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Comment by ironlake | Hacker News Reader

My Brother black-and-white laser is about ten years old. Pretty low volume of use from me, but it's held up well and is one of the most satisfying technology purchases I've ever made. If it stopped working, I would buy a Brother printer tomorrow without even looking at other brands.

The printer industry is horrible, but also HP is toxic at every level and across every product and service. Just avoid.

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Brother printers have regressed as well. See this post: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Et tu Brother? My Brother wireless laser printer/scanner has been so reliable you’d think it wasn’t even a mechanical device.

Ugh, same. Bought a Brother laser scanner/printer that has been a delight. I don't print much, but it does its job stashed away in my closet through wifi. I can even print from my phone. I've used maybe 3 toners in about 10 years and it still works perfectly.

Would also buy a new Brother without even considering other brands. Sad to hear it might be going downhill as well.

HP used to be such a mark of quality. It's a shame how much modern market logic convinced them becoming a rotted husk of a company without any value add was a wonderful corporate strategy.

Their early 90s laserjets are still going. My friend's school was throwing one out a few weeks ago. It was sitting dusty in a closet. I plugged it in and it worked right away. Probably 30 years old.

They stopped making things like that a long time ago. They've got the resources and the public capital to turn the ship around if they wanted to

I also swear by my Brother black-and-white laser. Now that I work remotely and I can't grift off of printers at work, it's become invaluable for printing out online purchase returns, hiking maps, etc. I require surprisingly little color printing, as it turns out.

Only printer I’ll buy. Does everything I need. Upkeep costs are negligible. Firmware updates don’t regress features.

Don’t have a lot of brand loyalty but nice to see them not shit on their customers.

> Firmware updates don’t regress features.

They do now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

~20 year old HP Laserjet 1200 here.

Same. Those things were built to last (at least in the low volumes I use it for). Needs a new cartridge by now (the third I think in 20 years?) but other than that it still runs perfectly fine. And it speaks PCL5 and PS so it's compatible with everything, from the Amiga to the latest Windows 11 (and of course Linux).

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