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I have only good things to say about Brother printers. My old laser printer (actually a bigger printer/scanner/copier all-in-one with the option to autonomously scan to email) died just last year after 18? years of service. If I were to buy a printer today, I'd choose Brother again, but I just don't do much printing these days, and it's just a 2 min walk to Staples from my place where they do all kinds of printing, scanning, and photo services.

Brother makes printers here with giant refillable ink tanks, instead of cartridges. Still on the ink that came with the printer when I bought it almost two years ago. On HP I would've had to replace the cartridge every few months for the same usage.

Except HP also offers printers with giant refillable ink tanks instead of cartridges.

Mine stopped working just after a year and a half. And replacing the printing head costs more than the printer.

We had a HP with replaceable ink tanks before. You still had to replace not just the ink tanks, but the whole printing head assembly because it would still clog up every half year anyway.

> I just don't do much printing these days, and it's just a 2 min walk to Staples from my place where they do all kinds of printing, scanning, and photo services

This is what I've ended up doing. We print maybe... 3-4 times a year? So I just walk down to a convenience store where they have a big multi copier/scanner/printer you can use for 10-20 cents a page. It also does photo printing so I don't have to choose between buying a laser or ink printer.

The only worry is you know the internal harddrives in those things are holding a copy of every thing that's gone through them, and god knows how they're going to be decommissioned...

I've had a Samsung ML1665 for about a decade. I've needed one new toner refill in that period and I've not had any issues dusting it off every few months when I need to print a boarding pass or form. Oem refills are about £20.

Works fine with everything I've connected to it. Very basic, black and white, but it's fast and I see no reason to get a new printer any time soon. Occasionally I wish it had a scanner, but I can get away with photos. Never felt the urge to get a colour printer which pushes the price up significantly.

It doesn't do airprint directly, but most of these things will plug into a router with a USB port for network printing.

Note that Samsung sold their printer business to HP, unfortunately, so they are no longer an option.

There were brilliant until they were sold to HP. Great Linux/MacOS support. I bought one recently not knowing this, and though it works okay, there is no support, no driver updates etc.

I bought a cheapish Samsung laser printer.

I literally print about two pages per month, and it stopped being able to suck the paper up within the first three months. It can still print pages individually if you push the paper into it manually by sticking your hands into it.

It managed to print probably six pages before it stopped working properly.

Fail.

There's a lot of variety within brands. An organisation I work at has a small Canon laser printer (generally no problem with Canon) - we travel around a lot and often don't have internet connectivity. That thing is useless. It doesn't work with generic drivers and the CD is out of date. Every time we want to use a new machine we have to remember to download the drivers in advance.

Many people swear by HPs older large-volume printers, such as the Laserjet 4200 or 4000 series. A toner cartridge lasts 10000 pages, and you can repair the things if the need arises.

I have a HP 4050N that I picked up at an 2008 financial crisis bank bankruptcy auction for 5 Euros.

I've printed thousands of pages and am on the same cartridge that came with the printer.

Amazing printer the way most HP devices were.

There is no USB, just LPT but there are USB->LPT adaptors

I've used brother laser printers, which seem to work without downloading an app or something.

We used the current model with USB, but it has ethernet and wifi and I have not analyzed what it tries to do with an active network connection. If I hook that up, I would give it an internal ip with no outside connectivity and see what happens.

I’ve also used a Brother laser for several years now and am happy with it. It doesn’t appear to try to phone home, but it’s on a VLAN with no internet access and limited connectivity to anything local. Even if devices like this are not phoning home, it’s still sensible to put them on their own isolated network (or network segment if you have an L3 capable switch) because the chances are their firmware doesn’t get frequent security patches so they could make a nice ‘beachhead’ within your network.

I personally use Canon Pixma series printers. They work really well with AirPrint and are not super expensive.

I’ve been using a Fuji / Xerox Docuprint M225 for a 5 or so years now. Replacement toner was dirt cheap, and I expect to continue using this printer for another 5 or so years. Works with AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. WiFi can be finicky at times but nothing a restart doesn’t fix.

If you don’t like HP because of the article, why do you like Google Cloud Print? Do you really believe Google is collecting less information about your printing?

I've been using a Brother HL-L2350DW on Wirecutter's recommendation for the last year, and it was just fine.

I don't know if it spied on me, though.