Get yourself a <$100 Brother laser printer and never look back. They work under Linux without any configuration and you can refill the toner for like $5 on eBay.
Mine has been going strong for like 10 years now.
And then I discovered the paint pens my wife uses for rock painting. Now, those really work.
Ah, and also on the newwer Brother printers one has to do a complicated configuration menu dance to get rid of "Toner cartridge empty" warnings, in order to do a "Toner Reset", which lets one continue to use a half-empty cartridge. Some kind of fools' tax, it seems.
And I'm seeing lots of printers come with native PDF/DVI support which is nice.
For printing academic research papers in reverse page order to hand staple and read, indeed you don’t need drivers.
Brother's site says my printer does support AirPrint. And through the printer's internal web server, I can see under Network -> Protocol that AirPrint is there and enabled.
I have the binary blob driver installed, so I guess this explains why two entries appear for this printer under Printer settings in Ubuntu.
So, a minor mystery is solved, and I now see that I have the option of removing this driver.
To be honest, I have no idea how. It just shows up as a network printer.
Brother's proprietary garbage driver is not needed for their older printers; there's a reverse-engineered 'brlaser' driver that you can use instead.
But I do wonder whether this problem will continue to be specific to ink jet printers. It's easy enough to make a laser printer refuse to print with a third party cartridge.
Many refrigerators do the same thing to prevent you from using third party water filters. I think this is a more general pattern than inkjet printers.
The best example I've heard from this was from {large-copier-manufacturer}. Someone (not an official dealer) in the middle east had purchased a truckload of copiers and cartridges in a fire sale from a business in the UK that was closing. They sold these copiers locally, of course undercutting regular local prices. Everything was fine until all the customers needed new toner, which they purchased locally, and suddenly got errors telling them the toner was incompatible.
What happened is while the copiers themselves are the same globally, the cartridges are region-encoded. The first time the copier powers on, it does a write-once setting to region-lock itself to whatever cartridge is installed. There's apparently no factory reset or software change to modify this setting (in the name of security), so the only fix was either to import cartridge from the UK (which the official dealers can't even do) or replace the mainboard to fully reset the thing back to how it comes from the factory.
I feel like the “black and white brother laser” attitude is like buying a car with no air conditioning because you’ll save five hundred bucks off the sticker price.
The reason to choose inkjet:
1. Black and white sucks
2. Color lasers are huge and don’t really save money on toner vs. ink for typical home users.
My current printer is an HP OfficeJet 9015, which has been excellent. Zero software needed for Windows 10, iOS (AirPrint), macOS.
Another thing those cheap brother laser printers don’t give you is, you know, features. My inkjet printer has a scanner, auto document feeder with auto duplex, and auto duplex printing.
If you want all that with a color laser you end up with a monstrosity in your house.
I, for example, have only ever used my printer to print such things as tickets and documents which must be mailed for bureaucratic reasons. My hunch is that this describes many others too.
I think most people prefer having color. The top 8 printers on Best Buy’s website are all color and/or photo printers.
Do I care about the color of the airline logo on my bording pass? Nope.
When I print driving directions, do I care about the colors? Maybe a little.
Does color matter for recipies? Not really.
I still got a color laser printer during lockdown to replace the inkjet that I can't print to with Chrome OS anymore (thanks to Google killing Cloud Print). It wasn't too much extra to support it for just in case, and color toner won't spoil by sitting like on the inkjet.
Since all the praise here has been for Brother laser printers, I went looking for the cheapest B&W and color laser printers they offer. That would be the HLL2300D and HLL3210CW respectively. The first one is 14.0" W x 14.2" D x 7.2" H, while the second one is 16.1” W x 18.1” D x 9.9” H. So it's 2 inches wider, 4 inches longer, and 3 inches taller. Doesn't seem that much bigger to me:
https://comparesizes.com/saved/CompareSizes_HLL2300D_vs_HLL3...
> and don’t really save money on toner vs. ink for typical home users.
At the very least, toner cartridges drying out isn't really a thing.
>If you want all that with a color laser you end up with a monstrosity in your house.
Your HP OfficeJet 9015 has official dimensions of 17.3" x 20.46" x 10.94". The Brother MFC9340CDW also has a scanner with ADF with auto-duplex (and does it in one pass, actually), and auto-duplex printing. Its dimensions are 16.1" x 19.0" x 16.1". So it's true that the color laser is taller. However, it has a smaller footprint, which is what matters for most people when trying to situate a printer.
One feature that your OfficeJet does not have that I appreciate (and this Brother AIO has) is a manual feed slot, which lets me skip the rigamarole of emptying the paper tray, fiddling with the tray to fit the envelope or whatever custom paper I'm using, printing, and then reversing what I previously did. That likely contributes at least a little bit to the height.
I just switched from a Brother printer to Lexmark. Not sure if it's Brother itself or just the model, but my particular printer only could connect over WiFi (no ethernet option), and it kept getting confused about it's IP address and dropping from our network. I bought a different printer after losing several hours of needing to use my limited network engineering skills to diagnose so I could print out worksheets for my kids. I haven't had issues since.
I always assumed this was true and the cartridge would last maybe 2-3x the initial amount of toner. I’m amazed that is 10 years! That’s awesome.
The major office supply chains and UPS stores offer online print services, so for the occasional color print job I just send it to one of them and pick it up the next time I’m out for lunch.
With IPP (AirPrint) built into CUPS now, my Brother actually works better (has a bigger range of print options) without their drivers installed.