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.
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.)
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.
Printers were the trial run for how to do customer relations on the IoT.
Probably because retailers try their best to steer customers to them because of higher profit margins on ink.
It has a super low-power standby and is always ready.
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.
Worth it, though. Most will replace it every few months if they are using them to print a lot.
Even color laserjets are decently cheap these days.
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.
And furthermore, Wirecutter uses affiliate links to make money. And then they got bought by NYT.
So, they definitely aren't completely unbiased.
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
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...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZS5EEI
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.
Excuse me, why are your printouts being uploaded to someone's server?! How did you not return this junk immediately after finding out?
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 :/
They fell so far.
What model was this?
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...
But the printer has always worked well for us. Maybe this is from the days before HP got bad.
So instead I got a Brother printer. Sorry HP, not this time.
Not that Brother isn't a wildly better experience but.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Source: Switched from laser to inkjet)
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.
it looks like brother's do? I'm looking at HL-L3210CW ($199).
If the printer uses four-color toner so it has pure black, your cost for B&W pages will be significantly less.
I admit my kid is only in second grade so far, but I disagree with you that color is mandatory. We've been very happy with the B&W laser.
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.
I wouldn't buy a general consumer inkjet though.
I used to have an Epson A2 printer and a full set of inks cost more than £500.
You can get ink reservoir systems but they're messy and rather fragile. Although they do pay for themselves if you're printing at scale.
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.
The photos they print are awesome.
But I won’t buy another one. I would tend to print in “batches”; sometimes, months apart.
Epsons don’t sit well. Each printing session would start with a whole bunch of “throat-clearing.” I’d waste a ton of ink, just cleaning the heads.
Also, the printers required a significant amount of desk space.
Used about 6 reams of paper (I don't print that much really) and haven't replaced the ink cartridge once! Still works great.
Here's the printer: https://www.fujixerox.com.mm/en/Products/MM-Printers/DocuPri...
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I cannot recommend Brother enough.
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!
It was the right shape, but had 'physical rights management' - tabs that prevented it from fitting in the holder. Quite clever.
Easily enough modified with a knife, but I was still foiled by DRM.
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.
A credit must be given when it's due. They're reliable, reasonably priced and have Linux drivers.
I bought color printer for much less then 100$.
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.
Of course I took the praises.
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
They actually created very nice, waterproof prints.
I think inkjets ended up knocking them out.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printing
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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?
Other than that I agree, Brother all the way.
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).
In short, Brother laser printers for the win!
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!
Inkjets suck. You don't need color. Buy a Brother.
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.
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 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.
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:
* HP Laser 10x Series
* HP Laser MFP 13x Series
* HP Color Laser 15x Series
* HP Color MFP 17x Series
So weird that HP would buy Samsung's printer division but not kill it off.
This one doesn't appear to have Ethernet.
... 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 :/
In dry climates, inkjet heads will clog.
In wet climates, laser toner will clump.
HP CP1525nw
Screw. Inkjets.
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.
And because the same printer hadn't been used in 5 months, I also had to clean the clogged head with a syringe afterwards.
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.
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.
I also suspect that just about any wireless printer will suck when used with Windows. Windows certainly has a lot of trouble finding mine.
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...
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.
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.
I use this Canon for scanning and photo printing: https://www.canon.co.uk/printers/pixma-ts9150-series/
It seems to be the best of both worlds for the price point and physical space.
One thing though - it's slow compared to new models.
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 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.
Finally wisened up and bought a (Brother) color laser ~9 years ago and it has been flawless.
The replacement toner is 20€. Why would I ever touch anything else?
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.
This time period included going back to school, a technical college, where I printed a ton of reports (and many misprints).
The Brother is a separate fuser that is replaced after some number of toner replacements.
I am not sure if it is still like this for Brothers.
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.
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.
It periodically, uh, does that printhead thing, was idle for a few months, no new clogs.
Why it is not common practice for other brands?
I freaking hate multifunction printers.
why can't I scan to the SD card inserted, is there no write capability?
why is this wireless printer looking for a wired computer to scan to?
why can I only scan to Google Drive or Dropbox?
why is it app so slow?
why can't I just tap it with NFC or bluetooth to get this data?
Just like really common frustrations which should be default by now in even the cheapest models.
fuck.that.