Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Printers. Yeah.

Herewith, my standard advice.

Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile.

If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done at a higher quality, with better ink and good paper, than you can do at your office or house -- unless you are big enough to utilize a whole flock of printers, or you are a professional. If you are a pro, you don't need this advice.

View on HN

Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color"

My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now without a hiccup. If it dies, I'm replacing it with another Brother laser printer.

EDIT: added cost of printer. The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.

Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts.

I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer. In fact schools have just had to learn to accept digital submissions due to COVID-19 so printing at home probably won't be necessary at all anymore. When our black & white toner printer dies we will probably not replace it and just go to Staples for whatever little printing we will still need.

"I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.

it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).

You can also print documents at staples that you email to an address. They reply with a 24 hour code that you can type into the printer.

I'd love a service that would mail you the documents back in an envelope and was still as cheap ($0.15/page).

We use clicksend.

1. obviously you don't put sensitive docs on that usb drive

2. autoruns haven't worked on USB drives since windows XP SP3. The risk of getting a virus in this case is minimal.

https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...

I appreciate the correction, but the risk still seems minimal.

1. The attack is very situational. There are hundreds of usb flash drive controllers out there (see: https://www.usbdev.ru/files/). The chance that your flash drive a) can be re-programmed b) the malware author bothered making a payload for c) copier is infected are all very small.

2. The attack is very visible, since the user would notice the computer randomly opening command prompts and typing commands. It's also very easy to interrupt. Stray mouse/keyboard inputs would foil the attack, as will unplugging the USB drive.

3. Despite how visible the attack is (see above), the lack of empirical reports probably suggests it's not a real attack that's being carried out

That assume it presents as a HID, and not another device profile with more direct attack surface in the hardware or kernel. Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?

I am not sure of the details, but agree that seems like a rather large amount of hacker effort, when they can currently attack over the internet and demand instant bitcoin payment.

> Windows isolates the USB drivers to thwart such attacks, but perhaps it could manage to attack memory directly through the PCI bus before the kernel’s involvement?

AFAIK how these attacks essentially work is by imputing key sequences to execute malicious code (eg. typing curl ... | bash into the terminal). There's no driver or pcie/DMA attacks going on.

He's talking about the Staples print kiosk being hacked so they can steal a copy of everything that is printed.

He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color? Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.

>He is? Who needs to print "financial documents" in color?

Nobody. Some still do out of ignorance.

The same thing can happen when you print them in black and white from a similar kiosk.

And the financial documents could be in the same usb next to documents you did want to print in color.

>Also, the part about "4 viruses written to the boot sector" suggests the kiosk is also dropping malware onto the USB.

He's trying to make a point, even if that wasn't the case in that particular instance, it's something that can very easily happen too.

There's a lot of losing the forrest ("people sticking usbs to commercial kiosks to print is bad security") for some less significant detail trees in those questions...

> Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines

I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things, and/or need things printed quickly.

Why am I bothering to write this? I guess I want you and others like you to not assume everyone is in the same situation as you. It's an easy trap to fall into, and especially dangerous if you are a builder wanting to take things to market (like so many people here on HN are).

> which is probably only 20% of us here

Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing—and in fact many Internet cafes are just glorified print shops where you can pay to use the computers originally set up for printing. In villages of 500 people (such as the one I lived in as a teenager!), either the post office, the community center, or the elementary school (frequently all the same building) will own a printer, and allow people to pay to use it.

Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town. 80% of people are not in that situation. 80% of people on this Earth have access to someone they can pay to print something for them.

> It is also only convienient if you don't have to regularly print things

Don't have to regularly print things in color. Most people don't. Unless you do photography for money, color very likely isn't a crucial part of anything you're required to be printing. (It might be a nice-to-have part of things you're required to be printing; or it might be a crucial part of things you don't really have to be printing; but it's unlikely for color to be crucial, and for the print to be required.)

I need to print things quite often, and yet I personally haven't needed to print anything in color... literally ever. (I did print things in color, when I used to own an inkjet, but in retrospect, I didn't need to have printed those things in color.)

> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world.

FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have been shrinking with every passing year.

I'm in Tasmania's second largest city, Launceston.

The closest printing shop with extended hours, which I need because I'm just a lowly blue collar working who needs to work 12 hour days to make ends meet, is Officeworks, and there's exactly one of those here and it's 8 kilometres from my house and shuts at 7pm.

I'll just use my second hand Brother colour laser, cheers.

Or, presuming you don’t work 7 day weeks, you could just go during working hours on the weekend.

Again, who needs glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?

Six day weeks, leaves me with Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

Does it bother you that much if I’m ok maintaining a colour laser printer myself because I want to have it handy for the Hangul of times a month I want to use it.

I think it's reasonable if you're using it multiple times a month.

I know my use case pattern is something like "oh shit, I have to print [a form/some homework-type presentation]" closer to once a year.

> glossy photo prints with a 24 hour deadline? What for?

Why do you assume that’s the /only/ thing someone would want printed? Quite odd, considering the declining popularity of print photos.

Because this thread is about buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability, and how that removes the option of printing photos (which is something people sometimes try to do at home), but retains the option to print pretty much anything else[1] people try to print at home.

And then, as a tangent, this is a subthread about using printing services to substitute for the rare — and as you say, declining! — use-case of printing photos, which, when you realize that that's possible, makes the calculus of "buying a simple B&W laser printer for its reliability" much more clear.

[1] (It also removes the option to print e.g. color flyers or posters or business cards, but people don't generally try to do any of those at home anyway, instead deferring to a commercial printer to 1. get a high-quality result, and 2. not have to buy dozens of ink cartridges and spend hours fighting their printer to get a thousand flyers out of it.)

I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the world where the majority of people live.

FWIW my 20% number was pulled out of the air and based on very rough knowledge of HNs userbase.

> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American

No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer.

—————

I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something being 20 minutes away by car is “inconvenient.”

Folks, where I used to live, the nearest thing other than a farmstead was an hour away by car. And I still would have had my photos printed in town rather than owning a shitty inkjet printer (that would have been used so little that it would have required maintenance before every print.)

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

I said "20 minutes by car"; I didn't say driving. Americans like to measure things in by-car distances. What I meant was "an hour's walk" or "45 minutes by bicycle."

I didn't own a car where I used to live. Whenever I needed anything in town, I walked two hours to town. (When I eventually got a bicycle, it was a big upgrade!) And this was convenience to me.

Many people, in many places in the world, live this way. It is a uniquely-first-world perspective to think that "living far from town" means living in some self-sufficient "own one of everything you need" farmstead/mansion. For most people, in most of the world, living far from town just means commuting to town, on foot, all the dang time.

People in most of the rural parts of India, or Nigeria, or China, still commute on foot to a town-center-ish area to get water. Together, that makes up most of the population of the world! You think these people should own color printers? When they only barely have electricity? No; in the rare, rare case that such a person would need to get a physical photo printed, they'd walk however long it took to get to "the big city", and from there, they'd go to a dang print shop.

Honestly, I think people are having a severe failure of imagination in this thread, if they think that the various different kinds of developed nation that HN users live in, collectively make up "80% of the world."

Yes, what you say is true. I come from South Asia, and I live in NL, so I fully understand this perspective.

But rather, in the scope of this discussion, having a printer at home when you can afford one, makes a lot of sense from a cost/time angle.

But for most of the world, the cost calculus doesn't work out, because inkjet printers are shitty and break down, and use up their super-expensive color cartridges to print B&W prints. (And laser printers don't work well in humid climates, so good luck using a color laser.)

It's the same reason that in most of the world, you don't see people using those shaving razors with disposable razor-blade cartridges. They're too expensive over time, compared to a straight-razor / safety razor that can be sharpened.

If you only ever need to print, say, five photos in your entire life, it's fine if each one takes a three-hour round-trip walk to town and the equivalent of a day's wages. That'll still be lower TCO than printing every B&W text report you ever need to print on a color inkjet, and so needing to feed it a new yellow cartridge every few months just so it can keep putting microdots on the paper.

Nobody is advocating this for people who can’t afford it. We’re talking about those who can and do need to print often.

I don’t know why we need to argue on about the poorest people who can’t afford it? Sounds like a rhetorical discussion honestly.

20 minutes by car has a lower carbon output that one ink cartridge (which is about the consumption when you realize once a year that you need to print something and the old cartridge has the yellow nozzle dried out)

Why are we discussing this situation for people who only print once a year? That sounds like an absurd premise.

There’s lots of inkjets now that don’t suck, and don’t need much opex or capex. Some don’t need cartridges, they have refillable containers.

Where I live in Asia, every convenience store (in any decently sized city, 24 hours and a 5 minute walk) and any major supermarket has a copier/printer. The convenience store ones also tend to have for-pay online features (photo prints of K-pop/J-pop idols, music scores to print)

I was just looking into this for while I'm on vacation next week in Wisconsin (or perhaps not, given delta), and the nearest printing place is about a 20 minute drive away. But then, because I do a lot of writing and prefer to edit on paper, I'm probably on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to printer usage.

To be clear, what we're discussing in this thread, are the options of:

• own a simple, reliable black-and-white laser printer for printing text; go to a print shop for fancy color-glossy prints

• own a fancy, unreliable color inkjet printer, and use it for both simple black-and-white text prints and photo prints

Nobody's suggesting not owning any printer at all.

Is there a library nearby? They probably do printing.

> They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries

That does not mean that they survive.

> Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town.

In Poland such places are mostly gone (some survive near universities) as nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work.

Some are at places where people need printing (government offices) but charge massive fees.

> all over the world

World is more varied than you expect.

> Every Internet cafe offers printing.

Not present anymore in Poland

> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing

No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).

Exactly this. Also:

>> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing

> No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).

While there are "parcel points" in Poland, I've never seen them advertising a document printing service, and they're also being rapidly displaced by the spread of Paczkomaty - automated self-service parcel collection and sending booths.

> While there are "parcel points" in Poland

All that I have seen are extra service of kiosk/greengocer/fuel station - not an independent location.

Yes, but you're not addressing the thrust of the argument. Certainly print shops don't exist in Poland, but that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.

In sufficiently-developed countries like Poland, you don't need print shops, but it's not because "nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work." (That's not even true; many people don't have color printers either at home or at work!)

Print shops never existed for the sake of making one print or one copy; the way they made their money was commercial, volume printing. Sign printing; poster printing; flyer printing; etc. "Consumer" printing/copying was always a side-business.

No matter how developed your city, commercial print shops still need to exist, because consumer printers just aren't up to the task of producing thousands of pages per hour, reliably, day-in-day-out; and because there's real labor involved in collating and feeding all that paper. Especially for weird paper shapes that need cutting (e.g. business cards.)

No, the reason Poland doesn't have consumer print shops, is because the commercial printers (and package services) who used to offer walk-in consumer printing as a convenience service, have been out-competed in that space by the lower margins offered by online document/photo print-and-deliver services (who can serve Polish customers from anywhere in the EU very cheaply, and so don't need to have a local presence in Poland.)

> that doesn't mean that getting prints done is inconvenient in Poland if you don't have your own printer.

It is inconvenient in Poland as there is no easy to use way to get your stuff printed.

There are some print shops, but focusing on specialist/large prints - and just few of them in a city, definitely not on every corner. Printing a single A4 page would cost me about 5% of printer cost (travel cost, printing itself, time of travel).

I really didnt want to start a big discussion about this... but I just can't help myself, so i will dig in.

You're actually missing my main point. It really isn't about Staples, or North American vs the world, print quality, or preferences for B&W vs colour.

My main point is this: Don't fall into the trap of thinking your life experience always maps well to eveyone else you interact with in life.

I realize that. And that was the point I was trying to contradict: that you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way, without having quite a lot of it. Because sometimes, a thing that you might intuitively think is one of those "only rich North American people have it" things is actually something possessed by the vast majority of the world, and so is a very bad example — a counterexample, in fact — of people being in different life situations.

> you shouldn't make arguments about life experience either way

These two arguments are not equivalent. Mathematically speaking, one side has to find just 20+% counter examples and the "vast majority" argument crumbles.

This thread has so many different people, from different parts of the world chiming in to say "this is not my lived experience", and you are still digging in to say "I'm right, the vast majority fit this mould".

I'm not sure my little hole-in-the-wall Deutsche Post shop offers printing.

Never used Staples, I've done most of my printing in the last decade at libraries. AFAICT they're still pretty common in Australia.

Even the article fell into this trap. There's a good reason to own at least a B&W printer even if there's a Staples downstairs: your home printing needs will predominantly fall outside the business hours. After all, during business hours you are most likely at work.

The need to print something is usually a result of some chain of actions. You noticed an interesting paper. You have a stack of documents to sign. Your kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow. These are things that, for most working adults, tend to happen during evenings and on weekends - because that's the only time they have to deal with personal stuff. Not having a printer available at a moment's notice tends to be a huge blocker.

+100 to this, not sure why these simple usecases are being ignored by the other commenters, most of whom think people are printing for “ignorant” purposes.

There's definitely more need for empathy (or life experience) all around :).

Having recently lived for a few years in a small town (population ~16k), I'll also add that the two or three printing shops that are in the town are absolutely not a viable option for most people either. They're always too far away, and closed when you need them.

Also, "ignorant" use cases have their value too. People underestimate the impact of trivial inconveniences[0]. My wife likes to print out interesting recipes she spots on-line. I wouldn't have eaten half of the good stuff I had over the years if she had to go to a copy shop every time she spotted something interesting to cook.

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

My "local" print shop allows me to email the docs and will have them ready to pick up first thing in the morning.

It's all about planning. And when -like me- you live outside urban area's everything is about planning. I can't order a pizza when I forgot to buy groceries. I can't have a Gorrilla cyclist deliver some beer when I ran out. So I need to plan (and have a larger storage).

Sure, I've been in the spot where I needed to print something at 04:50 in the morning (and could not). But that problem was really just poor planning, and not lacking a printer at that time.

I’m not sure why you’re dismissing life as “poor planning”. Shit happens, things need to be done, you can’t plan everything.

It isn’t dismissing, it is pointing out that for things that are not incredibly important, you can plan for it, and if you don’t, there might be a situation sometime where you are out of luck. I cannot imagine a scenario will I will desperately need a full color printout at 3am, that can’t wait till the morning and a short trip to the Walgreens, Staples, CVS, whatever. Is it possible that a situation could come up? I guess. But its not really reasonable to go out and buy multi hundred-dollar pieces of equipment for random insanely unlikely scenarios.

If you are in a situation where you need to print full color at extremely odd hours, by all means, you might want to get a printer. But if you are just forgetting to do something until 3am, that’s just poor planning and likely not even a big deal, or something that couldn’t wait until 6. Edge cases exist, but pretending like the edge case is the norm is silly.

Buying a printer to ensure access is a plan.

Yes, buying an expensive piece of equipment is always an option. The point is that maybe people should explore other options and think about whether you actually need it and if the purchased equipment is going to give the quality you require. Occasionally I need to move an appliance or haul a load of lumber for a house project, so buying a truck could be a plan. But is the cost, both in purchasing and in poor gas mileage, and the space it takes up worth it for the hauling ability? For me, renting a truck the occasional time I need that ability is a far better option for me, but it does require me to actually think ahead and plan and I can’t just run to the Home Depot and pickup a sheet of plywood on a whim.

If I did get a pickup, is it the best tool for the jobs I need? Would a larger moving truck serve me better? It wouldn’t be a smart move to spend the money and then have it under perform for the tasks I actually need, because buying a commercial grade version is not feasible.

Buying a b&w printer that you only use once every few months might not actually be your only option. Buying a color printer that prints lower quality than you really want and is gummed up or out of ink when you need it, might not actually be your only option. Without one, you can’t print at 3am, but just like that sheet of plywood, is that scenario really important enough to you?

I'm not dismissing. If there is a reasonable chance that you unexpectedly need full-color-prints at saturdays 03:00, or often get the material for the final prints mere hours for a deadline: sure! cover your risks by buying expensive machineries. It's what they are for.

Obviously, you'd need to cross-reference with the actual risk: are you out of a job, failing class, or kicked out of the local church when you fail to deliver full-color-prints last minute: cover your risks by buying the machines that were made for this.

My point is that most people don't have those risks. And if they do, can cover those risks with little planning just as well as with buying equipment.

You only need to print your CV minutes before the job-interview when such job-interviews are planned minutes our hours ahead (and in my experience that is literally never the case). You only need to print your dissertation last minute if you spent the first 6 months of "writing the dissertation" procastinating. I definitely did that. And I definately found that my printer jammed at 05:50 the morning before I had to turn it in at 10:00. if only I had planned just a little better...

> Your kid just realized, at 22:00 sharp, that they need some printout for school tomorrow.

Genuine Q: how important is it for such school printouts to be in color?

This sounds awfully similar to 'why can't they eat cake'.

> ... put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines.

In Japan, you can do the same thing on the multifunction printer/copiers that most convenience stores have. You can also upload the files in advance, so you don’t even need a flash drive [1 (English), 2 (Japanese)]. There are several such stores within a five-minute walk from my home in Yokohama. I do most of my printing there, though I do avoid them for confidential documents.

[1] https://networkprint.ne.jp/Lite/start?lang=enus

[2] https://www.printing.ne.jp/index_p.html

Flash drive is entirely unnecessary and, honestly, sounds like a pain. You can simply email your print jobs to Staples.

However, the couple times I've printed at Staples I've had to wait in line - there's only a couple printers and I had to wait for other people to finish printing.

I bought an HP 3600N networked color laser printer in Nov 2006. Cost me $574.39 delivered and gives reliable and excellent quality output for about $38/year so far in capex. 3rd party toner cartridges run around $110 for all 4 (they're about half the fill of the genuine HP article for about 1/8th the price). In home use, I've replaced the cartridges twice, so I'm around $800 plus paper for almost 15 years of convenient printing at home. $38/year in capex and $12/yr in consumables.

There’s no way I can justify leaving my house to color print in order to save $4.50 a month.

Having the printer for two pre-teens during COVID schooling was a bonus as well, but it was long ago “paid for” by convenience and time savings.

Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. [...] I'm just not convinced that having the ability to print in color at home is worth the huge expense in ink cartridges or in a color laser printer.

Depends on how much you value your time. I would happily pay a bit more if it saves me 100+ trips to a copy shop over the lifetime of a printer.

Besides that, ink tank printers like Epson EcoTank printers are really cheap per print because they do not use cartridges. E.g., an EcoTank all-color refill is 40 Euro and prints up to 4000 black & white and 7500 color pages.

That totally depends on where you live I guess.

This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-)

But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time.

If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you.

Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched.

Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.

It is not reasonable to drive 20 minutes there and back every time I need something printed. Colour printers are extremely useful, and I'm unlikely to go back to a monochrome one anytime soon.

Plug the printer into your WiFi router - instant WiFi.

Cheaper, and much easier.

Except then you need to put your router in the same odd location as the printer or run cables.

You have a second router bridged to the main one. Wireless Ethernet ports for you to enjoy.

I do powerline ethernet adapter instead with my bro. definitely more reliable than wifi wakeup.

Same here, love the 3170CDW with wifi.

I have the same printer. Sometimes it randomly locks up. And disappears from the network (ethernet, wifi is off).

Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.

An Ethernet printer can easily become WiFi with a bridge mode AP.

If you’re technically skilled, you could always make a print server out of a raspberry pi.

Modern Powerline Ethernet adapters are really decent these days, and can even come with Wifi bridges/repeaters built in that can either replace, or 'mesh' with your router's wifi.

I re-did the home network at a relative's place early this year when also replacing the laptop.

Zero regrets. All the fixed devices now have either an eithernet port right near them, or good wifi signal. The devices that had flaky wifi were now meters from a wifi AP. Better still, it didn't take up any more power points as they all had pass-through power support. So plugged in behind the TV, and bedside tables and lamps.

Powerline ethernet adapters have always depended very heavily on how the power is laid out in your home (and things like "noise") They can't, for example, jump breakers well.

So YMMV, but in my experience they haven't improved much if at all, the only thing that could have changed is your placement, the noise on the lines or your home.

I'm comparing against three different generations (and brands).

A very early powerline adapter that was I think 100Mbit, back in around 2004-2006 I think - it basically didn't work at all, and I got rid of it.

In ~2017 a new set top box came with a pair, but much smaller and sleeker. They worked out of the box, but did need to be powered off and on every month or two.

These new ones, they plugged right in, they delivered 800-900Mbit through iperf3, and the wifi thing, once configured with the right SSID and Password, worked great, and have been stable for about 6 months now.

This is all in the same house, and no major rewiring or renovations have taken place, and using the same sockets. The new deployment included additional sockets in other rooms since it worked so well.

The problem with color laser printers (at least from Brother) is that the lifespan of a bunch of the parts is quite a bit lower than for the mono printers (lower as in 1/4 to 1/3 the life), and in some cases you need to replace them in sets of 4.

My home color laser came from a client that replaced it with a mono multifunction - they rarely used color, but it was overdue for replacement of all 4 color drums and leaves a streak down the very edge of the paper. Replacing the parts just didn't make sense, so it got "recycled" to me instead.

> if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year

I get that you’re making a point about printers being rarely used. The exact detail though - are there places where printing of your tax documents is still required and they can’t be digital?

I print off my receipts and other schedules to hand off to my preparer (who does not accept outside PDFs from a security angle). The actual filings are digital, but the intermediate are paper.

I file electronically but prefer to keep a printed copy of my returns. They go into the same manila envelope that collects my receipts and tax forms throughout the year and then gets filed away until I need to refer to it.

Filling out my kid's FAFSA this year was much easier with hard copy of my tax return rather than bouncing back and forth to a PDF. Maybe I'm just old.

Yeah, the USA.

The IRS rejected my e-filed tax returns a couple of years back, and demanded everything in paper form. Hundreds of pages.

The stated reason was due to possible fraud. Hilarious, in light of the fact that the return in question indicated tax owed, not a refund.

> The article is right: if all you are ever going to do is print your taxes and financial documents once a year, a ~$100 monochrome laser printer is fine.

$100? I've got a xerox phaser 3140 that I got off the returns table at a major store chain 10 years ago here in SA for 350 ZAR (about 25 USD). I've printed enough to exhaust the toner twice.

+1 to the wifi. But without it, I've got a Google Wifi extender puck that has an ethernet port on it that can act as a wifi bridge. The puck is velcro'd to the laser printer so it will always be on the network. This has worked well for us for a few years.

I would never buy something else than a laser printer again.

The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period.

But then, one day I decided to suck up the buying price, and went laser. My brother too. Since then, every page prints, fast, clear, like the first one. No jam, no breaking, just printing. And so many pages, like the cartridge could never end.

One day though it did, so I prepared to bleed to death again, except it was $10 on amazon.

I wish I could take a time machine and sing to my young self the gospel of laser printers.

> I would never buy something else than a laser printer again.

I rarely print anything, but when I do it's things like the entire GDPR. Fully agreed!

No more switching it on after a year wondering if the heads will be able to clean themselves or if they're just completely caked in dry ink and a write-off. Just fire it up, print.

Of course the initial setup was a pain in the arse, it is still a printer after all, but as printers go it's been the least painful printer I've ever had (for ref its a Brother HL-1210W I've got)

Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color.

I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo (https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw) and it's magnificent.

* From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds

* It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc.

* No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen.

* It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20.

Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.

Even fancy inkjet printers tend to get their print heads irreversibly clogged if you let them sit too long without printing anything.

My parents does in fact talk about BW printing, hence as do I.

And I own a Brother inkjet. It was the same deal as usual.

I don't know about your experience, so can't really argue.

Just want to add another advice for “brother” as well as any other brand laser printers.

If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper.

For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges.

What These companies are doing is criminal and no different than dieselgate. Mis-reporting wrongly to throw cartridges to landfills.

Wow, thanks a lot, didn't know this. I've been forced to buy cartridges as I run out of ink way every few months, don't think the black HP cartridges today even last the promised 500 pages, they can literally configure it to their whim.

Funny, I bought a Brother HL-1240 for $15 off of Craigslist five years ago and it’s still going strong. Couldn’t be happier. So much so that I bought a USB-Ethernet adapter (https://www.iogear.com/product/GPSU21/) to avoid having to upgrade to a newer model with Ethernet/WiFi included.

In the last five years I have printed a few hundred pages, experienced <5 paper jams, and spent $0 on ink. (The guy I bought the printer from threw in a toner cartridge for free. But I’m still on the original cartridge.)

Thanks. For usb hint. Have a HL-1440 for 15+ years never replaced cartridge but usb only is kinda limiting but it's reliable when I need it.

I bought my HL-1240 ages ago, and printed thousands and thousands of pages before it finally died. I bought a newer model Brother, and have so far been equally happy, printing at the same rate.

I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert.

I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me.

(it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)

Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.

I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother.

We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same.

So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.

Ah, makes sense – I am just now becoming aware of the fact that practically speaking, I print duplex only because it … reads nicer? The printed product is lighter and smaller and easier to staple, and feels like a book. For me the effect is like a “cleaner workspace” for reading.

I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)

To be clear - I find duplex prints more convenient to handle too :). If I were in a market for a new printer, I'd go for duplex now. But I have a perfectly fine Brother laser printer, and it turns out that single-sided prints are not big enough of an issue to me to justify the effort of selling it and getting a new one.

Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing.

(“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.)

In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority?

People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing.

Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked.

Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts.

—For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50...

They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.

I agree, I read a lot more papers when I print them off. Thanks for the advice about the color printer - I also find my comprehension better that way. I've saved your recommendation for when I next am looking to buy a new printer.

My last HP colour laser was a nightmare. It cost a fortune to run and was unreliable. The mono Brother I replaced it with has never missed a beat in the ten years I have owned it.

uh-oh – I hope mine is different! And generally, I hope that we as a society can build some form of composable structure for gathering and discovering objective information about how to live efficently. So we can stop having to waste resources on individually discovering one bad printer after the other in an uninteresting and dreary process.

In Japan virtually every convenience store has a self service printer (¥10/page for monochrome).

For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”

Japan, and particularly Tokyo is special. Apartments are mainly glorified cupboards so most people will prefer to print out than dedicate precious space to an only occasionally used device like a printer.

+1, brother dcp-1512 which I got because it was cheaper than buying just the black ink cartridge for the HP inkjet it replaced. It’s hooked up to an old thinkpad and set up so we can AirPrint to it from our phones. Including one toner cartridge it’s probably cost under 70 bucks for 5 years of service.

People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet. Finding cheap ink is not a problem; Amazon has knockoffs for cheap. And in spite of what others do I gladly print color at home for random purposes. Sometimes for a family gift, other times for kid projects or hobby stuff. Printing color on photo paper produces great results.

I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.

>People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet

Brother are definitely the least scummy printer manufacturer by a country mile. Everyone I know with a Brother has always been pleasantly surprised by the quality, support (both my 2004 label printer and 2009 colour laser still get software updates!) and cost of supplies. Unfortunately, the Canons and HPs are definitely the most popular...

Agreed - my brother HL-L2375DW monochrome laser works great with Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu). I print over wifi due to lack of desk space and it is pretty much plug and play - I turn it on and within few seconds it is available as a printer in the print dialog. I am not a heavy user + I set it to toner-saving settings so still using the original cartridge it came with (bought in Aug 2019).

+1. I have a Brother HL-5250 that's 15 years old. I think I paid $250 for it, but it has to be one of the best pieces of technology I've ever bought. It's been a while since I looked at its internal counters but it probably has printed close to 50k pages. The printer itself is still 100%. About 5 years ago something gave out in the paper tray and it stopped feeding correctly, but these days I don't print more than a couple times a year so I just load paper manually in the front tray.

Brother HL-5250

Workhorses, I've seen one last until something well over 200,000 pages though it sounded terrible towards the end. When pricing them vs something like HP printers that take a maintenance kit, just figure the replacement cost of the printer IS the "maintenance kit" to replace worn parts.

Since I got a WiFi printer (Brother), I print 99% of things straight from my phone, and no longer procrastinate printing stuff because I'd have to boot the laptop, find the cable, log in to download the document etc.

It's worth it.

This is good advice. Laser printer cartridges for office printers last a long time and are priced as a minor (but infrequent) consumable.

Now, if you live in Tibet, have kids who need full-colour printing at 2am, or can't afford biscuits let alone printing supplies - then you know that. Quite why there's a pile-on to diss the advice is beyond me! Particularly the 'not outside US' crowd. Come on! HN has an obvious US bias and it's not interesting to be told that.

By all means let's hear alternative advice, but be interesting.

Apologies for the off-topic. As an info-nugget to compensate, I'm very happy with my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw so that may be a good alternative for those who know they need colour. Its drivers (via HPLIP) work well with Ubuntu Linux, including the excellent scanner; the latter has proven to be extremely useful for both mundane form scanning and family photographs (where the colour reproduction is far more faithful than the handful of other scanners I had tried).

I would nowadays don't buy printer without a WiFi. I am so used to sending things to printer from around the house at this point.

The rest I agree

I mean, if you can just hook it up to wired Ethernet you can do the same thing. My Brother MFC-3770CDW only supports 2.4GHz which is hella unreliable, so I run Ethernet to my switch instead and still can use network printing (including AirPrint from my iOS devices) everywhere in the house.

P.S. not all Brother printers have reasonable running costs - my MFC-3770CDW is outrageously expensive for consumables because it had a lower price tag than their higher end color laser MFCs. I needed a printer in a hurry because my old Brother Inkjet died and the better models weren’t readily available at the start of the pandemic, and it’s still cheaper than ink, but so make sure you do your research even with commonly trusted brands.

The point is not to buy a printer with only ethernet. But it should also have ethernet as fallback. I would recommend the same, now that my printer can't connect to any wifi anymore for whatever reason, but it works again since I connected an old wifi repeater via ethernet.

Years ago I bought a Epson WP4515 printer/scanner. It had Ethernet and no WiFi but it had to sit just by the PC so it wasn't an hassle back then. One day however I had to move things around and it would suddenly need a long cable to connect to the nearest Ethernet switch. Fortunately I had at hand a bunch of TpLink TL-MR3020 mini routers I had bought literally for coins at a flea market because I knew they support OpenWRT, so I grabbed one, installed OpenWRT and set it up to bridge the Ethernet input to my home WiFi, and bingo, the device was online without cables. If anyone is interested, those small routers are sold as 3/4G routers for being able to host a 3/4G dongle modem in their USB port but actually they contain no mobile modem, they just have 2.4GHz WiFi, one Ethernet port, one USB port. They are also ridiculously limited in HW capabilities, RAM and storage, etc, however they can run old OpenWRT versions, which makes them good for that use.

My wife started her PhD program a few years ago and printed nearly all of her resources on our inkjet printer at the time - only to recycle all of it after the class was completed. We were spending ridiculous amounts of money and constantly going out to buy the darn cartridges. I don’t know why, but I had completely forgotten about laser printers, then one day I suddenly remembered from my childhood school days that everyone used laser printers, did some research, and bought one. The cost was more than triple that of a decent inkjet, but nearly three years later, and she has only had to buy maybe two toner cartridges and the darn thing is extremely reliable. Personally I wish she didn’t have to print so much, but it helps her quickly annotate, locate, and visualize large amounts of literature.

I followed this advice right after the last time I spent 20 minutes having an ink-jet printer clean its nozzles thrice before I could print one sheet of monochrome text. I print infrequently enough that the nozzles would often dry up and get clogged.

It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use.

Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper.

Plus, it's so much faster.

The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"!

(Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)

+1 for brother laser +1 for duplex

I actually find Wifi useful.

Question, what's the deal with the toner cartridges plastic? It looks like a lot of thick plastic. I get to buy a new one and throw the old one, or refill one with the "not recommended non-original toner".

Does the manufacturer offer some other environment friendly option?

Brother offers free recycling for all their cartridges.

https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/toner-ink-recycling Go here, print a label, put old cartridge in the box your new one was in and drop it off at the post office or have your postal driver pick it up.

It's good to know. Unfortunately, in Uruguay we're not part of the 28 countries where Brother has recycling in place [1]. And I don't think we get any real alternative except for rogue refilling of the cartridges, or just recycle it as regular plastic waste.

Still, I consider having recycling in 28 countries to be pretty good.

[1] https://global.brother/en/eco/product/recycling

I’m pretty happy to get a brother colour laser printer for $300 I think because printing in colour when you want is great for kids homework and creative play, while being a good workhorse otherwise. My regret is the flatbed scanner I’d prefer one that can feed a few pages for me.

For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around the house, it's worked out so much cheaper for me so far. Plus there's no worry about proprietary cartridges being discontinued in the future. If you can find one for free/cheap, I'd say go for it :)

EcoTanks have a DRM chip on the ink dump container instead.

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m not sure what you mean.

Annoying dude, but he talks about this DRM and fixes his EcoTank issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA3wOmujZHA

This is my exact advice (minus the duplex, ethernet, and brscript) and my friends are tired of hearing it. My HL-2170W from... 2008? is still going strong. I just spent $20 on THREE 2600 page refilled toner cartridges. The printer itself was free, and I had to put a drum in it once (which was the reason it was free).

I second your advice but disagree on the WiFi point: there's a solid convenience aspect to anyone in the house being able to hit print on their phone with no further work. Guests can print boarding passes without asking, kids can print from their iPads, etc. with zero friction.

> If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one.

Middle-tier option: Walgreens Photo. Last time I wanted to print an 8x10" it cost $4 and I picked it up an hour later.

For photos, Walgreens definitely beats at-home printing.

Why do you recommend BRScript/3? I'm not disagreeing, just unfamiliar with different print drivers. I did find a page on Brother's website [1], but it says the advantages of BRScript/3 are mainly related to color graphics.

[1] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&pro...

Years ago the boss at the time wanted to do printing in a very dusty environment (stone, nothing flammable), specialist printers where expensive - my suggestion, buy a decent cheap brother printer and replace it when it died.

They where still using them when I left years later.

This is about the worst environment imaginable outside of trying to destroy them, a steel cabinet in an old workshop that wasn't really sealed from the elements where they where sandblasting stone and they just kept kicking.

My problem with laser combos (printer + scanner) is that they are >50% larger than an inkjet with same features. Inkjet is just the right height where you can use it on a shelf/desk and it won't be unbearable + you can stack some stuff on top.

WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)

WiFi printing feels like an essential feature to me. Being able to print directly from a phone or tablet is huge.

If WiFi printing is essential, then add it to your personal list of desired features. The point of the original feature list is to point out things that will save you money. The point of the anti-feature list is to point out things that vendors typically add-on to make their product more enticing yet don't necessarily add value.

Take WiFi printing. The typical WiFi router has ethernet ports. In that case a printer with an ethernet port is WiFi accessible, is typically easier to setup to be WiFi accessible, and is indirectly upgradable when WiFi security standards change. (The latter is important if a printer lasts 10+ years.)

It is also important to note the original desirable feature list can be modified. PCL emulation, rather than PS emulation, is typically fine. The point is to avoid printers where the drivers are vendor/model specific. USB only or USB/WiFi is fine, as long as you realize that network printing requires (or, at some future point, will require) setting up a print server.

Edit: also, I cringe slightly at the Brother recommendation. I use their printers and only have good things to say about them. Yet the important thing is to avoid the games many vendors play. There may be other vendors who don't play games. More important, there is nothing preventing Brother from playing games in the future.

The printer doesn't need wifi if it's connected to a network bridged with a wifi ap, like nearly every soho router/ap combo or isp-provided modem/router/ap combo is by default.

I wonder if I can get one of those that can also print A3-like sizes. When I last went printer shopping, there was a vastly wider gap between standard and wide-format prices for laser printers than for inkjets.

Why use such large paper? Printing off the occasional orchestral score.

I went for a massive Xerox Versalink for the same reason - it's not disposable garbage, the toner lasts an insane amount of time, and as long as you buy at least one toner cartridge a year you extend the onsite(!!!) warranty indefinitely.

AirPrint is a must for me. I do not maintain a dedicated desk. I leave the printer on an end table in one room of the house and I work from all over the place. AirPrint allows me to print from any of my devices from anywhere inside my house.

You don't need Apple Airprint for that. A regular Wi-Fi printer works fine, and it's not restricted to Apple devices.

I've had the same black/white HP LaserJet 4000 with ethernet for close to 20 years, and it has been an amazing beast of a printer. Never needed anything else.

I've had my Brother for well over half a decade, never needed to change it's original in the box toner... and it broke and doesn't feed paper now. :/

We have had the same Okidata led printer for almost a decade. Similar philosophy though. It’s a joy to use and works with Linux out of the box. Networked, etc.

I had two BW laser printers in my life and they both worked for >10 years with one cartridge.

One I found in the trash, one I bought for 150€.

Anyone have any suggestions for a B&W laser printer that will work "driverless" on Linux over USB?

Try finding an A3 mono laser printer, if you need to print a3.

Except this only makes sense in office-like environments. It’s not a solution for a typical home, simply because getting it to run is too complicated.

Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?

> Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?

It wasn't your distant forefathers in their "brutish, short, and dark" lives, nor even your own boomer parents in the hilarious 1970s, but people alive and walking among us even now (your boss, your children's school principal, your next-door neighbour...) who once upon a time -- not even all that long ago, actually right here in this same century we're living in now! -- regarded occasionally connecting and disconnecting an Ethernet or USB cable not as some freakishly onerous imposition but actually rather "normal".

But of course, same with horse carriages and Flash applets.

If you have any Ethernet network at all, it’s easy. Plug it into one of the unused ports on your router.

It’s really quite simple (and inexpensive even if you have to buy a cheap switch or wifi access point).

I have a Brother HL-L2380DW. It's a basic monochrome laser with duplex and WiFi. Setting it up was easier than any of my prior laser-jet printers (Canon, HP, both of which always had flaky software and drivers). My iOS devices print to it without any config - it just appears as an available printer and does its job.

Plus, no microdots, right?

Why BRScript?

>Printers. Yeah.

And cars, for that matter. May be not right now, but soon enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com