just buy a Brother laser printer and never look back. Seriously, inkjet and all of the surrounding bullshit is not worth the time or the money or the energy or the frustration.
I have a Brother MFCL3730CDN CMYK laser for document scan/print/copy and Epson EcoTank ET-14000 for photo and art prints.
A-fscking-mazing devices both.
Both provide (to be found somewhere in the maze of modern hardware vendor websites) solid (modulo CUPS wrangling and vendor filesystem layout) Linux packages. I've only had one recent glitch when Brother introduced some sort of USB/network bridge daemon that occupied the port so VueScan (Software so good that I don't mind that it's not open source, because it does exactly what I need and more. A work of art worth every penny.) couldn't find the scanner.
It "generally" works over Ethernet, but occasionally goes off the rails, and I have to scan over USB.
Because of that, I have the printer installed twice, once on the Network (where it lives most of its life, shared) and once as USB, that I connect during really heavy scanning sessions, which is seldom.
The problem is if you don't print a lot, the cartridges dry out, and the ink clogs in the printer and whatever else, leading to a big pain.
A month later, IT was tasked with re-replacing them for everyone but marketing overnight. Literally overnight, as in, we're paying overtime for this. The boss didn't know what was happening until a week later, but it was a fire drill of an intensity that you usually don't see outside of a full outage.
It turned out that, while the Phasers do generate gorgeous hardcopy, the wax-like prints, can, with some effort, some skill, and a sharp knife, be popped off the page. A customer figured this out and had been effectively stealing service by way of paying invoices with numbers quite literally pulled off the page. The old Laserjets were placed back into service everywhere but the marketing group.
Libraries are literally everywhere in the US, they're more common than McDonalds.
Laser printers can sit idle much longer but they're bulky and sometimes energy hogs.
I've always seen it at every library I've been at (both school and public), but I suppose it might be more of a regional thing.
On top of those, a few months ago I found a PrintWithMe [0] station at a corner store that's only a 5 minute walk away.
Most people print with whatever their employer/university has.
I have $200 OfficeJet that has a free fax service that I need once in awhile and I use the instant ink thing.
Laser MFPs are expensive and the toner is super expensive. Brother lasers are great as long as you’re ok with 600dpi.
If you care about print output and print often, inkjet will get you better value.
And remember it works flawlessly with Linux.
When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted.
The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous.
That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.
I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me.
However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ...
My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels.
[0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...
I've never seen this issue with my Brother MFC-2740DW using "Image Capture" on my Mac (which I assume you are referring to as the built-in scanner app). It's worked flawlessly for me (as did my previous Brother laser printer/scanner).
I am still using Mojave; I was unaware of the "Image Capture" app - I opened the printer icon, which has a "Scanner" button on the right when you have a multifunction printer - but it appears to be the same underlying implementation, and it has the same bug, described here:
https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...
perhaps it was fixed in Catalina; the page I linked (with the exact kind of corruption I just tested through Image Capture) is from 2012...
I thought it might be bonjour not working well over wifi, but the problem persists even when I assign the printer an IP address manually. I'm stumped.
In the days when you're expected to buy a new cell phone every two years and a new computer every four it feels like black magic that it just ... sits there ... and.. works.
For inkjet, I use Canon and I love them, although the ink is expensive, especially the 8-color ink packs.
The printer just keeps working. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it lased another decade.
Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.
Maybe they thought I was a business or something. No, just a guy in a rented room. I asked about it. The guy didn’t understand why I thought that was weird.
I was baffled. Oh also there was none of that nasty HP business. Buy any fitting toner and out it in.
I wonder if Oki still exists. If it does, here’s a recommendation.
They're still continuing in other markets though.
With my kid studying at home who can print directly from the iPad, it's great.
I don't print often but when I need to print I need to print. I spent a bit of change on a Brother Laser printer/scanner and I don't regret that purchase one bit. It's now been years and it still works great -- I've only replaced the toner twice now.
I managed to get two different Office LaserJets for like $10 each and they work wonderfully (and it will probably be cheaper for me to buy a new printer off the school than buy more ink when I inevitably run out).
I call her trashy. Trashy Brother.