Looking for a new printer. My new HP Inkjet is a piece of fucking garbage and I’m going to smash it to pieces in my driveway.
Looking for something with good Linux support, and as little proprietary online HP-type bullshit as possible. Also, should I get a laser printer?
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 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.
Yes Brother are fine or Lexmark 😺
Lexmark is just as bad as hp and is made by a Chinese company. Brother is the wave.
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.
@ablackcatstail @MashingBundle Absolutely
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 ! 😊
Me too! What a tank that machine is.
I bought the hl 5240 around ten years ago and still use the same drum. I buy ink powder every couple of years on eBay to refill it.
It will refuse to print every couple of thousand pages to force you to replace the drum, but that is just a kind of planned obsolescence in form of an internal timer. I think some sort of this shit will happen on every printer nowadays. Its only purpose is to create a hole in your pocket and produces a lot of plastic waste.
I found a kind of konami code you can enter for this model to reset the drum counter on the interweb, though, so its not an issue for this model.
So before you buy check if such a code exists for the model you have chosen, before buying one that will waste your time and money.
Power off; open front cover; hold go button while powering on until only 3 lights are lit (it should take around 15 sec.); press go 2 times; wait 20-30 seconds then press go five times; close front cover.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Brother colour laser. Surprisingly good price, fantastic quality.
I haven’t changed toner since buying it 2 years ago.
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.
