like yours. Feynman's was basically that.
There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.
It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.
> It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago
LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.
One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.
The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.
So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.
Not quite as cool, but my brothers would consistently break my records on minesweeper in the nineties until one day one of them admitted that if they put the PC in sleep mode just before they got to the same time as I had, then restarted it, the clock would stop and they could take as long time as they wanted to solve it.
(This was on an IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1. You could set it in sleep mode just by pressing the power button. This was amazing for its time (1995) I think - I didn't see that feature again on any machine I had access to until a laptop in 2003 or so.)
there was also a cheat code that would change the top-left pixel of the screen black or white depending on whether you were hovering over a mine or not
A friend an I had neighbouring rooms in our halls of residence, and both had an Amiga 500 so ran a serial cable through the wall to play Populous PvP. That was 1989.
Now that is super-cool. I also had an Amiga 500 but never got to play anything that supported connecting computers together with a null modem cable. I didn't get my Amiga until 1990 but multi-machine multiplayer would have been absolutely living the dream for me at that time.
Those head to head player games were great, but there was one catch on the Amiga.
The DB25 serial port on the A1000 (first Amiga) was different from other systems of the day. Not just the obvious gender difference, but the pinouts were different as well. I knew a couple guys who tried a A1000 <--> A500 hookup, and blew one or both computers.
My university's network policy specifically banned Doom and other networked games my freshman year because they didn't like network traffic being taken up by games. Apparently Doom had rather chatty netcode as well, meaning that LANs of the era could easily get bogged down if there were even two people online fragging it up.
Game netcode got better, and so did network infrastructure, so in time this ban got lifted. Though part of me thinks that they couldn't actually enforce this ban without punishing half the school. Doom was that popular... at least until Quake came out.
I was trying to remember if it had been a false memory of mine that that had been possible with Lotus 2, but thanks for confirming that it's not. Never managed it but would have been awesome. Actually pretty tempted to pick up another Amiga just so I can do this. I assume it would still work with a null modem cable between an A500 and an A1200.
No sure on Lotus or the amiga, but a null modem cable simply crosses the rx and tx between the two systems (so rx on one device goes to tx on the other and vice versa). Same principle of how a crossover ethernet cable was always used to back to back, for example, two machine nic's or two ethernet switches before auto MDIX.
If you like Feynman, you might like You're Stepping On My Cloak and Dagger. The CIA's basically given up trying to suppress its publication by now, and it's hysterical.
I fondly remember xpilot(1) combats at my university. Must have been around 1992?
We'd go to dinner together at 7pm and then descend into the basement of the electronics department to room full of HP Apollo 9000 workstations with gigantic monitors and an unreal resolution (1280x1024!!!)
Sometimes we'd play until 7am in the morning when the first students would come in to start working on their assignments, our hands completely cramped from pressing the right keyboard combinations to engage the ECM of our ships.
Really missed that LAN parties, it was something small but so much valuable. Our first addictions was Half-life (got stuck in Stalkyard for months) and AoE. I'm still playing Command & Conquer. Also found Red Alert mac version recently, can't wait to rock n roll with Tanya.
Yeah, done that. Using Arcnet. Which BTW, even though already then obsolete and slow, was way better for ad-hoc gaming setups than coax ethernet, because it had a hub-and spokes setup. Much more reliable than fiddling with coax ethernet and its terminators.
My first job out of college in the late 90s was up in SV at a startup. We used to play Duke Nukem in our bullpen (maybe 6 or so engineers) on the LAN. It was a blast. No internet required. Blazing fast game, decent enough graphics, etc. Early Pentium era as I recall.
I was new, and I remember that my PC that I had inherited from an outgoing engineer didn’t have a sound card. That was considered a special feature not everyone deserved. I remember me and a colleague sneaking into some random cube late in the evening with a Philips head screwdriver, prone on our stomach under the desk, to take the sound card out of an unsuspecting colleagues tower. Must have been someone in finance or HR. Fun times :)
Anywho I hope that helps to set the scene of this era.
Try NetTrek on an AppleTalk LAN of Mac IIs in 1988. 15 years ago my butt. Try more than double that, and we were well past being teenagers. You younglings have no respect.
As I recall the experience was enhanced by a goth nightclub that had opened downstairs from the office we were in and was playing the latest releases by the likes of Sisters of Mercy, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and their ilk. Hmmm, wonder if I can dig out my old Mac from the museum in my garage, throw on some tunes and some all-black clothing, and recreate my misspent young adulthood....
I admit that 1988 was before I was born, but I was playing games over AppleTalk!
Super Maze Wars on my dad's PowerBook connected to the family LC III gave plenty of fun to my brother and I. Why fight in real life, when I can shoot him on a computer game?
When we weren't playing networked games, we'd use whatever came on the latest MacFormat floppy/CD. Shanghai II, Spelunx, Shufflepuck, Beebop II. I learned to draw in Kid Pix, and code in Logowriter (not only patterns, but even music synthesis, on a Mac Plus, when I was 7-9 years old).
I rescued two Mac SEs from a dumpster, have my original Mac Plus and have since added a few more vintage Mac's and every once in a while I will break them out and PhoneNet them together over Apple Talk.
Ah, a completely different version than the NetTrek [0] that I was thinking about. The latter was a 16-person networked game played on workstations running X11 in a similar time period.
I was introduced to Counterstrike after-hours by my colleagues in the year 2001, and we were “just” devs in a large telecom company. The sysadmins (HP on-site outsourcers...), holed up in their windowless cupboard of an office, were on all sorts of FPSs most of the day, and hence basically unbeatable.
My favourite times were playing Marathon and Quake during lunch at work. This was mid 90s. Marathon was a cutting edge Mac game made by Bungie. It was the first 3D shooter I played where you could look up and down.
I remember forcing my dad to pack the car with my heavy computer and even heavier monitor back in the late 90s. He would drive me to large gyms where I would play with some other 100 people ego shooters. You had to be very careful back then not share any drives. You’d had instantly 20 people trying to login to you computer to browse your files. Fun times. My dad hated it though.
Scene: '93 or thereabouts, in a uni computer lab and I am bored. I log on remotely to an ONR Y-MP I have access to for research. Huge-ass machine in its day, but notoriously slow for single-CPU jobs. So I decide to compile xtetris on it, which was surprisingly simple (why did a Cray have X on it? who knows...).
And then I export the display and start playing the slowest game of Tetris, probably ever. Punchline: I was sitting at the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time, a machine not known for slow graphics... my lab-mates couldn't help but stare and ask "why on earth is xtetris slow on the SGI?", "oh, no that's just a Navy Cray" <grin>.
When I was at Intel back then there was a demo group which had access to a pile of new machines. You could get some colleagues together on the weekend to just play games. All you needed was pizza delivered.
I used to work for Lotus Support in the UK in '93 - '94 and we used to play games over the office network once we knocked off for the day. First with NetWars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars) and then Doom. When you shot a colleague with a rocket launcher for the first time....
//EDIT// We also used to connect to a Lotus FTP server in the US so we could download new WADs that people had built.
When call-waiting was introduced, it would usually destroy a 1200 or 2400 baud connection. So we would just call people we wanted to knock offline. It was pretty handy when a "big" chat board had 8 whole simultaneous connections and they were all busy.
When running a BBS the first thing you learned was how to add the codes to disable call waiting to your modem INIT string.
Ah, the good 'ol days. I picked up a cheap fax switch so I could share my dorm line with my BBS. Very cheesy british lady answered the phone "This is the Fax Boss answering your call. To send a fax remain silent, otherwise press 2 to connect" or something like that. I only really remember up to "...to send a fax...". Wish I still had that thing, it was awesome at the time. Of course instead of faxes I was receiving BBS callers but it worked perfectly. Confused my parents constantly.
I think they are saying they couldn't connect as all lines were busy, so they would call someone they assumed was connected, causing the other person to drop off and free up a line, and then try and get that free line.
It was specifically the call-waiting beeps that interrupted the modem connection. I recall my 300 baud modem tolerating it, but 12/2400 (and higher) could not recover from the interruption.
You could set how long the modems would wait for reconnect. We had a service that offered free phone calls with 15 seconds interruption for ads now and then. Worked fine for free bbs time if you knew how to set it :)
Lol, that reminds me of the time we were playing "Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator" in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX, and an IT person on the opposing team remotely rebooted our commander's workstation mid battle. Good times!
The trick is to buy a laser printer. Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time. Laser does not suffer from this problem.
Seriously. Brother has sold laser printers under $100 for many years now -- they're reliable and last seemingly forever, and toner is cheap.
Why any average consumer buys inkjets anymore is a mystery to me.
If you need to print documents for personal or basic business use, a B&W laser printer is the way to go. If you need fancier printouts of slides or product info to hand out to clients, a color laser printer is the way to go.
And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
I don't actually understand who the market for home inkjet printers is anymore.
(Inkjets have their place for certain niche uses like larger-format photography printing, but that's not really the "home" market anymore, more a professional or at minimum prosumer market.)
And the really nice thing about Brother is there's none of this "500mb universal printer driver" shit. Want just the printer driver? 10 mb. Want linux drivers? Here's CUPS drivers. They sell you a printer, here's drivers that work, end of story.
I adore (and have always adored) my Brother B+W lasers and am thinking about one of the color lasers one of these days, especially now that I am living at home instead of having access to a Xerox network copier at work (we are allowed reasonable personal usage of office supplies, no worries).
The Brother fan club is loud and for very good reason.
In contrast (I had a brother B+W at home) I owned an HP color laser for my office at school, and nope, never again, the driver package was fucking terrible and while I could usually get it to work after some finangling, it was constantly a pain. Literally threw it in the trash and got a B+W brother MFC instead even though that was a "step down".
I just got a Brother duplex color laserjet. I plugged it into our network and went to my computer expecting to need to spend the next half hour setting it up on Linux.
It was just... there. Printed immediately with no fuss, including duplex.
But honestly, I got the Brother printer because HP ink cartridges are filled with DRM and I have no reason to think they won't obsolete a cartridge model in order to force people to buy new printers. In fact it seems naive to think they won't, even if they try they will inevitably have to discontinue things.
This was more or less my experience. My old HP laserjet (P1005) was a crap: it required to be connected to a computer through the USB cable every time it was turned on, so that the 500MB HP Windows driver could be able to upload the firmware (the printer apparently has no permanent memory). And, boy, the Windows driver was awful: it was a pain to install, and in fact my wife has never been able to print from her Windows laptop. I used a patched driver found somewhere on Internet for my Linux laptop that worked miraculously well.
Last month I bought a wireless Brother laser printer, and the difference is astonishing! I was immediately able to print from my Linux laptop (no, I did not need to install any driver, the printer just got installed and configured automatically through wifi), and the same for my wife's computer. And, best of all, we can now print documents from our Android devices as well. I am moved to tears when I think of all the time I've spent in past years to re-configure my HP printer for the 1000th time!
I also have a Brother (laser, color, duplex). It literally just works. It has everything you would expect. It is a little bit too loud when printing and a minute after (after cooling it falls back to 0 rpm).
I recently bought a dirt cheap Brother B+W printer to replace a Canon inktjet printer and am very happy with the decision. It is a small printer, Windows/Linux network printing is easy to setup and just works. My only gripe with it is that it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi. It has been a pleasure to use the printer again.
> My only gripe with it is that it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi
I noted the same thing and eh. While this means your router has to continue to support a 2.4 GHz AP, I don't think that's an unusual decision as far as the "internet of things", due to cost reasons (as opposed to migrating every IOT to 5 GHz). I think you will have to maintain all three now.
Devices are eventually going to segregate themselves onto their own networks: 2.4 GHz for legacy / low-cost / IOT, 5 GHz for data rate, wigig/wifi 6/etc for extreme data rate. The performance hit on your other bands should be minimal even considering contetion.
There's no sense updating the wireless module for faster wifi and probably not any sense updating past 100 mbit wired ethernet either.
> I recently bought a dirt cheap Brother B+W printer to replace a Canon inktjet printer and am very happy with the decision.
Do note that canon inkjet printers can often be easily retrofitted for bulk "continuous tank" ink, which can actually make them surprisingly affordable to run as far as inkjets go! The ink itself isn't really that expensive, just packaging (it's a "priced according to demand" product). I'd look at bulk ink "cost per page" for photo before you toss it.
I think it'll probably still work out to being economically cheaper per page to get a brother B+W or color laser but if you can argue the bulk ink inkjet with printing some photos or school projects at home then maybe. Laser (color or B+W) is cheaper for b+w and occasional color presentation, and sending out to costco/kinkos/whatever is better for photos or premium presentation.
(There still is no comparison to professional photo printers of course - check out White House Custom Color, despite the "we're a pro service house! what is your professional account number" facade they're open to you even if you just want a couple family photos printed nice, and they have equipment and expertise you don't. Work out your cost per page and if you fuck up once on a big print you probably lose vs just sending it out, I bet.)
>Devices are eventually going to segregate themselves onto their own networks: 2.4 GHz for legacy / low-cost / IOT, 5 GHz for data rate, wigig/wifi 6/etc for extreme data rate.
That would be rather annoying. Wifi is so usefull because you can connect everything to the same network. Especially when most consumers are oblivious to any computer architecture design decisions. And can you really expect someone living in a tiny apartment to purchase three network types? (2.4; 5ghz; wifi6) or one expensive device with all three technologies? Communicating data rates and transmission power will be the way to go I believe.
If I can hook up a printer to a network switch then that's what I usually go for. And pray that the printer actually works.
I mean, it's still the same network. They show up as different options in your wi-fi menu, but devices can still talk to each other on 192.168.0.x, right?
Most (?) wi-fi routers now support 2.4+5, and it's not meaningfully more expensive. I assume wifi 6 will have the same kind of gradual introduction 5 had?
I've never heard of anyone buying separate routers for multiple wavelengths.
For me cost per print is not an issue since I print very rarely. When I do need to print, the printer should just work, and there the Canon printer had some issues (Pixma MP620).
After upgrading to Windows 10 it turned out the printer was no longer (support stopped after Windows 7). I never got the CUPS driver for it to work; it is an unofficial unmaintained one. other people have reported success with it.
The Brother worked (almost) out of the box on both Windows and Linux. Knowing that decent Linux drivers are available gives me some comfort that upgrading an OS will no longer disable the printer.
In the end I was surprised just how cheap the laser printer was. All in all I paid less than 120 euro for the printer plus one extra toner that is probably going to last a lifetime considering how often I print.
Regarding the WiFi situation I agree, it is not a big problem. I have a separate 2.4GHz network in the house now and that does not influence the speed of the 5GHz network in a way I notice.
Over the past five years, I've bought two HP printers (based in part on recommendations from the Wirecutter) and then three Brother printers, and have also read a dozen HN posts like this.
My summary is that Brother is the way to go, period. The HP printers are constantly fighting me by, e.g., demanding internet access to print, failing to print when HP servers temporarily go down, putting up baffling errors, etc. The Brother printers just work.
The fact that Wirecutter recommended HP when Brother is so clearly superior has forever lowered my faith in their recommendations.
I swore off HP products for a run of crap in the 2005-2010 era. What finally did it was a wireless printer. We got a new router, and I spent a couple of hours trying to get the printer to work again. I finally contacted HP support and the answer was, yeah, with that printer, you can't change the router. No way to get it to forget the old network and move to the new one.
Maybe I've just been terribly unlucky with that brand, but I also swore off HP products more or less in that period, after almost everything me, my friends and my coworkers had from that brand (laptops, Palm-like pre-tablet devices, inkjet printers, etc.) failed or gave oodles of problems (the exception was an expensive laser printer at work which worked fine for a long time).
Years after that, around 2017, my SO buys a rather high-end HP laptop in spite of my discouragement (can't blame her, it was a really attractive offer in terms of specs vs. price). She had to take it for repair shortly after buying it, the WiFi card never really worked (it's unstable, with constant disconnections, so an external one is needed) and the battery totally died a few days after warranty expired.
I suppose my experience with that brand is not representative because otherwise it should have been out of business for a long time...
I won’t do business with anyone that employees Meg Whitman. She was the CEO of HP while it imploded. The damage was obviously self-inflicted and driven by upper management.
Brother makes a basic AF black laser printer that costs $88 (back when I bought it). It's been 4 years and I have yet to replace the replaceable materials (toner). I was planning on upgrading but I don't wanna throw away useful hardware.
I have that same one. I've had it for years and years.
Here's a message for your future self: that printer has a very important, very small piece of plastic inside it that occasionally breaks and it won't grab paper internally. The part number is LY2579001 and here's how to replace it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcZ5gF0t7Kc
If you have this printer, print out this comment and then stuff it under the printer or tape it to the side or something (stuff it in the owners manual, etc.).
Home-office stuff got better when started taping shit to the side or under my printers / monitors / homelab servers. Same deal as a label maker in the data center...
I have not even had to replace the toner in it. It stays asleep the vast majority of the time and wakes on WiFi. I print directly from my phone or laptop wirelessly. It is everything a home printer should be.
I think I have the same one, but I haven't been thrilled with it. Even at the best print quality, I don't get nice, crisp letters from it. The print quality is really only good enough.
I am unsure how to guess how long the HP DRM'd laserjet ink cartridges will continue to be manufactured before they either jack up the price due to low production volumes or discontinue them to force people to buy new printers.
So instead I got a Brother printer. Sorry HP, not this time.
I mean if non-DRM'd cartridges work, they work on any printer you own, so third parties will manufacture cartridges and it will continue to work until it breaks.
Not that Brother isn't a wildly better experience but.
I'm saying that the currently available HP printers all have DRM that makes them potentially not work with 3rd party ink. I called them to be sure and was told that this is to ensure quality. This is doublespeak for "so that we have more control over how you use it".
I get the impression that right now they have the technical capability to disable 3rd party cartridges but do not use that capability for the most part. But they're quite upfront that they may change their mind.
So yes, non-DRM'd cartridges work on HP printers for now. That might change at any time though, at only their discretion. I don't know why you'd expect the same cartridge form factor to work in every printer you own.
I am saying that HP is making it so that third parties may be technically unable to manufacture cartridges and are left instead doing workarounds like refilling old HP cartridges.
I mean, they work with third party supplies for now on the current firmware, you could always lock onto that version to avoid updates.
Given how deeply it sounds like the HP drivers call out yeah that's going to be a problem eventually, I agree with you. Even if not with these models, maybe the next.
HP's drivers are super fucked, can't encourage people to stay away enough.
I think HP already tried to block 3rd party ink and was sued?
Either way, the DRM has been used to 1.) void your warranty as soon as a non-HP cartridge is installed and 2.) activate a kill bit in the cartridge DRM so it can’t be refilled and sold by 3rd party services. Any printer that reads a flagged cart will reject it.
...and when the toner warning appears, stick a piece of electric tape over the sensor and keep going! I printed for literally years after the toner warning appeared with no decline in quality (I didn't print often, but still!).
Thanks, I was looking to get a cheap home laser printer. Seems you and everyone recommends them, so it's ordered. Pleasingly, at least on the website I bought it from, the OS compatibility is listed as "Linux, Windows, iOS, macOS", which suits me quite well.
I don't think it's sending my printouts, because I don't think they have any use for them. But I do think it's phoning home as a precondition to print in order to get me to buy more ink at the right times. I've never bought anything from HP since that happened.
That's probably the HP Instant Ink service, which sends your ink levels to HP every freaking time so they can send a new set of cartridges if it's running low. You can set it up without that.
HP printers will still look for updates and take their time installing them even when you need to urgently print 2 sheets, as I found out myself :/
I got a HP 477 or something. Network connection works well, printer shows up on all machines at home immediately, there was a bit of setup required on Android (I think I had to install some hp print plugin). However I regularly get smears on the prints - even after shaking the toner, or printing a "clean up" page. I mean the rest is nice, but print quality is the most important thing...
Also have the 477. Print quality and speed is great for my use. Scanning-to-file over the network... refuses to work. I'm forced to use the USB thumb drive for that. It also seems to forget it's network connection if it sleeps for too long. The single-page feeder on the top is also very fussy... but I don't use it much.
My wife bought an HP printer about 15 years ago, and I've never had problems with it, but they wanted something like $500 for a memory upgrade, which was something like 128MB or 256MB, whatever was max for the printer. Even at that time, that was an absurd price. I was eventually able to find a third-party compatible memory module for about a 1/3 of the price.
But the printer has always worked well for us. Maybe this is from the days before HP got bad.
I think many people don't know better and when you go to a store you see ultra-cheap inkjet that can print in color or significantly more expensive B&W laser (or much more significantly expensive color laser, that's still not as good for pictures) and if you don't know any better it's hard to justify going for the laser.
I suspect that they might also be a strange factor that inkjet managed to corner the market by being crap, and not despite of it. People now effectively expect two things about personal printers:
- They're cheap
- They're crap
TFA is an example of this mindset. But then if you go to the store expecting to get a piece of shit printer, you're clearly going for the cheapest available option. Which means that you get a crap inkjet that you'll have to replace in two years, and then you'll buy an other crap cheap inkjet.
But I agree with both of you: after a few iterations of this cycle I finally decided to know better and bought the cheapest Brother B&W laser printer and it's been a joy. It just works.
If you don't buy a crap inkjet but instead get a more expensive one you're looking to get ripped off when the manufacturer stops producing the special ink cartridges you need for your super cool expensive inkjet.
Printers were the trial run for how to do customer relations on the IoT.
I had to google, and found I picked up my Brother HLL8350CDW (color, wireless, 4 independent colors) back in 2014 for $377 on Amazon. Thing has been rock solid - surviving both my daughter's high school years and my Bride using heavily for her work. When that beast finally dies, another Brother - no questions.
Up until about 6 months ago I woulda agreed with you but in the last 6 months all my brother printers have had odd connection issues, something about the driver changed and now I need to restart the print spooler each time I want to print something.
Say you have a kid in elementary school. Say you need to print something for a school project or even a home craft she's doing urgently (because if course kids don't plan long term - else they wouldn't be kids). BW prints look ugly. Color lasers are crazy expensive. Inkjets suck but the come with reasonably priced nice colour and photo paper printing options with a scanner built in. The inks are expensive but you're not printing much anyway. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just fire a print from the printer at home than check if the nearest print shop is open and mount an expedition
Not really. Honestly, I find the space taken by the duplexing color laser all-in-one I have from Brother a bigger deal than the up-front price was, but it's fast, excellent quality, and total cost of printing is much lower than a cheap ink-jet.
Color laser printers are not expensive, but their toner is not that cheap. I think it was estimated to be about 15 cents per color page. If you know better, do let me know - that's what's keeping me away from them.
I think the goal for consumers here is to look for a printer with a separate black cartridge and print most of your output in B+W mode and not full color.
it looks like brother's do? I'm looking at HL-L3210CW ($199).
They are not that expensive anymore. You can buy a Brother HL-L3210CW for $199, or you can get a second hand printer (I paid $5 for a Fuji Xerox CM205fw).
Color lasers are not crazy expensive anymore. I bought a Xerox color laser about 8 years ago for under $300. It's one of the best hardware purchases in terms of value for money I've ever made.
Don't buy modern Xeroxes though! I have a Versalink with huge useless OS that takes forever to boot and errors that require multiple reboot to 'fix'. Guy on the phone said it was because of drivers on client machines (what sort of crap printer crashes when there is a wrong driver installed?) but evrn with his updated version it hasn't fully gone away. I've had Xerox for 20 years but this will be the last one.
I recently bought a random cheap Canon PIXMA inkjet, and with proper photo paper, the photos it prints are indistinguishable from what you'd get from a regular photo printing service. No smudging, no bleeding, nada. It also uses big refillable ink tanks that are way cheaper and longer-lasting than overpriced HP-style disposable cartridges.
Now I'll admit that from a strict dollars-and-cents perspective, it's probably still more expensive per picture than using a photo service, but it's way more convenient. And it does a fine job with B&W printing too.
I had a Canon PIXMA around 5 years ago (I forget the exact model number), and it wasn't great. It could print decent photos, though I'd say ones from a professional print shop were still obviously superior. But it had all the usual inkjet problems - eating copious amounts of ink and needing constant maintenance.
Color laser has actually pretty terrible color, especially for photos, prints or any output that requires any sort of vibrancy or color accuracy.
Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.
Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.
If you want great color you should get a dye sublimination photo printer instead, nothing beats the finish on those, and they're colorfast in water.
Only trick is they recently tend to run small for producing 4x6s for frames or scrapbooking. Letter or A4 sizes are less common and more expensive. I'd check eBay to be honest, for used stuff like the Sony UP75D.
My color laser provided significantly better color than any of the inkjet I have used. It provided nice even color. Whereas the inkjet color was often banded.
Yeah most inkjet printers still suck. The Epson mid range to high end tend to be decent to great. The photo printers also have archival grade inks, some of which are rated for 80 years.
I print on photo paper to make front panels for electronic projects. It's fine under thin acrylic sheet.
Yeah, the toner transfer method[1] produces superior results, but when it's gear for my own use, I cant be bothered with the faffing around.
Sometimes I print photos too, just to have them around. With me it's "out of sight, out of mind", so I like to have the physical object as a reminder of something. Using your own printer on site has much less friction than using an upload-and-wait service.
All that said: yes it's getting to be a niche thing these days.
1. Laser print a reversed image in heavy lines onto an overhead transparency sheet, then use a hot clothes iron to melt the toner onto your shiny aluminium front panel. Three layers, tea towel, OHP, front panel. Then spray your panel with satin or semi-matte clear lacquer--once you've scrubbed off the metal front panel and repeated the printing and ironing often enough to get something that looks OK.
I went though around 4 crappy unreliable inkjets before getting myself a Brother HL-3150CDW. It's been ultra reliable and fast, even though I only print about 2-3 pages a month.
It has a super low-power standby and is always ready.
I bought a HL-3170CDW years ago and I've had the same experience. Bought a couple new black toner carts, and maybe one set of color ones, all OEM. Affordable supplies compared to my previous Samsung color laser (toner got outrageously expensive after 2 years of owning it).
I followed this advice and apparently ended up with the one garbage laser printer that Brother makes. The fuser roller melted and Brother's warranty service was impossible to navigate.
Ended up replacing it with an HP Office Jet that's worked fine for years. I participate in the HP ink hostage program but you know what, it's worth it to me for the hassle it saves.
I just can't praise Brother laser printer high enough. I own one for few years and it is cheap to maintain and never let me down so far. Last Saturday my SO tried to print something but printer refused to work (I thought it finally gave up). She told me to fix it (ugh..), I got to the printer with my computer but then got message from colleague, which I decided to prioritize ;-)
After 4 minutes, with me not touching anything printer decided it'll print and spew out few pieces of neatly arranged printed papers. Looks like it lost wi-fi connectivity but was able to reconnect and do the printout.
I bought a refurb Brother for like $90 (black and white) and it was setup and working over WiFi in 15 minutes. My kids use it freely. Print quality is sharp and it hasn't jammed once.
I've only ever considered purchasing an inkjet because of the many special use cases it has out of the box with standard ink: photos, transparencies, stickers, shirt transfers, and more. I know some lasers can do these things, but color laser printers are a lot more expensive and the quality is lacking in my experience.
One thing I have been surprised by is the quality of photo prints from my colour laser (Brother dcp-l8410cdw). Admittedly, my expectations were very low, and it's certainly a long way off high-quality professional printing.
But for something temporary like a photo to pin to the fridge for a few weeks, it's actually good enough.
I think this is relevant for quite a bit of the market. Most people getting photo prints online don't seem to care much about quality - the results vary a lot between companies and many cheap ones are really bad.
I'd say the colour laser get fairly close to bad ones ordered online, and is significantly better in quality to some other photo products (custom birthday cards, that sort of thing).
So I think for many causal users/uses it's pretty viable
About 12 years ago I stumbled upon second hand Brother laser printers and haven't looked back. They've even worked in Linux using the Windows driver and some sort of wrapper I found just searching online.
I've currently got a Brother HL-2132 I paid $AU30 for sitting on my desk in a dusty metal fabrication workshop. When the printer tells me the toner is low I start looking for another same or similar model just for the toner cartridge. When the drum goes I just switch over to the next second hand one.
The current one has only had two paper jams that needed the printer blowing out with compressed air, despite the dust in the workshop being full of metal particles and grinding disk particles.
Second this. I don't know what toner prices are over there but I've got a used Brother HL-2170W that I got for $20 and it works great from linux, mac, and windows. I've been able to refill it with generic toner @ $25 / two pack.
Yes. Get a Brother laser printer, and be done with it.
I've also been using a Lexmark printer for several years now, from the "workgroup" class. These are more expensive, but generally better built and if you print a lot, you can use larger toner cartridges which come out fairly cheap per page. But Lexmark software has weird quirks and you inevitably end up having to reset your printer, because it isn't on WiFi for some reason (have you tried turning it off and on again?).
None of that with Brother. You plug it in, set it up, and you're done, works with all of your devices (including iOS).
Frankly, color laser printers that would print a decent photo cost a lot, and the quality is but decent, not perfect.
An inkjet which can do justice to a photo is also usually not as cheap, its inks cost like French perfume (and sometimes there are 6 of them, not 4), and you also need to use expensive photo-quality paper. This allows you to have really great photos. Using such a device for printing business documents or school handouts is wasting it.
So yes, go with a laser, a color laser if you need, and just take your photo printing to a good lab, they usually have one of these inkjet beasts anyway.
Agreed. Inkjet makes little sense. I’ve had a $60 (on sale) Brother laser printer for 10+ years. I finally had to buy new toner just this year. Still prints like the day I bought it.
I had a B&W LaserJet for so long that I couldn't easily get it to work on Windows anymore, which is rare, especially for a basic printer. It seemed likely possible as a slightly later but very similar model was still in the included drivers, but it was a decade+ old.
Even color laserjets are decently cheap these days.
Since 2009, my requirements for a printer has always been:
* Color (switched away from laser for this)
* Printing and scanning (all-in-one)
* Duplex printing and scanning
* Automatic Document Feeder
* Network print/scan (Wireless and sometimes ethernet)
Before that, I'd been very happy with the Canon Pixma inkjets, and so I upgraded to the Pixma all-in-one (MX860, and later MX870), and I've sworn by this line. Reasonable ink/printing prices, great performance, fantastic network support.
Two years ago, we moved temporarily, so I bought a bargain basement Pixma TR4550 that checked off all of the boxes, but it was terrible. The first time my wife used it, she thought it was garbage. We made do, but I knew I wanted to change.
A year ago (after moving again), I had to add a requirement to the list. My new daily computer was a chromebook, which doesn't have scanning support, so I wanted a printer with some sort of scan-to-cloud solution. I was also eyeing color laser printers, which are now at reasonable prices, since I used to prefer laser printers before color became a requirement.
Enter the Brother MFC-L3750CDW, which I bought for $340. It's a color laser all-in-one with everything I wanted (including ethernet)... and it supports both scan-to-Google Drive and scan-to-email! This printer is nothing short of amazing. I've never printed from my phone before, but my wife and I both do this regularly now. I have two shortcut buttons in the interface, one for scanning directly to my email, one for my wife's. I have never installed a printer driver, every OS I've tried just prints directly to the thing (it's autodiscovered when adding).
My Epson printer just died an untimely death, after ~10 years of decent service.
I am exactly in the same use-case as you (color / multifunction / ADF / network & Chromebook) and spent hours trying to get some of the Canon printers working with a Chromebook. But I'm not finding that printer anywhere at a reasonable price!
They are the best options for home users. But I’ve had businesses buy them and they will last about 5,000 pages and then they either fail completely or you spend more money on a new fuser than the printer costs.
Worth it, though. Most will replace it every few months if they are using them to print a lot.
I'm not sure your piece of anecdata is representative of the whole. My piece of anecdata is that we have several Brother printers at work, the oldest of which has been going for 7 or 8 years and the page counter shows somewhere around 150,000. We did change the fuser unit once but it was around the same cost as a toner cartridge.
Brother (and all others) make different grades. You can pay a little more for a printer that is rated for more prints before needing a new drum. At work we were chewing through 2 brothers per year of the cheaper consumer grade type. Paid just a little more for an office version and it lasted until we stopped with faxes a few years ago. Now they bought an HP without asking me and it just sits in a corner because no-one can get it to work for very long. On the other hand paper usage is way down now so eco friendlier :)
I'm looking for a Brother duplexing color laser that works with their Mac drivers. I have the HL-3170CDW but it has a known issue with Macs waking up from sleep; it isn't a problem on Windows, Linux, or iOS, but with the latest firmware and latest drivers on the latest macOS patches, freshly power cycled and then allowed to sleep in low-power mode, it will intermittently not power up, though I see the print job spooling down from the flashing LED. Power cycling the printer always kicks the print job out, but I'm not a fan of that much power cycling.
Has anyone else run into this with their Macs in one of the older generation model Brothers and found a later Brother model that permanently fixes this behavior?
I sort of disagree with this article, except the fact that inkjet ink is overpriced.
I have a 5 year old basic consumer grade Canon color inkjet with a scanner built in. It's wireless, I can quickly print a photo on photo paper (no waiting multiple days for a printing service), any BW document I'm likely to print in 2020 (and let's be honest...how many documents do you really need to print in 2020?) come out at 10 pages per minute or so. It prints in duplex. Ink is about €50-€75 per year. I've had one paper jam in 5 years, solved by pulling one handle and removing a crumpled piece of paper.
I have way more issues with my €1500 laptop or my €800 phone than with my €100 inkjet printer.
Yeah, just last weekend, I was checking out various equipment in my office. I have a large format photo quality inkjet but one cartridge is empty and the other two are dried out. Would cost me over $100 to refill it and I just don't use it enough to keep the cartridges fresh. Not worth buying new cartridges for it. My B&W laser is fine for most things, the few photos I want printed are easily done online on choice of media and size, and if I decided I really have to print in color at home, I'd replace my B&W laser with a color laser printer.
I bought an Epson inktank inkjet b&w printer a few months ago. This thing is a beauty. Printing cost is ridiculously low , way lower than with a laser printer. A bottle of ink costs €10 and lasts for 12k pages. Sure, the speed is nowhere near that of a laser and neither is the functionality, but that just doesn't matter if you can print a 200 page document with less than €1 including the paper.
I had one of those too, and it worked great for about 6 months, until one of the print nozzles became clogged. It turns out that on most printers, the print heads are part of the cartridges (=replaceable), but on the ecotank printers they're built-in to the printer - so if the printer's built-in cleaning system doesn't work, it's almost impossible to unclog.
> And if you need to print photos, order them online from a professional photo printing service.
If you're in the need (like me right now) to print +300 photos in several formats, even shopping at best prices around me, that's something like 150€ for them. For that kind of price I could get a nice home printer, supplies, and afterwards just keep the printer for the future.
I'd like to see your BOM. ;) I'd estimate 10-20 EUR for high quality paper; undoubtedly the ink supplied with the printer will not be enough to print 300 photos, that's another 40-80 EUR, leaving 50-100 EUR for the printer. Are the prints from a ~100 EUR printer really equivalent to professionally developed prints?
And assuming the OP meant an inkjet printer, they'll probably go through 4 whole sets of cartridges to print 300 photos.
And they'll need to "realign the heads" and "clean the nozzles" at least 17 times, which will consume hours of your time, paper, and probably another whole set of cartridges too.
I battled with Epson and HP inkjets for years - I haven't looked back since I bought a small black and white Brother laser a couple of years back. No more wasting time, no more new cartridges every 5 pages - you just hit print and it prints.
I think that'd be a use-case for HPs "ink hostage" (instant ink or something like that), as another commenter put it, program.
If i recall right, i even read somewhere here on HN that someone basically printed full page color prints all day long and HP happily keeps sending him fresh cartridges, which is, at the rate he is paying monthly, a steal...
I guess nothing stops you from ending your membership after you're done with your printouts :)
Because home users are primary needing printer for those annoying homework projects. And being able to print in color late in the evening for cheap is massive help for that.
Laser printers are better in so many ways. Just make sure that they are not placed too closely next to your desk or in rooms where you spend a lot of time in since they can emit toner dust and volatile compounds that could potentially be harmful to one’s health over a long period of time.
I've been looking into this and couldn't find any studies or reports that showed any notable negative effect of particulate emissions by laser printers.
Seriously? If that is true, how have the manufacturers not gotten sued into oblivion?? This seems like the kind of thing that would be easy to prevent and a liability nightmare if you don't, so I doubt the companies would sell that kind of product.
Because the danger of fume is negligible. It's a thing if you put it in a 2m^2 storeroom and sniff the exhaust for 8 hours straight but in any other case it doesn't come close to concentrations you get on the street anyway.
In Germany at least, companies are not allowed to put the printer in 'busy' areas. Starting from a certain company size, a seperate room may even be required. I believe particulates are explicitly given as a reason for this.
I'm also not sure how this would be 'easy' to prevent, without adding a whole sealed enclosure around the printer.
... although I was disappointed recently by my usual go-to of the Brother brand. Their Linux/CUPS drivers are some sort of bizarre concoction of Perl scripts and x32 binaries... and still cannot print in duplex :/.
(I believe the duplex problem is probably a typo somewhere in the PPD or Perl script, but I don't know enough about PPDs and/or Perl scripts to be sure. I do know programming, hence my suspicion.)
Lesson is: Research if the EXACT printer you're purchasing is supported by the usual Gutenprint or whatever.
I had that problem. Then I realized that it is just a generic pcl printer and any driver will work. I do have to manually change the queue from binary_p1 to pcl_p1, but other than that it just works. (there are other queues in the printer for postscript and the like, the printer info page lists them all.
Warning: HP has bought Samsung printer division few years ago. As a result, there are HP-branded printers that are really Samsung inside, and they need the uld driver, which is binary-only abandonware. So caveat emptor.
I wonder if that's why our Samsung color laser failed? Never used anything but genuine Samsung cartridges, but the blue cartridge developed a leak that we just couldn't get rid of. Replaced with a Canon B/W that has been rock solid.
Not sure whether there is any systematic way to identify them.
I've been looking for a cheap b/w laser for my parents and have found HP LaserJet 135/135w. It looked very familiar, and behold, it is a rebranded Samsung SL-M2070w that I have in the office.
Hardware-wise, it is actually a nice printer. Software-wise... It works in Linux, but you have to install the binary-only uld driver. For MacOS it is more interesting: printing is not a problem, scanning in B/w is also OK, but scanning in Image Capture/Preview in color into PDF produces garbage output. What works is scanning in color into TIFF, then stitching and reexporting into PDF manually. The alternative, the EasyScan Samsung software no longer works in Catalina, it has 32-bit components.
Edit: from the ppds in the driver package, they are:
The Brother printers I've used all support IPP, which works great from Linux or any other operating system. I would discourage buying a non-IPP printer in any case.
My recently bought inexpensive Brother printer worked with CUPS without any special drivers, thanks to the IPP support. I just connected it to the network and it's automatically discovered and supported.
... and I believe it. Unless you researched it heavily that was just good luck, honestly. Your printer has a good OSS driver, and it worked. Mine did not, even though I thought Brother was generally OSS-friendly. :(
Well, at least the binary (x32!, if you can believe that) driver basically works, but no duplex... which is sad because I bought said printer because it had the duplex capability :/
On MacOS, our wireless Brother won't wake up without the official drivers installed in the Mac. Dunno what magic packet it's sending, but I couldn't get it working with generic drivers. Ymmv, obviously.
Good information! I may try this tonight. I like everything about my Brother laser printer except that I have to have an old computer sitting next to it that does almost nothing but print stuff.
I've got mine networked with an old Orange Pi using some old cell phone charger plug running the brlaser driver and it works great. Before that, I'd always have issues between Mac/Windows/Linux for seemingly no good reason. I'm glad brlaser came around.
Brother drivers are every bit as crap as every other brand.
I have one of their all-in-one office machines. It prints pretty well. The wireless scan is complete garbage. A known issue with their drivers, apparently.
My color laser printer has been working well for years now! Each toner cartridge lasts at least 1000 pages (current winner in my printer is black with 1553 pages). It is a little slow to load big documents but I don't see any need to upgrade any time soon. Wifi was really the latest beneficial technology.
Ditto, I picked up a Samsung CLP-620ND in 2010 and it's still going strong. I get about 5000 pages on a black cartridge, about half that on the colors, and it's time for a transfer belt but I think I can probably clean the old one and get a few more years out of it.
I have the same one. Haven’t had any issues with it. I don’t know when I originally bought it, but according to my records, I purchased toner cartridges in 2012, 2015, and 2020. The usage report says I’ve printed 6,111 pages. It has been a fantastic product.
> Inkjet is garbage and cannot handle being left idle for any period of time.
Modern printers are much better in this context, however what you pointed is true. To avoid heads clogging, when I moved from Laser to Inkjet, I planned a way to save the printer from inactivity by preparing a directory of family photos I already planned to print, but instead of printing lots of them in a single take, I print each of them every two weeks, so the printer heads never get dried.
The printer is a Epson WP4515, and of course I use refilled consumables (€3.50 per cartridge). Admittedly from time to time I forgot about printing my photos, nothing that one or two heads cleaning passes couldn't solve.
In short, it is definitely possible to have an Inkjet printer, make it print no more than a few hundred photos in years, but never clog a head or have to ditch new cartridges or worse, that is, an extremely low cost of operation.
It requires some attention though.
Even assuming you dedicate such time to it, very often the hardware itself is pretty poor and fails you. I recently had to basically take apart an (admittedly cheap) HP inkjet printer in order to reposition part of a hall-effect switch that helped it detect a paper jam - it was detecting a jam continuously because of it.
And because the same printer hadn't been used in 5 months, I also had to clean the clogged head with a syringe afterwards.
This is almost exactly my reply. I don't print a ton anymore, but I've bought exactly 2 laser printers in the past 25 years, the first I think I replaced because it was less expensive to replace than buy toner. The second I still own. Ink jet never seems to last more than a year.
I like the suggestion. For most people I think laser printers probably are a huge win.
As someone who mainly wants to print some photos now & then, sometimes in large-ish sizes, I'm not sure if there are offerings that will suit me here. Where-as, when they are running well, there are some very nice many color inkjets.
There have been some neat attempts to make economical better inkjet printers. Epson make a L1800 wide format printer with 6 refillable "ecotank" ink tanks, but it was targeted for non-primary markets & vanished with no replacement. Whether it was any more reliable than the other notoriously finnicky inkjets, and what, exactly, it's quality was, are unknown. But I think it's an interesting example of a product that was willing to break product segmentation boundaries that have been long standing, and deliver a lot of great capabilities- tank based rather than cartridges, many colors, wide format, good specs- at a very competitive price point, many times less expensive than what one would normally have to pay for such a printer. To me, it seems like strong evidence that the problem is markets, markets that don't want to compete, & that are reluctant to deliver better capabilities. Companies would rather raise the limbo bar, allow a little more fat; pushing for better is hard, but also, why do it, if you don't have to? Sell & compete at the next tier up.
If you print less than monthly, you are likely better just taking your print jobs to Kinkos, Costco, FedEx, etc... you'll likely get better quality prints too.
I typically print only a few times per year, so I use the printer at the public library, which is a short walk from my home. They even have an online service for submitting print jobs.
The comment I was replying to was referring to photos, not tax returns. I file taxes electronically, in fact almost every legal document I've had to print in years has been done electronically.
But if you are worried about that, this thread is about having laser printers which are quite good at leaving in the closet so you can print your annual tax returns.
There are still many ways for laser printers to suck. My Samsung C460, for example, gets a paper jam just about every other sheet. Or imagines a paper jam, because quite often there's no problem at all, but it complains anyway.
I also suspect that just about any wireless printer will suck when used with Windows. Windows certainly has a lot of trouble finding mine.
I see lots of recommendations for brother laser printers here.
One word of warning: Avoid their inkjets. I had one with permanent heads. Less than 100 sheets in, it jammed (this ream was fine with the printer before and after it).
It failed to put the head back on top of the seal that keeps it from drying out. I didn’t notice the jam, and a few days later it was permanently ruined.
I do recommend the brother ADS line (standalone USB document scanners), with the caveat that the Linux drivers on my old one are x86-only.
Inkjets suck. Don’t even think about it. Dye sublimation is (was?) nice.
We have a Samsung laser, which is great, except there’s a “disable the wifi until you plug me into ethernet” button labeled WPS on the top that the cats like to press.
Also their printer business was acquired by HP, so it’s only a matter of time until HP manages to somehow remote brick it or stop selling consumables.
Every person, their dog, and their printer has provided a recommendation thus far, so here are mine:
I have a Brother colour duplex printer for bulk printing (was useful for printing weekly school plans before schools went back a few months ago: https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=... . As noted by others, it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi.
Spot on. Have a laser printer since 2010 and the only thing apart from toner that I had to buy for it was a drum about 2-3 years ago. Not even buying branded toner. Only from Aliexpress.
One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
Try to get a laser with automatic duplex printing if you want to save paper. With manual duplex printing mistakes can cost a significant proportion of paper and may require significant amounts of effort to do correctly.
I currently have a Brother HL-2140 (also has HL-21 model number) and it has 'manual duplex'. This means if I want to save paper I have to mark a corner of the first page before printing and see what orientation it prints compared to that mark (it is not intuitive). I have been printing one page at a time because of this, although now I have written this down I realise I could do better.
I bought mine (Canon Laser) about what, 10 years ago? I'd say it's one of the best office appliance I bought and I think it can comfortably last my lifetime.
I print some pages about 5 times/year max. The toner that comes with it is nearly running out, but still able to print some greyish image if I want quick physical form of some files. ZERO maintenance.
and it's not even the expensive model, it's the base model, almost the cheapest. Such quality, really.
On another story, I also used to own Brother's multifunction scanner-inkjet printer. It was a nightmare.
I have a Samsung CLP-315W, and kept having problems detecting my first-party replacement toner cartridges because there were DRM chips in them [1]. I think a firmware upgrade even made the DRM worse.
This was almost a decade ago. If I had to get a high-volume home printer now, I'd probably consider one with refillable ink tanks.
One year ago I bought a Lexmark Laser Printer (Color) for 60€. I've barely printed more than 12 pages but it doesn't care about the long idling (currently working on disconnecting power when not in use). It prints full-duplex pages with no hardware margin in A4. The color is on par with all the color printers I've used in my life.
The replacement toner is 20€. Why would I ever touch anything else?
" (currently working on disconnecting power when not in use"
Watch out, modern printers run a full OS that doesn't expect power to be fully cut regularly. My Xerox does a full filesystem check every time I turn the power to it on, which takes about 5 mins. For my next printer I will carefully research how this works on it.
I'm fine with that. It sits in my homelab rack on the lowest rung, it uses a bunch of power that could be saved. I only print once a month or so, for those cases, it's entirely fine if it takes the 5 minutes it needs to boot.
I fear I will jinx my 20-yr-old hp 1200 laser jet that's on maybe it's 4(?) toner and hooked up to our home network via a parallel port to usb adapter. It's yellower than an 8-bit computer but still prints great and fast. One of my best tech purchases ever; I'm glad I resisted the lure of color inkjet and spent 3x much for a b&w laser.
I've had an HP multifunction laser printer for at least 5 years maybe 8 years. In that time I've bought two black toner cartridges and no colour cartridges.
This time period included going back to school, a technical college, where I printed a ton of reports (and many misprints).
For the brother multifunctions I've used, the fuser is replaced at 100k-120k pages; the large toner cartridges are like 6k pages. So, yeah, you don't replace the fuser with every toner replacement, but I don't see how that's a mark in favor of HP, if they replaced it with the toner (but doing some googling, it looks like HP also uses separate fuser kits.)
Yes, this is the answer. I'm looking at a HP LaserJet 1320N next to my desk that is yellow with age and it still manages to smash out B&W pages at a solid clip. I think it's close to 16 years old and I've bought exactly 3 ink refills.
I had a laserjet 1200 for a very long time, must have been 15 years or so. But it developed a problem where it would often pull multiple sheets at a time, and when the toner ran out I conveniently got my hands on a laserjet P2055dn that my old job was throwing out. Threw in a 3rd party toner cartridge (I guess that model is old enough to not suffer from the DRM crap of newer models) and it was good to go. Been rock solid so far.
That being said, based on what people write every time this topic comes up, whenever this one dies I'll replace it with a Brother.
The problem is that once you start adding features they get absurdly expensive. The bare minimum for me is color (printing colored things as grayscale in 2020 is frankly an embarrassment), built-in networking, automatic duplex printing and a scanner.
But you can't buy just that. The only printers that have those features also have a feeder on the scanner, a fax machine, all kinds of cloud crap, an "app" system (?!?), access control... which drive the price way up the their own - and that's before they slap on the "enterprise" markup because that is no longer considered a SOHO device.
I concur, back in 2011 I bought a Dell 3210 on an amazing deal (buy the toner get the printer free). It has built in networking (wired and wireless). It’s survived four house moves including one international move and works every day. Third party toner cartridges work in it no problem and last forever. I think I’ve bought maybe two sets of toner in the time I’ve owned it. Prints fast and rarely jams. We use online services for photo printing so we almost entirely only use it for documents and for that it’s been flawless.
I like the laser printer that I bought a year ago because it is fast but I haven't had issues with the HP PSC 1410 inkjet printer that I bought about 10 years ago...
I started up my laser printer after letting it gather dust for a good 4-5 years. It still works as good as new (and it was already 6 years old by then). This thing is unkillable and the toner lasts what feels like forever (while also being absurdly cheap).
I have a smallish Brother inkjet MFD, that absolutely can be left idle, unless you pull the power plug (clogged a few nozzles by leaving it without power)
It periodically, uh, does that printhead thing, was idle for a few months, no new clogs.
And DO NOT buy a multifunction. If you get a printer printer with nothing else Linux, macOS and Windows will probably auto detect and configure it automatically and every time.
yup 100%. I've been laser now for at least 15 years. The final nail in the coffin for me was when inkjet clearly became a loss leader on the printer made up through exorbitant ink replacement. The final-final nail was when manufacturers started selling all in one cartridges, so that when cyan ran out you could no longer print b/w.
If you read the article, the reason why he cannot print has nothing to do with the type of printer he has :) It's all to do with an idiotic "always connected to the internet" subscription plan.
Made a solemn vow years ago to never ever buy another HP product again when I realised that the inkjet printer I bought in the UK from a major UK retailer was region-locked to US ink. No official HP ink cartridge bought in the UK would work with it and there was nothing official I could do to change it. Had to muck about with refills, blank chips and ink systems for years until the happy day when the thing broke and I threw it as hard as I could into the e-waste skip.
The rot set in with printers when the technology got good enough for there not to be any easy improvements and the mindset changed from building a tool to help people create, to seeing customers as a resource to be exploited.
Every user-hostile bit of nonsense from shoddy software to region-locked, staggeringly overpriced ink stems from there.
Today I replaced a HP Laserjet that ran a firmware update. Shame on me for not keeping it from phoning home.
Four toner cartridges inside, 70% filled or higher, and after the update I see "supply error" on the screen. Turns out my aftermarket toner cartridges, which have worked for several hundred prints without problem – and I'm on the fourth purchase of these same aftermarket cartridges – are now DRM locked and will not print.
block out all from inet 10.10.10.5 to any
I'll not make this mistake with the Brother I'm unboxing now.
> The rot set in with printers when the technology got good enough for there not to be any easy improvements and the mindset changed from building a tool to help people create, to seeing customers as a resource to be exploited.
Sounds exactly like my experience with a low/mid-tier HP laptop a few years ago. Full of bloatwear, constantly overheating, gave up after a couple of years of light use.
for years we bought HP in my family, don't know why. After we got our hands on an Epson it was like seeing the light for the first time.
I took a risk with an ultra-budget Canon more recently and was pleasantly surprised with their linux support (via generic wireless printing and scanning)
The 1990s saw "peak printer" with the arrival of the HP LaserJet 4 series; perhaps the ultimate laser printer, considering the time in which it was created.
Realising that they were cannibalising future sales by having people buy one for life, HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults and improve the predictability of upcoming quarter's earnings. Other manufacturers were either too clever to ever create a reliable printer which would never need replacing, or they soon followed suit.
Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
I had a LaserJet 4 too, and I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here. I have a Brother DCPL2550DW that I got for $130 when the pandemic started and it's been better than the LaserJet 4 ever was in the following ways: more reliable (not a single jam), duplex printing out of the box, much cheaper, built-in networking (both Ethernet and WiFi), uses a modern interface (USB) that modern computers actually have ports for, built-in combo flatbed/feed tray scanner, better/more intuitive buttons on the printer, faster printer speed, and high enough data throughput to max out its print speed even for complicated pages. For a bit more money you can get a version of this that does duplex feed scanning as well (it wasn't worth it for me but it was for troydavis in one of the sibling comments).
The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
> I think there's some rose-colored glasses effect going on here
That may be anecdotal based on brand and model. I can agree with you in this case because I've got the Brother DCP-L2540DW. I got it on sale for $99 CAD (~$75 USD) when it was still the newest model available. I'm using the stock cartridge still, though I have a refill purchased and ready to go in case it's not possible to buy one when the original powder runs out.
This line of Brother printers is indeed good. It's impossible to say whether this applies generally to any laser printer, or to any Brother laser printer, or if we were simply lucky to have picked up these particular models.
Not sure of the exact model, but we had a brother laser printer at my old work. A few of them actually. They were fairly reliable most of the time. It would jam occasionally and figuring out errors with it was sometimes frustrating. But i never really hated them or have any ill feelings towards them the way i do with other printers.
I think I got it on the same sale. It was at Staples, I think, right?
But mine didn’t have a good life. It still works, but has a super weird issue where if you sent it more than a few pages it’ll hang with an error message needing a restart. Sending many pages as individual jobs is fine though.
Yeah the LJ4s jammed a lot. And they were real ozone generators. And would hold up the queue every time someone specified the wrong paper type "INSERT LETTER"
But I loved them because you could send a message to their screen with a PCL command. Even many of the matter models can still do this. I had so much fun with that.
> The LaserJet 4 was fine for its time but it doesn't compare to decent modern printers. Substantial improvements have been made over the past few decades.
...which is why I wrote "considering the time in which it was created"
I owned a LaserJet 4L in about 1994 and, yes, it was amazing. It was also about $550 in 1994 dollars, or something like $900 now. That was the smallest LJ model, targeted at individuals and home offices, and one of the least expensive printers on the market other than dot matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slor0f3LJIU
I don’t think I’ve spent a total of $900 on printers since then.
If one is willing to use a laser instead of an ink jet, quality still exists. I have a Brother MFC-L2750DW now (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1371537-REG/brother_m...). It’s wonderful and works flawlessly, including duplex scanning to macOS. It’s a far better price:quality mix than the LJ 4 was. It was $250, though, not $50, and as an inexpensive laser, it only prints in monochrome. If one is willing to spend $200+ and accept monochrome, good printers still exist. Today’s $900 printer will shine your shoes.
For what it's worth I waffled back and forth over this and ended up getting the cheaper Brother model that does everything else including duplex printing but that doesn't have duplex scanning. Seven months in so far and I haven't regretted the lack of duplex scanning. Of course that may vary for your use case, and if you have lots of documents or whatever that need digital archiving then obviously get it, but I haven't personally experienced that need.
I use my Brother MFC-2740DW more for scanning than I do for printing. It does a great job with Apple's Image Capture on my Mac either using the document feeder or the flatbed.
What I love about the document feeder is that it will scan both sides of the pages and combine them into one PDF. Really handy for dealing with real estate and other legal documents that are 20 pages long.
I have rarely had a page skip but then you can scan that page and use Preview to insert it in the proper place in the PDF. You could feed 10 pages, then flip them and feed them in again and combine manually. But it's very nice that the machine will do it for you.
We also have a Brother color laser printer, an HL-3170CDW. Its print quality is better and faster than my machine but it likes to go offline for no apparent reason after a couple of days. The easy fix is to power it off and on but it'd be nice if there was a better one.
I also recommend your version. Had it for years. Changed the toner once. It’s been in storage for a year in hot Houston, moved cross country three times in a uhaul and gone months between prints. Just used it the other day to print a pumpkin stencil, prior to that printed immigration docs, 100+ pages in March.
No colors, single side scan, does everything else on macOS.
I sent my first brother back after I realised I misread duplex printing/vs duplex everthing. It's so handy to just dump a pile of pages in the ADF and let it chew through it all (when I was at uni with handouts etc, book extracts)
I feel like in 2020 we should all be more scanners than printers, so for me anyway it pays to have the duplex scanning
I'm wary of multi-/omni-function printers (driver support for printers is bad enough and I don't want to spend a year's worth of PTO figuring out which particular unicorn multi-function will work with all the devices I currently have on hand), so I have a brother B&W laser (from a ~decade ago, still perfect, still works across all my platforms) and a fujitsu scansnap ix500.
the scansnap does (single-pass) duplex scanning, has a decent enough mobile app, and happily sits on my wifi.
the above combination was absolutely critical during remote learning last spring, my kids' teachers wanted a bunch of stuff printed and results scanned back in.
I bought two other HP printers later in that timeframe and they were both garbage in comparison to the HP4000.
I was big fan of HP at one time but have refused to even try any of their products for more than 10 years now -- their quality across-the-board dropped too low for my tastes.
I think, based on the other comments here, and my experience with my own Brother printers... I think they are the "less clever" people building reliable printers.
This advice has been good for the last 12 years or so. I never install their drivers; I just tell CUPS that there's a Brother in PS mode with a duplexer at a particular IP address, and then there's no further issue.
> HP soon decreased the quality of their printers to increase faults
I often hear such claims of planned obsolescence and while I won't put it past companies to do it, they feel a bit too conspiratorial to me. Are there any documented cases / exposes of companies doing this, as opposed to just making lower quality stuff because it is cheap?
I am talking of deliberate planned obsolescence, and not of things like the iPhone battery scandal where Apple throttled the speed of devices to prevent sudden shut-offs.
"The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. "
"The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[8]"
In some cases the effect is indirect but equally likely to be achieved somewhat on purpose. If I am under pressure to cut costs and I fire my QE team, I didn’t do it explicitly to achieve planned obsolescence, but I’ll get that result anyway. There won’t be anything on paper saying “we want quality to go down”, but everyone involved will just know what the game is.
Gluing something in instead of using screws is just faster and cheaper to manufacture.
And if it's a product like a phone that 90% of the customers will replace with a new one in just a few years, the large majority of customers actually won't care.
There are simple pull-tabs to remove them. The alternative is a hard shell (which decreases the space available for energy storage)... or letting the battery flop around inside the unit, I suppose.
> Buy your equipment second-hand where you can to help reduce e-waste.
This. It's amazing what can be found if one takes a look.
I got an Epson C8600 for free (A3 color laser with duplex and all from 2006 or maybe 2008?) complete with spare cartridge set. Someone was throwing out old office stuff.
The only problem was the pagecounter chip on the photodrum that had to be replaced, that was something like $5. And I had to reinforce the ikea table it sits on.
Otherwise a great machine, if a bit slow to start up.
> The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs.
I know someone still using a LaserJet 1100. Looks like it might be from 2002? She can still find toner for it, and adding a PCIe parallel port was enough to get the printer working in Windows 10.
Back when I used to do IT work, close to ten years ago, the HP LaserJet 4 and I want to say both the 3000 and 4000 were always the printers I was happiest to see when I walked into a new client’s office. They seemed to last forever, they broke the least frequently, their drivers were the easiest to install and the most stable. It’s both wild to me and not totally unsurprising that so many people have fond memories for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people were still squeezing life out of theirs!
I bought a Lexmark e232 back in 2006 for a mere €120. Fifteen years later and the damn thing works like a charm. It's not just HP that made high quality products.
I still have an HP Laserjet 4 series printer with network card. I bought it 10+ years ago on Craigslist for $40 which included toner in it. I love it! Has two 500 page (1 ream) trays. That toner lasted a few years. Bought more toner that lasted 5+ more years. Bought another toner cartridge. Finally starting to look at replacing it with a multi function color laser printer.
My parents still have an HP LaserJet 4 series printer. As long as you are just printing text that thing generally works great (some PDFs seem to max out the buffer and take forever to print). It will be interesting to see how long their much newer HP all in one laserJet lasts in comparison.
My nearly a decade old hp laser printer is chugging along nicely and in addition to my work related printing, has handled multiple kids going through middle, high school and college including snapchat picture wall phases!! On first set of toner cartridges.
I have a Brother duplex color laser printer connected to the network here at home and it's been reliable but I don't use it heavily so I don't know if moderate use would have broken it by now or not.
Still running our LaserJet 5si on the network for 11x17 pages. Been out of service (maintenance contract) for years, but it's still working fine with some light cleaning.
You seem to be saying contradictory things... if printer quality has decreased so that printers now break quickly, wouldn't that make a second-hand one a really bad idea?
The HP8150DN was also awesome. It had extra's that could tack, sort, duplex, multiple trays for odd papersizes and a massive, massive 3000 (?) page bay.
I have a Brother entry level laser printer, first printer in years that I've liked. Will never buy an inkjet again, there is something inherently flawed with that technology.
I was about to say the same thing... It is really completely amazing how wide the gap is between standard, cheap ink jet and cheap Brother laser. Seriously do yourself a favour and just switch. Your sanity will thank you.
It's that Japanese engineering shit... my Brother label makers were a gift from a hackathon and one of them was a used on that had like 30,000 pages run through it. Powered it up, paired it through bluetooth, ran a perfect page through it.
There's nothing inherently flawed with inkjet printers. There are very good ones out there; look up something like the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000. You're using an overly broad brush to unfairly tar the entire technology based on your experience with the very worst cash-grab implementations of it. It'd be like saying smartphones as a technology suck because a $50 piece of junk Chinese Android performs terribly.
No, inkjets are an inherently flawed technology. The nozzles dry out and clog up. If you use them infrequently, you'll use more ink for cleaning than you do for printing.
They're not "inherently flawed". Color laser doesn't come close to the same high quality photo prints. If printing high quality prints is something you regularly do then inkjet is your only option.
It's not that the technology is inherently flawed, it's that way too many people are buying them for document printing when they should instead be getting laser printers. Inkjets are much more of a niche specialty product.
Inkjet isn't really a home office printer tech. It's a "super high quality photo" tech. If you got a cheap inkjet for black and white document printing then you bought the wrong thing, plain and simple. Cheap inkjets aren't suitable for any purpose; they should just flat out be avoided, like all those really cheap no-brand Chinese electronics on Amazon/Wish.
There have been so many horror stories about inkjet printers that I went directly from dot matrix printers to lasers in the mid-1990's. I have never been disappointed.
The last printer I purchased was a Brother. Some people criticize them for the quality, but they seem to be fine for home and small office use. They don't play games with toner and are reasonably compatible with whatever you throw them on to.
Yet you do have to be careful when choosing lasers. Some vendors seem to use the same approach as inkjet printers when it comes to supplies, and it affects both consumer and corporate models. I also recall doing a fair bit of research on Brother printers to ensure I ended up with a good (but inexpensive) model. That being said, at least there are options.
I found we just went through ink like nobodies business. We don't print all the time (typically 3-4 times a year), and it would be sufficient gap that between prints we'd find the ink cartridges had dried up or just stopped working. No amount of cleaning runs would get it to flow smoothly again. It was getting stupid expensive to keep buying ink.
I bought a multi-function HP Laser printer a couple of years ago and haven't looked back (although we started having to print more and more frequently as our kids have got older). It's one of those devices that "just works" now. Even Linux automatically detects it on the network and configures itself for printing.
I have an Epson P900. Inkjet. 17x22” archival pigment prints at 1440 dpi. Paper feed isn’t the best ever but it’s usually not a problem. Inkjet is sublime and amazing.
I have a Canon Pixma Pro-100. Not quite as fancy but it does an amazing job. I've been using cheap matte photo paper for the few color documents I need and that works pretty well. It uses far less ink than I expected. It's cheaper to run than the terrible Epson photo printer it replaced.
I have used Brother MFC laser printers for over 10 years and I don’t hesitate to recommend them. Cheap enough to throwaway if they break, but otherwise the software stays out of your way.
The built in brother webconnect capability is nice to scan an OCR’d pdf directly to your dropbox/drive/box/one drive account. Too bad it doesn’t work with iCloud.
To add my voice to this, sure it’s nowhere near the quality of the super fancy laser printer at work, but for home use the brother laser printer I got (entry level) has been absolutely fantastic. At this point literally the only printer I’m not scared to recommend to friends when they ask.
High-end ink is fine, just expensive. Both for the printer, AND for the inks.
You cannot reproduce photo-quality prints with just 4 colors (cmyk). Your high-end photo-level printers use 10 or 12 inks, with far higher resolution than a typical $200 Brother printer.
But if you're only doing office work / text / etc. etc., laser is great. Even mild graphics (diagrams mainly) work out fine with laser prints.
--------
The typical $200 ink printer however, is complete garbage.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018 when I realized "oh fuck, I bought another printer." But it's killer feature is third party ink support - OEM cartridges can be reset and refilled with inks that are good enough and the inks can be bought in bulk...where bulk means 100ml at a time for as little as $2/oz (or ~$0.07/ml).
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
My dad had a HP Deskjet 720 and after several years of using it, it had been sitting for at least 2 years without a single print or maintenance. Then one day I needed it for a school project, with all its colors due to some graphs.
Printed a simple test page with some colors twice, then the colors were back in action. Successfully printed 20 or so color pages after that without issue.
So clearly inkjets that doesn't dry out was a solved problem, however I realize that doesn't exactly drive ink or printer sales so yeah.
These days I just have a monochrome laser printer at home for the two-three times a year I need it. Always just works, no fuzz.
The copyright on the 750c manual is 1997. It was a different era. The printer market was in a different place. And HP was a different company. Occasional home use is not the market segment it was twenty plus years ago. My 550c didn’t clog either.
One of the the big changes is inks print and dry faster. Those early inkjet inks needed thirty seconds or so to dry and similar times to print...at best - a full page of color in the 1990’s was minutes per page.
I have a brother MFC-J6520DW scanner/printer. It is inexpensive and I bought it mainly for its large format scanning capability.
Problem #1: I don't use it much. But every night (or two?) it does a self cleaning cycle which uses up some ink apparently. Despite saying the ink cartridges saying "500 prints", I might actually make 50 pages before it runs out of ink after a few months.
Problem #2: I only ever need it for black and white, yet I have to buy expensive color cartridge sets as it refuses to print B&W pages if it is out of color. And it runs out of color despite my not using it because of problem #1 above.
Problem #3: After it gives the ink low warning, if I ignore it for a while until it actually starts making splotchy prints, when I put the new ink cartridges in, I have to literally print dozens of test pages before the quality is acceptable again. I have no idea what is going on there. By that time the B&W cartridge will report it is at 60% capacity.
Once this set runs out in a few months, I've already decided to get a monochrome laser printer, and regret not doing it long ago.
If that is the only problem, wouldn't laser printers have fixed it? There's a ton of other things that don't work, e.g. paper jams. With the multi-function devices this gets even worse.
Not using a device all the time should be a use-case that is accounted for. Imagine having to service a car every time it stands still for a few weeks, nobody living in a city would have a car.
Of course, there's a lot of complexity and moving parts involved, but it just seems like a problem that could have been fixed by now. The rise of home office makes it very annoying, before that most people I know would just print everything at the office where someone manages the printer, also some places have a 7/11 around the corner with one of those big printers, so that really helps.
It would be nice if someone could make a "fair printer" at a reasonable premium, with good (open source) drivers, cartridges for different use-cases, replaceable and easy to clean parts and thinking of the biggest problems, e.g., an easy way to understand and fix paper jams. I doubt the way financing or corporations work we'll see that happening.
Paper jams are also related to use. Paper is dimensionally unstable. It swells and shrinks with changes in humidity. In a stack of paper the exposed top sheet will change more than the sheet below it. The edges of each sheet will change more than the center. Additionally paper has a grain structure and expands more in one axis than the others. Humidity also changes the thickness of paper.
That’s the nature of paper. Most people, and for a long time I was one of them don’t have a good working model of paper as a material. In part because mechanical printing was not common until thirty years ago. In part because in the first part of the PC revolution printing was more an everyday thing since online publishing was rarely a viable alternative.
After I wrote my previous comment, I fleshed out an idea it touches on tangentially.
Printers are not computational artifacts. Little more so than a dishwasher with a microprocessor. Though we tend to think of them as part of a computer, they act directly in meat space. Directly on paper with ink or toner.
Laser printers are less reliable because we print less. The old workhorse printers were workhorse printers because they were used so heavily that paper didn’t have much time to swell in bad ways.
There are printing methods that are good for infrequent use. Fanfold paper tractor fed through an impact printer is nearly bulletproof and dies gracefully as the ribbon ink depletes. But they are noisy, bulky, slow, feature poor, and inflexible. However most understand ESC2 and writing control software is accessible from any language that can send bytes to a port.
I took a tour of HP's Boise test lab [1] a few years ago, and the biggest take-away from that for me was that (in their opinion) paper quality is one of the biggest factors in printer reliablity.
The test lab includes lots of neat things: an RF chamber, acoustic chamber (in a dedicated separate vibration-isolated building), a couple climate simuation rooms (humid, cold), a bunch of robot arms that open/close drawers or use touchscreens/keypads. (Here's a 5-min video tour [2] of it if you're interested.)
Despite all that they were quite proud of their a massive inventory of paper from all over the world and testing they did with it. This included environmental (humidity/temp) testing after acclimatizing the paper for several days. They even went out of their way to get paper mills to custom create some of the crappiest papers they'd run across. I think the explanation was basically poor quality, rough paper leaves particles all over everything and causes rollers, drums etc to wear out faster.
Depending on your usage, it's at least worth considering when you're buying paper and looking at saving a few dollars on the cheaper stuff.
In 1992 I bought an HP Inkjet 550c. In 1994 HP sent me a roller cleaning kit and a floppy to run it. Basically a scotch pad scrubby for the paper pickup rollers.
It was the last great HP product I bought. The sound it made was magical. It was still well working after ten years when I gave it to a non profit administrator who lacked a printer. The 600 series printers I specked and bought for the office in 1995 banshee howled by comparison...though nothing like a dot matrix.
Thanks for sharing, this looks like an interesting place. I understand that it's challenging, I just don't think it's unsolvable given there is sufficient of a market for people to complain.
You won't get the same up to spec paper and humidity around the world, the printer should handle that and I think there are people willing to pay a premium on the hardware if they now it's going to play nice for the rare use in many years.
I think people underestimate just how difficult it is to design and manufacture a printer! Paper isn't easy to work with, especially when it comes with all sorts of thicknesses and finishes. We expect extreme accuracy and reliability, with no maintenance. It is amazing they work as well as they do!
When I worked with old Xerox form printers, even the brand of paper made a difference. One brand would work well for multi-thousand page jobs while another would get occasionally stuck in the rollers.
While I'd think that things have improved since the era of tag/bus printing, I'd also think that the concern is still there.
Are you specifically referring to inkjet printers? Because laser printers are pretty close to "Accurate, reliable, minimal maintenance".
If you're focused on inkjets, if what you're saying is true, it's overshadowed by the predatory practices employed by printer manufacturers. Practices that make it easy to conclude that printer issues are more about planned obsolescence and selling more ink than they are about difficult engineering problems.
Ask yourself: What is the best hardware on the planet with the worst software?
LABEL PRINTING
I realized a few years ago that, if my clients fired me, I’d have to go get a “real job.” My expertise has been Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), and I became pretty good with hardware integration UI/UX. That’s when I asked myself the question above.
I learned React/Electron and built a solution named Label LIVE. Check it out at https://label.live.
This side-hustle has been a HUGE challenge and helps augment my consulting income.
Do you have to print Avery sheets with dynamic data? Don’t want to mail merge? Copy/paste got you down? Want to use your Zebra printer on a Mac? These simple things were incredibly difficult a few years ago...
My app has tons of fun features powered by the JavaScript ecosystem: USB, Fonts, Barcodes, Excel/CSV integration, dithering via WASM, PDF generation, etc.
It may not be the most memory efficient app, but it lets you get your printing done so you can focus on something else.
Label printing was a dumpster fire. Users expect a high-stress stinky mess. If I can make it 50% better I’ve succeeded in my goal. There’s still a ton of work to do... I just need to make time for it.
p.s. Do you know another hardware industry that needs better software? Get in touch!
From my own experience (my own history with printers and of those of the people around me who I've done pc clean ups for in the past) I fell that it's all down to the fact that consumer grade printers are built down to a price, often to the point where the profit lies in the ink refills and with inkjet printers consumer printers are not used enough to prevent them from drying out in between prints.
About 10 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand mono laser printer (A Kyocera FS-1010, had over 65k pages on it at time of purchase) because I was fabing my own PCB's at home and it is still "mainly" working just as good as it was the day I got it. (I say mainly because the front pull down paper feed isn't fully working, but that is my fault I damaged it, not the printers fault)
I've put another ~15k prints on it in the time I've had it, Its still going, Sure its big and bulky but its a work horse thats just keeps going and going.
Yeah it does click when in standby / low power mode. I do the same and just power it down when its not in use. These days its only used once in a blue moon so its not really a bother to me. But yeah if someone was going to have it on 24/7 so its ready to go at a moments notice, I would recommend rigging up some kind of remote power management for the power supply (Not that I recommend any buying a 17 year old printer model).
Haven't owned a printer in about 10 years. I hated the bloody things. The expense, the jams, and above all the pointlessness of taking an electronic document and printing it on paper, when everyone has email.
I have an HP inkjet now, that I bought for my son's school work during lockdown. We had no choice. He was actually expected to print out work, stick it in his book, then send in a photo of the work. FFS.
It came with a three month free subscription service, to their automatic ink cartridge resupply.
So we had some cartridges arrive in the post, just as the ink was running out, and I changed cartridges.
A month later, the free subscription ended, and the printer refused to print, using the cartridges, unless I renewed my subscription, which I had to do through their mobile app.
How can you make such a simple technology, so ridiculously complex?
When we were young and poor I got my wife HP 2200D for $40. It was in 2010, the printer was already really old and beat. Since then it has printed roughly 200 000 pages for her and God knows how many before we got it. The C4096A toners are roughly $20 where I live and easily print on average 10 000 pages but some we did almost 20 000, it’s technically impossible (most toners are built for 6000 pages) but it happened. In the meantime my parents changed 3 or 4 XXI century printers and some of them were very expensive. The only trouble with 2200D we have is it won’t run on Windows 8/10, worked flawlessly on 7. I spent days trying to figure out the drivers and surrendered. So we’re just printing on Mac. It’s extremely easy to fix (I personally replaced broken duplex mechanism and it was 100 times easier than changing RAM in Mac Mini) and did nothing else excepting feeding it paper and new toners. I hate printers and am really scared what is going to happen once our old timer breaks for good.
Only job I was ever fired from - it was a temp job. Mortgage comps in the early 90s. Printing was the slowest part of the process. I installed a print spooler and was 3x more productive than peers and boss.
I was fired for “installing unsanctioned software”. Yet a friend’s brother was a muckity there and heard what happened and wanted to hire me full time - this was a summer part time job. I said nope. Had fun being the right hand for a chemical engineer at one of the local refineries and learned a lot more.
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
If the US Secret Service went to printer and copier manufacturers, and convinced them all to make forensic markings, that's not collusion by the manufacturers.
I might have mistakenly said that date because plans have been difficult to keep track of. We have a cruise scheduled for May but nothing is written in stone. Our last trip was a short road trip in February.
I have an HP LaserJet MFP M28w, and it's actually somewhat decent! It does B&W prints, and that's actually all we need at home. I can print directly from my phone, scan directly to my phone, and amazingly, I can print from Linux, which I would never have dreamed of in all my 20 years of Linux desktop usage.
Being the family tech support, I'm slowly but surely migrating all family members away from inkjets to laser printers. This is easy because the inkjets invariably die within a couple of years. I make the beloved relatives think really hard about needing color or not. Let's be fair, we don't need it for printing ticket QR codes.
I read an article years ago about how high the markup is for ink toner.
Unless I inherently misunderstand something about this industry, it seems like the perfect opportunity for a new startup to swoop in with a new quality printer with affordable toner cartridges. My only conclusion for why this hasn't been done is that it must not be profitable.
Most people wouldn't buy a printer if they charged proportionally to what they cost to build. The manufacturers universally rely on ink profits to make up the difference.
I like the Xerox Workcenters.
Speaks PCL + Postscript, can netcat a job to it. Automatically shows up in CUPS and Windows, and has a full duplex scanner to boot. I got mine for 400$, which considering it's monthly duty cycle is 10x my yearly output
I don't really mind.
From reading many of the comments both in the original article and the HN post there is a clear theme: HP printers seem to be the source of many people's frustrations. Perhaps printers wouldn't have such a bad rep if it wasn't for HP.
I very rarely print nowadays but I'd certainly never buy an HP printer based on what I've read. The amount of e-waste they're responsible for as a result of their crappy semi-disposible printers must be shocking.
HP laser printers are good, their expensive stuff is good. It seems that most people buy the cheap ink ones, that's where most problems seem to come from (mine is certainly frustrating at times)
But one should also notice that HP seems to have a lead in the cheap ink printer market, so a lot of testimonies mention HP. I think the lesson is: don't buy cheap ink printers.
Until you've used a wet process printer you haven't lived..
Bromides are cool. feeding them the tape of the fonts, super cool: adjusting the hex for minor positioning, extra merit points (I never did that but I know a guy who did)
The Early canon laser was half good, but the size of a fridge. The Benson Varian stuff was ok, but the paper felt slimy.
I think using the pen plotter to write cursive was my favourite, but the operators hated me when I did that.
Back in the 80s there was a strong "don't waste it" vibe for devices in general. This one took very specific pens. I was writing a fortran printer driver for it, I had reasons to use it but the overall sense was "stop wasting ink"
When the wet process laser came along, we got a lot of love using it at first, but then it went to the same place. it was a continuous roll feed (bit like a fax in some ways) and consumed some kind of chemical. I can relate to them rationing it. (it also had NROFF/TBL cut marks to show where to slice it to make the effective page size)
The colour printers they got on trial from textronix we got to keep the demo sheets doing various DECUS tape 3D graphic drawings, but it was way too expensive to buy. I have no idea who bought those things then. probably big physics, not compsci schools.
The giant LPT up front which took 132 column papper? go for your life, but you had to be in the freemasons to break the feed sheet, and if you printed the 'Star Trek' overhit ascii art you were banned for months. (it burned through the ribbon)
Ops duty cycle included walking out front, breaking the feed, tearing various peoples printouts into discrete chunks, putting it into the pigeon hole.
Those stories about accidental form-feed shooting paper ribbons across the room? They are true.
You have your choice: you can get an inkjet, and all of them suck at the consumer price level.
Or you can get a laser made by a company that got its start making sewing machines and still does, or a company that got its start making test and measurement equipment and spun off that bit of the company (i. e. The good bit) to focus on making crap printers.
That explains cheap hardware but doesn't explain why the software is as bad as it is. Amortized over any large hardware vendor's product line the per-unit cost of investment in the software has got to be nothing.
My experience is that hardware companies are almost universally bad at software. I can only guess it's because the hardware guys are treated like rockstars and the software guys are treated like a necessary evil.
This applies to pretty much any other computer-related thing sold to non-tech people. They either don't care or don't have the skills to judge the quality, so a better quality but more expensive product will always lose in favour of the cheapest crap.
In 2020 it is now possible to simply refuse to use paper or a printer. It's possible to do an all-PDF workflow for most things.
I make do with a little wi-fi thermal sticky label printer, for the few times I need an address label, because I am vehemently opposed to the concept of handwriting. I have a letter laser printer, which I have successfully avoided needing to use.
The only time I've used it in recent memory (2 years?) is to print off updated car insurance documents, current copies of which must be kept in the car by law (and of course they change every six months). My insurance company will mail them to me, but it's faster to just print them than to order them in the app and wait for them to arrive by post. I technically don't need to print them myself.
You just have to be a little bit stubborn in refusing to use paper, and it's possible now.
Unless you're printing novels, best bet imo is to buy a canon wifi multifunction with a duplex scanner for ~$100, and get 3rd party ink cartridges on ebay for $1 each.
Do they really? I can't remember the last time I had a printer problem, and I print a lot. Printer hardware and software have gotten a lot better since 10 years ago.
Exactly. Try to print every other month, and very different tasks - scanned images of cashier's receipts, color pictures a toddler drew in MS Paint, pages 87-112 from SICP, Bing Maps directions, an ASCII text from from a flash drive and the likes.
Sometimes you have to reset printer (with a button). Sometimes to cycle power off-on. Sometimes to download whatever's needed from a browser in a form of a PDF. Sometimes nothing works, and only by pure luck you can do something - not always - when completely misremembering steps which led to the printing.
I've never had much trouble with printers. I owned an original Apple LaserWriter II, which I retired in working condition, an HP LaserJet, which I retired in working condition, and an Epson ET-2650, which works OK. It's cheap to operate; I have to pour in some more ink once a year or so. Doesn't seem to jam. It is subject to nozzle clogging if not used for a week or two, but a few cleaning cycles fixes that.
It's on the end of a USB cable and driven from Linux, so it doesn't phone home or require an Epson account. Prints fine. It's also a scanner, using the terrible SANE software for Linux, but it scans fine once.
I have an old Samsung scx-4626 multi-function laser and its been problem free ever since I purchased it. rock solid device. I also use good paper that does not have all that paper dust from cheaper brands.
I had to buy the first printer I’d ever owned this year due to switching to wfh indefinitely. Got the Brother HL-1110 just since it was the cheapest laser printer available here. It is a ridiculously austere and brutalist design, it really feels like they were optimizing out every penny on the BOM. It should be utter trash. In practice it prints fast, with good quality, and I have not had any trouble with it. It’s like the Citroen 2CV of printers.
So I find it hard to believe that printers really suck. Even the worst case was actually quite wonderful.
I still have a Canon Pixma iP3600 that I've bought 10 years ago and 3rd party refillable cartridges. It's cheap, plug'n'play setup, compact (relatively to the laser jet printers).
Yea, inks can run out. When they do I just use a syringe and refill them all in 20 min. However, laser cartridge can run out as well, what are you going to do with it? Buy new? Refill at the shop? Meh, I don't want to go to the shop. (If it works during these times)
People hate them, however, for tech savvy folks they're cheap and easy to maintain.
It took me an embarrassingly long time before I learned I could digitally sign PDFs (literally draw my signature). After this discovery, I've not had any need for a printer.
I use fox it reader. You can paste a signature PNG file in a PDF. I print that PDF again using Microsoft PDF printer as an image with reduce quality. It looks like a scanned page.
+2 for Brother laser printers. I have a HL2270DW (duplex wifi) and a DCP7040 (multifunction print/scan/copy, USB only). They cost me, respectively, $0 and $5 at garage sales. They have <$20 aftermarket toner cartridges in them and print flawlessly with these.
There are really two use cases for printers: Heavy, frequent use, and infrequent use. Laser printers excel at the latter because they use dry supplies. I've had laser printers that sat idle for a decade, toner and all, simply power up and print.
I couldn't get these Brother printers to work except by using Brother's Linux printer installer, which works perfectly, but alarmingly, is still 32-bit software which makes me wonder how much longer it'll work. Similarly, the scan feature of the multifunction machine will only work after Brother's installer is run (but then it works great - sheet feed duplex scanning (stack flip and second pass) with gscan2pdf).
Anyway so slight software concern aside, very happy with these printers. I don't think either of them has ever jammed in my use.
Also - projectors still suck. When I did my grad school presentations in 2004, I was asked to print 50 copies for 40 slide decks just in case the projector failed. Even in 2020 at work, we run into significant issues that completely derail meetings. And it seems like the most expensive setups (in our executive conference room for example) are the worst.
My university in the mid 90's had HP LaserJet 5 Si MX printers in the computer labs. When I got a job in 1997 I laughed at how bad the printers were in the office. I convinced my manager to buy the same HP LaserJet 5 Si MX. It was $3500 but everyone loved it.
It had a built in PostScript interpreter and was great for printing from our Sun and HP workstations.
The only printer I've ever enjoyed was a short-lived Kodak pigment based printer.
That said, while it worked great and the pigments were reasonably priced, the unit experienced hardware failures every 6-12 months. Kodak support was above and beyond, and they must have shipped me 4 printers as replacements.
It's a shame consumer pigment printers didn't take off but I guess once Kodak realized the price wasn't going to move the needle on consumer habits, they might as well get their slice of the ink cartel pie.
My current HP is maybe the worse printer I've ever owned. It is constantly inaccessible on the network despite being connected and the only solution is to power cycle it. If I hold the power button to power it off, it sits and spins "Preparing to shut down" literally forever. I've left it overnight just so see. So I have to pull the plug every time just to turn it off. It's insane.
Next time I swing by the computer recycling place, I gotta see if they still have that Tektronix Phaser dye-sub printer up front. They've been trying to move it for years, and I think their clientele just doesn't recognize it.
Dye-sub is downright magical. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I just want to own one.
Intrigued by the hugely favorable reviews for Brother printers. I like appliances (printer or otherwise) that just work. If I ever have to buy a printer again, I'll seriously consider Brother.
I currently use HP InkAdvantage 2135. Everyone at home uses Linux and it works flawlessly. Didn't have to particularly install anything for printing.
After reading the comments here, I'm starting to believe that we got lucky.
Here are the downsides of my HP:
1. You cannot print a lot of pages on a single cartridge. They claim just 480, but I would put the realistic number to below 400 pages. And the cartridges are NOT cheap.
2. No auto-duplex
3. No wireless connectivity option for this particular printer.
But I knew about 2 and 3 while making the purchase, so it's not really a downside.
However, considering that Brother printers are cheaper and paper yield is substantially higher, I feel that I should've bought that instead.
I'm secretly hoping my existing printer goes kaput :)
My question is more like -- what's the next big thing? We've had laser printers forever, and the under-$100 Brother ones are just awesome for a home printer. But nothing has really changed in years. Color laser has gotten cheaper, I guess. But is that it? Is that the pinnacle of printing?
Just to echo the general theme:
-I have an Epson inkjet for printing colour photos. It is a pain in the arse. I hate it.
-I have a cheap Brother B&W laser for printing documents. It has been great.
I once had a HP colour laser printer. It was so bad (particularly the software) that I vowed never to buy HP kit again.
Lol! I bought a Brother laser printer for $100. Prints automatic full duplex. Joins to my WiFi and hardwired Ethernet. Plugged it in and every computer in the house printed to it immediately. My PHONE prints to it flawlessly. GTFO printer complainer! You have no idea how bad it used to be!
I've never had that hateful relationship with printers. Sure, the occasional paper jam etc., and experience with the office printer that is beyond it's useful lifetime in terms of lifetime prints or underspec'ed for its monthly duty cycle, and we replace it.
As for ink expense, yeah that's been an issue for decades though it is not due to lack of technical advances, but to vendor lock in. However, most brands now offer printer options slightly more expensive than an entry level ink jet that have ink tanks instead of cartridges. I recently replaced my 6 year old work horse with one: It came with the equivalent of 10 cartridges of ink, and each replacement color is $15, again for the equivalent of 10 cartridges.
Hardware is notoriously hard and there are so many moving parts where something can go wrong.
The real world is also messy and so many variables can lead to a failure. It's astonishing that we can print so easily most of the time, let alone send someone in space unharmed.
The real reason is that hardly anyone prints any more so the remaining companies are chopping costs in the hope of continuing to get some revenue from a shrinking market. Quality suffers...so fewer people even buy a printer “just in case”. Death spiral.
Printers don’t still suck. You just have to spend proper money on one if you want it to be nice. Like every other consumer product.
My HP OfficeJet 9015 is fantastic. It’s fast, automatic duplex printing, automatic duplex scanning. Recognized by every wireless device I own (Windows 10, macOS, iOS) automatically with zero software installs. AirPrint is fantastic.
Yes, that’s a $200+ printer. Probably most people are going out and buying $50 all-in-one printers and complaining about how they suck. No shit!
And IMO the ink cartridges are priced reasonably enough. I could swear they didn’t used to be this cheap but I don’t have any kind of ink price index or anything.
If you're complaining about ink cartridges I have no sympathy. You bought the cheaper option that is terrible for home use. Meanwhile I've never once had to buy more supplies for my laser printer with 4 years of owning it.
Not my experience at all. When my girlfriend's HP 4L died we looked for a replacement and we both wanted to print color images so I bought a Canon MX870 ("multifunction", inkjet) in 2010.
I still have it and it still impresses me with how robust it is - the fact it's a good document scanner and a fax is gravy. On its strength I bought a PRO-100 and the European analog of the MX870 whose model number I forget.
The PRO-100 sat unused for several years, and when I tried it again, it picked up and worked as though for the first time.
The assertion that inkjet is garbage sure isn't borne out by my three Canon inkjets.
You want a real-life "why do printers still suck story" ? Try this one one for size.
Go out and buy yourself a Canon laser, one of the current LBP models.
Set an admin PIN/password.
Forget the password and try to recover it.
You'll find there is no recovery function.
You'll find there is no factory-reset function.
Your ONLY option is to call out a Canon service engineer at your own expense (or 'carry-in' the device to a Canon service centre and still be charged for the pleasure).
No, I'm not joking. I have this both verbally and in writing from Canon that they have no factory-reset because of "security reasons".
Doesn’t Apple get plaudits for Activation Lock that prevents an iPhone being activated? Why is Canon bad for making things secure but not Apple? Do you own your phone any more or less than you own your printer?
I bought a Brother laser printer from a company that was upgrading their office equipment. I paid for it like £30. It is a colour printer. I have been enjoying it for like 6 years now and it still has plenty of toner left and no issues whatsoever. It feels like it can print infinite number of pages without any issue. I am truly amazed.
When I compare it to the Canon and HP printers I had where I had to literally swap the ink every few pages and for Canon there was a moment where it was cheaper to buy a printer with ink included, than just the ink.
I've been using the same Brother MFC laser printer for like 10 years without a single issue, and the cartridges are cheap and last an incredible amount of time.
I'm at the stage now where I get annoyed when I have to print anything.
Typically I only need to do so for banks of government agencies so that my signature counts.
Though I successfully signed a government document on an iPad and argued that their instructions didn't say I couldn't use a digital pen to sign it. (Still had to print it off though)
The only real use case I can think of (I'm sure there are others) for truly personal printing is photography - even then, I think I'd probably send it off to a specialist printers.
Anecdotal evidence of course but I’ve had nothing but success with Brother ink jets. I’ve had my current Brother business class printer for over six years now. It’s huge but it prints on ledger size 11x17 paper (nice for flowcharts). It works great with cheap Amazon generic ink cartridges as well. Even the scanner is reliable. Half the printers I’ve used require all sorts of incantations to get the computer to recognize the scanner but not the Brother.
As a kid we had an HP DeskJet Plus. It was built like a tank and cost close to $1000 (in 1989). It worked flawlessly for many years, and we only eventually upgraded to get color.
Part of me is nostalgic for the days when printers were built to last, but when I realize it cost the equivalent of $2000 today, I'm content with the cheap "disposable" printers they make now. $2000 would be enough for me to buy enough printers, paper, and ink to last my lifetime.
I would not want to endorse any company, but we've been using HP Instant Ink quite successfully since we knew the existed and we are really happy with how that resulted. It is actually pretty cheap for us, 3 EUR per month and we get 50 prints per month and these accumulate if you don't use them. They even send you the ink before you run out of it and they take the empty ones for you to recycle. Great value for the customer if u ask me!
I really enjoyed my Epson multifunction inkjet, up until it just stopped printing, even with new ink cartridges. It died after only a couple years of extremely seldom use.
My favorite part? The software. It was very Japanese. Very ugly and very functional. Little jingles for everything. A ton of useful functions out of the box. First rate mobile support. It was so easy to use I'm honestly sad the POS printing part stopped working.
I have three printers right now, two inkjets for photo printing and one monochrome laser for documents - lately, mostly research papers about wasps.
All three printers work beautifully. They all print perfectly from all my devices, never give me trouble, and thanks to the economics of HP's Instant Ink program, low and medium quality photo prints up to letter size only cost me as much as one sheet of whatever paper I'm using.
Forget about the printer for weeks until I need it again
Inkjets work reliably when used regularly. And tend not to when they aren't. And this is even more the case when the inkjet is unplugged because of those annoying maintenance cycles in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day that result in an empty ink message despite not printing anything.
I went through the same thing for years. A cycle of dread where I avoided printing because half time printing seemed to mean a trip to the office supply store and twenty or sixty dollars in ink cartridges with the anticipation I would have a similar experience next time.
Now I print regularly because I know it's ok and have had zero issues since April of 2018. It's killer feature is third party ink support - cartridges can be reset and refilled and inks that are good enough can be bought in bulk.
When it runs out of ink, I can reset and refill the empties, top off the non-empties, swap out the cartridges, and put everything away and clean up the sink in about twenty minutes. Less time than going to the store and back. Since I have two full sets of cartridges, I can do the swap out before the refill and empties hold me up less than five minutes in practice.
Sure, there's a big part of me that doesn't feel that any of this should be necessary because...well it's a computer. On the other hand, I can't just use my laptop and close the lid without plugging it in. YMMV.
I have an HP inkjet printer from ~2010 that works great.
When I want to print from my phone or PC, it seems to just work. I can email a magic address from any other device and it also starts printing.
I order ink a few times a year (we print a lot) and it takes just moments to install. Maybe I'll buy a new laser printer at some point, but I haven't really seen the need.
Got the ink subscription plan. Worked for a while. Lost the little bag to send cartridges back, but wait! you can order another on their web site. Got it, sent the spent cartridges back and ..... nothing. No more ink. Still paying, but not getting ink. Sigh. No button on the website to press that says "where the fuck is my ink?!"
I wouldn't mind printing out a paper (as in academic paper) to read and add notes while building things, since I would need to take hand written notes anyway and to avoid having the screen on all the time or to read outside when the weather is nice.
My experience with printers is keeping me from it. It feels like a market for lemons, the cheap ones are obviously crap, but who is to say that an expensive printer will be any better, especially with all the silly strategies the bean counters are using to squeeze the last bit of revenue out of the consumer. Reading the other comments, HP seems to be the company to avoid (My last cheap laser printer from them, P1006, was reasonably good though, it just doesn't support duplex and I won't run around with double the paper that's needed)
On the distance learning bit: My old iPad I used in college and grad school was great. When I had a bunch of readings to go through, I did prefer it to printing for the lower cost, synced notes, less to carry, better for the environment bits.
Now that I don't have any class notes and assignments, I would really like a printer for the once a month 30-50 pages duplex prints. Especially since my iPad is essentially a brick now that it can't access my Safari saved pages or iCloud Drive and can't install Firefox – yes it's old, but it would work fine except for software, so I'm not getting a new one.
I'm curious to hear why. I can't think of any reason to use a printer (not implying your usage is invalid, just saying I can't think of what it might be).
Because paper is such a great medium for some tasks. Every day we print out the list of assignments my kids have, and they can check them off as they do them. They have several writing assignments which we print off and they write by hand. (my kids are in kindergarten and second grade - too young to be good at typing so a pencil is clearly better for writing tasks)
Why are there no real open source hardware printers? Some parts should be similar to 3d printers, probably the print head (for ink) or toner roll/drum (for laser) will be quite difficult. I saw some tries on hackaday etc, but no real printer with 100% open source & open hardware.
The two big fujixerox colour laser printer run my kids to its pre-college and my wife home business. But once boys are gone i immediately switch to the ecoprint version (epson l6190). Slower, but so much cheaper for colour print.
Did worry about the drying but so far so good. Do keep a Hp laser portable mono in case of trouble.
Simple - everybody’s buying bottom-tier garbage while expecting something long-lasting and reliable.
Step up your budget to $1500 and a new world opens up. The reason it’s not cheaper is because there’s no market for it, people just don’t value good prints enough to make the scale bring down the price enough.
I remember my first academia study delivered in the best paper, printed with my Inkjet Cannon printer, and later, with my laser Epson... my proffesors where drooling over it and i got the best puntuation because of the quality over the rest of the guys who used typewriters :S
There was a quick period of inkjet printers reign when everybody wanted to print their digital photos. Now it's gone, so the only thing we should come to terms with is going back to black-and-white for everyday printing and settle with inexpensive laser devices.
Some are complaining photo quality on laser printer. Try heat laminator: colors melt again and get mixed better and then get diffused into the transparent plastic. No visible plastic layer on top. This would not happen with ink-jet colors.
Get a monochrome laser or LED printer, if you can. Brother (my current favorite), Kyocera, whatever. They are generally quite good if you can limit your printing to text and b/w diagrams.
The problems start when you want to print color and photos.
Brother printers always suck in weird ways. I had one that had a thousand settings for things but not one controlled the volume, duration or existence of a loud, long beep when you opened the paper tray. That would be fine but single feed sheets never came up straight, so checks had to go in the tray each time.
For the life of me I can not print to my Brother HL-2270DW over wifi from linux or android. I've tried all combinations of print services, cups drivers and wrappers (even the ones from the Brother web site), and protocol/port/queue combinations I can find.
Anyone got any tips/tricks that can help me out? Some way to query the printer, watch the traffic (and know what to look for), anything?
I struggled with exactly this model and use case. Check out the AUR package for the 2270DW, and make sure image quality is set to 600dpi. That was the magic combination for me. Also check out the Arch wiki on Brother printers.
I seldom need to print anything, but when I do I email the document to my local Staples. They are cheap, fast, and reliable. I suspect most people could get rid of their printers and do the same thing.
I gave up on their entire product category. I stopped buying printers 15 years ago and I urge everyone to stop also. When their fucking wallets are empty they'll fix their fucking shitty printers.
I've been using for the last 5 years, inkjet with integrated printer cartridge (With this type, the nozzle plate (printhead) is built into the side of the cartridge) no problem so far
It's not just printers. Windows' print spooler and drivers are still garbage after 25 years, since W95. Freezes, hard to tell if printing is actually happening, etc., etc., etc.
There is no incentive to improve printers now simply because it is clear that they are on their way out. I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
I use a printer less and less, but I don't think I'll ever not need one in my lifetime.
I haven't printed anything in years, and don't think I ever will again.
So between today and the end of your life, you will never sell anything online? Or never for the rest of your life send something you already own to someone else? You need a printer to print shipping labels, unless you take the item somewhere to be professionally packed and shipped.
I moved recently, and printed out the USPS form to change my address so that I didn't have to pay the fee to do it online.
I also had to print and mail a form to get a ballot mailed to me for today's election. In my state, this can only be done with a signed document, not online.
I don't limit my life experience to things that are online, so about once a month I use a printer to print envelopes to send checks for things that I buy over the phone. Sent one out today to a store in Seattle that deals in a specialty good my wife likes, but has no online presence.
According to the New York Times, there are top-end restaurants that only take reservations by letter. Not via an app. Not online. Not even via telephone.
I know interesting people who live in places beyond the reach of the internet. I write letters to them a couple of times a year.
Four of the last six property purchases I've made in the last few years involved printing and mailing forms. Not every government office in every county in every state is online. And very often legal forms have to be notarized. You can't do that online.
If you choose to live a simple life, you may never need a printer. If you choose to do more, then it's good to have one stashed away for when you need it.
Last year I bought an HP OfficeJet 8720 and it's a pretty amazing bit of hardware for $300. Yes, ink is expensive but I don't have to print that often so it's not a big deal.
You probably will if you need to RMA anything in the US. Just had to RMA to Lenovo and Amazon recently and both required me to print out a shipping label.
Amazon RMAs these days can optionally involve carrier pickup, and the carrier brings a premade thermal label with them. You just need to put it back in the box it came in.
A HP LaserJet from 2001 is still my main printer. It's a bit slow, but very reliable, cheap to run and has good quality prints. Many InkJets have come and gone in that time.
A lot of comments here have mentioned that inkjets don't perform well if left idle for a long period of time, but I can't seem to a reason for this. So, why?
Yes this exactly. My friend has a professional printer like you'd find in printing shops, and when he is on holiday I go to his house every few days to run a test print to make sure the head doesn't dry up. If it does, the only real option is to pay a few hundred Euro for a new one.
While their use is hopefully dwindling, I expect there will be a long tail.
In my household, the printer gets used for a couple of things. The first is sheet music. Musicians are starting to use a big tablet screen, with a foot pedal to turn the pages, but adoption will be slow. Musicians seem innately impatient with technologies that don't just work instantly when you pull them out of the box.
The other thing is documents to read for school, which is still more ergonomic when done with paper.
At the office, I suspect nobody needs to print any more, because nobody reads any more. I can't count the number of times I've hit "send" on a report that I was supposed to write, and a manager will be in my cube a few minutes later asking me if I could just summarize it for them. The first paragraph in the report is a summary.
Tablets are well and good for reading sheet music, but I can't imagine scribbling rehearsal notes / markings on a tablet in a way that's not infuriating.
Best advice I can give anyone - buy yourself a used office laser printer. Those things never die. You'll probably never finish the cartridge and they print crazy fast.
Another happy Brother user here. Our HL-L2360D is rock solid, crisp, duplex and AirPrint is excellent. Cost AU$150 years ago and AU$15 for toner via eBay.
OTOH, I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $41/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price).
In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for 14 years of convenient printing at home.
Razor-blade economies. It's most consumers who suck because they didn't wise-up to DRM, giveaway printers, ink drying-up, and expensive ink and instead get a used flagship laser printer. Convenience store vs. Costco or Staples Business Advantage.
What a terrible article. I clicked to learn why do printers suck, and ended up spending several minutes reading some absolutely non-informative ranting.
This is relatively recent. My HP printer from 15 years ago is excellent and it's still going strong. Anything I can buy today would be a de-facto downgrade.
I'm cheap. Buy most basic £45 canon with seperate ink cartridges and use dollar a cartridge third party ink. Lasts 3-4 years. Brother inkjets were good till they got too clever at chipping ink cartridges.
Bigger budget get one of the new Epson/canon inkjets with refillable tanks. Even the quality official ink is dirt cheap!
Laser would be nice but finding a cheap one with cheap good toner availability is hard. Colour copying on a multifunction inkjet is nice too.
Back in the day I worked for Sun. They had a laser printer called the SPARCPrinter that did all the rasterization on the workstation - which made the printer very inexpensive, but it bogged down the workstation when printing.
We often played flight simulator after work (ok, sometimes during work) where you could fly an F-15 and go shoot your buddy out of the sky.
There was a sys admin (Keith) who was an absolute ace. If Keith got on your tail you were basically dead. Keith would win all the time.
But Keith had a weakness. The SPARCprinter was attached to his workstation....
So if Keith got on your tail, we discovered that we could send a nice big print job to his workstation. That was usually enough to shake him from your tail and escape.
The virtual equivalent of chaff I suppose