Brother lasers are pretty great.
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This is the way.
I got a b/w Brother laser and have been using it with Windows, Linux and Android devices with no issues. It has lasted me through 6 years of university and I've only replaced the toner once. Probably the best technology investment I've ever made.
All Brother all the time.
For now at least yes. I would have said the same thing about HP 25years ago.
This thread is pretty much all brother 🤣
We're all brothers in Brother
Count me in as a happy Brother user. I used to think they were the knock off crappy printer but once I started to see more of them poo up and how much better they worked... I just bought myself an all in one laser one. Couldn't be happier. It works so well, and no bullshit in Linux either. Works there too. Hp used to be the easy way but they're not so great anymore.
It's the first printer I've owned that didn't make me want to throw it off my balcony
Did well with Brother laser printer. Canon was okay.
I had setup a friend's HP printer and noticed he was constantly switching to WiFi Direct in order to print. I did him the favor of connecting it to the AP, so he wouldn't have to manually switch all the time.
The moment it got online, the printer locked itself down and refused to continue print until he paid for a subscription service on the ink.
My brother laser printer has been going for like 7 years. I bought a replacement drum head recently but that's the only thing other than toner that it has needed.
Happy brother user here. We had a hp and the bastard had connection troubles then ended up only printing blank pages. Never again.
I thought you meant happy brother as an euphemism for hp
Get a laser printer not an inkjet printer
Inkjet printers will crap out if not used constantly due to the ink lines getting blocked with dry ink
I've got a brother laser printer and it works great
Brother, my brother. My little HL1200 serves my needs nicely, is cheap to run with both genuine and third party toner, ~~and the company isn't run by a bunch of greedy pigs. Probably the only printer brand I'll ever buy again.~~ Fuck HP indeed.
Edit: discovered Brother plays that game too
Brother
Brother laser , no WiFi , no color , prints perfect everytime. Cost like 200 euro. Edit checked model HL-L23100
The ones that have a network jack, and WiFi that you can turn off are OK too!
In addition to the Brotherly love, we have multiple Samsung ML-1865W laser printers that have been consistently reliable for years with no janky printing software and I have even used the $6 or whatever bottle of loose powder to refill although the regular cartridges are more convenient.
Going laser and not HP is the most important parts.
No printer. Unless you really print frequently, just use printing services from place like Staples, FedEx or UPS. Your local library probably even does printing. The drive is better than dealing with a printer.
20 year old HP LaserJet
Honestly, i have 20 year old hp and epson printers and they don't have this proprietary problems modern ones have
Brother. Strong, reliable, durable, in my own experience.
Everyone talking about Brother but does the point still stands for the newer models?
No, it doesn't. Not even the old ones, because Brother is rolling out malicious firmware updates even to older models:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
If you have one of the remaining good Brother printers, make sure firmware updates are disabled.
Upvote for.disabling firmware. It's a sad state when the average printer consumer needs to know how to disable firmware updates and even needs sysadmin skills to know how to block a host from the internet.
Another vote for Brother . I have a black & white laser printer (mfc-L2675). And I can get a 3-pack of toner off Amazon for around $20.
Check the EFF's list of printers without tracking dots
They are probably all pretty old, but you should be able to make a good Ebay search
printer (model-a,b,c) -replacement -for
or similar
But, Warning
REMINDER: IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT ALL RECENT COMMERCIAL COLOR LASER PRINTERS PRINT SOME KIND OF FORENSIC TRACKING CODES, NOT NECESSARILY USING YELLOW DOTS. THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT THOSE CODES ARE VISIBLE TO THE EYE AND WHETHER OR NOT THE PRINTER MODELS ARE LISTED HERE. THIS ALSO INCLUDES THE PRINTERS THAT ARE LISTED HERE AS NOT PRODUCING YELLOW DOTS.
I have a Brother HL-L3230CDW. It has been a horse and has quickly become my most prized possession of all things that I own. It takes anyone's toner and produces quality without question. It works with my various Linux, Macs, Windows, and Android devices without hesitation and minimal fuss to get setup.
So that's what I would recommend. Is a good bit of coin up front but in my opinion, it has paid for itself in cheaper long run TCO and sanity in that it just fucking works.
I got myself a Xerox printer because I figured I'd be familiar with the interface since all the offices I worked in had Xerox printers, plus I figured getting a near-corporate printer might keep some of the bullshit away since Xerox would probably not want to motivate their corporate customers to switch brands. AFAICT they probably get most of their business through service, not so much product.
So far it has worked out well. I have yet to buy a Xerox brand toner cartridge, and I've had this printer for several years and I keep getting consistent high quality prints. Some of the features are not super intuitive, but I don't think it's terrible to have to read the manual once in awhile.
I have a funny story about a Xerox printer!
I had a problem where there was ink left (this was a solid-ink printer, the ink came in blocks you could easily see), but the page count had run out and it wouldn't print. So we found the flash memory IC that held the info -- it used I2C to communicate. There's a similar IC on consumer RAM to store the manufacturer info. We swapped it in, hex-edited it so there were a huge number of pages left, and put it back in the printer.
It worked fine!
Then, days later, I noticed that the printer's web interface let you reset the page counter by just pressing a button in a web browser. So the whole hack had been completely unnecessary :D
Actually, I work in it and had to install a xerox printer for someone's home office yesterday. Grab the driver's, go to install and it completely failed. I told the guy to restart and we'll try again tomorrow since it was the end of my shift. Guy messages me back, the printer and PC restarted and when he walked back to it, there was a page printed that said congrats on your new printer.
Fucking thing failed successfully.
If you want to print in oversized, I can readily recommend the Epson ET 8550.
It's a 6 tank A3+ photo/poster printer for under €800. If you got the use case for these (say as a photographer or an artist or you just want to print your own posters) then it's a really good model.
Unlike it's closest rival in the semi-professional market from Canon, the tanks make ink very cheap to operate, the vast vast vast majority of the printing cost is going to be the paper. It has a damn good printing quality even on mostly dark prints, it's quite fast for documents spitting them out in 3-5 seconds each so for personal use it's not meaningfully behind a laser. Quite variable, too, you can take the back off and feed whatever material you want in there with a huge clearance for thick plates to print on.
Sure, it's not something the average user ever needs but if you are looking for something like this, I can recommend it.
I love my HP printer. Always prints when I ask it to every few months, uses third party toner, 0 issues whole time I've had it. Of course it's a laserjet from 2004 so it's built a bit different. I wouldn't recommend a new HP though lol.
Sort of depends on what type of printer you're aiming towards. At work we've been mainly using HP Laserjet (the more expensive business class types with multiple trays) & those things are workhorses, they do last a good while. I also did work for a guy whose office still runs an ancient HP Laserejet from probably 20 years ago & somehow the thing still works (old enough to still have a parallel port on it haha).
On a related note more recently I've been testing a Canon MegaTank color inkjet to replace our dying Lexmark color laserjet, so far everyone in the office hates the Canon.
Same. We have dozens of M477s and M479s in production and few issues. Recently started deploying 4301s and so far so good. I bought an M479 on a good sale a few years ago for personal use and never had a problem. No mandatory subscription, hp account or any of that mess, and the toner lasts a long time. Not sure if it even will expire.
Many years ago we maintained a fleet of 4050s and 2200s (had to purchase parallel port add on cards to use those…) Those were rock solid for many years and very repairable, but at a certain point part availability and time lost doing repairs adds up and we had to move on.
I had a Brother black and white laser (I think a HL1240?) for almost 10 years and then we started having to print a ton of education related stuff for our kid and colour made sense, so I got the closest thing that I could to the colour one that I use at work which ended up being a DCPL3551CDW.
Printing a little in Windows and Linux, but more often from apps on my Android phone and my partners iPhone.
I absolutely hate printers, but they have been fine.
Nope. They’re all shit.
Partially because ink/toner scam.
Partially because fuck you, I bought the damn thing. If I am ok with stripy printouts until I squeeze the last molecule of toner from your hellcartridge, imma do it and you can’t stop me.
Ex. I bought a $30 printer off eBay. Burned thru the toner quickly. Bought cartridge.
Turns out that this printer counts pages - and only pages - and hangs itself at an arbitrary number of the same.
Twenty pages of the cartridge were lettter sized.
Ten were A4.
The remaining pages? A fucking 5.
IOW, I printed thirty total pages of US letter. And the remainder were half-letter.
Printer doesn’t care, a page is a page.
Admittedly, printers have to sol e a fairly difficult MechEng problem - grab one and only one sheet, pull it just right, and don’t wrinkle it.
That doesn’t give the mfg the right to extort us. I literally should have 2x the A5 pages I’ve remaining bc by def each one is half of (roughly) a full page.
I’ve gone from printing general templates for my day to day, to developing things that feel native to me to draw - but I’m also a fountain pen hobbyist and truly care about paper quality, etc.
TL;dr - I just want some damn lines to color between, as I organize and journal my life. Printer manufacturers have abs ruined that. There are zero good ones.
Srsly I’d rather spend the time to carefully develop a template for day to day use and trace it (max 1 hr, tracing it then takes zero time to speak to) than deal with printers.
But that’s just me, an IT guy who values organizing in an analog world.
Oh, also, a 40ish IT guy who remembers LaserJets that were nearly bulletproof and still weren’t worth screwing with.
Brother here too. I bought a used one to save some money. It did come with a small printing problem that wasn't stated in the refurb description, but it was a problem i could live with for the savings, and has worked perfectly except for that one problem ever since.
I’m pretty happy with my Canon GX7021.
It’s pigment based inkjet, so no bleed, and it also prints thick card stock that lasers can’t. And way cheaper than lasers.
Otherwise ticks all the boxes, double side print and scan, Ethernet etc
That's interesting & somewhat surprising, we are currently testing a Canon MAXIFY GX5020 and everyone in the office hates its color output. It's in the same MegaTank family that your Canon is in.
I'm trying to figure out if maybe Canon sent us a bad printer or if these Canons just don't do colors that well. If you have a chance can you do these two color test prints & let me know how yours does?
https://cmyktool.com/cmyk-test-print/ (download the PDF and print it)
https://printtester.com/#print-color-test-page (download the Color Test Page PDF and print it, the one with the color wheel)
What I've found is that our Canon does fine with the CMYK Test Print but doesn't do as well on the Color Test. For us in the color wheel when the colors blend from Blue into Red (e.g. the dark blue / purple / dark red) the mixed colors look sort of dull and generally off. So any images with purple or around that color come out sort of darker/dull compared to our old color laser printer. I can't really explain colors that well but you get the gist :D
When we first received the printer magenta was barely printing so all the colors were especially bad, after doing the printer maintenance functions that color at least started printing but I wonder if the printer heads are just screwed up on this one, hmm.
I don't have anything to directly compare against, but it seems fine to me! Then again, I bought this for productivity (not photos).
Canon laser, no question.
I believe they manufacture for other brands including brother, but I just woke up and I'm too lazy to reference. You like doing online research like this anyway, so you're welcome.