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.
