Do yourself a favor and don't buy another inkjet printer, let alone a shitty HP product. Definitely get yourself a Brother laser printer. Brothers are bulletproof.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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This is the advice I heard on the Vergecast. The best printer for anyone is whatever Brother laserjet is currently on sale.
Wish i knew that before i opened fire at my inkjet
Well, now you can replace it with a laser.
LOL! I actually did that to a printer that pissed me off. Cool thing is it was in the middle of the Arizona desert and we basically vaporized it.
We've got some Brother laser printers at work and they've been great. We get third-party toner from a local company for peanuts too, as well as sending them the old cartridges to reuse/recycle. If I ever need a printer at home, this is the route I'll go!
EDIT: Also, checkout company closing auctions (there's a few around again!) and you can pick-up some decent office stuff including printers for cheap!
Smart! I have a very well used brother laser that I picked up for 50 bucks and it still take a licking and keeps on ticking.
@ablackcatstail @MashingBundle
I had some issues with predatory pricing of “genuine Brother” cartridges and quality alternatives, in which Brother changed the codes or something, it seems, locking my device. Brother’s monochrome lasers are fine (reasonable printer and supply costs), but I have a sore spot with their color printers.
I've never had a color laser printer so I would be none the wiser on that front. I hate the whole "genuine product" movement. I thought a federal court ruled that companies cannot force their customers to use only company-branded cartridges. I don't know. Maybe I am not remembering correctly.
Brother laser printer owner. The only printer I've ever not hated with a firey passion. I actually quite like it. It's not a color printer, but it's fine.
HL-L2320D brother laser printer, had it for years with no fuss. It doesn't have wifi but who needs it when you can just plug it into a raspberry pi and share it on the network.
HP
You fucking what? 😂😂😂😂😂
Seriously, there might be a debate of what printer company is better, but there is no debate which one is worst. It's HP. 😅 They are so bad that they have no competitors of the worst fucking printer company. xD
Myself I got Brother printer. Works like a charm, no bullshits. People on Reddit also highly recommend this brand too. Totally agree.
HP
Inkjet
I had a Brother printer, the costs were prohibitive. For over a decade now buy discarded office laserjet printers, chunky as hell, but for 100€ you get tens of thousands of pages out of them. And for those 100€, often a duplex unit is included. Am currently on my 2nd printer over 15 years.
I think the whole point of this is Brother being least annoying. You might save some buck with old HP printers, but i would prefer saving my sanity over bucks. 😅
Not at all, the old, chunky office printers you get for cheap work even without any special driver or so, just postscript. (You might get better quality for pictures with the original driver, but for simple letters it just works.)
Edit: Where HP really sucks is the consumer market.
I've had a Brother HL2130 B/W laser for as long as I can remember, perfect ! 😊
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My Brother HL2170W has been reliable for over a decade. Whatever has replaced it is the one I'd buy if I needed to replace it.
Buy a laser printer. They've come down in price a ton and are so so so so so so so so so so much better than fucking ink jet printers. I'll never go back, and regret the years of anger and stress they caused me.
Brother printers are the best as well.
I got a Brother HL-3140CW and couldn't be happier. Also just works with Linux.
Obviously look for a new printer under a street lamp, duh
As with everyone else, Brother laser printers are the way. I have owned multiple. I think one which my family uses is about 10 years old now, another which is about 5-6, and one which I got at the start of the pandemic, so around 3.5 years. Zero problems with any of them.
All the ones I have tried work fine on both Linux and Windows, work over wifi for both scanning and printing, and the toner drums last ages without needing to be replaced unlike inkjet cartridges which constantly need replacing or dry out if you don't use them often enough.
Brother MFC-xxxx whichever is available. Plug in the ethernet or connect to wifi and go. No drivers.
We've had a decade+ of solid use, the couple of times we've had issues we've had reasonably priced local service.
It's because they're lower-end "business" machines rather than any-level "consumer" grade crap.
We've had a bad run with off-brand toner shitting up the machine though. We probably spend about $600/year on genuine toner. But we do a lot of printing. I shudder to think what our inkjet costs would be though.
If you don't need immediate printing facility, you might find printing ad hoc at Stationery Warehouse or the public library more cost effective!
Second the Brother MFC. We're really happy with ours. Before that we had a HP LaserJet which actually was that bad either. I guess just avoid the cheap inkjet machines.
Brother work fine on Linux, but be aware they've directly fucked using third party cartridges
They have??? I'm still on my original toner cartridge from like 8 years ago so I haven't tried any 3rd party stuff but that's really disappointing to hear.
Here’s a little secret, they are all garbage.
That said, definitely opt for a laser printer next go around and avoid HP anything imo. I have heard good things about Brother tho.
Brother colour laser. Surprisingly good price, fantastic quality.
I haven't changed toner since buying it 2 years ago.
I agree with nearly everything I’m seeing. Maybe to summarize:
Laser of any kind is shelf stable. Liquid ink dries out and different printers compensate for this in different ways. Even dumb ink tank printers - where you add liquid and there’s no chip to be read anywhere - can have internal ink sponges that fill up and cause failures. Just a different kind of chipped consumable.
Color laser means four smaller cartridges and an extra wear part to replace after a few years: ITB or intermediate transfer belt. Instead of going from toner drum to paper, toner goes onto this belt first and then to the paper.
Different printer manufacturers have different behaviors to lock you into only buying their consumables. HP tends to be the worst offender, but it varies.
I got lucky, bought a used HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M477fdw. Basically two generations old, and the top of their desktop / tabletop printer line without being tabloid / large-format or being a huge copy machine / document station.
Toner chip validation is an option you can turn off. For now. But individual components have firmware versions and can be incompatible with each other, so I’m fully confident I’m one part replacement away from needing to update firmware on everything else and losing this tolerant behavior. A full refill of all four cartridges (5000 pages) totals like $65 right now, so that will suck.
+1 for Brother. Works great printing from Linux.
I bought a brother laser printer 20 (??) years ago and it’s still working beautifully. Was the budget model at that time. So definitely under 150. Maybe even 100.
Hardly know anything about Linux, but if you need a printer, buy a Brother one. It just fucking works.
Brother is probably the best company regarding open source and support...
Also the refills are not overpriced...
I liked my Brother, but they have some tricks they pull. For one, when I got my Brother box duplex monochrome laser printer, it had just printed a fantastic looking page and then it stopped and declared it was out of toner. I turns out, there's an option in the settings that is enabled by default to stop it from printing when it feels the toner is out. Anyway, I then ordered some aftermarket toner and the printer was fucked since. I'm not sure what happened, but the print quality went to crap. I'm guessing I'd need to buy a new drum kit or something, but for what I paid for it, I gave up on it and threw it out. I've not had a printer since. Occasionally, I wish I had a printer, but nowadays, you can get by without one fairly easily. I may purchase another Brother at some point, but it's low on my list of things to get.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Brother label printers are annoying. I'm not sure if they own stock in battery companies, but if you let them sit with a battery in them, it will be fully depleted by the next time you'll want to use it. I feel the engineers secretly offered a way to stop this without alerting upper management by leaving a void in the battery/media chamber with enough room to store a battery that you can pop out to disconnect the circuit and store the battery inside the unit. Also, they are overly generous with the margins for the labels by giving them like an inch on each side. Instead of a label printing out like [ TEST ], it prints out like [ TEST ]. Such horseshit!
Brother is my go to company for printers. Also definitely get laser, printer ink is like the most expensive substance on earth.
I recommend kyocera. maybe you'll say, "man, you can buy 4 inkjet for the price of ecosys", but on the other hand, you bought a ecosys and you can fill it with toner just from a balloon until the drum unit wears out.
Brother laser printers. Never buy a consumer inkjet. especially from HP.
Also here to say Brother. I bought a 2170w like 10-15 years ago for $99, have bought toner for it twice, and it's chugged along the whole time. I see someone else saying they don't deal with 3rd party cartridges, and mine def does, but that might be because of it's age.
I'd also strongly recommend against another inkjet printer. We didn't print enough in color even 10 years ago that when we did want to the cartridges were dry and it wasn't just worth it to go to a Staples or Walgreens or whatever for photos or the occasional kid's school project. If you do have to do a lot of color printing, laser jet is still where it's at.
Dailly reminder: there are no good printers.
APAB (Yes ALL)
I got an Epson ecotank printer. It doesn't work out of the box with Linux, but there are drivers and it does the job. Otherwise it's been pretty dependable.
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Brother laster printer. It's the least evil I've found.
Look at non-multi-function "Enterprise" laser printers. They are completely different than the consumer grade garbage.
I recommend an HP LaserJet Enterprise Mxxx printer, color or not, that is listed on the HPLIP All Supported Printer Models page.
You can find lightly used, older model ones on Ebay, sometimes even with a full toner cartridge(s), for much less than new price.
HP is still releasing firmware updates even for many older models, and the firmware is loaded with features (for example, if it is connected to your network, network printing works from Android and Apple phones without requiring any special apps). The firmware does not depend on any remote service.
If you even need them, the Linux drivers are free and open source and packaged in Debian main (for example); your don't have to install some weird closed source garbage that won't work in a few years.
People here are recommending Brother, but I don't think they have free and open source drivers (think "nouveau vs. Nvidia"). Am I incorrect about that? In my experience, this can become a significant problem as software moves forward but the company does not continue to support their Linux binary driver.
I know people say Brother, and I believe they are right. But around me Brother is just not that popular and didn't want to risk it for future support, so I got cheapest wifi enabled HP laser available here (M111W), works without problem on Gentoo, Mint and Android. Hardest to setup was gf's Windows. Works over USB cable and wifi.
I might regret it later, but currently it is working. If I could try out Brother, I would. Also their website is not clear about specifications of cheap models, so I decided agains it.
And don't take injets, those are awful.
I upgraded my 10 year old brother bw laser to color a few years ago and gave the old one to a friend
I have found Canon has good support on Linux and the quality matches the price.
I recently got a Canon Pixma G3060 series printer. It’s one of those ink tank ones, so getting refills is no problem. It cost $300 CAD and came with ink bottles for ~7000 pages of printing; a pretty good deal if you’re printing often. I couldn’t find a good laser printer at this price point, certainly not a color one.
Linux works great with it once it’s set up, no proprietary drivers or extra junk. CUPS does wireless printing just fine, and I can use Xsane to scan documents too.
Brothers are good, but we were having problems with ours, especially the wireless network features so we replaced it with a Canon TS6420a ink jet all in one that prints double sided, and it's been working flawlessly
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